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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?
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.
"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?
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?
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!
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;))
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.
If Cisco outsources the manufacture of the hardware how can it possibly believe that the manufacturer won't run an extra X copies off the line after they've run Cisco's? Sure, your contracts may prohibit that but when the cost vs what Cisco charges the end user is so great, the temptation for someone at the manufacturing line is going to be pretty high. Especially if they figure they'll sell the goods in a market where Cisco isn't.
There are reasons on-shore companies used to do the manufacturing themselves. This is one of them.
Outsourcing may be cheaper in the short run but Cisco is beginning to learn what the long-run costs are.
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.
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Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
There are a ton of counterfeit Cisco goods on the market, they all come from the same Flextronics plant in Suzhou, China where Cisco makes 40% of all its electronics. The cards are exactly the same as Cisco cards, but the firmware is sometimes different, and they are missing the official Cisco logo. They have the same part numbers as their Cisco counterpart. I'm pretty certain these are cards which failed QA/QC in the plant, and are re-sold without the Cisco logo.
These cards are the bane of support people. When you yank a failing card and realise you can't call TAC, the customer is screwed.
There are a lot of used equipment resellers in Europe with these cards and chassis, they come in through Rotterdam by the container load. You can pick up a non-branded, fully loaded 12008 for a few thousand euros, a 2811 for about 100 euros, and a palette of 1720s with ADSL WICs for 20 euros each. At those prices, you don't bother about TAC support, you just buy extras as spares and swap out anything that fails. The MTTF is usually under a year, so it's still Caveat Emptor.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
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!
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.