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No. It points to ftdi not providing specs or tests for detecting fakes. They just randomly break shit. If there was a way to reliably check for fakes, people wo
by deelowe 11y ago
No. It points to ftdi not providing specs or tests for detecting fakes. They just randomly break shit. If there was a way to reliably check for fakes, people would use it.
- maxerickson 11y agoThat just leads to the conclusion offered in the post I replied to: or hey, I got a better idea. Let's just not buy FTDI any longer. That sounds much cheaper and less painful. If you want to trade on your reputation and a manufacturer makes it impossible to verify their parts, don't use that manufacturer. I think differing ideas of 'reputable brand' may be the problem, you can't just want to be a reputable brand and go through some motions of providing quality, you have to walk the freaking walk.
- deelowe 11y agoYep. So the solution is to boycott ftdi.
- st3v3r 11y agoSo basically, you feel that no one should respect your IP either.
- deelowe 11y agoNo. I'm worried that a supply chain screw up upstream is going to create unbounded liabilities for our company. If FTDI provided a mechanism to prevent this, I'd have no issue with it. We WANT to use genuine FTDI parts, but have no way to be sure other than accepting this risk that FTDI has created out of thin air. That's a risk that we simply can't take.
- kefka 11y agoWell, yes. Or at least until they shape up and no longer introduce an unknown failure mode to all products using those chips. The cost for a company to use those chips are too great now. And that result is purely FTDI's response. They could have taken other avenues: Windows Syslog, GUI messages, warnings. Instead they chose to do a path that we plebes would have been arrested and charged with the CFAA for doing (vandalizing hardware over a network).
- logfromblammo 11y agoFTDI discovered a way to detect fakes. Obviously, this does them no good to keep it to themselves, because they know that all the chips they make are, by definition, genuine. Logically, the proper thing to do would be to develop a counterfeit detector and distribute it to all reputable intermediaries in the supply chain between them and the customers. That way, distributors could test the chips before accepting a shipment, and before paying for knockoffs. Instead, FTDI gave the tester to end-users, all the way down at the other end of the supply chain. Many of these people will not even know what a FTDI is. And the tester actually works by making all detected counterfeit chips non-functional, which basically means someone ordered a package and it blew up in their face after they already paid for it. The responsibility for protecting and enforcement of trademarks rests entirely upon the owner of the mark, not upon the customer.
- deelowe 11y agoAgreed. I'd love to get a tool that allowed fakes to be identified and certification be provided by OEMs. Instead, we get a windows update that randomly bricks devices. Not cool.