[kregasaurusrex]

Trust in hardware supply chains when manufactring a PCB for a product can be quite fragile: when one component operates outside of spec, the entire device could be rendered useless. In the case of the DS18B20, the author states in the 'Warning' section that the primary way of determining counterfeit sensors is to check the ROM output compared to a known format. When counterfeit parts like this are added, it creates vulnerabilities in the entire system due to the ability for a bad actor to leverage this vulnerability and cause one part in an entire system to fail.

For example, the company FTDI snuck in code that was in a series of Windows updates that was able to detect counterfeit FTDI and brick them via software to send back all 0's.[0][1] This anti-consumer behavior on behalf of comapnies can a be a headache for end-users and programmers alike.

[0] https://hackaday.com/2014/10/22/watch-that-windows-update-ft...

[1] https://hackaday.com/2016/02/01/ftdi-drivers-break-fake-chip...

[analog31]

If I recall correctly, FTDI took some well deserved heat, but quickly discontinued this practice.

[marcan_42]

The really sad thing is that the FTDI clones worked better than the original ones.

The original FT232R chips have a clocking bug that makes bitbang mode unusable for many applications, with no workaround (their errata sheet suggests a bullshit workaround of setting the clock speed to max, that is unusable in practice because USB can't keep up). It's supposedly fixed in a revision that I've never seen, and I believe they never manufactured it.

The clones... work perfectly fine: https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/695292366639378433

In fact, I reverse engineered FTDI's bricker, and it works by exploiting the fact that their own chips violate their own interface design by requiring EEPROM words to be written back to back - even word writes alone are staged and ignored without an odd word write. The clones honor the writes independently, like FTDI's other chips. Their bricker code only writes even EEPROM words and preimage attacks their own checksum algorithm (since the real checksum is at an odd word they can't touch) to make it work, so it has no effect on the real chips (which get sent the same commands). It's hilarious.

Don't buy FTDI. They're just bad.

[drothlis]

We too found that the FT232R is unusable in bitbang mode. After much to-and-froing, FTDI support eventually acknowledged that even their later hardware revision "C" is still buggy, despite what the errata sheet implied.

We switched to the FT230X, which works great.

Our detailed investigation: https://stb-tester.com/blog/2016/05/26/ir-post-mortem

[robomartin]

I've been using FTDI for, I don't know, twenty years. No problems at all. Also using USB solutions from other vendors (not FTDI clones).

> The original FT232R chips have a clocking bug that makes bitbang mode unusable for many applications, with no workaround

One of the problems with this situation is that if clones are allowed to permeate the market unencumbered the manufacturer of the genuine device might not have the financial capability to address problems and continue to innovate. Every single fake chip takes revenue away from the legitimate supplier.

Not arguing that your technical point isn't valid. It is. My point is that causing damage to the legitimate manufacturer by substituting their chips with clones has a non-zero non-trivial effect. Clone chip makers have zero interest and expend zero effort, time and money supporting the ecosystem they infect. All they care about is pushing their hardware and nothing else.

This also causes damage to consumers because it is impossible to know what issues fake chips might bring to the table across a wide range of vectors, safety and reliability being just two of them.

The better path is to take design wins away from FTDI and adopt hardware from legitimate part suppliers with solutions that meet your requirements. That's fine and that's how a healthy market works. Choosing fakes over legitimate parts hurts everyone. Today it's FTDI, tomorrow it could be your own products. Having experienced the "attack of the clones" myself, I can tell you this is not pleasant at all and it can, quite literally, destroy your company, costing jobs and your future.

Not a simple problem.

[feteru]

Wait so the bricker wouldn't even work on the clones? Or it only works on the clone because they don't have the FTDI checksum algorithm bug?

[kd5bjo]

If I’m reading marcan_42’s comment correctly, the FTDI chip defers any EEPROM write request to an even address until it receives the next write request to the subsequent, odd, location. If the next write is somewhere else, it discards the original data.

The 3rd-party chips, on the other hand, perform each write immedately per the official documentation. The malicious driver uses this difference to overwrite the firmware of the 3rd-party chips with carefully-crafted nonsense that has the same checksum as the legitimate firmware.

[voltagex_]

Both FTDI and Prolific have done this kind of thing. I switched to the CH340 a while back without any issues.

[makomk]

If I remember rightly, what Prolific did was worse in some ways because it rendered genuine but older-revision chips that they'd actually made non-functional with current drivers. (Also, some of the CH340 clones are genuinely really badly done and can't understand register writes that differ even slightly from what a particular version of the official driver sent.)

