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FTDI Reportedly Bricking Devices Using Competitors' Chips.
janoc writes It seems that chipmaker FTDI has started an outright war on cloners of their popular USB bridge chips. At first the clones stopped working with the official drivers, and now they are being intentionally bricked, rendering the device useless. The problem? These chips are incredibly popular and used in many consumer products. Are you sure yours doesn't contain a counterfeit one before you plug it in? Hackaday says, "It’s very hard to tell the difference between the real and fake versions by looking at the package, but a look at the silicon reveals vast differences. The new driver for the FT232 exploits these differences, reprogramming it so it won’t work with existing drivers. It’s a bold strategy to cut down on silicon counterfeiters on the part of FTDI. A reasonable company would go after the manufacturers of fake chips, not the consumers who are most likely unaware they have a fake chip."
Update: 10/24 02:53 GMT by S : In a series of Twitter posts, FTDI has admitted to doing this.
Never mind your feeble class action lawsuit. Let their executives or other staff responsible travel to a country where unauthorized computer access causing this kind of damage is a criminal offence!
Then let them stand up in court and argue with a straight face that the user of a device that without the user's knowledge contained an alleged counterfeit component had authorised them to install software that was actively designed to impair the use of that device.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The user didn't harm FTDI.
Yes they did. Buy buying a knockoff product (counterfeit) directly harms the maker of the real, and diminishes the value of the real. If you buy a Rodex watch, expecting it to be exactly like a Rolex watch, you have harmed Rolex. If you buy a Frod Car, instead of a Ford Car, you have harmed Ford.
And while bricking a device is harsh, I have no problem with an updated driver for FTDI chips harming faked FTDI chips. None at all.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.