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FTDI Driver Breaks Hardware Again (eevblog.com)

Posted by timothy on from the up-stuff-creek dept.

janoc writes: It seems that the infamous FTDI driver that got famous by intentionally bricking counterfeit chips [NOTE: that driver was later removed] has got a new update that injects garbage data ('NON GENUINE DEVICE FOUND!') into the serial data. This was apparently going on for a while, but only now is the driver being pushed as an automatic update through Windows Update, thus many more people stand to be affected by this.

Let's hope that nobody dies in an industrial accident when a tech connects their cheap USB-to-serial cable to a piece of machinery and the controller misinterprets the garbage data.

3 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Supply chains by willaien · · Score: 5, Informative

    MCP2221, CH340G, etc. Just see:

    http://www.eevblog.com/forum/r...

  2. Re:Keeping me happy for disabling auto-updates by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 5, Informative

    So, your problem may well be that you have a counterfeit "Prolific" chip that Prolific's driver no longer plays nice with.

    No, that's not the problem at all. You can read yourself from Prolific's website:

    http://www.prolific.com.tw/US/...

    Note on that page how they no longer support "EOL chipsets" even though they work fine in windows 8 and 10 if you simply use an older driver that doesn't care about what OS version you have. If you use a newer one though, the driver throws a code 10 error so it won't work, unless of course, it detects a non-EOL chipset.

  3. FTDI is malware by stooo · · Score: 5, Informative

    FTDI is malware.

    Use Linux.
    use MCP2221.

    --
    aaaaaaa