[omgtehlion]

how about cp2102? I prefer it to ch340, for no reason though ))

[pantalaimon]

I found both cp2102 and ch340 seem to use less power too than ft232r. At least there are some boards I can power with the 3.3V output of the cp2102 and ch340 dongles, but which will brown-out with the old ft232r ones.

[janekm]

It's my go-to part for this purpose also (and I don't believe I've encountered any clones so far, knock on wood). Another part I've used in a high-volume application is the Holtek HT42B534 which is great because it's CDC class and hence doesn't need a driver for Win/Mac/Linux. It's EOL sadly. There's HT42B564 which is a HID-class replacement. The other alternative is using a cheap micro with USB interface.

[analog31]

Aha, I didn't know about the CP2102. Looks like I'll have to give one a whirl, and there's even a breakout board at Adafruit. I've used relatively few VCP adapters since I've been using microcontrollers with built-in VCP.

I was nervous about the CH340 because the Windows drivers seemed to come from some weird place in China, but maybe US sourced drivers aren't any more of a comfort in these times.

[voltagex_]

If someone wants to quote me for a full reverse engineering of those drivers then I'd be interested in (crowd)funding it. But in terms of risks to worry about, it's pretty low down on the list IMO.

[IAmEveryone]

That's a lot of fancy words for essentially restating that old adage about three million parts being required to launch a rocket, all of them being delivered by the cheapest bidder.

And yet, these rockets (mostly) got off the ground quite safely!

Because these statistical vulnerabilities are rather obvious, and it isn't quite just the "cheapest bidder", and because their parts are tested, and because people took care to allow for 2 million of those 3 million parts to fail without disaster being inevitable.

The risks of remote-bricking counterfeits are rather obvious, indeed.

But it's just as trivially obvious that it is intended to protect the supply chain. Or, for the cynical: that its intend to protect these companies' profits is aligned with protecting the supply chain.

It's a trade-off, unlikely to have a single, generic best answer.

[robomartin]

> This anti-consumer behavior on behalf of companies

I strongly disagree with this. I see no way to rationalize that a company should be responsible for ensuring that counterfeit devices work correctly by releasing drivers that are tolerant of them or do not stop them from functioning. FTDI's products are the combination of their hardware with their drivers. Both are required in order to delivery functionality and reliability to meet their specifications.

Imagine your drivers are used in some sort of a critical application and a counterfeit device causes a failure that, in turn, causes harm to someone. An example might be a wired remote control for an industrial machine. It seems to met that bricking that device as soon as possible before harm is done is what we would want from a company that delivers a quality product.

Another way to put it is: Let the counterfeiters engineer a real product and be responsible for their own drivers, quality and safety.

The way to see clearly through some of these problems is to extend the definition towards extremes. Let's forget FTDI for a moment and generalize the problem to a microprocessor and a vendor-provided RTOS used to run the flight system of an airliner. This is a contrived hypothetical, forgive me for taking artistic license.

Imagine counterfeit processor make it into the supply chain. Should the avionics OS do its best to work with every possible fake or should it brick it on power-up before that potentially dangerous aircraft gets off the ground?

Another hypothetical could be one where we eliminate hardware completely. Imagine someone creates a fake Amazon, Facebook, NY Times or online brokerage site. Imagine proposing that the real companies would be anti-consumer if they created software that revealed the impostors. I could not imagine anyone who would propose they allow the fakes to continue to deceive consumers.

From my perspective this isn't anti-consumer at all. It's as pro-consumer as you can get: You work hard to ensure quality, consistency, performance and reliability.

The real anti-consumers are the counterfeit manufacturers. They, quite literally, could not care less. All they care about is tricking engineers and consumers into thinking they are designing and buying a quality product when, in reality, they might be dealing with dangerous junk.

[LeifCarrotson]

I agree that anyone who built a device and knowingly used a counterfeit FTDI chip deserved to be punished.

However, the FTDI debacle didn't punish those people, they're not the consumers. It punished end users who have no idea what an FTDI chip is or does or that one exists in the products they buy.

In your airliner microcontroller example, you have much more informed consumers. They could reasonably be expected to know what processor is in their hardware, and to want to validate it. That's not the same.

