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Counterfeit Cisco Gear Showing Up In US
spazimodo writes to point out a Network World report on the growing problem of counterfeit networking equipment. The article surveys the whole grey-market phenomenon, which is by no means limited to Cisco gear — they just happen to be its biggest target. From the article: "Thirty cards turned out to be counterfeit... Despite repeated calls and e-mails to his supplier, Atec Group, the issue was not resolved... How did a registered Cisco reseller (also a platinum Network Appliance partner and gold partner to Microsoft and Symantec) acquire the counterfeit [WAN interface cards] in the first place?... Phony network equipment [has] been quietly creeping into sales and distribution channels since early 2004... Counterfeit gear has become a big problem that could put networks — and health and safety — at risk. 'Nobody wants to say they've got counterfeit gear inside their enterprises that can all of a sudden stop working. But it's all over the place, just like pirated software is everywhere,' says Sharon Mills, director of IT procurement organization Caucus."
This all smells of FUD.
What he didn't know was that phoney network equipment had been quietly creeping into sales and distribution channels since early 2004, when manufacturers began seeing more returns, faster mean-time between failures and higher failure rates,
Isn't this the same period we have seen bad caps making equipment randomly fail, batteries which blow up, hard drives not being hard enough and dead pixel nightmares for all different companies?
Is it not more likely that this is just another symptom of too much, too quickly and they should just improve their quality control and testing regimes?
Sure, the cards might have been resold, but they are branded cisco items bearing the entire cisco interface and functionality - somehow I doubt outright fake chipsets and devices like this can be produced by anyone other than cisco themselves.
The article manages to totally skip highlighting a single specific case of fake hardware, the nearest being a raid on a hardware repair centre where officials from a group of agencies pounced.
Reports in the San Francisco Chronicle made it appear at first like an immigration raid, as 12 illegal immigrants (11 from Mexico and one from Colombia) were taken away. But that wouldn't explain the presence of so many agencies, including the FBI, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Postal Service and the Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team, which investigates large-scale, high-tech piracy and counterfeit cases.
Just because a group of people from different departments turns up does not justify the argument, there could be any number of reasons.
If it was directly related to fake hardware, don't you think cisco would be highlighting the fact a little clearer than supposition?
They just want to scare people into paying top dollar from the top tier people.
I have no problem with this, but it seems like an underhanded way to say it.
liqbase
Remeber those sunglasses and also Folexes? Fiksco equipment! I can't wait to see the hoboes in NYC selling these.
Help me get a new laptop - http://nocreditcard.yourgiftsfree.com/?id=3012
those Gears work nicely here. BTW first po$%&$&R/&A98908 NO CARRIER
If they can make something that people will think is good enough to be a Cisco product, they should go legit and sell cheaply. I mean it would be genius of them
Yay, I have a sig.
Even reputable shops like Adorama will sell you 'grey' prosumer Nikon digital SLRs for example. The difference is the lack of a US-actionable warranty and funky things like manuals in Turkish and whatnot... but other than that the gear is largely the same (be careful who you buy from anyway!). These things typically go for about 10% less than the 'straight' ones.
I've bought a couple of high-end Canon lenses this way and I haven't been burned yet, but I probably won't be doing it anymore. Too much risk.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
My understanding is that a vendor is contracted to produce, say, 100,000 cards for Cisco. They make 100,000 and then another 100,000 more (say without the Cisco logo or whatever) and sell the extra ones on the pirate market. It's not like it's totally hacked together - this is gear off of the same production line. They may sub in some cheaper components.
Now would I knowingly use pirate gear in my production network? No. But when I was building a lab at home and needed 20 WIC-1Ts I was sure glad I could get them on eBay in bulk. Probably not legit but I wasn't planning on putting my home lab under Smartnet.
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
A BOFH column for every need. Here, the Bastard has to deal with "Crisco" brand switches.
http://members.iinet.com.au/~bofh/newbofh/bofh3dec 97.html
This isn't as bad as when pirates pirated an entire company: NEC. Yeah, they had fake buildings, fake manufacturing facilities, fake executives, everything.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Cisco derives it's power in HW mostly because of it's ASICs, so until somebody is able to counterfeit that, it's not that big of a deal.
Besides, how come the issue was not resolved? How about standard warranties? Did he loose the signed delivery protocol that listed all the WICs an their S/Ns?
