However, the FTDI debacle didn't punish those people, they're not the consumers. It punished end users who have no idea what an FTDI chip is or does or that one exists in the products they buy.

In your airliner microcontroller example, you have much more informed consumers. They could reasonably be expected to know what processor is in their hardware, and to want to validate it. That's not the same.

It would be more like a good packaging manufacturer finding that their packaging was being counterfeited and their proprietary plastic blend was somehow being leaked up the supply chain. If they changed their recipe to something toxic, but using good plastic internally, and when people started dying said "they should have bought potato chips packaged in genuine FoodSafeStuff bags". People don't know what their packaging is made from or who it's made by. They have no way to verify it prior to purchase, and even after purchase, it would take an expert to identify. And there's no customer loyalty based on the plastic bag, after the food manufacturer switches away from the counterfeit they won't be significantly harmed. But everyone who innocently bought those bags and got poisoned suffered real harm.

For food, you can't change the game without prior notice, but if it is clear that faked goods are toxic, people would start buying from trusted providers themselves. For electronics, I don't see a problem. If a device is bricked, go to your dealer and let him replace it. He will do the same for his supplier, etc.

Somebody in the chain will discover that his supplier is a fraud. He will have to swallow the costs, but has learned a valuable lesson.

If people have brought the product from some unstable source, then they most likely got it cheaper and they are now paying the price for the increased risk they took. It doesn't feel good but I don't think that it is unfair.

Getting hardware to just work on windows was a mess (not sure if they have corrected this).

Would you say that they also have "the absolute right to create drivers that sabotage counterfeits of their products"?

That's a different argument. You could argue that they should have the right given that (elsewhere you have argued) their governments have abrogated their responsibility to protect their IP. And that would be an interesting and compelling argument. But it's entirely different to "[having] the absolute right to create drivers that only work with their products in order to assure quality, performance and function." - and it would be disingenuous to keep arguing that.

> the FTDI case was a case of the company intentionally shipping malicious code used to brick the clones

don't you understand? FTDI does indeed have the absolute right to create drivers that only work with their products, but to intentionally damage a third party product so that it no longer works anywhere else, including with that third party's drivers, seems egregious.

One is the issue of intellectual property theft and what a company has a right to do in order to protect itself.

FTDI invested massive amounts of money to produce excellent solutions for a number of problems. I have personally been using their chips in my designs for over twenty years. I don't even remember when I started, it's possible it was at the very start of their history.

The fake chip makers --mostly in China-- steal intellectual property with impunity, hurting companies, ecosystems and costing job. In some cases they have completely imploded companies in the West.

We can either accept this at our peril or take a stand against it. The only people who are OK with intellectual property theft are those who don't understand the subject or haven't lived it.

My experience? I've had the experience of mortgaging my home to fund a business and then watch a company out of China clone my product and bring it into the US and European markets at half my price. I can't even begin to describe what this did do my business, the people who worked for me, my family and my health. I didn't lose it all because I am a resilient SOB, but it put me in the hospital twice in four years due to the stress.

It's really easy to voice opinions from behind a keyboard when the consequences of said opinions carry no personal consequences.

A company like FTDI and their products did not materialize from nothing. There are people, families, investment and hard work behind such offerings. Clones are not a victimless crime.

The other issue, of the two that I said were separable, is the damage to consumers due to fake chips being bricked by FTDI.

That, in my mind, is a separate matter and a very complex one at that.

There are at least two angles to this one. The first is that the hardware they were using was intentionally made with fake FTDI chips. This is likely the case for most cheap hardware coming out of China. If that garbage doesn't work it is 100% the responsibility of the designers of the hardware. They are thieves. Plain and simple.

If, on the other hand, the designers of the hardware had no idea and fake chips got into the supply chain, the problem is far more complex. At that point it is a question of tracing the supply chain in order to understand, if possible, how it happened. I won't go into the many permutations this could put on the table. Suffice it to say that anyone dealing with China knows full-well what they could be in for. Caveat emptor applies in the case of the OEM.

