If you're worried about a data-leak "when not using their service," it sounds like you're a bit confused about what you want. If it is some other thing that is leaking, like slashdot, then why are you even talking about maps?
Try to describe your complaint in such a way that your words are literally true. Whatever stylistic form you're attempting may be great, but your complaint is not at all clear.
It may be that you don't have a specific complaint, and just heard some people on the internet say some non-specific bad things about google, and now you've got concerns. In that case, chin up.
Kinda silly to complain about the strobing when I put a warning right on the link.
It is by some famous artist, you'll have done well in life if you die half as famous as him. If it doesn't speak to you, well that is art. Nobody asked it to speak to you. Go and choose something else. Be strong, little newbie. You can do it. Find some kittens or something.
Right, that is what you're not reading. You get to the words, and you skip over them instead of reading them.
Yes, we're talking about digikey. You cannot buy official FTDI products from them. If you don't believe me, call up FTDI and ask. They will not guarantee that parts purchased from their biggest official distributors are genuine, and yes those are the exact sources of parts that they accuse of including counterfeit chips. You have to buy them directly from FTDI for them to guarantee authenticity, and if you sent an assistant to pick them up and later want to verify that the boxes in your warehouse that you believe to have come from FTDI are real, well then you'd be out of luck because they will not guarantee authenticity except at the moment they pass it out the factory door.
The difference between FTDI and Texas Instruments is that TI doesn't say I have to buy it from them or it might be fake; they say if I bought it from any of the distributors on their list then all is good, and if there are fakes they'll deal with it themselves. That is the difference, and everything about it has to do with FTDI making impossible demands on users that nobody else makes.
If I asked TI if the boxes in my warehouse are genuine parts, they'd ask me where I bought them. If I said "mouser" or "digikey," they'd be happy to verify the authenticity. And the drivers would never stop working on purpose.
I've been here for a long time, and active that whole time, and that doesn't really ring a bell to me. Probably seen it, but probably ignored it too. When was the last time I heard some neckbeard pining for hot grits? I don't know, I never paid much attention to that sort of idiocy. The idiocy itself sometimes rises to a level that feels like a bombardment, but it is generally a wide range of idiocy rather than a specific meme being the bomb.
When I think of slashdot and hosts files, I actually think of the Big Taco on Slashdot Radio talking about using hosts files (on linux) to filter web advertising, and whatever script was being used for email before SpamAssassin. Back then, half of slashdot had their email on a private mailserver that they managed themselves.
Google maps doesn't have a leak; actually, google is the data provider! They're not providing a pipe to some other map, or putting a tollbooth in front of a public map, it is actually their map stored on their server, and when you use google maps you explicitly ask them for that data. Asking somebody for something isn't the same as leaking your identity to them. You're telling them who you are when you show them your face to ask to look at their stuff.;)
Never say yes to an app permission your use of the app doesn't require. Generally this requires only using open source apps, and downloading the source and turning off extra permissions.
Never require networking from apps that you don't want to phone home.
Assume everything that can phone home, does.
As to the complaint that MS's "privacy mode" isn't as private as some people wanted, it reminds me of Richard Feynman at Los Alamos complaining that otherwise-intelligent people thought that secrets were safe because they were stored in devices called "safes." Had they been called "locking cabinets that reduce the likelihood of access a little bit, especially by honest folks" or something else literal, they might have had less problems with secrets being stolen. "Privacy mode" isn't intended to make everything "private," it is intended to mask your pr0n access from casual examination of your browser history. But that isn't actually private in most cases, it is just web traffic and they could unmask you at the router anyways. Internet doesn't have a "private" option, if you want private you'll need a "private network." Internet is a "public network." It is like wanting privacy on the sidewalk; you can't have it. You can usually keep people from touching you, though.
Ultimately if you want a private mobile device, you should be buying hardware, replacing the OS with something FL/OSS and only using a private network.
The one constant throughout all of the culture changes in America is the government. The group which is supposed to lay down and enforce the laws of the land so that anyone of any culture can live and thrive.
What we have here, and what i was pointing to is that our Government is taking on a different role, not one of of setting down the laws and frame work which allow for cultural freedom and evolution but rather a Government which is laying down laws in order to influence and Control said culture to make it what it wants.
