Suppose you buy an electronic device and it has copycat chips in it? Is it their jobs to brick your device even though you don't know what you bought has a fake chip in it?
Watch That Windows Update: FTDI Drivers Are Killing Fake Chips
Joined: 1-Sep-2004 Posts: 1142
From: North Florida - Big Bend area.
@Chuckt
What does it say about FTDI? It says they will protect their brand name.
Are they "bricking" the fake chips? Nope. They are only removing the VID/PID numbers in the chips that identify them as FTDI devices.
The chips still work as well as they ever did, EXCEPT that they no longer claim to be FTDI manufactured devices.
The fact that the real (pirate) manufacturers have no working drivers for their chips is a sad side-effect of the way they do business. If the pirates want to be in the USB chip making business, let them create and promote their own brand, instead of impersonating someone elses.
If a big-name manufacturer walked through a store and saw a bunch of counterfeit products using their brand and logo, they should expect action to be taken. FTDI is not harming these pirate chips at all, just erasing the FTDI identification inside those chips.
Brilliant. And in the long run this will improve the reputation of FTDI products.
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Chuckt
Re: Is it their job to brick fake chips? Posted on 24-Oct-2014 13:00:31
The recently release driver release has now been removed from Windows Update so that on-the-fly updating cannot occur. The driver is in the process of being updated and will be released next week. This will still uphold our stance against devices that are not genuine, but do so in a non-invasive way that means that there is no risk of end user’s hardware being directly affected.
Regardless of their intentions, it was a dumb thing to do. Dishonest chip suppliers have sold knockoff chips with legit branding painted on them and chips get resold all the time, so even honest hardware dealers that background check their suppliers and inspect the assembly lines can be using knockoff chips without knowing it. If you can't tell if your chips are legit or not and the price for getting it wrong is a huge percentage of returned non-functioning devices (and associated hit on your reputation), you're going to stop using that chip manufacturer.