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Fakes, Coming to a Store Near You
fishdan writes to tell us that while most Slashdotters have their own trusted sources for gear there is a growing concern that all consumers should look out for. According to PC World, more and more counterfeit hardware is coming to market each year. From the article: '...batteries aren't the only tech item that counterfeiters love. In October 2004, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials in Anchorage, Alaska, seized 20,000 suspected fake Memorex USB memory key thumb drives from Asia. And last year, Miami officials seized 900 allegedly phony laptops valued at $700,000. "Maybe it's a laptop, an MP3 player, or a component like a DVD drive--anything in the digital world can be counterfeited," says Therese Randazzo, a U.S. Customs Service counterfeiting expert.'"
What is wrong with counterfeit electronics? Do they have different functionality, are they shabbily built, or do they just take profits away from the rightful owners of the product?
"Maybe it's a laptop, an MP3 player, or a component like a DVD drive--anything in the digital world can be counterfeited," says Therese Randazzo, a U.S. Customs Service counterfeiting expert.'"
Last time I checked there captain obvious anything in the analog world can be counterfeited as well. Basically anything can be counterfeited. If this guy counts as an expert I'd hate to see a n00b.
and you'll probably be alright
I would much rather and have in the past purchased a cheap fake rather than over priced branded kit. It all works, is usually useless in a few years anyway and since it was much cheaper, if it dies in a year or two then you can be happy you got that much use form it and buy another cheap fake.
China, dudes, bring on the fakes!
P.O. Box 12345
Hometown, USA 12345
Please note that due to cost concerns, your hardware cannot be returned. Thanks and if you include your email address I'll let you know if it's counterfeit.
(just a joke...please don't actually send me anything cuz that address is extreme bogusness)
i wonder what can be fake about a laptop ? i mean does it still work ? maybe this is were the stolen amd cpu's went ....
Julien. http://free.hostdepartment.com/8/81fortune/
or some fake. How to tell?
what we have in stores for you. Earlier we had soy sauce made from hair juice. Yes, factories in China grinding human hair into juice and mix with water.
Fake down blankets stuffed with shit polyesters.
Now hear this, fake EGGS. Yes you heard right. What mogglers my bind was how on earth could you make eggs cheaper than collecting from chickens. The fake eggs were obviously inedible, but will crack and pour just like a real egg, with yolks and stuff.
The famous fake gucci's and LV's are old news.
Latest that came in from a buddy who works in shenzhen was that he rode in a fake mercedes benz. They copied all contours and instead of the tri-star, it's a 5 pointed-star (China)! Cool eh.
Yeah "fakes" can work. In a way the PC your sitting behind right now is a "fake". Unless your a rich bastard sitting behind a IBM or Apple machine.
This article is however not about those kind of fakes. It is where the buyer presumes he is buying the real deal often for the real price. That is not good.
Same with software, you can hold a lengthy argument about software piracy but when I pay full price for a software package I would expect to get a real offical copy.
By all means, make cheap memory or hd or mp3 players but don't try to pass it of as a superior product and charge the same money.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Not a dupe? Hey, whoever counterfeited Slashdot, back to work!
No wonder they were so cheap here! :-D
(I'm in Anchorage)
I've read that when a company is done with a factory in China making their product, you will then see the factory "illegally" keep producing a product sometimes. Or the process will be copied by another factory. Hence the label of "fake". Then it comes down to if a fake is a fake if it's identical but doesn't carry the name brand or authorization of the name brand (where the answer is probably yes).
"To discover how prevalent counterfeit high-tech parts have become in the United States, PC World purchased seven hard drives, seven memory modules, and ten cell phone batteries online, using pricing search engines to find low prices. We then asked vendors to authenticate the gear. Of the two dozen products we bought, four (all cell phone batteries) were counterfeit. We also received at least one old or refurbished product masquerading as new, got one broken drive, and in a few cases ordered a specific brand but received a cheaper brand in its place. Worse, our reporter had his credit card number stolen and misused multiple times during the course of researching this story. Ultimately, only 15 of the 24 items we bought turned out to be exactly as advertised."