It is just hand-wavy assertion though. The Government is still there, when did the NSA dismiss congress? Oh, didn't happen. If you read more history, you'll find out that there were worse transgressions of rights in the past, and yet the country was still here, the Government hadn't changed it was still a bunch of representative jerks most of whom were legitimately elected, and the Courts are still there are still actively balancing the legit concerns of different branches of government. The process is still going on. The nation didn't die from hippies, and it didn't die from signals intelligence.
None of the modern accusations even involve concentration camps, or armies raised by the executive branch to invade States and disagree with Congress. It is just hand-wavy assertion of the death of the nation, without even a dead body, or a lack of heartbeat. Those with more fortitude than you are neither defeated, nor disenfranchised. Nor even under significant threat. People whine about rights they think are being violated, but a quick glance at history shows there were always people whose rights were violated, and rights have increased substantially under that process as the Court continuously restores those Rights. Such is the process, and it has not slowed.
Right, you haven't looked it up, you're too busy repeating a narrative to comprehend if what I am saying is consistent with the public details.
It doesn't occur to you that I might have looked into it in substantial detail far beyond what anybody would discuss on slashdot. You throw a "you're bluffing" bluff from the dark, it is not impressive at all. Show you understood whatever you read by identifying the specific parts that contradict specific things I said, and say them. LOL that is how a discussion works. I said things, you're only saying "no you're wrong." But missing is an actual accusation of a part being wrong. All you give is bare assertion that doesn't even hint at knowledge.
No, it is new code with no public beta testing and no way to verify the answers it gives. As a software developer, it is obvious that new software comes with bugs. Therefore, we know already that some percent of affected users don't actually have a counterfeit device, they merely have an authentic device that either was lower quality than average, or just randomly hit a driver bug.
The problem isn't that companies are buying large lots of chips from non-reputable distributors, the problem is that if you buy those chips from the mainstream distributors that FTDI sells most of their units through, those might be chips that FTDI accuses of being counterfeit. You mistake the nature of the problem. This is not having to do with buying from low-reputation distributors. Testing 1 unit out of 10k doesn't really help all that much. A true counterfeiter could easily put the first 10 units off each role as units they got from FTDI, and their own copies in the rest of the reels. (Most ICs come in ~1000 unit tape reels)
The fact that there is no mainstream North American or European distributor that FTDI can point to and say, "if you buy it from them it is genuine" leads me to the strong suspicion that there are many less counterfeits being sold here than they allege. I don't doubt that Chinese firms don't honor foreign ideas of "intellectual property" on products sold internally in China. (And why would they? Laws don't work that way) If it was just Chinese exports, they have lots of legit tools to stop the larger players and prevent serious impact to their business. It seems they don't do that. Presumably, they have trouble actually proving that anything is counterfeit.
You just wave your hands and instead of, "make different policy choices through the process of representative democracy than I wanted," you make conclusory statements that imply 1) that everybody agrees with you what freedom means exactly 2) that bravery[sic] was a national value of importance (laughable) and 3) that not using your policy ideas is the death of the nation.
Rather pathetic analysis you give in every single dimension. But the worst is that you don't consider how it negatively affects freedom for you to completely ignore the representative process and the obvious implication; that freedom still exists now in the exact same ways it existed before. Perhaps you had a magical idea before, and you found out it wasn't the world you live in? That doesn't mean everybody else was wrong, it might just mean you were mistaken about the necessary elements of freedom in the minds of your fellow citizens. You want to choose everything for them, even what policies they should support or what freedom should mean to them, but you have no chance of success at that; their freedom is too strong, it runs too deep. They'll decide for themselves, and they'll outlive you too.
Well, if you read news then you know that just because their company's lawyer "cleared" it, that doesn't mean it is legal or that they won't get in trouble for doing it.
All it takes is a company whose product is affected to convince the jury that they did do their diligence, and they believe they purchased good chips. It might very well be that FTDI can't prove the chips are not genuine, and they would have to prove that side. The accusers would only have to prove they believed them to be. IP violations don't forgive sabotage, but sabotage can indeed mean you have "unclean hands" and can't push a counter-suit.
They probably just have poor quality lawyers, just like they have poor quality engineers and only one successful product.