It would be more like a good packaging manufacturer finding that their packaging was being counterfeited and their proprietary plastic blend was somehow being leaked up the supply chain. If they changed their recipe to something toxic, but using good plastic internally, and when people started dying said "they should have bought potato chips packaged in genuine FoodSafeStuff bags". People don't know what their packaging is made from or who it's made by. They have no way to verify it prior to purchase, and even after purchase, it would take an expert to identify. And there's no customer loyalty based on the plastic bag, after the food manufacturer switches away from the counterfeit they won't be significantly harmed. But everyone who innocently bought those bags and got poisoned suffered real harm.

[toohotatopic]

>People don't know what their packaging is made from or who it's made by. They have no way to verify it prior to purchase, and even after purchase, it would take an expert to identify.

For food, you can't change the game without prior notice, but if it is clear that faked goods are toxic, people would start buying from trusted providers themselves. For electronics, I don't see a problem. If a device is bricked, go to your dealer and let him replace it. He will do the same for his supplier, etc.

Somebody in the chain will discover that his supplier is a fraud. He will have to swallow the costs, but has learned a valuable lesson.

If people have brought the product from some unstable source, then they most likely got it cheaper and they are now paying the price for the increased risk they took. It doesn't feel good but I don't think that it is unfair.

[pastage]

The counterfeit FTDIs are ok. How drivers are created is a much bigger problem, the windows model specifically where hardware takes a long time, if ever, to be included in the default installation.

Getting hardware to just work on windows was a mess (not sure if they have corrected this).

[robomartin]

@LeifCarrotson

You are making the mistake of taking a hypothetical and arguing against it. These are contrived examples designed to communicate a concept rather than an absolute reality that one should argue against.

I'll just say that it is very common to see comments relating to hardware issues on HN from people who obviously don't have experience building hardware at scale. And so, it is hard to discuss these things due to the asymmetry of knowledge and experience.

Any non-trivial hardware development and manufacturing operation has or should have professional supply chain management. It is their responsibility to ensure they build product as designed by engineers. If the hardware engineer specified an FTDI chip he or she did not mean "anything that is labeled similarly to FTDI". No, they meant to design in an FTDI chip. Anything else could fail or perform differently at any time.

Blame for the bricking of devices given a change of driver code isn't with FTDI, it is with whoever manufactured the product that was supposed to use FTDI chips and did not.

Let's also mention the very real potential for someone knowingly using clone chips in order to save money.

It is preposterous to charge the chip manufacturer with this responsibility.

There could be many tentacles to this kind of an issue, but the manufacturer ensuring that their drivers only work correctly with their chips isn't anti-consumer at all, quite to the contrary.

Yet another angle: The crappy clone manufacturer --who could not care less about the consumer-- make a bad chip and it is the responsibility of the legitimate manufacturer to write the drivers and ensure it works well? In what alternate reality is that reasonable or required?

[fulafel]

You are talking about compatibility but the FTDI case was a case of the company intentionally shipping malicious code used to brick the clones, no? Quote from article: "the latest driver bricks the fake chips, rendering them inoperable with any computer"

[robomartin]

Well done. They have the absolute right to create drivers that only work with their products in order to assure quality, performance and function.

Fault is at the feet of the clone makers and those who used clone chips, not the legitimate manufacturer.

I am actually astounded by some of these responses. However, I do understand that they likely come from a lack of experience delivering hardware products at scale, and so I can't fault people for getting it wrong. Hence my favorite quote:

"A man holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way" --Mark Twain

[pugz]

No one is disputing that "they have the absolute right to create drivers that only work with their products in order to assure quality, performance and function." - that's a given.

Would you say that they also have "the absolute right to create drivers that sabotage counterfeits of their products"?

That's a different argument. You could argue that they should have the right given that (elsewhere you have argued) their governments have abrogated their responsibility to protect their IP. And that would be an interesting and compelling argument. But it's entirely different to "[having] the absolute right to create drivers that only work with their products in order to assure quality, performance and function." - and it would be disingenuous to keep arguing that.

[javawizard]

What part of:

> the FTDI case was a case of the company intentionally shipping malicious code used to brick the clones

don't you understand? FTDI does indeed have the absolute right to create drivers that only work with their products, but to intentionally damage a third party product so that it no longer works anywhere else, including with that third party's drivers, seems egregious.

[panpanna]

Since you are blindly defending FDTI and blaming the designers, let me add another crucial detail that might change your mind:

A lot of fakes were distributed through reputable sources as originals. So you could for example build a medical device using expensive original components from digikey, only to see it breaking in the hospital for no apparent reason.