Damn - it's a jungle out there. It makes you wonder about the future of e-commerce vs. touch-it-before-you-buy-it stores if there is so much online fraud and it is such a PITA to fix/return the problem product.
OTOH, in years of buying hundreds of books from Amazon, they messed up my order only once, and they promptly "fixed" (refunded) it when I sent back the improper item.
It makes sense, though. When you don't have a physical location/person to track down, and your money is already in their bank, it is much harder to get a refund for defective goods, so the PITA factor means a lot of people wont bother. And thus, an online retailer has much less incentive (vs. a brick and mortar store) to be sure of the quality of their goods since the return percentage will be less anyway.
Please don't sell me counterfeit dildos. I'll be all hot and horny, and let down.
"In October 2004, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials in Anchorage, Alaska, seized 20,000 suspected fake Memorex USB memory key thumb drives from Asia."
Do Memorex even make USB drives, or do they simply buy them in from Asian and stick their badge on them?
"Miami officials seized 900 allegedly phony laptops valued at $700,000. "Maybe it's a laptop, an MP3 player, or a component like a DVD drive--anything in the digital world can be counterfeited," says Therese Randazzo, a U.S. Customs Service counterfeiting expert.'"
I bet they were *real* laptops and *real* mp3 players, the only difference was the label. What you're saying is they can fake *labels*. But that's just because the USA has become a fake brand country, companies license a brand like Polaroid or Caterpillar, buy in cheap Asian crap, stick a "Polaroid" badge on it and charge loads more money because people think they're buying American.
Who cares if those fake brands get pirated, since its the difference between an overprice Asian product and a cheap Asian product, it's still jobs in Asia.
They should tackle false origin of goods labelling instead, since that's the cause of jobs being lost in USA and Europe. How can an Italian shoe maker compete with companies which appear to be Italian luxury show makers, but are just fake Asian brands with some minor finishing in Italy?
I think my copy of windows may be counterfeit. Its really slow and every time I open internet explorer I keep getting directed to hardcore porn sites.
Maybe they run a counterfeit version of Linux?
...after they've brought a SHINY brand camcorder with lettering that might have said SONY if you didn't look closely enough. Is that a counterfeit?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Nothing like some cold, hard facts to back up the case.
...as long as they don't start importing counterfeit Penis Mightiers. Because, what matter is, do they work?
+1, Appropriate Demonstration?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
.. is just a point of view, so I named myself Phake, a parody on the whole genuinity thing. As for counterfeit hardware I guess nowadays it doesn't matter much now all the components are cheaply made, the difference lies in how much effort the manufacturers put into their hardware to make it look as genuine as possible.
In an interview with police chief Wiggum, Wiggum reports that they are unable to apprenhend the suspects because the evidence has "mysteriously disappeared". I wonder if anyone can even remember this reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Springfield_Conne ction
A Cisco dual channel T1 controller, part VWIC-2MFT-T1 is $2,000 new list price. A small reseller will pay 70% of list or about $1,400 for it in distribution, while a large reseller might only pay $1,100 or so. Below we see a tinyurl link to an Ebay auction for a new boxed unit at only $227 or 11.3% of list price. I guarantee if you contact the seller you can get six dozen of them for the same price.
http://tinyurl.com/ak9by
This has gone on and on and on and on for the last two years, destroying the value of used Cisco gear we pull from customers and making it almost impossible to buy a used/refurbished card without running into this stuff.