This is where the problem becomes far more complex and it becomes political. It is our politicians (US/Europe) who allowed us to come to a moment in time where an entire country is openly stealing intellectual property at almost every layer in industry as well as freely distributing it across the world with impunity. This is a far larger problem than a bunch of USB devices getting bricked because a company in Europe decides to defend themselves from what must be a massive loss of revenue of unimaginable scale. I can only imagine what FTDI could be, the people they could employ and the technologies they could develop if fakes could not exist in the market.

Counterfeit products have real and non-trivial consequences to entire societies and their existence should not be taken lightly.

I don't have the solution to this problem. Sadly, it's political. What I do know is that I'll be damned if I am going to blame the victim.

Perhaps you think it strengthens your argument to use a miscategorisation that both you and most of your readers know to be a false equivalence. It does not. It shows you're happy to ignore the truth in order to cast those you disagree with as criminals; or, you're ignorant, which I doubt.

You don't need to be happy with IP infringement in order to be not-happy with corporate (group A) [criminal] destruction of the property of others (group C) based on tortuous infringement of a third party (group B).

Not to mention that IPR goes against an established culture in the country of some of the infringers (group B).

TRIPS Art.35 requires IC circuit layouts to be protected for 10 years (as in 17USC S.904), IIRC. I don't know Chinese law though, perhaps IC related IPR has lapsed for the chips in question?

The OP headline chip is 20 years old (edit: I had the date wrong). Counterfeit, trademark infringement, is wrong of course.

>What I do know is that I'll be damned if I am going to blame the victim. //

You seem happy that one of the victims, the unwitting purchaser of an item having an copied FTDI chip in it, gets punished? In preparation of the sui generis IC mask rights the USA senate committees apparently were careful to ensure that users - "innocent purchasers" they're referred as - could only be punished by paying a royalty and that devices would not be destroyed or confiscated. That seems balanced and avoids punishing victims beyond what is reasonable.

The question of who the victim is under the FTDI scenario is a really interesting one and likely one that is difficult to resolve with absolute certainty. By this I mean that the consequences of various permutations of potential and actual actions require the benefit of time in order to fully grasp. All we can do is attempt predict outcomes based on experience, knowledge of technology, markets, and, of course, the bias every human being brings to the table.

It is important to note that FTDI devices don't just exist in Windows PC's. They are part of a wide range of products covering an unimaginable range of applications. Defects in clones, therefore, can have an equally large and unknowable range of consequences.

In my case I see two scenarios.

The first is what took place: FTDI was forced to retreat, effectively allowing millions of clones to exist unencumbered and without suffering any financial or legal consequences.

On first inspection forcing FTDI to back off was a pro-consumer stance. The victim, in this line of argument, was the consumer and FTDI --to be dramatic-- was the evil greedy corporate actor wanting it all. How dare they!

It is interesting to note that in this narrative the true criminals, the counterfeiters, never seem to be characterized as the culprit, when in fact, they are. It is easy to demonstrate that the marketplace would be safer without fakes.

This, BTW, applies to any product category, not just chips. Simple example: Fake dog food that could potentially kill your dog because the producers don't really care and have no responsibility or accountability to society, whether it be legal or moral.

And yet, if you analyze this scenario, it is also easy to demonstrate that the actual long term outcome is precisely opposite to the desired outcome (protecting the consumer).

How?

By forcing a retreat at such a high level (FTDI devices are everywhere) the message was clear: Counterfeit chips got away with it, will get away with it. Legal and market forces only care about the here and now and will force legitimate companies to not interfere with counterfeiters.

One might say "Nobody issued a statement even remotely resembling what you just said".

True. Nobody ever does. We are defined by our actions. Society and individuals. In this case society cared more about immediate effects rather than the promotion and maintenance of a healthy ecosystem based on laws and regulations that, among other things, respect intellectual property and ownership rights.