I bet people have _died_ due to FTDIs actions.

[kbenson]

> I strongly disagree with this. I see no way to rationalize that a company should be responsible for ensuring that counterfeit devices work correctly by releasing drivers that are tolerant of them or do not stop them from functioning.

There's a difference between not taking steps to ensure counterfeit devices function, and purposefully causing hardware to fail on a remote system. For example, I'm pretty sure purposefully causing the problem is illegal, if the user didn't request it, as it seems the same as hacking to me.

> Imagine counterfeit processor make it into the supply chain. Should the avionics OS do its best to work with every possible fake or should it brick it on power-up before that potentially dangerous aircraft gets off the ground?

Refusing to function is acceptable. Bricking the hardware is not.

[S_A_P]

>Refusing to function is acceptable. Bricking the hardware is not.

In some/most cases there is no difference.

[IAmEveryone]

Intend is 99% of the law (and commonly understood ethics).

That's why you can kill someone and be either glorified as a war hero, hanged by a jury of your peers, or ordered to retake your driving exam.

[teruakohatu]

> I strongly disagree with this. I see no way to rationalize that a company should be responsible for ensuring that counterfeit devices work correctly

They destroyed devices that worked perfectly well, but maybe (or maybe not) had a fake FTDI branding on a chip inside the device.

Even the manufacturer may have been a victim of commingled inventory. For this reason I stopped buying anything with FTDI in it, because I didn't want to take the chance it would be bricked because the smalltime seller on Tindie.com bought from a bad supplier.

I would hate to think what you would have Apple do to Hackintosh hardware.

[robomartin]

> I would hate to think what you would have Apple do to Hackintosh hardware.

You are looking at it precisely backwards. The key question here goes something like this:

Is Apple responsible for ensuring that fakes function correctly as it issues software updates for its own hardware?

In other words, just because someone decided to make a Hackintosh or a fake iPhone is Apple now instantly saddled with having to support this hardware for the lifetime of the fake products? And this is the case whether there's just one clone or 100 different variants?

As I have asked others, in what alternate reality does this make any sense?

My guess is that none of you have ever designed or manufactured hardware products at scale and don't fully comprehend the implications of what you so vehemently believe. No hardware manufacturer would ever take the side of having to ensure fakes work correctly; this would be sheer insanity.

[teraflop]

Nobody's complaining that FTDI didn't make their drivers compatible with counterfeit hardware. They're complaining that FTDI deliberately took actions in their driver code to damage any supposedly counterfeit devices that were plugged into a system.

To use your example, imagine if Apple released an update to iOS that would scan any jailbroken iPhones on the same network, and if it detected one, would use a backdoor to send it malware that wipes the device's bootloader.

[robomartin]

One bad example after another. Why is this so hard for folks to grasp.

The proper example would be fake iPhones made in Switzerland sold in the US as through they were real iPhones. If that's the case, then, YES, Apple would be right to brick them with an update. Absolutely.

I ask again: In what alternate reality would Apple be required to allow fake iPhones, look the other way and just let them be?

[kd5bjo]

Your example is also off, because we’re talking about an internal component rather than an entire device. If a repair shop doesn’t use a Genuine Apple replacement screen, does Apple have to support it? No. Is going out of their way to physically destroy these replacement screens anti-consumer behavior? Yes.

A key point here is that it’s impossible for the malicious driver to know what representation the seller made to the consumer— the presence of a nonoriginal part doesn’t necessarily mean there was any fraud involved.

Edit to add:

> ... fake iPhones made in Switzerland sold in the US as through they were real iPhones. If that's the case, then, YES, Apple would be right to brick them with an update. Absolutely.

Only after obtaining a court order to that effect. Destroying someone else’s property without due process is generally not acceptable, regardless of how right you are. To step away from technology for a moment, is it ok for a glassmaker to go around town breaking windows because they’re allegedly made with counterfeit glass?

[IAmEveryone]

> I ask again: In what alternate reality

In that alternative reality where, for example, mobile phone carriers are required to allow 911 calls even if your account is otherwise locked because you fraudulently paid with someone else's credit card.

[wegs]

Let's work through this example. You're a manufacturer of devices using FTDI chips. You make an emergency system for airplanes which e.g. releases breathing equipment, or life rafts, or similar. Or a backup avionics system. Due to a supply chain slip-up, a small number of counterfeit devices slipped in.

An emergency comes up, and the instant the emergency system comes up, it turns out to have been bricked. People die. Is this a good outcome?

