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.

Comments

Re:Is it legal to make code compatible alternative

[rgbscan]

My $3 generic eBay FTDI clone USB->Serial cable (that I bought to program my Baofeng radio via Chirp) came with no drivers and Windows pulled down the real FTDI driver. Over the summer, it only worked sporadically. Usually didn't work. Swapping out the cable for a $12 legit cable from Trendnet solved all issues. It isn't just that these chinese places are making a clone, it's that they are making a crappy sort-of compatible clone and passing it off as the real thing, and directing you to use the FTDI drivers. It totally makes FTDI look bad. I didn't find out until after researching with some guys from chirp that my cable was a knock off. I thought I was buying a supported chipset. Might not be legal or ethical, but I'm all for anything that stops these crappy chinese cloners in their tracks. I spent way too much time and hassle on a problem they caused.

Re:This is just wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

I own several fake FTDI chips (thanks DealExtreme for those $2 USB -> RS232 adapters). They do not have anything "FTDI" written on the chips (I opened them up to check). When using newer (but not these) windows drivers the chips are, however, detected as counterfeits and the FTDI driver throws an error, which seems like fair play. I have enough to test and see if this new driver rewrites the VID. Betcha it does.

Destroying this hardware that doesn't have their name on it, however, isn't fair play, especially when the driver is built into windows. Not like I went and downloaded it from FTDI on purpose.

Re:Is this legal?

[dgatwood]

One, the cloned FTDI subcomponents are in and of themselves essentially indefensible.

Not necessarily. It is not a crime to use the USB ID of a competing product. It is a violation of the rules set by the USB standards body, but if you are not a member of that organization and have no prior business relationship with them, you are under no legal obligation to comply with those rules. More to the point, reusing a USB ID is absolutely not the same thing as counterfeiting. As far as I know, no country in the entire world has a law that says that devices are counterfeit merely because they conform to another device's programming interface. For something to be counterfeit, it has to be designed and marketed as the real thing, with the intent to defraud the purchaser.

What this means is that if the outside of the packaging claims that the part was made by FTDI, then the counterfeits are indefensible. However, if they were sold as FTDI-compatible chips, then the chips are almost certainly not in violation of counterfeiting laws. And if there's no way for the software to know the difference between those two, and if even one single device that was sold legitimately as a clone gets bricked, then FTDI is committing the crime of destruction of property. And if their actions ends up destroying medical equipment, they could be charged with even more serious crimes, up to and including manslaughter.

The reality is that in this sort of cat-and-mouse game, nobody wins, because everybody loses. It is vital that the authorities in Scotland take immediate legal action against FTDI to ensure that other companies are not tempted to pull similar stunts in the future. Their actions are clearly indefensible criminal actions, and should be treated as such, regardless of who fired the first salvo or how much harm they believe they have suffered at the hands of the counterfeiters.