However, they are not a very successful electronics company. They have one (1) product that is wildly successful, and since they don't have better engineers than their competitors, they're not positioned to ensure they continue to control that niche in the future. In fact, Silicon Labs are already replacing FTDI as the preferred name-brand chip. Presumably that one is designed by Microchip. I prefer the Texas Instruments ones, because they come in more packages. (SL prefers modern non-hand-solderable packages) Cheap designs are moving to Cypress chips because they're the same price as counterfeits, and work fine.
So, their goal is to milk the declining product as hard as they can until it is dead.
One thing you missed is that FTDI doesn't guarantee that chips bought through their official distributors are genuine. The official distributors are the ones substituting the chips that are either "counterfeit," or for whatever QA reason don't get properly detected by FTDI's driver.
There is no source of genuine chips other than FTDI's factory door. And what happens if you hire a shipping company to deliver them? Can you have FTDI check the chips to verify? Is there some official way of checking? No. There is no method of checking.
This is not a problem that rears its head only when suppliers are out of stock and you buy somewhere else. This is a problem that begins when the idiotic engineer puts an FTDI part on the BOM, instead of a comparable part from a reputable brand like Texas Instruments.
If a single USB-to-Serial mis-reading can cause a disaster, then disaster is coming. It's a matter of if, not when.
Such is the state of things in factories. When I was younger I worked in factories, and people do die at work. That does not imply that increasing the likelihood of disaster is harmless.
All it takes for somebody to die in a factory is looking away for a second.
Factory equipment is rarely designed to be "safe," it is designed to be safe under certain controlled circumstances that typically can't be maintained during maintenance or malfunction.
A piece of equipment merely detecting the garbage data and going into safe mode could cause other equipment to spill a load that overflows onto somebody's head. Especially if the error is something that never would have happened in testing, because RS-232 adapters had never spewed false instructions. Older systems sometimes have noise detectors; they will shut things down if there is too much noise on the line, while it is still too low to cause "line noise" in the communication. So even systems designed to robustly prevent line noise could be defeated by this, and create a whole new untested failure state. There are generally only protections for known failure states. That is why an unexpected "safe mode" in one piece of equipment can turn a connected machine deadly.
The user of the equipment doesn't get to choose the safety protocols, and there is no guarantee that the first letters of FTDI's line noise isn't a command that moves equipment. Often, most bytes that you send translate to commands! This isn't like some sort of modern system with acknowledged messages; when a byte is ready it is read, and every 2 bytes or so is a command. Just feeding a sentence of English into an RS-232 control system will very often cause numerous events, not even just 1. If it is a factory machine, most of those events result in activation of some part of the machine.
Your belief in factory equipment safety is perhaps misguided. That isn't the world that exists. And the person doing the maintenance was not consulted as to the protocols; they are not the only party responsible for their safety. Yes, factory equipment maintenance is inherently unsafe. Nobody is asking you to take the job, they're pointing out that this endangers people who do the job using existing safety protocols. You simply have to remove some of your lockouts in order to troubleshoot; you have to trust the machine to behave predictably while doing those tasks.
MS can't test against genuine hardware, because FTDI can't/won't check an existing chip to tell if it is "genuine," and don't guarantee chips as genuine even when purchased through their distributors. So a generic device that purports to have an FTDI chip can't be tested by MS. Nobody has any way of knowing is something is genuine unless they personally picked up the chips at FTDI's will call door and hand-shepherded them through the manufacturing process.
An OS vendor has to be able to walk into an office supply store, buy a device of brand Foo(TM) and test it against the driver, or else they can't really say if it will work. If you can only test samples from each device vendor, they won't be sending you random samples that represent what is really in the box; you'll mostly get higher quality short run prototypes, or the devices that aced the QA tests. They're not going to send the devices that barely passed but would still get sold.
It is too bad MS doesn't step in and play the silverback here, but they end up leaving it where you say; savvy users of their OS won't trust their updates. That sometimes leads to security problems, but hey; pick your poison. Toxic updates are more common than harmful exploits for most users.
They have their own generic driver that works if you use an off-brand chip.
For manufacturers and makers the solution is obvious; don't choose FTDI because their own distributors sell counterfeit chips, or at least chips FTDI fails to recognize as genuine. Silicon Labs and Texas Instruments make better chips anyways.
Check the data sheet for your chip and make sure it uses the generic USB driver. Then it works in any new-ish OS, and on older ones with driver install.