I found out about this sort of thing the hard way. I got a *fantastic* deal on six new in the box Cisco 1721 routers. It wasn't so fantastic when I had to explain to my biggest customer that half of the machines they owned couldn't be registered for service because Cisco had them listed as in service in South America. Oh, and they failed, one by one, with mysterious problems not attributeable to hardware or software
Foo on all counterfeiters. They should be given counterfeit lifesaving drugs while riding in an ambulance equipped with counterfeit brake pads on their way to a hospital where they'll be cared for by a doctor who is really a drunken paramedic who thought it'd be fun to be a trauma surgeon for a day. If they live through that then they should be placed in a real live jail and periodically offered counterfeit parole papers to sign.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
I hope they can create a pirated fleshlight. But I wish it doesn't explode like bogus cell phone batteries. ***Kaboom*** aow dismembered....
See for yourself: http://www.home.ecommerce.hct.ac.ae/news/adwcake.j pg
said it comes from Sony/BMG and then it was a rootkit installer. :-)
I don't see this as being a major issue for consumers - so long as you shop at places you trust. It is up-to the retailer to ensure they are buying the ligitimate goods, not for the buyer (how is run of the mill guy going to know how to tell the difference?).
You buy from a respectable outlet, and you use the product. If it fails, you bring it back to get it replaced. If they discover its a conterfeit, you get it replaced with the real thing (or sue if they are not forthcoming). Issue lies between outlet and supplier, not consummer and outlet.
There is the issue pointed out that things may go boom, but I think this is over hyped. Counterfeits arn't the only thing that go boom, and again, so long as it is a tracable outlet (i.e. not the back of a van) you get it replaced or sue for damages depending on how much of a boom.
As always - you want to buy cheap from the back of a van, you run the risk of getting malfunctioning crap and money down the drain. You buy from a reputable retailer, you still run the risk of getting malfunctioning crap, but you also you get the protection of the law if it goes pear shaped.
A major Dutch retail chain recently had to recall a whole lot of Gilette Mach 3 razorblades. It turned out they were fakes. The packaging looked real enough, but the razors were nowhere near the quality Gilette makes.
Trouble is that with globalization going on as it is, it is not unheard of for an import/export company to buy wholesale an X amount of razors, to sell most of it through their normal channels and to sell some excess surplus on the international market. Buyers would normally buy from the manufacturer, but it is hard to resist buying some of the wholesale surplus of others.
With globalization increasing, creating a bigger marketplace and smaller margins, I would expect to see more fakes for two reasons:
- more superfluous relationships between supply and demand instead of the traditional 1 on 1 manufacturer, wholesaler, retailer relationships. Making it easier to slip something in and be unnoticed.
- larger markets make it more profitable to inject fake goods into the economy, by creating larger demands for products, so that the margins combined with volume creates a large enough incentive for crime to seize the chance.
Use Adsense for Charity
I think counterfeit hardware could be the next stage in trojans and viruses.
For instance, imagine you buy a wireless router from ebay, which the seller has pre-installed with trojan firmware and comes with a packet sniffer, bulk mailing software pre-installed, ftp server, password grabber etc. The best part is, most people trust their routers implicitly so don't bother checking them from the outside world. Some people then disable their software firewalls once they have a router available.
Another great idea would be a network printer with a trojan payload.
I read in a magazine last year that children-oriented fakes like backpacks and the like were often of better quality than the real brands would produce, using better quality images or better design.
This probably doesn't apply to electronics and computer hardware, as the fake cheap-knockoff is always of considerably less quality.
"create a look which cannot be functionally duplicated by someone making 500 pieces a day"
If brand work for companies, then why not for countries? Isn't French cheese worth paying more for, because they don't sell French reprocessed Cheddar!
Isn't Italian hand made shoes better because Italy doesn't make crappy cheap shoes so you're less likely to get a crappy cheap shoe if you buy Italian!
"Made in Italy" has value just like any other brand. The problem is they don't protect that brand, they protect this fake brand companies, that set up in Italy to gain some of the Italian kudos.
They've been poorly counterfeiting Mac OS for years now.
Sort of makes me think of Sir Mix-A-Lot's 'Swap Meet Louie'
"Your OS might have windows like a Mac, but in Redmond that ain't Jack."