The net result of taking this path is easy to predict: Nobody is ever going to challenge counterfeits because of the way the marketplace --due to shortsightedness-- pushed back on FTDI. Nobody wants to be the focus of a mob.

And so we are now in a situation where consumers, because of this path, will remain the victims for decades to come. Today, they, quite literally, have no idea what's inside the devices they purchase and legitimate hardware manufacturers dare not challenge counterfeits for fear of what the mob might do.

This is, at least to me, a clear case of good intentions not thought through to completion actually causing more damage to consumers in the long term in exchange for a short term benefit. This is why I think it was a terrible decision not to take the pain, support FTDI, repair/replace devices and send a strong message to counterfeiters that they risk going bankrupt rather than the opposite.

Part of that encapsulates the second scenario, one where counterfeiters are not allowed to derive financial gains from their operations. That would have been the true pro-consumer stance. And one that would have delivered a future where consumers could have a reasonable certainty of quality, safety and performance from the products they purchase.

I am not going to lay the entire responsibility of the counterfeit problem on the FTDI event, that would be preposterous. However, this was a very clear cause-and-effect case where one choice was to punish counterfeit makers (and the companies who knowingly use their products to increase profits) and the other was to think consumers were being protected by pounding down the legitimate manufacturer when, in reality, the outcome was precisely the opposite when a long term view is taken.

I can't imagine anyone making an argument proposing the unencumbered proliferation of counterfeits (anything, not just chips) is good for consumers. I think what was done with the FTDI case was extremely shortsighted and damaging.

In brief, that products are necessarily worse if they're fake; that societies approach should conform more to your model rather than being more liberal (in all except trademark infringement).

A lot of fakes were distributed through reputable sources as originals. So you could for example build a medical device using expensive original components from digikey, only to see it breaking in the hospital for no apparent reason.

I bet people have _died_ due to FTDIs actions.

Medical device manufacturers would want both certificates of conformity and traceable parts. They'd want these if they built the product themself; they'd specify this if they got a sub-contract manufacturer. If the component supplier can't offer traceability back to the real manufacturer you'd probably want to buy from someone else.

https://www.jjsmanufacturing.com/blog/traceability-in-electr...

I don't think bricking the devices is the right thing for FTDI to do. The consumer friendly thing to do is give warning and an FDTI contact email to report the product so FDTI can talk to the manufacturer.

I can't understand how a component supplier would comingle their traceable stock.

EDIT: since this is getting downvotes.

A component supplier would destroy customer trust if they supplied fakes with traceability certificates. It would mean anyone building for aerospace or military or medical or mining or etc etc (all large, multibillion dollar industries) would have to avoid that supplier. So what's in it for the component supplier?

I accept the fakes are common. I accept people bought fakes from reputable suppliers. What I don't accept is that people bought fakes when they asked for traceable components. I don't accept that companies buyign direct from FTDI got fake components.

They raise truly legitimate first approximation concerns about damage to consumers without understanding the long term damage to, again, consumers is far greater when a hard stance isn't adopted on fake hardware. It's the satisfaction of "doing the right thing" in the one case (FTDI) at the expense of never again being able to protect consumers from fake devices by disabling them if identified.

Counterfeiters continue to exist because they are allowed to make money. Stop their ability to profit and they will evaporate as quickly as they popped up. That's what everyone is missing, it's this feeling that the consumer was actually protected by forcing FTDI to pull back when, in reality, the mob created lasting damage to the safety, security and quality of consumer electronics products until someone else has the intestinal fortitude to make a stand, which, given the ferociousness of what is social media today could easily take decades.

Not only is it it a lack of understanding of how the electronics supply chain works, it also represents a lack of understanding of how the economics of fraudulent products works and how it is affecting people, companies and jobs globally.