If I were a manufacturer, I'd want to know about this ASAP. Would I want devices to stop working? Especially the examples you gave where people's lives are on the line? Absolutely not. I'd want them to work as well as possible until a replacement can go out.

Pro-consumer would be a pop-up letting the user know they received a counterfeit devices. I can then contact whoever sold me the device, and ask for a replacement. During cross-shipping, I can keep working. Anti-consumer is having my business trip and fall on its face when all the pen tablets which allow people to work from home are bricked during a pandemic.

Of course the counterfeit manufacturers are the bad guys. But FTDI is a company I'd never do business with either. If I'm an FTDI partner, and I got the wrong product, we were both cheated. I'm no more at fault than FTDI.

Should FTDI smack me and my customers upside the head for it? Well, that means we're not really partners.

[robomartin]

You are making the mistake of arguing against a hypothetical. It's just a fabricated example to convey an idea, not something to argue against. As an aerospace engineer I assure you that sourcing components for aerospace isn't as simple as your hypothetical to my hypothetical.

> Pro-consumer would be a pop-up letting the user know they received a counterfeit devices.

This from driver code?

The party at fault here is whoever sourced the devices. If the design engineer called for FTDI and they put in FunTDI instead, well, they didn't build what they were contracted to build. Period.

Something as simple as a driver revision to, for example, improve performance, could break a fake chip. Is the legitimate manufacturer supposed to now be aware of every fake and design their drivers forever more to ensure fakes work perfectly? C'mon, that's preposterous.

If I design a board and someone decides to use a cloned version in their machine and somebody gets killed because of a software update I can assure you that the case wouldn't even get to court. The instant it is discovered that the board was a fake the entire thing would be thrown out. There is no way anyone is going to hold the manufacturer responsible for ensuring that clones work property. That is not what they are in business to do.

[leoedin]

About 7 or 8 years ago I built an internal testing system used to test a satellite payload which used a microcontroller board from a reputable manufacturer, purchased through a reputable electronics supplier.

When we updated the ftdi driver, the board was bricked. Fortunately the system was still in development so we found a different board - it was only a bit of pain.

However, if that system had been shipped (as it was 6 months later), that board being bricked could have had much more significant ramifications. It would have caused a slipped schedule and tangible costs.

What should I have done differently?

[robomartin]

You would have to explain the degree to which parts were traced, certified, tested, etc. If you simply trust the supplier and distributor anything could happen.

I mentioned in another thread that we had one of the top two US electronics distributors knowingly ship us low "B" grade components many, many years ago. These components were in allocation and an enterprising young man at the distributor thought he would be smart and ship us a lower qualified component instead of what we ordered. That was twenty years ago or so. It cost our company dearly, nearly took us out of business.

This was that learning moment for me and it changed my approach to sourcing as well as the level of trust I grant anyone providing us with components. I will never put anything into a design where an illegitimate or lower grade component could jeopardize the safety, reliability or operation of the system.

At some level this is what engineering is about, isn't it? It's that old "Trust but verify?" concept.

We are working on industrial, flight (aircraft) and space (lunar) projects at the moment. No component will go into any of these systems without full knowledge and verification of its origins. This is true for individual components or contracted sub-assemblies.

BTW, this issue of failures being caused by not verifying components isn't anything new. The history of engineering is full of examples. One reasonably recent example of this happened to SpaceX a number of years ago:

https://www.space.com/29994-spacex-rocket-explosion-cause-fa...

[wegs]

No. This is not what engineering is about. Engineering is about making reasonable design trade-offs. Simply throwing dollars at a wall without doing an ROI estimate is called overengineering, and overengineering is bad engineering.

For reliability, where that trade-off sits depends on the application. Aerospace, medical, consumer electronics, and disposable toys will sit in different places. If I lose a mission to Mars saving $100 on part which had a 5% chance of failure within a year, that's very poor engineering. If I include that same part in a $3 toy, bringing the price to $103, that's equally poor engineering.

Whether I trust or trust-and-verify depends on how much the "verify" part costs, how strong my trust is, and what the costs of failure are. Normally, the ROI calculation is easy; capitalist markets work well for this. I can ballpark expected costs.

When working with a customer like the government, the boundaries might be a little bit distorted, since the customer is process-oriented. The government might have a hard salary cap which makes it impossible to bring in qualified engineers, and I might take 3 years with a team of 5 people at $100k to do what one person at $300k could do in 6 months. At the same time, I might have hard requirements on process, such as origin-tracing every part.

