151–160 of 315 posts
The real problem here is that USB does not define a standard interface for an RS-232 adapter. Proprietary drivers should never have been required for these. Same deal for Centronics printer adapters.
It's interesting to consider from a legal perspective exactly why this isn't something a company is allowed to do. (Assuming the company did in fact intentionally damage people's chips, reversibly or not -- sounds like we don't know for sure yet?) - Intentionally sabotaging someone's stuff, legally, is more or less the same as intentionally taking it. Keying a car and driving it away might have different names but ar…
One could argue that using the official driver with counterfeit chips is outside intended purpose of the official driver, at which point the user is proceeding at his or her own risk.
* That doesn't mean you can shoot them as they ride away.
* It also doesn't mean you can booby trap your bike.
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> purposely reprogramming them to make them non-functional isn't Dumb question maybe, but why?
In addition to the other posted replies, it's bad software engineering. You really can't be confident enough in your logic to ever start issuing DESTROY_HARDWARE() commands of any kind, short of the small set of very specialized programs that may be deliberately used for such things (FPGA programmers, etc). Any error whatsoever and you may end up nuking your real customer's hardware. Bad plan. Same reason why program…
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Nobody would fault FTDI for releasing new drivers that don't work with counterfeit parts. That alone would cause enough inconvenience to manufacturers to make sure they use legitimate parts. It's the (unethical) bricking of the parts that has everybody up in arms.
Tangentially: people totally would fault FTDI for releasing drivers that don't work with counterfeit parts. See: Apple detecting and rejecting counterfeit iPhone cables.
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> purposely reprogramming them to make them non-functional isn't Dumb question maybe, but why?
You're damaging someone's hardware without their consent? Its essentially vandalism.
I'm not a supporter of intellectual property laws, but we have them, so I'd also be curious of any legal ground fake chip users have to stand on.
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Nobody would fault FTDI for releasing new drivers that don't work with counterfeit parts. That alone would cause enough inconvenience to manufacturers to make sure they use legitimate parts. It's the (unethical) bricking of the parts that has everybody up in arms.
"bricking" doesn't seem to be the right word. FTDI is making it so that the counterfeit chips don't work with any FTDI drivers, old or new. (Per the thread, all that happens is the PID is changed to a PID that no FTDI driver will recognize)
I'm surprised you found time away from scrubbing your Facebook page clean of all the disparaging comments.
My advice: Skip breakfast tomorrow morning - you're going to be eating quite a bit of crow for lunch.
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> purposely reprogramming them to make them non-functional isn't Dumb question maybe, but why?
Making alterations to someone else's property without their consent for the express purpose of rendering it non-functional is commonly called vandalism.
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Hi,
I've been advised to email this address by 'XXXX' at Microsoft Support.
FTDI is shipping a malware driver for Windows; if it detects what it thinks is a counterfeit device plugged in by USB, it bricks it. Details here:
http://www.eevblog.com/forum/reviews/ftdi-driver-kills-fake-...
I've also attempted to report this by phone as suggested by XXXX. I've never experienced such difficulty trying to report a security issue; I'd have expected that you'd have processes in place, but apparently not.
My first attempt was met by a CSR who informed me that he knew of no protocol for reporting security issues, and that he couldn't help me because it wasn't directly effecting my computer. He then hung up on me when I asked to speak to a supervisor.
Second call got me a much more helpful chap, who after conferring with a supervisor, transferred me to professional services. The person I spoke with there said they also didn't have any security reporting protocol, or if they did, he didn't know about it. When I said the issue could effect thousands of devices, he transferred me through to 'corporate'.
I ended up going through an IVR system to an operator, who was no help whatsoever. She was entirely the wrong person to speak to; she was also completely ignorant of any security reporting process, and didn't know who to transfer me to.
Could you please call me on +61 XXX XXX XXX to acknowledge receipt of this report, and to discuss it? Thanks.
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody would fault FTDI for releasing new drivers that don't work with counterfeit parts. That alone would cause enough inconvenience to manufacturers to make sure they use legitimate parts. It's the (unethical) bricking of the parts that has everybody up in arms.
Tangentially: people totally would fault FTDI for releasing drivers that don't work with counterfeit parts. See: Apple detecting and rejecting counterfeit iPhone cables.
The problem in that case is not the actual new drivers, but the process of uninstalling the old working drivers.
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The FTDI OSX drivers will still randomly cause kernel panics when the device is unplugged and a program still holds an open file descriptor for the serial port. While working with a company which was developing and selling products with FTDI chips in them, we made FTDI aware of this issue and attached many panic logs. It's been about 5 years and they've still yet to actually fix it.
OS X ships with an FTDI driver since 10.9. I suspect this one is made by Apple. Maybe because of this kind of issues. Do you still have crashes on 10.9+?