We need to get very serious about intellectual property protection or Europe, the US and the world will be converted into nothing more than service and agrarian economies in a matter of decades.

I'll bet that's an exaggeration. If you are going to say something like that you have to back it up with data.

I could just as easily make the claim that people have died due to fakes. We can do that and go round and round a silly pointless circle.

The problem of fakes is real. And it is likely very much political (addressed in another comment). What is is NOT is the legitimate manufacturer's fault, even if they defend their existence by refusing to allow fakes to function with their drivers.

Fake chip manufacturers are perfectly free to do the required R&D, issue and support their own drivers. However, they are thieves, and prefer to steal rather than do the hard work and take the risks their victims undertake.

I don’t think anyone is arguing that FTDI has to let those chips be supported by FTDI drivers. I believe that intentionally sabotaging devices that have clone chips in them (such that they won’t work even once disconnected from the computer running their driver or that the device will be damaged simply by plugging it into a computer with that driver) goes well beyond simply “refusing to allow fakes to function with their drivers.”

That’s not OK, IMO.

There's a difference between not taking steps to ensure counterfeit devices function, and purposefully causing hardware to fail on a remote system. For example, I'm pretty sure purposefully causing the problem is illegal, if the user didn't request it, as it seems the same as hacking to me.

> Imagine counterfeit processor make it into the supply chain. Should the avionics OS do its best to work with every possible fake or should it brick it on power-up before that potentially dangerous aircraft gets off the ground?

Refusing to function is acceptable. Bricking the hardware is not.

That's why you can kill someone and be either glorified as a war hero, hanged by a jury of your peers, or ordered to retake your driving exam.

They destroyed devices that worked perfectly well, but maybe (or maybe not) had a fake FTDI branding on a chip inside the device.

Even the manufacturer may have been a victim of commingled inventory. For this reason I stopped buying anything with FTDI in it, because I didn't want to take the chance it would be bricked because the smalltime seller on Tindie.com bought from a bad supplier.

I would hate to think what you would have Apple do to Hackintosh hardware.

To use your example, imagine if Apple released an update to iOS that would scan any jailbroken iPhones on the same network, and if it detected one, would use a backdoor to send it malware that wipes the device's bootloader.

The proper example would be fake iPhones made in Switzerland sold in the US as through they were real iPhones. If that's the case, then, YES, Apple would be right to brick them with an update. Absolutely.

I ask again: In what alternate reality would Apple be required to allow fake iPhones, look the other way and just let them be?

A key point here is that it’s impossible for the malicious driver to know what representation the seller made to the consumer— the presence of a nonoriginal part doesn’t necessarily mean there was any fraud involved.

Edit to add:

> ... fake iPhones made in Switzerland sold in the US as through they were real iPhones. If that's the case, then, YES, Apple would be right to brick them with an update. Absolutely.

Only after obtaining a court order to that effect. Destroying someone else’s property without due process is generally not acceptable, regardless of how right you are. To step away from technology for a moment, is it ok for a glassmaker to go around town breaking windows because they’re allegedly made with counterfeit glass?

I’m not saying that FTDI or a similar company should sit idly by, but the vigilante justice you’re advocating leads to bad places. We have customs enforcement to stop goods at the border and a court system to deal with internal disputes; use them.

In that alternative reality where, for example, mobile phone carriers are required to allow 911 calls even if your account is otherwise locked because you fraudulently paid with someone else's credit card.

An emergency comes up, and the instant the emergency system comes up, it turns out to have been bricked. People die. Is this a good outcome?

If I were a manufacturer, I'd want to know about this ASAP. Would I want devices to stop working? Especially the examples you gave where people's lives are on the line? Absolutely not. I'd want them to work as well as possible until a replacement can go out.

Pro-consumer would be a pop-up letting the user know they received a counterfeit devices. I can then contact whoever sold me the device, and ask for a replacement. During cross-shipping, I can keep working. Anti-consumer is having my business trip and fall on its face when all the pen tablets which allow people to work from home are bricked during a pandemic.

