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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.
If they work, I don't care. The scumbags bricking devices are the problem.
A component manufacturer is unhappy that someone else is using his product id so he puts code in a driver that sets the product id to zero. This prevents the fake component being recognized by his driver or any other driver. The license for the driver explicitly states that using the driver with a fake component may irretrievably damage the component.
If the component manufacturer doesn't want the fake product to work with his driver he can code his driver to ignore the fake. Modifying the product id to brick the component is another matter entirely.
This doesn't hurt the people who created the fake, or even the people who purchased the fake and used them in their manufacturing. It only hurts end users who have done nothing except purchase a product in retail channels. Deliberately destroying equipment because it uses a fake component goes to a whole new level of nastiness.
>We've discovered some non-factory parts in your car.
-Oh, really? Well, I'm going to drive over to the dealership take that up with them.
>We've already handled the problem. We crushed your car into a cube.
-Uhhh...
>You have 15 seconds to move your cube.
Not quite. Non-factory parts are fine. There are alternatives to the FTDI chips, just like there are alternative parts for your car. The problem here is the part is pretending to be genuine when it's not.
This all goes out the window the minute you write code that intentionally does harmful things to your hardware. And it would be fairly easy to prove said intent: no driver should be mucking with USB PIDs ever, especially not when they've proven that the hardware in question isn't theirs. A driver that says, "Okay, this hardware clearly isn't mine, let's go break it" is malicious software.
This is shit that Nintendo flashcart vendors do.
It is. And if they get their own USB:ID and are otherwise a complete knock-off, that's great.
http://www.linux-usb.org/usb.i...
The problem is all the phone calls to FTDI's customer support line complaining that the cheap-shit underdesigned parts aren't working to spec. or that the drivers are broken and the users "demand a fix" when the problem is with a device FTDI didn't build, and didn't make any money from to support driver development and customer support.
They have every right to have thier drivers detect the non-genuine parts, report them and refuse to work with them. Bricking them is clearly causing intentional harm to equipment they don't own. Never excusable.
What did companies learn from the Sony rootkit? That the criminal penalty for perpetrating literally tens of millions of felonies on behalf of a corporation is... absolutely nothing? Sure, that'll teach'em!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
So is it illegal to own counterfeit products or only to sell them? For example, if you have a fake Gucci handbag can a Gucci employee come up to you with a can of spray-paint and spray it to ruin it? Or if you took it to a legit store and they discovered it was counterfeit could they do the same thing? I'm thinking this steps way way over the line of what they're allowed to do to stop counterfeiting and they're going to get their asses sued big-time.