The danger is when that becomes in-cultured and spills over to other places. If I'm working for the government, I'll follow government processes, and I understand why those are there. But I won't confuse those processes with good engineering. Once people do, they become poor engineers.

If I've shipped a toy which unwittingly has thousands of fake parts which I thought you made, we'll both have been cheated, and I'll expect you to solve that with me cooperatively. If you hack into my product and brick it, even if you were legally in the right (and you're not), you've lost a customer. That's bad business too.

[wegs]

Your hypothetical was lousy, I agree, but if you're going to hinge your argument on a lousy hypothetical, I'll push back on that hypothetical.

To answer your questions:

(1) Yes, driver code can do things like this. If you don't believe me, buy an HP printer, and see the driver code pop up all sorts of advertisements, deals, and other crap. Driver code has access to your system's low-level internals. From there, it can do whatever it likes.

(2) The parties at fault here are multiple. One of the keys to building robust systems is to understand failures can take place anywhere in the system. In medical device, the terminology is "single point of failure." If one failure can kill a person, a medical device won't be certified by the FDA. In the same way you want the hardware to be tolerant of a single-point-of-failure, you want your organizational processes, logistics, etc. to also be tolerant. Mistakes will happen, and when they do, people shouldn't die.

(3) No one would hold FTDI responsible for making sure clones work properly. Plenty of people would hold FTDI responsible for intentionally attacking my hardware because I had a clone, if things go wrong. Two wrongs don't make a right. There is plenty of case law around this. Here's a nice chain for you to go down to get you started:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

https://www.cs.uaf.edu/~cs393/CACHE/Wired_RIAA.pdf

If FTDI's drivers stop working with my device incidentally, they're not responsible. If they intentionally brick a piece of hardware I own, for any reason, including believing I violated or contributed to a violation of their IP, that's a pretty clearly digital trespass under CFAA.

Would I pursue FTDI for breaking a cheap consumer device? That's not worth anyone's time. Had it, as in your example, killed someone or took down a planeload of people, you can bet your butt there would be both civil and criminal prosecutions for stuff like that.

(4) Any regarding supply chains, whenever I've done this, I've worked for small companies that wanted to keep logistics simple. We'd try to make sure complete designs could be sourced from one distributor (usually Newark, sometimes Digikey). And no one had resources to do any kind of tracing of parts. I understand that's done in aerospace, but that's not done in hardly anything else.

If there's some mixup in the supply chain, and I've shipped a thousand consumer widgets with a bad FTDI chip, FTDI should go after the parties responsible: my distributor, and the pirate company. Not me. Not my customer. And it should do it properly through the legal system and pursue damages, not break devices vigilante-style.

[erdo]

You're presenting this as a binary choice:

a) > company should be responsible for ensuring that counterfeit devices work correctly

or

b) > bricking [the counterfeit] device as soon as possible

The answer is almost always c) let it be, if it works fine, if not, not your problem.

Adding any kind of bricking code anywhere, unnecessarily introduces the possibility that it will be unintentionally (or maliciously) activated. Personally I don't have that kind of confidence in software or the people that write it (and I am one of those people)

[robomartin]

Here's another choice:

Go ask the manufacturer of the fake chip to support it with their own driver.

Really. As a hardware manufacturer, if you use a fake version of my product and demand that my software work with it you will hear the loud sound of the phone being hung up forcefully.

The legitimate manufacturer can do anything it wants with the software and their hardware. If someone wants support for fakes they can provide it themselves.

We are talking about encouraging or tolerating theft of intellectual property here. Having been the victim of this I am quite sensitive to the idea.

[indiv0]

Your last comment brings this quote to mind:

> It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

No one is suggesting encouraging or tolerating theft of intellectual property. People are _discouraging_ vigilante justice against IP thieves.

In this instance, because it harms consumers (an innocent party).

You're arguing against strawmen when you claim that people are arguing for FTDI to support these chips. Instead what people are arguing for is for FTDI to not brick them _intentionally_.

[robomartin]

If you really take the time to think it through you should conclude that the forcing FTDI to back off is actually as anti-consumer as you can get. It guarantees long-lasting harm to consumers as counterfeiters now know they can continue to push their devices --of any kind, not just FTDI-- without suffering any consequences.

In other words, when viewed with a long term perspective the mob actually succeeded at protecting the counterfeiters rather than consumers.