This is widely done in media, and what you get as "replies" are press releases. Actually, your comment pretty much defines "press release." They rarely are going to "clear up the news," or attempt to.
Well, a lawyer might help you if you're a distributor who bought enough units to make it worth suing FTDI for contract interference.:)
If it isn't their chip, they don't have the legal right to harm it. They could try to counter-sue you, but then they'd find out you're not responsible for their supply chain woes; you're only responsible for buying from a reputable reseller and doing related diligence. You sue them, they have to sue your supplier.
Sounds good, except that a lot of computers only put out 5V already.
Even just an RS-232 inline breakout debugger can drop the level too far for full speed communication between computers. If you're plugging into an external modem, then that side is full power but more importantly it can read down to 3V. The 5V computer RS-232 implementations rarely survive under 4.0V.
12V is plenty and I say that as somebody who has had this problem.
Arduinos have the same exact range of USB chips as the serial converters.
Not only are their competitors, but many of those competitors don't pay Microsoft to get their proprietary drivers included, and so you get generic USBSerial drivers. This is a huge advantage to the user, because no installation is required, and the drivers don't get updated over time, so shipped units will continue working.
FTDI wishes they were pushing me away from cheap knockoffs onto their brand, but they're pushing me away from their brand (because I have to buy through a regular supply chain, I can only go off the label I don't have magic vision). They do leave me wanting a premium product, and I can get the chip for about $3 from Silicon Labs or Texas Instruments. A quality cable costs more than the converter chip.
it's possible the driver actually choose to cause BSOD, there's no way to know.
Stop there and don't pretend to be providing analysis. That is very knowable. Not knowing is no excuse to pretend it is not knowable, and that people just have to wave their hands and guess.
People don't care if their hardware is genuine, they care if they use a thing with that brand on the label, is it likely to work or not. They expect the vendor to punish the people counterfeiting, if they can, not the end user who correctly read the label. It is their own nose they cut.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're worried about a data-leak "when not using their service," it sounds like you're a bit confused about what you want. If it is some other thing that is leaking, like slashdot, then why are you even talking about maps?
Try to describe your complaint in such a way that your words are literally true. Whatever stylistic form you're attempting may be great, but your complaint is not at all clear.
It may be that you don't have a specific complaint, and just heard some people on the internet say some non-specific bad things about google, and now you've got concerns. In that case, chin up.
Kinda silly to complain about the strobing when I put a warning right on the link.
It is by some famous artist, you'll have done well in life if you die half as famous as him. If it doesn't speak to you, well that is art. Nobody asked it to speak to you. Go and choose something else. Be strong, little newbie. You can do it. Find some kittens or something.
Right, that is what you're not reading. You get to the words, and you skip over them instead of reading them.
Yes, we're talking about digikey. You cannot buy official FTDI products from them. If you don't believe me, call up FTDI and ask. They will not guarantee that parts purchased from their biggest official distributors are genuine, and yes those are the exact sources of parts that they accuse of including counterfeit chips . You have to buy them directly from FTDI for them to guarantee authenticity, and if you sent an assistant to pick them up and later want to verify that the boxes in your warehouse that you believe to have come from FTDI are real, well then you'd be out of luck because they will not guarantee authenticity except at the moment they pass it out the factory door.
The difference between FTDI and Texas Instruments is that TI doesn't say I have to buy it from them or it might be fake; they say if I bought it from any of the distributors on their list then all is good, and if there are fakes they'll deal with it themselves. That is the difference, and everything about it has to do with FTDI making impossible demands on users that nobody else makes.
If I asked TI if the boxes in my warehouse are genuine parts, they'd ask me where I bought them. If I said "mouser" or "digikey," they'd be happy to verify the authenticity. And the drivers would never stop working on purpose.
I've been here for a long time, and active that whole time, and that doesn't really ring a bell to me. Probably seen it, but probably ignored it too. When was the last time I heard some neckbeard pining for hot grits? I don't know, I never paid much attention to that sort of idiocy. The idiocy itself sometimes rises to a level that feels like a bombardment, but it is generally a wide range of idiocy rather than a specific meme being the bomb.