Of course the counterfeit manufacturers are the bad guys. But FTDI is a company I'd never do business with either. If I'm an FTDI partner, and I got the wrong product, we were both cheated. I'm no more at fault than FTDI.

Should FTDI smack me and my customers upside the head for it? Well, that means we're not really partners.

When we updated the ftdi driver, the board was bricked. Fortunately the system was still in development so we found a different board - it was only a bit of pain.

However, if that system had been shipped (as it was 6 months later), that board being bricked could have had much more significant ramifications. It would have caused a slipped schedule and tangible costs.

What should I have done differently?

I mentioned in another thread that we had one of the top two US electronics distributors knowingly ship us low "B" grade components many, many years ago. These components were in allocation and an enterprising young man at the distributor thought he would be smart and ship us a lower qualified component instead of what we ordered. That was twenty years ago or so. It cost our company dearly, nearly took us out of business.

This was that learning moment for me and it changed my approach to sourcing as well as the level of trust I grant anyone providing us with components. I will never put anything into a design where an illegitimate or lower grade component could jeopardize the safety, reliability or operation of the system.

At some level this is what engineering is about, isn't it? It's that old "Trust but verify?" concept.

We are working on industrial, flight (aircraft) and space (lunar) projects at the moment. No component will go into any of these systems without full knowledge and verification of its origins. This is true for individual components or contracted sub-assemblies.

BTW, this issue of failures being caused by not verifying components isn't anything new. The history of engineering is full of examples. One reasonably recent example of this happened to SpaceX a number of years ago:

https://www.space.com/29994-spacex-rocket-explosion-cause-fa...

For reliability, where that trade-off sits depends on the application. Aerospace, medical, consumer electronics, and disposable toys will sit in different places. If I lose a mission to Mars saving $100 on part which had a 5% chance of failure within a year, that's very poor engineering. If I include that same part in a $3 toy, bringing the price to $103, that's equally poor engineering.

Whether I trust or trust-and-verify depends on how much the "verify" part costs, how strong my trust is, and what the costs of failure are. Normally, the ROI calculation is easy; capitalist markets work well for this. I can ballpark expected costs.

When working with a customer like the government, the boundaries might be a little bit distorted, since the customer is process-oriented. The government might have a hard salary cap which makes it impossible to bring in qualified engineers, and I might take 3 years with a team of 5 people at $100k to do what one person at $300k could do in 6 months. At the same time, I might have hard requirements on process, such as origin-tracing every part.

The danger is when that becomes in-cultured and spills over to other places. If I'm working for the government, I'll follow government processes, and I understand why those are there. But I won't confuse those processes with good engineering. Once people do, they become poor engineers.

If I've shipped a toy which unwittingly has thousands of fake parts which I thought you made, we'll both have been cheated, and I'll expect you to solve that with me cooperatively. If you hack into my product and brick it, even if you were legally in the right (and you're not), you've lost a customer. That's bad business too.

To answer your questions:

(1) Yes, driver code can do things like this. If you don't believe me, buy an HP printer, and see the driver code pop up all sorts of advertisements, deals, and other crap. Driver code has access to your system's low-level internals. From there, it can do whatever it likes.

(2) The parties at fault here are multiple. One of the keys to building robust systems is to understand failures can take place anywhere in the system. In medical device, the terminology is "single point of failure." If one failure can kill a person, a medical device won't be certified by the FDA. In the same way you want the hardware to be tolerant of a single-point-of-failure, you want your organizational processes, logistics, etc. to also be tolerant. Mistakes will happen, and when they do, people shouldn't die.