A lot of consumer hardware is sold, with unchanged specifications and possibly minor cosmetic changes, using multiple brands and pricing based primarily on those brand names.
Would this be considered counterfeit as well?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
"If I buy a laptop that has "AMD Sempron 3000+" written on it, I would like to *know* that that's what it is - not an 900MHz Intel Celeron. Similarly, I want the video memory to be whats advertised, etc etc etc."
1 8/content_383303.htm
l /EGC_-_Events_-_WEoY_-_2003_Participants
Agreed, but isn't this the exact same thing:
You're being sold "foo" when in reality it's "foobar".
In my example, "foo" is Italian Made Designer Shoe, and "foobar" is Chinese Made shoe imported into Italy.
In your example, "foo" is an AMD Sempron and "foobar" is an Intel Celeron.
In both cases it's not the method of deception thats important (trademark in one, origin of goods in another), its the deception itself.
What I think they should do is focus on origin of goods laws. That way fake Italian brands gain their protection by leveraging "Geox made in Italy", but in order to do that they have to actually make their brand in Italy! Otherwise they would be "Geox" with big "Made in China" labels stuck all over their adverts & boxes!
Geox BTW is an example brand, that manuafacturs in China, but is based in Italy and tells different stories to each side. For example they tell the Chinese this story:
"With a history of more than 300 years, the Geox company ranks first in Europe and eighth in the world in terms of its sales."
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-10/
Which is bollocs because Geox is a fake brand created in the early 90's:
http://www.ey.com/GLOBAL/content.nsf/Internationa
"Italy
Winner: Mario Moretti Polegato, President
Company: Geox International S.r.L.S.p.A.
Description: In seven years, Geox has become the leader in the Italian shoes market. Founded in the early 90's, Geox designs, manufactures, and markets a rubber soled shoe, allowing the foot to breathe. Geox is now the world leader in the casual shoe segment. "
Well, what i mean is that Cisco is infamous for taking off-the-shelf products and then relablelling them "Cisco" and putting in a 1000x markup on it.
No joke.
A couple of years ago, we were trying to expand a Cisco Localdirector we owned with another ethernet card. We ordered it from Cisco and the card came. We opened the box and there was an ethernet card like you'd find in your home PC. No name, just in the Cisco packaging.
Curious, there was no markings on any chip, except there was a UPC label on the PCB. We hunted it down through google, and wouldn't you know it was a dead stock card that cisco had removed the chip markings from. Can't remember if it was a 3com or another common name. But it was the kind you could find for $15 pretty much anywhere.
We even popped it into a PC, and sure enough Windows XP saw it and used it as a standard card. No driver necessary.
Had we known, we would have saved $1485 and just bought a generic.
So now you know why Cisco has fabulous profits. They go to CompUSA, score some on-sale ethernet cards and then repackage them.
Forgive me if I have no sympathy for them.
There was a story about counterfiting in an issue of Fast Company last year. In it, there was an example of an elevator company who got called to service an elevator in a high-rise building.
The elevator company had no record that they had an elevator installed there.
When the technicians got there, they couldn't fix anything, because the elevator wasn't really theirs. It was a knock-off!
"They're usually lower quality goods along with a fake label. "
We already have counterfeit laws on the books, which is how these goods were seized.
I'm suggesting extra protection for brands in the form of protection from false 'country of origin goods' because that's where I think the jobs have gone.
So genuines Italian Shoe makers can use "Made In Italy" while shoe importers or shoe finishers would have to honestly put "Made in China" on their labels. They don't have to compete with brands pretending to be expensive Italian brands while at the same time manufacturing in China.
You know, there's a "Preview" button just to the left of the "Submit" button. Had you used it, or even read the "Allowed HTML" line just below it, you might have noticed that you should have used <blockquote> instead of [quote]. Also, your capitalization, punctuation, and general grammar really, really suck. In view of that, I was very surprised not to find any spelling errors.
Even the "Italian" goods are often manufactured in third world countries.