When I think of slashdot and hosts files, I actually think of the Big Taco on Slashdot Radio talking about using hosts files (on linux) to filter web advertising, and whatever script was being used for email before SpamAssassin. Back then, half of slashdot had their email on a private mailserver that they managed themselves.
Oh, how times and users have changed! What a world the future is! (MEDICAL WARNING: FLASHING LIGHTS)
Google maps doesn't have a leak; actually, google is the data provider! They're not providing a pipe to some other map, or putting a tollbooth in front of a public map, it is actually their map stored on their server, and when you use google maps you explicitly ask them for that data. Asking somebody for something isn't the same as leaking your identity to them. You're telling them who you are when you show them your face to ask to look at their stuff. ;)
Never say yes to an app permission your use of the app doesn't require. Generally this requires only using open source apps, and downloading the source and turning off extra permissions.
Never require networking from apps that you don't want to phone home.
Assume everything that can phone home, does.
As to the complaint that MS's "privacy mode" isn't as private as some people wanted, it reminds me of Richard Feynman at Los Alamos complaining that otherwise-intelligent people thought that secrets were safe because they were stored in devices called "safes." Had they been called "locking cabinets that reduce the likelihood of access a little bit, especially by honest folks" or something else literal, they might have had less problems with secrets being stolen. "Privacy mode" isn't intended to make everything "private," it is intended to mask your pr0n access from casual examination of your browser history. But that isn't actually private in most cases, it is just web traffic and they could unmask you at the router anyways. Internet doesn't have a "private" option, if you want private you'll need a "private network." Internet is a "public network." It is like wanting privacy on the sidewalk; you can't have it. You can usually keep people from touching you, though.
Ultimately if you want a private mobile device, you should be buying hardware, replacing the OS with something FL/OSS and only using a private network.
The one constant throughout all of the culture changes in America is the government. The group which is supposed to lay down and enforce the laws of the land so that anyone of any culture can live and thrive.
What we have here, and what i was pointing to is that our Government is taking on a different role, not one of of setting down the laws and frame work which allow for cultural freedom and evolution but rather a Government which is laying down laws in order to influence and Control said culture to make it what it wants.
It is just hand-wavy assertion though. The Government is still there, when did the NSA dismiss congress? Oh, didn't happen. If you read more history, you'll find out that there were worse transgressions of rights in the past, and yet the country was still here, the Government hadn't changed it was still a bunch of representative jerks most of whom were legitimately elected, and the Courts are still there are still actively balancing the legit concerns of different branches of government. The process is still going on. The nation didn't die from hippies, and it didn't die from signals intelligence.
None of the modern accusations even involve concentration camps, or armies raised by the executive branch to invade States and disagree with Congress. It is just hand-wavy assertion of the death of the nation, without even a dead body, or a lack of heartbeat. Those with more fortitude than you are neither defeated, nor disenfranchised. Nor even under significant threat. People whine about rights they think are being violated, but a quick glance at history shows there were always people whose rights were violated, and rights have increased substantially under that process as the Court continuously restores those Rights. Such is the process, and it has not slowed.
Right, you haven't looked it up, you're too busy repeating a narrative to comprehend if what I am saying is consistent with the public details.
It doesn't occur to you that I might have looked into it in substantial detail far beyond what anybody would discuss on slashdot. You throw a "you're bluffing" bluff from the dark, it is not impressive at all. Show you understood whatever you read by identifying the specific parts that contradict specific things I said, and say them. LOL that is how a discussion works. I said things, you're only saying "no you're wrong." But missing is an actual accusation of a part being wrong. All you give is bare assertion that doesn't even hint at knowledge.
No, it is new code with no public beta testing and no way to verify the answers it gives. As a software developer, it is obvious that new software comes with bugs. Therefore, we know already that some percent of affected users don't actually have a counterfeit device, they merely have an authentic device that either was lower quality than average, or just randomly hit a driver bug.