The article is vague about that
there is no issue with my network
Don't build stuff in China.
To be blunt Cisco and 3Com build stuff in china because it is cheap. The people that build the stuff can pick up a little extra money selling the gerbers , firmware, and document ion to the counterfeiters.
This is the price price for doing business in China and other very cheap countries.
What will really become expensive is when these companies can take what they have learned building stuff for Cisco and 3Com and then compete with them directly.
You can pay now or you can pay later.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I should have realized that Sorny does not make Kinksys routers. Works great BTW, except for the firewall part and instead of NAT the router emits occasional swarms of gnats.
like it's time to go with open source routing!
If they can make something that people will think is good enough to be a Cisco product, they should go legit and sell cheaply. I mean it would be genius of them
You miss the point : people who make counterfeit products pay peanuts to manufacture the fake goods, and sell them with a huge markup because the goods are branded with the logo of a company that makes expensive stuff. If they went legit and sold Cisco-compatible equipment under the SuperCrapola brand, instead of selling illegal Cisco-compatible equiment under the Cisco brand, they'd be a lot poorer.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Ahhh now i can head over to ebay and build my cisco lab for half the price !!!!
These are physical items. It's not like software.
You buy them from a store. The store has to have them on hand or order them. Either way, since the store you're buying them from did not make them, shipment will be required.
So just keep following each shipment back until you find the company that manufactured the parts or the company that "cannot find their records".
There, problem solved.
I know a genuine Sysco 4507 when I see one!
Monstar L
One of the Cisco vendor in my area used to replace the original RAM chips from new Cisco routers before shipping. They used to replace those RAM chips with made in taiwan RAM chips which were dirt cheap (1/5th or lesser in price). Then this vendor used to sell those original RAM chips, that they earlier removed from Cisco routers to other customers at higher rate. PROFIT.
;-)
How do I know this?
The guy who use to work there, was my college mate during my Computer Science graduation days. You can still find all of us drinking beers on Weekends at near by joint.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the summary talks of grey-markets; are these the same grey markets that were thought of as great until Sony shut down Lik-Sang and are now thought of as bad because of some Cisco gear going wrong?
Or did I just misread the summary?
Their televisions were reboxed Motorola's and the only thing worth their price!
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
I'm not surprised by this - I'm seeing it more often with supposedly fire safe parts with the "UL" tag on them. Since so many electronic parts/appliances now have such very tight profit margins, the following happens:
Primary original equipment manufacturer (OEM) subcontracts out to a cheaper source to make some profit on the part.
Secondary part supplier, also hit with tight margins, subcontracts to local supplier/small business to make the part.
Tertiary part manufacturer, also hit with tight margins but glad to have the business uses off-spec parts, or in the case of flame retardant rated plastics, dilutes the specified plastic with non-flame retarded plastic to get the parts made on time, and cheaply.
There has been an increase in the parts that have UL tags "failing" random pulled fire tests that UL makes by going into stores and randomly pulling consumer goods off the shelves. So I'm not surprised that this is happening in other areas as well when all sorts of quality control go out the window since the OEM can't directly supervise the secondary and tertiary suppliers, and they won't know the part is off-spec until they get the failed test. Once the tertiary vendor has made the part once, they usually have all the molds and other expensive equipment to start making knock-offs, especially in areas with poor law enforcement.
-When going for broke, go for Ithaca!
If we'd spent all that money researching telepathy instead of electronics, we wouldn't be in this position.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I know that this may sound a little too "tinfoil hat", but the thing that scares me the most about this is the potential for backdoors, spyware, and other nefarious modifications in this grey market hardware. Where would you detect the spying? This is potentially A Bad Thing(tm).
Yes, I know that so far no-one has found anything like that, but the potential creeps me out. One of the reasons people buy Cisco gear is because they trust the company. Counterfeit goods weaken the brand value and in and of themselves generate FUD.
Let's take a slightly easier (and fanciful) example: fake Rolex watches. OK, everyone knows that there are fake Rolex watches out there. But let us pretend for a moment that you did not know about the fakes, and you bought a "Rolex" (in quotes to indicate a fake) watch. The thing keeps lousy time, losing 5 minutes a day, and the wind stem breaks off in a month. You walk away from that experience thinking that Rolex (note: no quotes) watches are trash.