...) other countries. My mother in law used to own & operate a sweater assembly shop. Even using immigrant labor that was low paid by Italian standards, they could not compete with the no pay of Pakistan. (Yes, I know that the workers there are their familys breadwinners.)
I can't speak specifically to shoes, but I can speak for sweaters. Production has largely moved out of shops in Italy, and into (Pakistan, Malaysia,
The problem of jobs moving from high paid countries to low ones is endemic, and a good example of a beggar thy neighbor approach to economic production. (You offer companies more incentives to work in your place, and let them pay less for the work.) Eventually everyone works for nothing;(
Better country of origin laws would work if everyone was willing and able to pay more for goods made in *well paying* countries. However some sort of horrible tax regime based on how much workers receive would probably make more sense.
my $.02 ($.02, that's more than an hourly wage in a Burma sweatshop;))
I've read that when a company is done with a factory in China making their product, you will then see the factory "illegally" keep producing a product sometimes.
These factories are not illegally producing the product if they are under contract to the license holder. They are guilty illegal distribution. These grey market products have been around in the clothing area since the beginning of designer clothes. Now with ebay and internet stores, there is a distribution outlet for technology hard goods that did not exist 10 years ago.
And let's not forget the P-P-P-PowerBook incident.
For all the talk brands sell dirt cheap in China, and pretend their trademark violators if you try to import those goods. Levi's used the "dilution of trademark" claim to stop Tesco's importing cheap Levis from abroad, but the goods were genunine Levi's:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1261060.stm
I don't think a Cisco card or two on eBay from a seller in Beijing are exactly a big deal personally, and I wonder why you imagined Cisco would register and support routers you bought from China on eBay???
w00t
"owever that is not the case - these shoes will say prominently "Italian designed" or similar, but have in smaller print "Made in China"."
So it's a matter of degrees, what I'm after for this current round of counterfeiting laws is strong origin of goods laws, and the counterfeiting to concentrate on origin of goods. So that the origin of goods is stuck right there on the advert, the top of the box etc.
"There is a huge difference between some advertising that is deceptive about the country of origin & fraudulently claiming one good is another"
You took an extreme case, which would be a fraud + trademark infringement, but that doesn't mean all trademark infringements are as serious as fraud.
Suppose:
Memorex buys Beijing 'Chung Brand' USB stick and sells it labelled as made by Memorex.
Fred Bloggs buys Beijing 'Chung Brand' USB stick and sells it labelled as made by Memorex.
1. The person who buys Fred Bloggs stick is being deceived, because it's not Memorex.
2. But then so is the person who buys Memorex because it's really 'Chung Brand'.
Item 1. is already covered by counterfeiting laws. Item 2, currently isn't covered. Nothing forces Memorex to disclose that its selling a rebadged Chung Brand product.
It was only a matter of time before counterfeiting struck its hand on the electronics industry. There's already counterfeit electrical parts, medical supplies, you name it. The thing is about counterfeits coming from China is that there are thousands of factories that can produce the exact same product easily. Factories are next door to each other in Guangdong/Shenzen -- getting the blueprints for products is only a matter of knowing someone from another factory and getting a copy for you to produce. So it may not be so much an issue as having a counterfeit phone, but having a phone produced in a different factory.
The truth of the matter is, the '100% mirror quality' fake Louis Vuitton's that walk their way past you in the mall are impossible to tell from the real ones. The quality is the exact same, and the materials and craftmanship the same. So for small, (mostly) meaningless electronics, counterfeit does not impose much of a problem to the consumer. For health-critical devices or medicines, it's a different story. That's why there's so much more focus on stopping counterfeit medicine than Louis Vuitton.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
you bet!