The problem isn't that companies are buying large lots of chips from non-reputable distributors, the problem is that if you buy those chips from the mainstream distributors that FTDI sells most of their units through, those might be chips that FTDI accuses of being counterfeit. You mistake the nature of the problem. This is not having to do with buying from low-reputation distributors. Testing 1 unit out of 10k doesn't really help all that much. A true counterfeiter could easily put the first 10 units off each role as units they got from FTDI, and their own copies in the rest of the reels. (Most ICs come in ~1000 unit tape reels)
The fact that there is no mainstream North American or European distributor that FTDI can point to and say, "if you buy it from them it is genuine" leads me to the strong suspicion that there are many less counterfeits being sold here than they allege. I don't doubt that Chinese firms don't honor foreign ideas of "intellectual property" on products sold internally in China. (And why would they? Laws don't work that way) If it was just Chinese exports, they have lots of legit tools to stop the larger players and prevent serious impact to their business. It seems they don't do that. Presumably, they have trouble actually proving that anything is counterfeit.
You just wave your hands and instead of, "make different policy choices through the process of representative democracy than I wanted," you make conclusory statements that imply 1) that everybody agrees with you what freedom means exactly 2) that bravery[sic] was a national value of importance (laughable) and 3) that not using your policy ideas is the death of the nation.
Rather pathetic analysis you give in every single dimension. But the worst is that you don't consider how it negatively affects freedom for you to completely ignore the representative process and the obvious implication; that freedom still exists now in the exact same ways it existed before. Perhaps you had a magical idea before, and you found out it wasn't the world you live in? That doesn't mean everybody else was wrong, it might just mean you were mistaken about the necessary elements of freedom in the minds of your fellow citizens. You want to choose everything for them, even what policies they should support or what freedom should mean to them, but you have no chance of success at that; their freedom is too strong, it runs too deep. They'll decide for themselves, and they'll outlive you too.
Well, if you read news then you know that just because their company's lawyer "cleared" it, that doesn't mean it is legal or that they won't get in trouble for doing it.
All it takes is a company whose product is affected to convince the jury that they did do their diligence, and they believe they purchased good chips. It might very well be that FTDI can't prove the chips are not genuine, and they would have to prove that side. The accusers would only have to prove they believed them to be. IP violations don't forgive sabotage, but sabotage can indeed mean you have "unclean hands" and can't push a counter-suit.
They probably just have poor quality lawyers, just like they have poor quality engineers and only one successful product.
I doubt they'll fire the bot, worst thing for Timmy would probably be getting renamed.
They do realize.
However, they are not a very successful electronics company. They have one (1) product that is wildly successful, and since they don't have better engineers than their competitors, they're not positioned to ensure they continue to control that niche in the future. In fact, Silicon Labs are already replacing FTDI as the preferred name-brand chip. Presumably that one is designed by Microchip. I prefer the Texas Instruments ones, because they come in more packages. (SL prefers modern non-hand-solderable packages) Cheap designs are moving to Cypress chips because they're the same price as counterfeits, and work fine.
So, their goal is to milk the declining product as hard as they can until it is dead.
What's being talked about here is ordering THE SAME part from a different supplier.
No, what's being talked about here is ordering THE SAME part from any distributor.
One thing you missed is that FTDI doesn't guarantee that chips bought through their official distributors are genuine. The official distributors are the ones substituting the chips that are either "counterfeit," or for whatever QA reason don't get properly detected by FTDI's driver.
There is no source of genuine chips other than FTDI's factory door. And what happens if you hire a shipping company to deliver them? Can you have FTDI check the chips to verify? Is there some official way of checking? No. There is no method of checking.
This is not a problem that rears its head only when suppliers are out of stock and you buy somewhere else. This is a problem that begins when the idiotic engineer puts an FTDI part on the BOM, instead of a comparable part from a reputable brand like Texas Instruments.
If a single USB-to-Serial mis-reading can cause a disaster, then disaster is coming. It's a matter of if, not when.
Such is the state of things in factories. When I was younger I worked in factories, and people do die at work. That does not imply that increasing the likelihood of disaster is harmless.
All it takes for somebody to die in a factory is looking away for a second.
Factory equipment is rarely designed to be "safe," it is designed to be safe under certain controlled circumstances that typically can't be maintained during maintenance or malfunction.
A piece of equipment merely detecting the garbage data and going into safe mode could cause other equipment to spill a load that overflows onto somebody's head. Especially if the error is something that never would have happened in testing, because RS-232 adapters had never spewed false instructions. Older systems sometimes have noise detectors; they will shut things down if there is too much noise on the line, while it is still too low to cause "line noise" in the communication. So even systems designed to robustly prevent line noise could be defeated by this, and create a whole new untested failure state. There are generally only protections for known failure states. That is why an unexpected "safe mode" in one piece of equipment can turn a connected machine deadly.