People are far more likely to complain than to praise, and when they're ripped off they are far more likely to tell people about it than when something works as expected, therefore the damage is done not only in your mind but in the minds of people who trust you. Suddenly, many people think that Rolex watches are junk.
Again, a fanciful example because Rolex's reputation is well established to the point that if a "Rolex" were to fail most people would suspect a fake. But the point is that the damage can occur to the brand as well. I can see Cisco trying to fight this one quite vigorously to protect their reputation.
The damage has been done. The only thing now is to minimize the results.
But think of all the sells they could make, and they would be on the correct side of the law. A lot safer and probably survive longer.
Yay, I have a sig.
If the air traffic control system can go down because of a single faulty card in a router, fake or not, I'm thinking I want to avoid planes, and look up a lot more than I do now.
Cheesco makes great networking equipment, and so does 3Corn. We use MircoSoft Windows OS, and it's never let us down! I mean, Linux is good for servers and all, in fact, I only use RedCap. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some Sorny DVDs I want to watch on my MagnetBox TV.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Another reason is that Cisco holds patents on parts of their routers, so a legit business would have to pay licensing fees to Cisco for every compatible router they sell.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
Yaay, pirates!
Fake products are getting more sophisticated all the time. I've even seen fake ICs. They looked fine, worked OK (most of the time), but if you xrayed the device you'd see that the actual silicon was different.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
But they'd also have to create a support infrastructure, etc. Much easier to just create the knockoffs and sell them as the genuine article.
They send thier chipsets and engineering specs to an outside company (flextronics) just like all the other vendors. I imagine that with ISO9001 certifcation making every detail of label placement and branding a documented aspect of the manufacturing process, the details on how to build a card can fit on a USB drive, and be sent to taiwan or china for the incredible markup Cisco enjoys. I would further assume that the failure rate off the assembly line is about the same as the real production runs, its just a matter of who is going to bother QAing parts that are conterfeit.
For that matter the cards that don't meet vendor QA are a likely source of these counterfeits.
Keep in mind, the markup on flash and dram memory that is essentially identical to off the shelf memory is intense, and back when I cared about how much the crap cost, I would skimp on the gen-u-wine cisco memory or pix interface cards myself. I wouldn't want to buy a conterfeit DS3 blade though...
The scary thought is that if Chineese plants are going to slap together a counterfeit router, how hard would it be to add wiretap capability. THE YELLOW IT PERIL!!!
[PLEASE INSERT ADDITIONAL STAR TREK JOKES BENEATH HERE]
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
So what kind of price break are we talking here? is this like 10bucks off genuine or are we talking some hard dollars here?
"Nobody wants to say they've got counterfeit gear inside their enterprises that can all of a sudden stop working."
That sentence reads the same if you remove "counterfeit". Hardware and software that can all of a sudden stop working is a fact of life, regardless of manufacturer.
The use of logos to indicate that a piece of hardware is genuinely from another company when it is not is unethical and should be stopped, but this argument is simply a scare tactic attempting to disguise the real interest, which is that of the manufacturer whose logo is on the product and is angry they did not derive any revenue from the sale. Otherwise, they could care less. From a consumer standpoint, safety is found in redundancy and contingency planning, not trusting that the logo of any one manufacturer on an item means it will not suddenly stop working. I do not blame the manufacturer for wanting in on the sale, but tell it straight, don't childishly trot out the bogeyman to get sympathy,.
Counterfeit Equiptment could also have backdoors, to which certain people or countries could control and relay private data for bad purposes, including spying, identity theft, and many other things. I think Cisco Equiptment should have hardware signatures and checksums to keep fraudulent equiptment from being used. Kinda like Lexmark did with thier toners, although it was a bad idea for consumer in that case, I think it would be helpful in this one.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit!
Going legit would require them to develope their own firmware and drivers rather then just making copies of Ciscos.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Wal-Mart customers aren't too good at upgrading their firmware, it seems, and you still run into some unencrypted hotspots where non-admins without physical access eat these blue-box-specials lunch.
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/switches/ps 4324/ps4321/index.html
Catalyst 4500 Series includes four chassis: Catalyst 4510R (10-slot: redundant Supervisor Engine capable), Catalyst 4507R (7-slot: redundant Supervisor Engine capable, Catalyst 4506 (6-slot), and Catalyst 4503 (3-slot).
Granted its a 4506 with two really small sups.
