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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.'"
If I think something is funny, I will probably mod it +1 Insightful. "It's funny because it's true."
"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?"
From TFA:
Bogus cell phone batteries, shoddily made and potentially unsafe, are a specialty of counterfeiters. "It's one thing to buy a fake $30 Louis Vuitton bag on Canal Street in New York City. It's an entirely different matter when you buy a fake cell phone battery and it blows up"
So yes, lack of quality IS a problem - it's not just IP whine.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
If you'd read the article, you would see that sometimes certain counterfeit products came broken or worse malfunctioned in such a way that caused injury. If there's really something counterfeit I'd avoid, it's batteries. Better safe than sorry is my motto when it comes to my valuable electronics like cell phones, laptops and MP3 players.
Most of these items are made in the same shops, with the same materials by the same workers as the originals. They are made in [Chinese|Russian|Malaysian|Other emrging economy] factories that during the daytime produce their product (eg thumbdrives for Memorex), and during the night for "parallel export".
There are dangers to this practise. In these cases the producer cannot be held accountable (because it's not know who it is), so they don't have an interest in quality control. Often, discarded parts (that didn't meet QA) from the daytime are used.
The only other difference is that the profits are not for the originating company. So in the case of forged thumbdrives: if it works, it most likely identical to one bought legitimately.
the pun is mightier than the sword
That's different than counterfeiting. It is perfectly legal to state that your battery is compatible with a Motorola. It is another thing to state that the battery is made by Motorola and will be supported by Motorola if it goes bad. In the US, people are allowed to state things are compatible, I can make HP compatible inks, I can also make perfume that smells exactly the same as the a name brand perfume as long as I make it clear that it is not the name brand perfume. Calling your perfume Opium is probably not okay, calling it Poppy Seed, with a tagline, smells like Opium is perfectly fine.
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).
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
In case anyone doubts the fake eggs story, here's a photo of one of the phony eggs: http://news.xinhuanet.com/photo/2004-12/28/content _2387255.htm
The shell is made from calcium carbonate and the internals are mixed up (there's no defined yolk) and made from a mixture of gelatine, starch, alum, and a variety of other things.
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
you don't seem to realize the point of the fake name. it isn't just to capitilze on reputation, it's to prevent problems due to fake or shoddy products from coming back to the thief who made them. I've bought a memory key that had no circuit board in it, it was just the cut end of a usb cable with a case glued over it. that's how far they can go with this, the two are connected.
Examples...and believe me, I know of where I speak, since I'm living at ground zero for where this stuff originates.
Sony branded ni-cads - might hold a charge ok for the first few uses...rapidly downhill from there. Who knows what is inside. Use your imagination, but remember to only consider materials that are easy to obtain, with low cost up front.
Sony branded 1gb USB microdrive - after one week...corrupted data. On and on...blank CDs, DVDs, SD cards....no end. If you get in with the shop vendors, they know what to avoid, and they won't sell you the bad stuff. I've learned how to spot most if it, but the odds are more than 50/50 you'll be buying fake, regardless of the outlet. Fake cosmetics, deodorants, medicines, shoes, clothes, watches...a small percentage are acutally high quality, just made after hours. But for the most part, the fakes are of lower quality than the originals.
How good are they at doing this? No joke, I've seen fake raw eggs. Shell, egg white and yolk. No protein or edible matter whatsoever. Mostly off the shelf building materials. What kind of profit is there, when there is a market for a fake fresh chicken eggs?
Why is this so prevalent? Believe it or not, being able to copy an original is considered a test of ability. It is routine for one generation in China to test itself by attempting to duplicate something done by their ancestors. From fabrics to porcelin, it shows respect and skill by being able to reliably copy something that was first done over two thousand years ago.
Where is this headed? What better craftsmen, to really be the first to clone a human.
[quote]Sometimes the factories in third-world-factories that produce the "legit" products also produce those "fake" things. Is there something like this in computer electronics manufacture ?[/quote] yes Intel gave AMD all necessary Information to produce
:)
the Intel 80386 Microprocessor in the early 80's then the 486.
As intel could make the CPU fast enough for the Demand and outsource to AMD to manufacture them.
AMD started selling the exactly identical chip as Intel
(they had the blueprints afterall and were by authorised by Intel to produce them.
Suddenly there was Intel 486 Processor
versus AMD 486 processor
same processor but AMD was undercutting Intel on price.
Enter Pentium haha AMD you cant copy our name any more since it is
Trademarked
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.
NiMH Battries are not toys. They contain electronic safeguards to ensure they run within parameters otherwise they explode (end they blow up if they run too empty too). This has happened to Nokia in the past and people were hurt because their cellphones started burning. This was caused by fake batteries. The energy density in an NiMH cell is very high.
I know that's true of Lithium Ion batteries (hence why they're always packaged in a flat plastic square - the electronics are included in the battery pack), but I thought NiMH batteries were just generally plain cells with no electronics whatsoever.
Dude, I ain't no sucker. I live in hong kong and this hair soy sauce story made the 7pm news. That's because they weren't just making it and sell as no frills. They counterfeited an existing brand and trade it all over mainland, just not hong kong.
Depends on what your definition of "fake" is. It is well known that manufacturers of, say, memory chips producing under contract/license for known brands sell surplus and not-tested-to-make-sure-the-chips-are-within-spec stock to the grey market. Which is ok, as long as there is no contract/license agreements barring the factory from doing so and the memory chips sold in this manner aren't passed off as "known brand" chips.
Rebadging does happen, but whether it is done by the factory or by people buying surplus is a different matter.
The Intel/AMD story is a bit different. When IBM put together the IBM PC they had to rush to get it out the door to compete with the myriad of personal computers that were showing up on the market. Instead of taking the traditional route of designing everything in-house, they did something that at the time was very unusual for IBM. They went outside IBM to pick the components to build the machine, including the 8088 from Intel.
IBM was then a powerhouse, and Intel was in comparison small fry. IBM did not want to depend on a single source for the components used in the IBM PC, so in order for Intel to get the contract they had to license the x86 to a second source - AMD.
AMD was at first a second source producer of Intel designed x86 CPUs (8086, 8088, Am286). Intel considered the licence only valid up to the 80286, so they cancelled the agreement in 1986 and lawsuit(s?) ensued. AMD kinda sorta won, and starting with the Am386 in 1991 they have designed and manufactured their own x86 compatible CPUs.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
Mission critical systems normally procure their products directly from the manufacturer, or from a known reseller of the manufacturer - in either case, something that is known and trusted. In addition, for a new supplier, they will generally perform rigerous testing on the product.
This procedure alone stops all but the most experienced of counterfeiters, as mission critical systems need to build up a pattern of trust beforehand.
For regular service, counterfeiters can go in just fine by creating medium quality products. I know one government organization that got burnt by counterfeit network cards - while the cards individually met the specification, they were all cloned with identical MAC addresses.
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?
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...