The user of the equipment doesn't get to choose the safety protocols, and there is no guarantee that the first letters of FTDI's line noise isn't a command that moves equipment. Often, most bytes that you send translate to commands! This isn't like some sort of modern system with acknowledged messages; when a byte is ready it is read, and every 2 bytes or so is a command. Just feeding a sentence of English into an RS-232 control system will very often cause numerous events, not even just 1. If it is a factory machine, most of those events result in activation of some part of the machine.
Your belief in factory equipment safety is perhaps misguided. That isn't the world that exists. And the person doing the maintenance was not consulted as to the protocols; they are not the only party responsible for their safety. Yes, factory equipment maintenance is inherently unsafe. Nobody is asking you to take the job, they're pointing out that this endangers people who do the job using existing safety protocols. You simply have to remove some of your lockouts in order to troubleshoot; you have to trust the machine to behave predictably while doing those tasks.
MS can't test against genuine hardware, because FTDI can't/won't check an existing chip to tell if it is "genuine," and don't guarantee chips as genuine even when purchased through their distributors. So a generic device that purports to have an FTDI chip can't be tested by MS. Nobody has any way of knowing is something is genuine unless they personally picked up the chips at FTDI's will call door and hand-shepherded them through the manufacturing process.
An OS vendor has to be able to walk into an office supply store, buy a device of brand Foo(TM) and test it against the driver, or else they can't really say if it will work. If you can only test samples from each device vendor, they won't be sending you random samples that represent what is really in the box; you'll mostly get higher quality short run prototypes, or the devices that aced the QA tests. They're not going to send the devices that barely passed but would still get sold.
It is too bad MS doesn't step in and play the silverback here, but they end up leaving it where you say; savvy users of their OS won't trust their updates. That sometimes leads to security problems, but hey; pick your poison. Toxic updates are more common than harmful exploits for most users.
They have their own generic driver that works if you use an off-brand chip.
For manufacturers and makers the solution is obvious; don't choose FTDI because their own distributors sell counterfeit chips, or at least chips FTDI fails to recognize as genuine. Silicon Labs and Texas Instruments make better chips anyways.
Check the data sheet for your chip and make sure it uses the generic USB driver. Then it works in any new-ish OS, and on older ones with driver install.
This is widely done in media, and what you get as "replies" are press releases. Actually, your comment pretty much defines "press release." They rarely are going to "clear up the news," or attempt to.
Well, a lawyer might help you if you're a distributor who bought enough units to make it worth suing FTDI for contract interference. :)
If it isn't their chip, they don't have the legal right to harm it. They could try to counter-sue you, but then they'd find out you're not responsible for their supply chain woes; you're only responsible for buying from a reputable reseller and doing related diligence. You sue them, they have to sue your supplier.
Sounds good, except that a lot of computers only put out 5V already.
Even just an RS-232 inline breakout debugger can drop the level too far for full speed communication between computers. If you're plugging into an external modem, then that side is full power but more importantly it can read down to 3V. The 5V computer RS-232 implementations rarely survive under 4.0V.
12V is plenty and I say that as somebody who has had this problem.
Arduinos have the same exact range of USB chips as the serial converters.
Not only are their competitors, but many of those competitors don't pay Microsoft to get their proprietary drivers included, and so you get generic USBSerial drivers. This is a huge advantage to the user, because no installation is required, and the drivers don't get updated over time, so shipped units will continue working.
FTDI wishes they were pushing me away from cheap knockoffs onto their brand, but they're pushing me away from their brand (because I have to buy through a regular supply chain, I can only go off the label I don't have magic vision). They do leave me wanting a premium product, and I can get the chip for about $3 from Silicon Labs or Texas Instruments. A quality cable costs more than the converter chip.
it's possible the driver actually choose to cause BSOD, there's no way to know.
Stop there and don't pretend to be providing analysis. That is very knowable. Not knowing is no excuse to pretend it is not knowable, and that people just have to wave their hands and guess.
People don't care if their hardware is genuine, they care if they use a thing with that brand on the label, is it likely to work or not. They expect the vendor to punish the people counterfeiting, if they can, not the end user who correctly read the label. It is their own nose they cut.