So umm.. Cisco gear couldn't all of a sudden stop working? Cisco stuff breaks down just like stuff from Sweex, Trust and other dubious brands. Cisco stuff is generally faster, has more features and breaks down less often and costs ten times more.. but every system breaks down eventually. The second law of thermodynamics really is a bitch. ;-)
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
Funny you should mention 3com though...
Huawei appears positioned to become a power in the world's networking industry -- except for one very large problem. On Jan. 23, after an eight-month investigation, Cisco launched a sweeping lawsuit against Huawei, alleging a host of intellectual-property violations and pushing for an injunction to remove certain Huawei products from the market. Huawei responds that the injunction Cisco seeks is unwarranted, and that it has already addressed Cisco's concerns. Still, the suit has derailed Huawei's expansion into the U.S. market. And it may have led Huawei to seek an alliance to bolster its presence and credibility in networking. A month after the suit, Huawei announced a global joint venture with Cisco's longtime rival, 3Com Corp. (COMS )
> Nobody wants to say they've got counterfeit gear inside
:-)
> their enterprises that can all of a sudden stop working.
To bad it's hardware, and not router firmware that's "counterfeit" -- If it was truly different and not an exact duplicate, your fake equipment might be the only stuff working after a good attack!
Cisco offshores a lot of production over to China. This recently bit them in the butt when a company named Huawei stole their software and Cisco tried to sue them in China, but the Chinese Government, which backs Huawei, shut that lawsuit down.
I wouldn't be surprised if Cisco's current counterfeiting woes came from some other offshore producer that stole other facets of their IP.
I have little sympathy for Cisco; they think American workers are too expensive, and that American labor rules are too tough. Well then, let them go to China and get everything that comes along with their cheap labor. Including counterfeiters...
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Just a thought, but the off shore fabs that make the gear could just as well sell the stuff unbranded. The issue might be less about "fake" and more about poor supplier control.
i thought that buying routers from a jamaican guy in times square would be a great way to shave a few thousand from the budget and earn some points with the PHB. the rastaman told me that all the cisco reps use blankets to display thier gear, and that they routinely throw in a bag of weed with every catalyst.
sarcasm:
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
Did you examine or keep any of the fake ones around?
I'm really curious to see a "fake" one right next to an "authentic" Cisco part. Are they duplicates? Or just some other network card that they stamped a phoney Cisco logo on?
It would make a pretty big difference. In the latter case, they're nothing more than counterfeits, like the fake Rolexes that you can get from guys in Battery Park.
But if they're actual Cisco parts, being sold "unauthorized" (perhaps the factory they're outsourcing the assembly to decided to run an extra production shift or something, make a little money on the side), then the situation could be a lot different.
So which is it? A fake Rolex that actually has a $0.25 quartz movement inside? Or the real deal in terms of functionality and hardware, being made somehow without Cisco's approval and without going through their distribution chain?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Point aside, I'd hope they come up with a better brand name than SuperCrapola. Something just doesnt ring right. I dunno, maybe too many syllables? I'm not a marketing guru.
This is what happens when you outsouce you stuff to developing countries, they have all your details and proprietary information, and you have no real control of who works there. I have seen fake chinese Ipods, my sister bought one. What waas funny is that this thing was exaclt alike. When you outsource you products for the sace of cheap labor... Well you get what you paid for. Unreliable security for your secrets, allowing others to replicate it. Just imagine if The USA outsourced it's money printing to Korea? WOW!!! Oh thats where the presses to print the money is made... No wonder!!
"Too bad that bureaucrats' hunger for power is never matched by greater quantities of wisdom or intelligence!!--Could it
FUD patrol on call.
I've heard stories that a lot of the off-brand clothing and shoes that you can buy in Asia are actually produced in the same factories that make name-brand stuff. At the end of the day, after finishing a run of $US_BRAND, they'll bring in the third-shifters and run another production cycle and just not put the logos on. (And depending on who you ask, use lower quality raw materials, etc. etc.)
I wonder if the contract electronics assemblers are doing similar stuff? Seems like it would be pretty easy. If you're assembling network cards for Cisco, you know where all the parts are coming from, and how to put them together. Chances are, all the parts suppliers are also going to be Chinese; not too difficult to call them up and request an extra 1,000 widgets, and just pay for it out-of-pocket. Then you just keep assembling parts until the supplies are exhausted, package up whatever you've promised to deliver to the foreign company (Cisco), and sell the remainder to a local distributor who makes sure they disappear into basically untraceable Asian markets.