That's what people disagreeing with my perspective are missing in this argument.

Show me a legitimate scenario where giving counterfeiters a free pass leads to long term (decades) protections for consumers and there might be something to argue about.

My quote is far better, BTW:

"A man holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way" --Mark Twain

Most everyone voicing opinions on this thread has zero experience manufacturing products at scale and perhaps even running a non-trivial company. Nobody has held any of these cats by the tail and yet everyone seems to think they understand market and business dynamics.

As my wife puts it (she is a doctor): A google search isn't a medical degree.

[woah]

Why are the two options you present either to a) fully engineer and qa the driver to work with every possible counterfeit, or b) to insert malicious code to brick counterfeits? Seems like kind of a false dilemma.

[robomartin]

There are a bunch of permutations, sure.

What you are calling "malicious code" could --and likely is-- quality control code.

The fact that fakes fail isn't the responsibility of the legitimate manufacturer.

I don't know how many hypothetical examples I have to concoct to drive the point home.

OK, here's another one. Fake Tesla. The real Tesla writes code that bricks the entire fake car. This is 100% pro-consumer. The fake Tesla could literally kill people.

What you guys are arguing for is that Tesla should ensure that fakes are able to function. And, at the extremes, that Tesla is responsible for their proper function and safety.

Think about that for a moment.

[erdo]

Sure, and fake Tesla just happens to be bricked while it's driving in the fast lane of a motorway, or is accidentally bricked because a bug triggered the kill switch. Think about that for a moment.

[robomartin]

...and it never occurred to you that a hypothetical is just a thinking tool rather than an absolute.

OK, I'll play your game. The car would not turn on after being parked somewhere for four hours. Only an idiot software developer would brick it at high speed on the Autobahn.

[0x0]

That's what FTDI did though. They pushed the malicious bricking driver through an automatic Windows Update to systems already running in production, no? That's pretty much the equivalent of going at high speed on the Autobahn.

[mrob]

It is impossible for the FTDI driver to reliably determine if a chip is counterfeit. The difference between a counterfeit and a compatible part is trademark violation, and that can only be detected by looking at the physical packaging and the marketing materials.

[kire456]

You are advocating willful destruction of property. Property that is neither yours nor FTDI's. This is illegal, and broadly considered bad taste.

A counterfeiter commiting crimes against FTDI does not excuse FTDI committing crimes against a third party (i.e. the consumer). The world being safer without the counterfeit products also does not excuse the FTDI destroying things that aren't theirs. The justice system being ineffective at addressing counterfeiters is also no excuse for FTDI to take matters into their own hands. Vigilante justice is usually illegal.

Programmers make mistakes. A bug in your counterfeit detection code may end up destroying legit products. In addition, you can not be sure destroying a product will be safe - if the chip is in a medical device, you might be killing someone. The entire idea of destroying a product without explicitly being told to do so is fraught with peril.

You deal in false binaries. The third, imo correct, option is for FTDI to design software that works correctly with their own product, and spend no effort on the counterfeits - neither to get them to work correctly, nor to brick them on purpose.

A fourth option, if you want to spend some effort on something other than destruction of property, is to take option three, and also alert the user that they are using a counterfeit chip with unpredictable behaviour, and in your airplane example, advise the user they should probably not take off. If you want to be pro-consumer, this is a better way to go about it than smashing their stuff.

From the consumer's perspective, they had a working device, and a firmware update bricked it on purpose. It is possibly out of warranty, in which case they end up footing the bill (or experiencing frustration) for replacement and downtime. It takes Olympic levels of mental gymnastics to view that as 'pro-consumer', imo.

[robomartin]

Some hours later, reviewing all responses...

The primary counter argument to mine requires an inversion of responsibilities and ascribes criminality to the victim.

Devices got bricked because counterfeiters committed a crime in the first place.

Along the same lines, there are supply chain questions that are impossible to answer:

How many of these device manufacturers knowingly used fake chips because they cost less?

How many distributors knowingly shipped fake components because, again, they cost less and delivered higher margins?

How many device manufacturers were true innocent victims who did not know fake devices had been substituted for the real thing?

How many failures of import controls led to consumers receiving devices with fake chips?

I have had the experience of having major US electronics parts distributors knowingly substitute defective --yet genuine-- parts instead of the top grade parts we ordered. The effect was what the hardware sector generally refers to as "infant mortality", where your hardware fails early or becomes unreliable due to substandard components.

