[chirp_users] FTDI Chipset driver bricking fake FTDI chips

[Aubrey Turner]

I wondered how long that would last.

Lots of people were very angry with FTDI on this one.  I can understand 
them not wanting their driver to work with counterfeit chips, but they 
went too far.

As I understand it, they are going to do the same thing as Prolific and 
prevent the driver from working with counterfeit chips going forward.  
In the interim, MS has rolled back the FTDI driver on the Windows 
auto-update service (so no one will get the "bad" driver going forward) 
while FTDI is preparing a new version of the driver to go out soon that 
will simply error out when it detects a fake chip (no more bricking).


On 10/24/2014 02:17 PM, n4lbl wrote:
> ​ and it changes.....
>
> /. FTDI Removes Driver >From Windows Update That Bricked Cloned Chips
>
> http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/10/24/1330252/ftdi-removes-driver-from-windows-update-that-bricked-cloned-chips 
> ​
>
>
> On Wed, Oct 22, 2014 at 1:32 PM, Aubrey Turner 
> <aubrey.c.turner at gmail.com <mailto:aubrey.c.turner at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     The common wisdom with regards to USB-to-serial cables seems to be
>     that
>     one should pick FTDI over Prolific because of all the Prolific
>     counterfeits in circulation.  It seems that this is now becoming a
>     problem with FTDI, as well.
>
>     Up to now it was not a problem for the end-user.  FTDI has decided to
>     change that with their latest driver, which changes the
>     configuration of
>     a "fake" FTDI chip so that it is rendered useless (at least without a
>     bit of fiddling with configuration tools and device IDs on Linux
>     or XP).
>
>     I hadn't realized that FTDI had such an issue with fake chips until I
>     read this article.  Some of the comments point out that the
>     end-user of
>     the device has no way of knowing whether the chip is genuine or not.
>     Further, as noted above, many in the radio programming community
>     purchased devices touted as having FTDI chips in good faith as an
>     effort
>     to avoid the counterfeits Prolific chips.
>
>     Anyway, if you suddenly have issues with your FTDI USB-to-serial
>     adapter, take a look and see if the PID has been changed to 0.  If so,
>     then you may have been affected by this new driver.
>
>     Sources:
>     -
>     http://hackaday.com/2014/10/22/watch-that-windows-update-ftdi-drivers-are-killing-fake-chips/
>     -
>     http://www.eevblog.com/forum/reviews/ftdi-driver-kills-fake-ftdi-ft232/
>     - http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=270175.0
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