As foreign companies outsource more and more of not only the production and assembly, but also the supply-chain-management and procurement functions to "one stop shops," this becomes easier and easier. There are plenty of companies who would be happy to manufacture your widget for you, and handle all the parts sourcing -- allowing Western companies to avoid all the unpleasantness that sometimes involves. But that means there's very little way to verify whether the company is ordering more components than are actually needed to complete the run. In fact, it's nearly impossible -- without intimate knowledge of the part's defect rate and of manufacturing errors, you have no idea how many extra parts need to be ordered. Are they buying 5% more ICs than necessary because they know the factory tends to produce crummy ones (but is still the cheapest available), and are looking out for you? Or are they padding the order so they can overproduce and sell the excess on the side?
Like you, I have little sympathy for American companies who get bitten by this. If they wanted control over the manufacturing process, they could keep it here in the States. If counterfeiting is what happens when you outsource everything to a country with cheap labor and little respect for foreign intellectual property, you made your bed and now you can sleep in it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
So you are suggesting that Cisco makes crap? It's not hard to copy a circuit board. The very problem is that the products aren't turning out to be as good because they fail or turn out to be flaky. And when they fail, Cisco's not going to replace them for you because they weren't legit Cisco products.
I agree it doesn't make sense. Plus, when you load the truck up with fake goods, it means that the contents won't be written off as quickly as a loss and passed on to the insurance company, which if you're into cargo theft, is exactly what you want to happen. The faster the load is just written off, the sooner people forget about it.
A load of stuff that just gets stolen happens all the time; the police probably aren't even going to investigate it that hard. (If anything, they'll look hard at the driver, because the way cargo theft normally works is that somebody gets their hooks into the driver and 'encourages' him to park his truck somewhere and go eat lunch.) If you swap the stolen goods out for fakes, then the crime might take a little longer to uncover, but it's going to stay alive for significantly longer. It's an anomalous crime as well, meaning it'll attract more attention.
A bright blip on the radar screen which fades away fast, is far preferable to a dimmer blip that stays up there for longer.
I'm not saying it couldn't happen -- criminals sometimes do bizarre, illogical things (but usually only once) -- just that it seems really unlikely.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It would've been fine had they being labeled as "compatible" or "clone" products. Duplicating (insert company name) logo's are at very least trade mark violation, not to mention willful misrepresentation of merchandise.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
"Crisco": Trans fats, very bad!
"Frisco": Works okay, but seems a bit too... flamboyant
"Disco": Status lights all blink in hypnotic rhythm. Once you get really into it, it dies.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Or you can find a country that, like China, does not overcharge high rip-off prices, but unlike China, has better enforcement on this. Then you neither pay now nor pay later.
In other news, North Pole granted accession to the WTO; attempts at elf unionization fail.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
What the parent says
I run the robotics factory making building materials.
The stuff that dont make the national quality standards to get sold officialy, gets sold out of the back door to a handful of tame builders supliers in our city.
Posting AC for a reason
Between the summary talking about grey-market and a bunch of you not having a clue.....
They seem to be talking about actual counterfeits, they may be entering the market via grey-market channels and getting mixed back in with the regular and/or real grey-market stuff.
What little meat there was seemed to say there were cisco cards that had the wrong chip or something that was diferent. That and don't buy cisco cards from a dude in china...duh
Manufacturers could track the locations of product serial numbers through production and distribution and out to the retail outlets. Duplicate serial numbers in disparate locations would get flagged as counterfeit. Consumers should have a way to look up the serial number of a product before they buy it, and verify that it is at the retail location where it is supposed to be, and that it hasn't been flagged counterfeit. Companies could cost effectively defeat counterfeiting of their products this way and consumers would know they are buying the real thing. I wrote a paper which describes how to use location tracking of serial numbers to defeating counterfeiting. The paper starts out describing an idea for anti-counterfeit labels using a smart chip with electronic ink, but further down in the paper, it also describes how to do it with just location tracking of printed serial numbers. The paper, titled "Anti-counterfiet authenticity labels - smart chips with electronic ink and wireless i/o - duplicate serial number detection" is posted at IP.COM and also on my friend's web site:h tm
http://above-the-garage.com/rblts/Vincent-Labels.