I gladly buy fake high intensity White LED's all the time at around $0.06 each compared to the insane markup of around $).99 each in quantity here in the states. I buy packs of 1000 a couple times a year to feed my habit of modifying LEd flashlights into insane levels (I have a sharper image led floodlight that was modified from 16 led's to 50! it is now painful for people 1/2 a mile away) as well as making cash for my electronics projects by selling them at $0.25 each undercutting the local Ratshack and greedy guys at hamfests trying to get $1.99 each out of theirs. I have a simple battery testblock so friends and people at hamfests ca test them before they buy them. I usually sell out all of what I have left within 1 hour.
Yes they are probably unuseable for someone doing a production run because I have found that 1 in about 20 is either dim or dead but for me these fakes are perfect!
I also welcome our cheap fakes china overlords!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"Better country of origin laws would work if everyone was willing and able to pay more for goods made in *well paying* countries"
Price isn't everything.
Do you pay more for a BMW than a Fiat? Fiat makes good cars sometimes, but they've also made bad ones and are devalued as a result. BMW compete at the premium end and avoid making bad cars. People do pay more and do by BMWs.
Fiat = China
BMW = Italy France...
I don't get it. As long as the product funcitons as advertised, who cares?
What's this, designer CD-ROM drives? Gucci memory sticks? Give me a break.
Most of the parts and gear I buy is noname stuff from Taiwan. That's where the 'high class' Sony, &c. product comes from, anyway. You think these guys actually manufature all of their own products?
However, fakes aren't stopping at clothes and fashion. The problem is that if you don't fight counterfeit very efficiently, you soon see them appear in places where reliability and traceability are paramount. What about bad components crashing a mission-critical system? Fake brake pads in your car that overheat and fail? Or even worse, fake antibiotics and aviation parts? All these are happening today and are a major concern.
One way to fight counterfeits is to ship items with an RFID tag that is queried at each step of the shipping and traced back to the originating factory. Of course, pirates will soon start counterfeiting tags too, so the system has to be designed to prevent fake and duplicate numbers.
I personally must be naive because I cannot conceive making fake drugs or couterfeit airplane parts -- could you endanger thousands of lives to make a quick buck? Obviously, such scruples belong to a gentler era, such as the Hun invasions.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
i can buy a pppowerbook?
Another use: Put the numbers on cards inside boxes of prescription drugs, and require pharmacies to put one card in each bottle sold. In some cases, numbers could be printed on individual pills. I would never buy a drug without checking the number, would you?
Obviously, there are variations of this plan that would be appropriate in other situations. In some cases, bar codes of random numbers, or a combination of bar codes and a list of printed numbers, would be useful.
Customs officials would find it more efficient to have a bar code with a number and a web page URL coded in an international format on the outside of packing crates. They could wand the number and listen for a verifying beep.
IP theft happening in offshore factories placed in IP piracy-friendly nations, like China.
That's what you get for offshore outsourcing to despotic nations. China won't even prosecute IP theft. In fact, China is involved in it. Ask Cisco about Huawei or Chevrolet about the Cherry QQ if you do not believe me.
Offshore to a democratic, (relatively) moral nation like Germany, though, and they'll prosecute an IP thief.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
"To discover how prevalent counterfeit high-tech parts have become in the United States, PC World purchased seven hard drives, seven memory modules, and ten cell phone batteries online, using pricing search engines to find low prices."
Well DUH. When you're shopping solely on the basis of price, you will get fleeced, because somebody is always happy to give you a really good "deal" on SHIT. Suck up the extra few $ and buy from a reputable site/store and you'll have a much better chance of getting a decent product.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Unfortunately, fakes are the only way for a new business with limited sources of cash to break into an old product line. With all of the "parnerships" between advertisers, labor organizations, governments, and retail stores, a small company which produces a product that is also produced by the big players will have a hard time seeing their product appear on the shelves of stores like Wal-Mart and Target.
Because people are a lot like lemmings, they will spend vast amounts of money on a pair of shoes simply because they have a checkmark (Nike) on them while disregarding a brand that is cheaper and better quality. Rather than looking at the material and construction of a product, most people buy based on what people on TV or the magazines are wearing. If one can afford to buy a blessing from Madison Avenue, they do not need to conterfeit.