(3) No one would hold FTDI responsible for making sure clones work properly. Plenty of people would hold FTDI responsible for intentionally attacking my hardware because I had a clone, if things go wrong. Two wrongs don't make a right. There is plenty of case law around this. Here's a nice chain for you to go down to get you started:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

https://www.cs.uaf.edu/~cs393/CACHE/Wired_RIAA.pdf

If FTDI's drivers stop working with my device incidentally, they're not responsible. If they intentionally brick a piece of hardware I own, for any reason, including believing I violated or contributed to a violation of their IP, that's a pretty clearly digital trespass under CFAA.

Would I pursue FTDI for breaking a cheap consumer device? That's not worth anyone's time. Had it, as in your example, killed someone or took down a planeload of people, you can bet your butt there would be both civil and criminal prosecutions for stuff like that.

(4) Any regarding supply chains, whenever I've done this, I've worked for small companies that wanted to keep logistics simple. We'd try to make sure complete designs could be sourced from one distributor (usually Newark, sometimes Digikey). And no one had resources to do any kind of tracing of parts. I understand that's done in aerospace, but that's not done in hardly anything else.

If there's some mixup in the supply chain, and I've shipped a thousand consumer widgets with a bad FTDI chip, FTDI should go after the parties responsible: my distributor, and the pirate company. Not me. Not my customer. And it should do it properly through the legal system and pursue damages, not break devices vigilante-style.

a) > company should be responsible for ensuring that counterfeit devices work correctly

or

b) > bricking [the counterfeit] device as soon as possible

The answer is almost always c) let it be, if it works fine, if not, not your problem.

Adding any kind of bricking code anywhere, unnecessarily introduces the possibility that it will be unintentionally (or maliciously) activated. Personally I don't have that kind of confidence in software or the people that write it (and I am one of those people)

Go ask the manufacturer of the fake chip to support it with their own driver.

Really. As a hardware manufacturer, if you use a fake version of my product and demand that my software work with it you will hear the loud sound of the phone being hung up forcefully.

The legitimate manufacturer can do anything it wants with the software and their hardware. If someone wants support for fakes they can provide it themselves.

We are talking about encouraging or tolerating theft of intellectual property here. Having been the victim of this I am quite sensitive to the idea.

> It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

No one is suggesting encouraging or tolerating theft of intellectual property. People are _discouraging_ vigilante justice against IP thieves.

In this instance, because it harms consumers (an innocent party).

You're arguing against strawmen when you claim that people are arguing for FTDI to support these chips. Instead what people are arguing for is for FTDI to not brick them _intentionally_.

In other words, when viewed with a long term perspective the mob actually succeeded at protecting the counterfeiters rather than consumers.

That's what people disagreeing with my perspective are missing in this argument.

Show me a legitimate scenario where giving counterfeiters a free pass leads to long term (decades) protections for consumers and there might be something to argue about.

My quote is far better, BTW:

"A man holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way" --Mark Twain

Most everyone voicing opinions on this thread has zero experience manufacturing products at scale and perhaps even running a non-trivial company. Nobody has held any of these cats by the tail and yet everyone seems to think they understand market and business dynamics.

As my wife puts it (she is a doctor): A google search isn't a medical degree.

What you are calling "malicious code" could --and likely is-- quality control code.

The fact that fakes fail isn't the responsibility of the legitimate manufacturer.

I don't know how many hypothetical examples I have to concoct to drive the point home.

OK, here's another one. Fake Tesla. The real Tesla writes code that bricks the entire fake car. This is 100% pro-consumer. The fake Tesla could literally kill people.

What you guys are arguing for is that Tesla should ensure that fakes are able to function. And, at the extremes, that Tesla is responsible for their proper function and safety.

Think about that for a moment.

If I receive constant 1Mbps stream, the PLL doesn't even have time to stop/start? Or drivers are supposed to handle upgrade hand-off? Sounds crazy complicated, and I don't see the point of such a feature

A counterfeiter commiting crimes against FTDI does not excuse FTDI committing crimes against a third party (i.e. the consumer). The world being safer without the counterfeit products also does not excuse the FTDI destroying things that aren't theirs. The justice system being ineffective at addressing counterfeiters is also no excuse for FTDI to take matters into their own hands. Vigilante justice is usually illegal.

