The big question to the hobbieist community is will you do that and pay the extra $ for the genuine part or not?
I am glad to see FTDI respond here on the forum.
We appreciate your feedback, comments and suggestions.
As you are probably aware, the semiconductor industry is increasingly blighted by the issue of counterfeit chips and all semiconductor vendors are taking measures to protect their IP and the investment they make in developing innovative new technology. FTDI will continue to follow an active approach to deterring the counterfeiting of our devices, in order to ensure that our customers receive genuine FTDI product. Though our intentions were honourable, we acknowledge that our recent driver update has caused concern amongst our genuine customer base. I assure you, we value our customers highly and do not in any way wish to cause distress to them.
The recently release driver release has now been removed from Windows Update so that on-the-fly updating cannot occur. The driver is in the process of being updated and will be released next week. This will still uphold our stance against devices that are not genuine, but do so in a non-invasive way that means that there is no risk of end user’s hardware being directly affected.
As previously stated, we recommend to all our customers to guarantee genuine FTDI products please purchase either from FTDI directly or from one of our authorised distributors. http://www.ftdichip.com/FTSalesNetwork.htm
If you are concerned that you might have a non-genuine device, our support team would be happy to help out.
Yours Sincerely
Fred Dart - CEO
We appreciate your feedback, comments and suggestions.
As you are probably aware, the semiconductor industry is increasingly blighted by the issue of counterfeit chips and all semiconductor vendors are taking measures to protect their IP and the investment they make in developing innovative new technology. FTDI will continue to follow an active approach to deterring the counterfeiting of our devices, in order to ensure that our customers receive genuine FTDI product. Though our intentions were honourable, we acknowledge that our recent driver update has caused concern amongst our genuine customer base. I assure you, we value our customers highly and do not in any way wish to cause distress to them.
The recently release driver release has now been removed from Windows Update so that on-the-fly updating cannot occur. The driver is in the process of being updated and will be released next week. This will still uphold our stance against devices that are not genuine, but do so in a non-invasive way that means that there is no risk of end user’s hardware being directly affected.
As previously stated, we recommend to all our customers to guarantee genuine FTDI products please purchase either from FTDI directly or from one of our authorised distributors. http://www.ftdichip.com/FTSalesNetwork.htm
If you are concerned that you might have a non-genuine device, our support team would be happy to help out.
Yours Sincerely
Fred Dart - CEO
Take the FTDI post as a mere press release, i doubt very much the email address the account is registered is Mr Darts
Take the FTDI post as a mere press release, i doubt very much the email address the account is registered is Mr Darts
It is: http://www.ftdichipblog.com/?p=1053
Someone posted this over at Slashdot, amused me:
>We've discovered some counterfeit parts in your car.
-Oh, really? Well, I'm going to drive over to the dealership take that up with them.
>We've already handled the problem. We crushed your car into a cube.
-Uhhh...
>You have 15 seconds to move your cube.
I suppose they could go for a hail mary and open source the drivers, in the hope that people will stick to legit chips. But I'm thinking that the chances of that are about as small as, well, you know, avian porcines and such.
As has been well said here in the last nearly 40 pages or more users don't mind so much that a driver refuses to work with a future non genuine chips as they can then seek redress from the supplier and as they have not been in use for years and suddenly stop working don't create mayhem and collateral damage that will severely hurt your customers.
but to brick historic products is unacceptable.
Other companies seek legal redress through laws and lawful methods of enforcing their patents etc,
I suppose they could go for a hail mary and open source the drivers, in the hope that people will stick to legit chips. But I'm thinking that the chances of that are about as small as, well, you know, avian porcines and such.I'm not sure. If the new driver shows a pop-up saying a fake FTDI chip is connected (but still works!) people can go back to the supplier and demand a device with a genuine chip. I contacted the seller of the RS485 boards (which started this thread) and he promised me to send 12 new boards and I urged him to make sure these have genuine FTDI chips on them otherwise they would be as useless as the boards he send me previously. I'm planning to hand out these RS485 boards to my customers so I don't want a 'this is a fake pop-up' appearing on their computer.
I am quite happy FTDI did what they did and the resulting shit storm highlights the extent of the problem. The people claiming they won't design in FTDI parts in the future are admitting they build low quality shit with parts from unidentified manufacturers - they are the ones I laugh at.
The recently release driver release has now been removed from Windows Update so that on-the-fly updating cannot occur. The driver is in the process of being updated and will be released next week. This will still uphold our stance against devices that are not genuine, but do so in a non-invasive way that means that there is no risk of end user’s hardware being directly affected.
As a bit of an oddity, I'll ask the folks here for a similar thing I asked of FTDI support:
Can someone create a tool to reproduce the "kill" operation of the 2.12 driver? If this is a "thing" that can happen, I'd prefer to add a few seconds of production test time to screen parts that might cause the end-user grief down the road. This is, in essence, a vulnerability without a clear way to patch it - so the easiest route I can do is attempt to brick any devices that might get a non genuine part in the lot. (I buy all my parts from Mouser and Digikey, but they're not omnipotent or flawless).
as usual, rufus is defending the company that exhibited poor decision-making. not sure why, but some of us can guess.
as was said several times before, if the US MILITARY can't ensure, 100%, that they avoid clones and fakes when building their own hardware, I'm not sure its reasonable in today's 'made in china' world to expect any company to be on the ground, 7x24, 100% of the time, to watch the board makers production lines.
to think so shows total ignorance about how things are done in today's 'outsourced' world.
rufus, give it up. your cred here is totally shot. perhaps its time to add you to my ignore list. I'm getting tired of your posts, to be honst; and they are not adding any value to the discussion.
but do so in a non-invasive way that means that there is no risk of end user’s hardware being directly affected.
As a bit of an oddity, I'll ask the folks here for a similar thing I asked of FTDI support:
Can someone create a tool to reproduce the "kill" operation of the 2.12 driver? If this is a "thing" that can happen, I'd prefer to add a few seconds of production test time to screen parts that might cause the end-user grief down the road. This is, in essence, a vulnerability without a clear way to patch it - so the easiest route I can do is attempt to brick any devices that might get a non genuine part in the lot. (I buy all my parts from Mouser and Digikey, but they're not omnipotent or flawless).
You can write "kill" code for any devices that has development tools that let you reassign USB VID/PIDs. It has been a standard feature of many chips for a while now. They're just simply using it maliciously to "brick" devices by abusing the general trust around their official drivers (other malicious hackers writing kill code won't get it into the official microsoft update system for example)