It took months for these effects to come out into the open and for the major US distributor to own up to this against the threat on our part of legal action. Not only did they replace all components with legitimate top grade parts, they also paid the costs involved in replacing the affected systems for our customers.

My guess is that the context lacking most, if not all, who disagree with my position perspective that comes from having "skin in the game" in the domain we are discussing.

The knee-jerk reaction is to think bricking these devices is bad for consumers, as if that would have been the end of the story. No, in a properly functioning economy and legal system this would and should lead to tracing through levels of responsibility as far as possible, with consumers being made whole with properly engineered and manufactured devices.

The end result of forcing FTDI to not protect their product from counterfeiters is that not one consumer today can be assured the devices they purchase has quality reliable parts that will function according to specifications. A chip can, quite literally, go up in flames (I had this happen to me with a cheap Chinese device) because we did not support FTDI in disallowing fake chips from the market.

Sure, there would have been short term pain and a bunch of companies and suppliers fixing their pipelines and designs. Yet, we would have emerged with an above-average guarantee of quality and performance and counterfeiters thinking real hard before doing what they do.

Instead the feedback we gave counterfeiters is "you win".

And the result we obtained for consumers is "you lose, forever".

This incident extends well past FTDI. Because the mob won and forced FTDI to accept fakes it now means nobody is going to take similar steps towards protecting their products. Which, in turn, means counterfeiters know they won and know they can get away with it. Consumers, once more, lose, big and in unknown ways.

We are swimming in a sea of fake products. The only way to stop this is if fake products become losing propositions for producers, suppliers, manufacturers and consumers.

I mentioned I had a chip go up in flames. A while back I bought a little humanoid robot directly from a vendor in China. One of these things with 15 to 20 servos and, typically, a mobile phone class processor powering it and the touch screen on the chest. I bought several of them as part of a business venture.

A couple of days after receiving them one of my kids was working with it on the table in the garage. As the robot walked, it failed to take a step and fell. It just planked onto the table, a 90 degree rotation from the toes, nothing too dramatic.

In an instant flames were shooting out of the chest. Flames, not smoke. Since we were in the garage it was an easy matter to open the door and toss the thing onto the driveway.

Upon inspection we found a crater at the center of the ARM processor on the main board. It failed and took a bunch of other parts with it.

I contacted the company and very specifically asked about the source of this processor. We were actually considering importing and modifying this robot in quantity for educational purposes. In other words, we had established an engineering relationship with this company, this wasn't a case of just another consumer buying their product.

They pretty much told me they bought the cheapest ARM processor clone they could source in China.

This was and was not a revelation to me. Having done business with China for some time, as well as having a number of friends and business acquaintances doing business in China, nothing surprises me any more.

The degree of supervision and cross checking you have to engage in when doing business with China is impossible for someone outside of manufacturing to grasp. It takes a lot of work to ensure safe products are landed in Europe and the US. When you deal with European or US companies this requirement almost disappears because you can generally trust they will deliver what they agreed to supply at the required level of quality.

Taking the case of this real product, this robot, as an example, it would have been far better if --through whatever mechanism-- the thing had been bricked by the processor manufacturer before it got into the hands of any consumer.

I cringe to think that this company likely sold tens of thousands of these units into homes and schools that could, due to fake chip issues and low component quality, go up in flames any time. We got lucky in that the robot ignited while we were there and under circumstances that were easy to control. This could have happened in the middle of the night and the story would have been potentially horrific.

Be careful to think that allowing consumers to be fed fake products of unknown quality and traceability equates to having a pro-consumer stance.

Due to this FTDI event it is likely consumers today have no clue what quality and safety has gone into the products they are using. This is not a good outcome. The right path would have been to take the pain of fixing the real problem and make consumers whole through both corporate responsibility and the legal system.

In other words, FTDI is a victim and consumers are now even larger victims because the fake chip content of their devices is likely to go well beyond a little USB chip. No way to know how far and wide this has gone. A clear case of good intentions actually causing more damage to consumers.

OK, I'm done. I don't expect to change anyone's mind. Just stating a perspective I think many don't have because they don't have practical experience at scale in the world of hardware manufacturing and support. If it makes even one person think this through, research and perhaps understand, I am satisfied.

Be tolerant of contrasting perspectives...you might just be wrong and not know it...or, even worse, one day you will be correct and the mob will dismiss you just as you have to others when you think you are right.

Tolerance is important. Don't punish, dismiss and ignore those who you do not agree with because one day that person could be you.