Where are many critical electronic parts for computers, automobiles, military weapontry, and other important devices for America manufactured? The simple answer is the "Peoples Republic" of China. How many of these devices have "trojans" or sabatage circuitry embedded in intergrated circuits themselves? We may never find out (Hopefully). I can picture the day when the world grows tired of accepting worthless paper (dollars or Federal Reserve Notes) as "payment" for tangible goods. I can also picture the day that the "People's Republic" of China decides to annex Tiawan by force. All they have to do is wait for or cause a certain condition to occur, such as a specific date, or a certain code to pass over wires, or even a specific signal to be transitted. The "trojan" circuitry picks up the signal and disables the device. A couple of lines of code or a few transistors can throw a real monky wrentch into the functionality of a device. How could the U.S. stop the invasion of Taiwan when its electronic infrastructure has been disabled? I'm sure that the U.S. government has investigated this option when it permitted American telephone equipment manufacturers to export equipment to Eastern Bloc countries before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now, the tables are turned, and America depends on foriegn counties and companies for its electronic infrastructure.
Where do you get them? I'm doing a project where I need about 500 white or blue LEDs. All the suppliers I found sell them like you said - for around $0.99 or more.
many OEM suppliers for major automotive makers are in china. most of the parts on that fake benz are probably the exact same parts on the real ones.
the big differences? all the chinese OEM parts are shipped to germany and assembled there, oh yeah, with a 3 pointed silver arrow.
there were many rumors in automotive journals about walmart importing these knockoff cars and selling them at sam's club.
You can't see all the numbers without scratching off the material that covers them.
Legitimate distributors don't want fake products. A few reports would cause the distributor to suspect that a shipment was counterfeit. The distributor could identify the supplier. Remember, a few reports are all that is necessary. False positives are easy to check, by checking more numbers in the same shipment.
Random numbers cost nothing. No number would be used more than once.
Web pages with delayed responses stop password crackers. Anyone checking many numbers from the same internet address would cause the system to delay even more.
There are only 31,536,000 seconds in a year. That's an extremely small proportion of a sixteen digit random number. Therefor, a one-second delay in responding to a web request prevents cracking.
Everyone used to sell those cards. Netgear sold a zillion of them. And many companies sold the same card (probably a reference design) under their own name. Apple did, for example. If you bought the 10/100 PCI add-on card for a Mac from Apple it was a 21142 ("tulip") reference card that was exactly the same as the others.
e /e0903230412m.jpg
(I don't know the difference between the 21142 and the 21140, they even used the same drivers.)
Here's a link to a picutre of the most-common shape version of that card.
http://fromto.cc/hosokawa/diary/2002/20020903-hom
and another
http://www.soho-jp.com/image/FE100D.jpg
There were other versions, that had square PROM sockets instead of DIP and such, but this was by far the most common.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I do not think this word means what you think it means.
Doesn't this really mean that the same piece of hardware that Memorex imports with their name on it, was imported with Memorex's name on it by someone other than Memorex? I have a hard time wrapping my brain around the idea that Memorex USB key drives are somehow exclusive enough to encourage a counterfeit market. Aren't they all like five bucks, no matter who you get them from?
Edith Keeler Must Die
"Pfft. I know a genuine Panaphonics when I see it. And look, there's Magnetbox and Sorny."
Yes, counterfeiting is wrong, but this article is jam packed with FUD! They make it sound like only counterfeit products will fail, but we all know that the real thing can be just as bad (XBOX 360s overheating, IBM HDDs crashing, Ipod batteries dying). The worst is when they quote the MSoftie who states that if you buy a counterfeit MS product, your credit card number could be stolen. What's the basis for that?
So some companies can produce functionally-similar goods to famous brand names for less money. Big surprise. They haven't got the overheads like private yachts for fatcat directors and shareholders. If government propaganda is to be believed they do have alternative overheads like bombs and stuff. Maybe blowing up buildings is cheaper than blowing up the tyres of a Ferrari?