> Sure, the cards might have been resold, but they are branded cisco items bearing the entire cisco interface
> and functionality - somehow I doubt outright fake chipsets and devices like this can be produced by anyone
> other than cisco themselves.
Not really. A lot of Cisco cards are pretty simple products, off the shelf chips from 3rd party vendors with some common glue logic and some connectors. Some are more difficult, granted. Now consider Cisco doesn't actually manufacture much of anything. And finally consider that getting the complete files for the board and component list wouldn't cost much, just bribe an employee. Happens all the time.
The reason this is happening is that Cisco is trying to keep a closed market on an increasingly large segment of the the world's information infrastructure. They do it by requiring all equipment to be under service contract (or no updates or other support of any sort) and forbidding clone/generic add ons. This creates tremendous market pressure which someone is bound to find a way to satisfy. If you can't install a clone part, buy a really lowball 'genuine' one. Everyone with a clue knows what is happening but doesn't care as long as the customer can retain enough plausable deniability to avoid having service contracts voided if they get caught.
The marketplace has been ripe for cutting Cisco out of the loop now for a decade. Hopefully the new open source based routers will be able to get some high end interfaces available and end their dominance of routing. There really isn't much left that a 1U PC with some new PCI Express slots turned in such a way as to get several cards to slide in along the back of the box couldn't handle.
And I'd certainly rather configure with vi instead of Cisco's fudged up CLI.
Democrat delenda est
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
One of the reasons people buy Cisco gear is because they trust the company.
Sounds like a really good argument why you should never just blindly trust someone because of a brand name.
If you don't know who's code is actually running on your firewall/router/whatever, and I don't mean "what code is running on that model device, according to the manual," I mean your firewall, that actual metal box in the closet, then you are assuming a certain amount of risk. Any time you blindly swallow what some company that you bought something from tells you, remember that they have a financial motive to make you believe that their farts smell like roses. Some may be more blatant than others, but their goals are not the same as yours, even if they do coincide in certain areas.
By the time you get your hands on a piece of hardware, it's passed through dozens (if not hundreds) of carriers, middlemen, distributors, wholesalers, and the like. You are trusting every one of them to not have messed with it, in ways ranging from an actively hostile backdoor, to petty thievery like the RAM theft that someone discusses further up in the thread. There are some pretty good arguments for using the simplest hardware possible and then loading software yourself. It's still not totally devoid of risk (and with software you get into the whole thing about compiler compromises), but it limits the number of hands the code passes through.
The amount of trust that people put blindly in others is simply astounding. Sometimes it's for good reason, but other times it boils down to calculated laziness. Maybe that calculation needs to be revised a little.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I bet they're buying more ICs because they're declaring an inflated defect rate.
It's the easiest way to cover their tracks.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
They are usually a joke. The average tag is an adhesive backed vinyl with a clear polypro laminate to provide scratch protection. There is NO other verification method used on these labels.
The hologram labels are different. The hologram substrate itself has between 12 - 24 security features embedded into the hologram. They include:
- Frequency specific holograms
- Angle specific holograms
- Quarter codes
By combining these, customs can tell pretty much at a glance if the hologram is authentic or not.Even so, they still trash cargo by the boatload every year that made it through the initial inspections.
How did [] a gold partner to Microsoft and Symantec)
Wow, well, those are certainly some reputable outfits.
All Cisco has to do is quit beating competitors over the head with patents and other anti-competitive practices and compete off of merrit and service instead. If it wasn't for things like this artifically pumping up the price of Cisco products and locking out competitors, other vendors would be more than happy to build their own brand recognition. IMHO, Cisco is getting exactly the plate that they dished themselves up, and now they wine about security, sub par products, and quality. HA! What a joke.
> Sure, the cards might have been resold, but they are branded cisco items bearing the entire cisco interface and functionality - somehow I doubt outright fake chipsets and devices like this can be produced by anyone other than cisco themselves.
s ionid=VY3ZV2L4EFUAWQSNDLPCKHSCJUNN2JVN?articleID=1 92600455&queryText=cisco+counterfeit
The article manages to totally skip highlighting a single specific case of fake hardware, the nearest being a raid on a hardware repair centre where officials from a group of agencies pounced.
Okay, how about this one? http://www.varbusiness.com/showArticle.jhtml;jses
This outfit tried to sell some Catalyst switches to Northrop, and by extension, the Navy. Now they're out half a million, with a grunch of unsellable switches on their hands, what status they had with Cisco has been revoked, and they're suing their supplier (who is countersuing). As an added bonus, the Navy is doing a criminal investigation.
