Really Prolific?

MS should take away their keys.

> PPS: In meantime, you can download the older driver (v3.8.39.0 worked for me) and use it instead.

This implies that the fake IC isn't being bricked and will work with Linux, etc. after the new Windows driver has communicated with it. It appears the Windows driver refuses to communicate with the IC.

> PS: And yes, FTDI did say they saw the error of their ways back in 2014. Only to pull the same shit again in 2016. They learned nothing. Chances are neither will Prolific.

Corporate institutional memories can be remarkably short.

Unless I'm misunderstanding, this isn't bricking the device. The driver is refusing to allow it to work, sure, but it doesn't damage the chip itself in any way. The reason the FTDI incident back in 2014 blew up was because the FTDI driver didn't just refuse to work - it reprogrammed the USB PID on counterfeit/cloned chips to 0, which actually prevented them from working on any host (looking back at articles from that time, it looks like you could fix it by downloading the FT32 config tool from FTDI, but the important point is that the driver was effectively damaging the chips).

I really don't see the issue with drivers developed by a hardware company to support their hardware refusing to work with other hardware. I recognize that it creates problems for innocent end users when they do it, but Prolific just doesn't have any obligations to the end-users of other manufacturers' chips. Refusing to operate (rather than reprogramming the chips like FTDI's solution did) seems like a completely reasonable path to me.