Anyway, it's almost entirely the fault of the manufacturers of the "genuine article". If people are counterfeiting your products and still managing to make a profit selling them cheaper than you, then you obviously are overpricing them in the first place.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Maybe the fake products actually work.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
I always buy my hardware from Jimmy's Trunk. He guarantees the merchandise fell off a local trustworthy truck!
A major Dutch retail chain recently had to recall a whole lot of Gilette Mach 3 razorblades. It turned out they were fakes. The packaging looked real enough, but the razors were nowhere near the quality Gilette makes.
I am told that most of the hardware sold to third world countries for stuff like defence equipment, cryptographic equipment, high tech medicines, etc are usually fakes or duplicates from what you you would find in the western world. Does anybody have any idea of the amount of fakes being sold in the third world? I am told that 50% of all high tech equipment sold in African countries are fakes, some of them with approval from the powers that be.
Can you share your source? I'd like to get a couple thousand and that is a substantial savings over the best I can find for $.59ea.
A friend of mine purchased a cheap laptop from your average privately owned computer store in town, and asked me to have a look at it, becuase it kept asking to activate.
After looking at it briefly, and seeing the tell-tale sign of a badly cracked copy of Windows (Tells you to activate, but then keeps saying you've already activated) I went to the Genuine Windows checker on the Microsoft site and confirmed it was a stolen copy.
It seems private companies selling computers with pirated microsoft software is becoming extremely common, as it allows them to easily increase their profit by many hundred dollars (if you include Office also).
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
I don't understand why someone can't come out with a counterfeit ipod that works well.. I've seen ones that look like ipods, but only contain 512 megs or something.
I'd buy a decent quality knockoff ipod if it worked like an actual ipod and had comparable features, but who wants a 512 memory stick that just looks like an ipod?
But you raise a good point: If a fake was released that was much better than the original, would they still attack them?
As long as the maker of "fake" merchandise comes up with its own branding and doesn't try to pass off its goods as someone else's, then there's no trademark problem. In fact, U.S. trademark law recognizes the nominative use of a competitor's mark in the context of a "compare to" or "compatible with" as a fair use of that mark, so long as it creates no confusion and implies no sponsorship or endorsement.
After all, as a consumer why would you accept that a "SuperTosh" is better than a Toshiba?
Apple managed to take a bite out of Toshiba's market shar with its "MacinTosh" computers, split into the PowerBook and iBook lines.
I recently took a look inside a fake Dell AC Adapter, whose temperature reaches 133 C! (271F). at full load..." see
www.electricstuff.co.uk/acadapter.html
Warning : contains scenes some engineers may find disturbing....
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=17338 8&cid=14426971
See, other people are pointing out the same thing.
Neo con moderators can't stop the truth.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
You can usually go to eBay and find hundreds of high-intensity LED lots (usually of 50 or 100) for sale from various sellers in Hong Kong (find someone with a low combined bid price and shipping). For Joe Hobbyist, it's usually much cheaper than ordering it from most of the component suppliers out there.
Just a little guy, y'know?
I used to buy a lot of 80mm ball bearing fans, because the cheap-ass sleeve bearing fans that came stock in power supplies would always sieze up after 6-18 months. But often the ball bearing fans would wear out, too.
A little surgery revealed that many of the supposed ball bearing fans actually had cheesy bushings, and the clever Chinese simply learned how to sell their cheap wares for more by slapping "ball bearing" stickers on them. Once, to make a point, I bought an $8 fan and immediately dissected it in front of the vendor with a pair of diagonal pliers. He just shrugged.
One way of ruining the competition is by counterfeiting the competitions products and building defects into them.
All those objections are easily resolved.
The numbers are generated inside a label making machine, and transferred securely to the web site with encryption. No humans ever see the numbers, until the covering paint is removed.
The web site can ask for identification, the name of the store where the item was bought, and an email address.