We're talking about Chinese companies here. On the rare occasion that anyone bothers to sue them for patent violation, the Chinese courts shoot it down faster than you can say "reverse engineering". China has zero respect for other nations' IP laws.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...you are correct, and unfortunately 2), it is the bulk of US manufacturers doing this. They are completely destroying the economy *on purpose*, pillaging as they go, then will flee when the collapse comes, literally leave, leaving the bulk of medium and smaller investors stranded with bogus shares and the bulk of the US workers in generational debt.
Right now they are taking the housing bubble slowly collapsing loans and selling them to hedgers on discount (themselves in other words), who then are using that simply bogus conjob "collateral" in a huge scale manipulated wall street pump and dump scam. Obvious as all get out. This recent record DOW-HAHAHAHA! It's HILARIOUS! Look to exactly where the bulk of that money is coming from..analyse that..follow it back.
We WILL be seeing a great depression version two from all of this. China right now is just taking the free stuff they are being handed by the boatload, and who wouldn't? The top 1% are the only people benefiting in the long run from this scam economy, and they will be sitting rich enough and powerful enough to go live wherever they want and have guards a-plenty. ALL of these globalist loons know china will continue to counterfeit, they don't care, they are in on it to ripoff some millions or billions apiece (you don't think all that investment money going to china is really invested, do you? think some might get skimmed? Ha!) then slip away right before they let it crash, then by proxy (paper companies, shells) they will use the profits they are taking now to pick up real properties for a nickel on the dollar, exactly the same thing they did with that last great easy credit/bubble/collapse/skim like a madman scam they pulled in 1929. These people are shills and grifters, read between the lines and keep it in mind there is no long term free lunch. They keep selling that fairy tale and will continue to do it until enough people bingo to the fact that it IS a fairy tale.
Tangibles are where it is at, that and being completely 100% out of debt..anyone reading this-you have been warned, and you can research what I just outlined. You will see this is correct and in the back of your mind you know you have been suspecting it. You know something is wrong but can't put a finger on it. I just outlined it simply. It's a big con run by a handful of very large central banks and investment houses, who control most of the financial media and the money supply. Pretty easy to sell that fairy tale when you control those resources.....
Act accordingly, and do not wait. They are very close to pulling their next major stunt.
The summary refers to this as "grey-market", which it doesn't seem to be. Grey market goods are legitimate goods sold outside the authorized distribution channels, it could be imported from outside the US (think Canadian Pharmacies, though many of those are fake), it could be bought on the cheap to be resold. The Key being Grey market goods are by definition the "real thing", obtained legally but resold without the backing of the maker. Its up to company policies then whether they will support grey market goods. On the other hand, Black market goods may not legally obtained, may not be legal for possession, or may not be what they are represented as being, and are certainly not supported by their "makers". Note that "black market" goods might be represented as "grey market", turns out purveyers of black market goods tend to be dishonest in their dealings.
So which is it? A fake Rolex that actually has a $0.25 quartz movement inside? Or the real deal in terms of functionality and hardware, being made somehow without Cisco's approval and without going through their distribution chain?
Either way the part is called "counterfeit". When it breaks, Cisco won't support it. A Fake Rolex w/ a cheap Quartz movement will likely keep time better than a knock off that tried to replicate the delicate and intricate movement of a true "automatic" watch. If it was made w/o Cisco's approval, they likely made it w/ substandard components and w/o the proper QA procedures, so they can actually make money when the sell it at a deep discount. What do they care, they don't have to worry about supporting it.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
We bought a Cisco router, but realized it was counterfeit when it routed our traffic through Burma instead of China.
You're also missing the fact that the manufacturer does not have to make up for R&D costs.
If we're talking about grey market products, they are the real thing, just imported from outside of the control of the local official representative of the brand.
In Hong Kong we get grey market stuff from everywhere. Most laptops or camera from Sony come from grey market imports from Japan, outside of the control of Sony Hong Kong and they are 15-30% cheaper.
It doesn't mean that the equipment is fake. Companies may been keen on reporting grey imports as fake to justify a legal ban or instill FUD into their users but, in most cases, I doubt that it is true.
Grey imports just bypass and don't benefit the local 'official' representative.
