[chirp_users] FTDI Chipset driver bricking fake FTDI chips

[Bryan McWhirt]

The problem is China's patent laws are so messed up and companies do not 
pay attention to it before shipping manufacturing there.

Basically regardless of international patent status if your patents are 
not on file with China's patent office it's perfectly ok for a 
manufacturing company to copy your device/process for their own, or at 
least in China's eyes. Of course if your patents are on file that only 
makes a tiny bit of difference and they still get copied. The solution 
is quit manufacturing EVERYTHING in China unless you WANT it copied.

I don't agree with China but at this point it's well known enough that 
if you manufacture in China then complain about it getting copied, you 
should really be blaming the man in the mirror.

KB9YEN
Bryan McWhirt
bryan at kb9yen.com

On 10/24/14 3:29 PM, Aubrey Turner wrote:
> 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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