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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.
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)
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!
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).
"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?
This isn't talking about cheap fakes. Instead, you're getting unreliable fakes for the brand price. You're getting ripped off twice as much. That's not good at all, no matter what spin you put on it. I think you're confusing this with just getting stuff dirt cheap from China. The article focuses on the fakes commonly being put in place of the real goods.
Fun Zoid RPG
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.
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
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.
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;))
no. they run a counterfeit version of minix.
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.
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/
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.
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'.
From what I've been told, it doesn't work quite like that. That the sticks come from the same factory does not mean that they have the same quality.
1) Memorex does a contract with 'Chung Mfg. Co', asking them to produce USB sticks according to certain specs (quality, price, etc). Checking that the sticks are of sufficient quality is either done by 'Chung Mfg. Co' according to the contract, or by Memorex after purchase. The important thing is - Memorex is guaranteeing the quality by putting their name on them, and know that they can't sell low grade goods without damaging the brand value.
2) 'Chung Mfg. Co' sells surplus sticks to the general market. These might be just the same quality as those sold to Memorex, lower quality that can't be sold to Memorex or straight off the production line with no quality check (the general/grey market probably pays less than Memorex, so 'Chung Mfg. Co' is likely to cut costs somehow, perhaps by doing less testing or using lower grade raw materials). When buying one of these in the store - whether 'no-name' or mislabelled as Memorex - noone is guaranteeing the quality.
You also have:
3) 'Less known company' buys surplus sticks cheap from 'Chung Mfg. Co', does their own quality testing (probably less than Memorex, to keep costs down) and sell them as 'Less known brand' USB sticks.
4) 'Well known company' does the same as (3), but instead of selling the sticks under the 'Well known brand' label, they sell them under the 'Less known subsidiary of well known company brand' label.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
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!
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 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.