Until 1999 (or around, can't remember), nearly all of the CD found in HMV stores in Hong Kong were grey market imports. None were fake, they just came from different countries and could be sold cheaper.
Now the law has changed to curb on piracy and because it's harder to track the origins of grey imports HMV now mostly sells officially sanctioned imports: they could still have the same origin as before, but now cost more to the consumer.
Now, actual fakes are a different matter. There probably exist fake cards manufactured in China that mimic a particular function and are sold under well known brand names but I doubt that this is very common for non-generic hardware beyond simple network cards and the like.
No one seems to know about this. The problem is huge!
I work trading parallel channel and used Cisco and the guys in China are shipping out tonnes of stuff. Just search on www.ebay.com.hk for cisco. Most of the guys on Ebay the world that pretend to be in HK trading are located in China and are trading fake stuff.
Most WIC, VWIC, VIC modules available are fake. 2621xm, 2950-24, they have now even started to sell counterfeit PA- board like the PA-2FE-TX. If you want a full list please let me know I will post what is available in the fake market. The list is BIG, even modules for Catalyst 4500's!
Cisco in HK run a lot of the anti-counterfeit efforts, every few months the close a factory in China, but more keep emerging.
Some countefeit appearing in USA? USA is the largest counterfeit market in the world. The China guys sell over to the USA to companies, who then distribute back out to the rest of the world. The other biggest consumer of fake Cisco is india. They don't care, they just want cheap prices.
The problem with the fake stuff is that procurement in companies and even Cisco official channel want better prices and what do they do? They buy from some guy located in say NJ who supplies at 60% off list, who has bought a pile of stuff from Shenzhen, China. The china guys are even able to invent or guess serial numbers, which you can look up on the Cisco site and will check out. The hardware is not the same, not the same Q&A, the failure rate is higher, so if you do save money
In my experience in 6 years in the business most of the people trading Cisco in China are trading fake goods, the problem is that try make themselves look legitimate and give out HK addresses to people and are ruining the reputation of us legitimate companies in Hong Kong. How to tell? Their phone numbers start with +86755 and not 852. They also always post two email addresses, or exclusively use Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail as the china email systems lose too much mail.
I have been fighting against this problem since it appeared in November 2002 and it is nightmare to trade original parts.
... unfortunately, teh masses have been conditioned to believe the things you speak of are un-possible. Just look what happened to my post on the same topic yesterday: (-1, Troll). Disbelief is widespread.
There's always been a dedicated few fighting the globalist gangsters, and now a few in the media are starting to pick up on the plot too - namely, Keith Olberman (see his special comments, also on YouTube) and Lou Dobbs. Hopefully when the elections get stolen (again), this time we'll have riots in the street...
The global economy is in meltdown, plan accordingly. China will do well after the restructuring, because they now have so much production capability. America will have to re-industrialize, so we'll be able to produce the things we still need...
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
The article does readers a disservice by implying that "gray market" automatically means counterfeit. Gray market products are genuine branded products that were simply not intended for the market in which they are being sold. They are just as good as regular products, with the exception that their warranty is generally invalid in the region where they're sold. Reputable merchants who deal in gray-market products include B&H Photo and Dynamism.com. (And no, I don't work for either of them.)
who is a Cisco reseller with shiny knobs on (this is all theorectical and I've made it up - OK?).
Seemingly the factories where they make at least some of the stuff make 'extra' and if you work your way high enough up the supply chain, you'll get approached by them. Seemingly it's not 'fake' it's exactly the same, just you get 5 routers all with the same serial number.
I assume the factory tells Cisco they only made 1 router, produce 4 clones, and unless more than two of them break down simultaneously, Cisco support is never going to notice. Most customers don't seem to mind either.
China has zero respect for other nations' IP laws.
Often with good reason unfortunately. Much "IP" these days is simply market manipulation.
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Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
I am a senior in high school, and last year my Cisco teacher ordered about 50 WIC 2T cards. They didnt quite fit right and we couldnt figure out why, until we checked the name on the side, instead of Cisco, it was C1sco, not a big difference, but enough to keep us busy for awhile.
If not +5 Insightful, at least +1 Interesting. It's certainly something to think about. Looks to me like ...
... domestic manufacturing might be an excellent long-term investment right about now. Basically any kind of factory that makes, or can be converted to make, the kind of stuff we'll need but won't be able to keep importing from China.
Olbermann rocks.