[KennyBlanken]

The article mentions that the company died when they announced copy protection that, upon a failed check, would wipe your hard drive and potentially install a worm.

It reminded me of when FTDI decided to combat clones, and released a driver that intentionally fried the clones.

That got them in a lot of hot water, so they backed off...but then released a driver that, upon thinking it was talking to a clone, would spew garbage data out the serial port.

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/ftdi-gate-2-0...

I wonder if that garbage-spewing ever inadvertently caused unexpected or dangerous behavior in microcontroller boards, PLCs, etc that control really important processes or big hardware. Imagine the scandal if it caused something like a PLC in a chemical plant to go bonkers. On the surface it seems unlikely, but somewhere out there is a microcontroller that takes really short, simple serial commands and random data could eventually generate a 'valid' command that does something that really shouldn't be done.

[throwaway48476]

The clones even fixed errata in the FTDI chip.

[shiroiushi]

It's just like the IBM PC and its clones: before long, the clones were better than the real thing, and cheaper too.

[Crosseye_Jack]

iirc the garbage data from FTDI's driver is the string "NON GENUINE DEVICE FOUND". Instead of returning the real data serial data, it replaces it with bytes from that string, read 5 bytes from the chip and you would get "NON G" read another 5 and you would get "ENUIN" and so on.