Programmers make mistakes. A bug in your counterfeit detection code may end up destroying legit products. In addition, you can not be sure destroying a product will be safe - if the chip is in a medical device, you might be killing someone. The entire idea of destroying a product without explicitly being told to do so is fraught with peril.

You deal in false binaries. The third, imo correct, option is for FTDI to design software that works correctly with their own product, and spend no effort on the counterfeits - neither to get them to work correctly, nor to brick them on purpose.

A fourth option, if you want to spend some effort on something other than destruction of property, is to take option three, and also alert the user that they are using a counterfeit chip with unpredictable behaviour, and in your airplane example, advise the user they should probably not take off. If you want to be pro-consumer, this is a better way to go about it than smashing their stuff.

From the consumer's perspective, they had a working device, and a firmware update bricked it on purpose. It is possibly out of warranty, in which case they end up footing the bill (or experiencing frustration) for replacement and downtime. It takes Olympic levels of mental gymnastics to view that as 'pro-consumer', imo.

The primary counter argument to mine requires an inversion of responsibilities and ascribes criminality to the victim.

Devices got bricked because counterfeiters committed a crime in the first place.

Along the same lines, there are supply chain questions that are impossible to answer:

How many of these device manufacturers knowingly used fake chips because they cost less?

How many distributors knowingly shipped fake components because, again, they cost less and delivered higher margins?

How many device manufacturers were true innocent victims who did not know fake devices had been substituted for the real thing?

How many failures of import controls led to consumers receiving devices with fake chips?

I have had the experience of having major US electronics parts distributors knowingly substitute defective --yet genuine-- parts instead of the top grade parts we ordered. The effect was what the hardware sector generally refers to as "infant mortality", where your hardware fails early or becomes unreliable due to substandard components.

It took months for these effects to come out into the open and for the major US distributor to own up to this against the threat on our part of legal action. Not only did they replace all components with legitimate top grade parts, they also paid the costs involved in replacing the affected systems for our customers.

My guess is that the context lacking most, if not all, who disagree with my position perspective that comes from having "skin in the game" in the domain we are discussing.

The knee-jerk reaction is to think bricking these devices is bad for consumers, as if that would have been the end of the story. No, in a properly functioning economy and legal system this would and should lead to tracing through levels of responsibility as far as possible, with consumers being made whole with properly engineered and manufactured devices.

The end result of forcing FTDI to not protect their product from counterfeiters is that not one consumer today can be assured the devices they purchase has quality reliable parts that will function according to specifications. A chip can, quite literally, go up in flames (I had this happen to me with a cheap Chinese device) because we did not support FTDI in disallowing fake chips from the market.

Sure, there would have been short term pain and a bunch of companies and suppliers fixing their pipelines and designs. Yet, we would have emerged with an above-average guarantee of quality and performance and counterfeiters thinking real hard before doing what they do.

Instead the feedback we gave counterfeiters is "you win".

And the result we obtained for consumers is "you lose, forever".

This incident extends well past FTDI. Because the mob won and forced FTDI to accept fakes it now means nobody is going to take similar steps towards protecting their products. Which, in turn, means counterfeiters know they won and know they can get away with it. Consumers, once more, lose, big and in unknown ways.

We are swimming in a sea of fake products. The only way to stop this is if fake products become losing propositions for producers, suppliers, manufacturers and consumers.

I mentioned I had a chip go up in flames. A while back I bought a little humanoid robot directly from a vendor in China. One of these things with 15 to 20 servos and, typically, a mobile phone class processor powering it and the touch screen on the chest. I bought several of them as part of a business venture.

A couple of days after receiving them one of my kids was working with it on the table in the garage. As the robot walked, it failed to take a step and fell. It just planked onto the table, a 90 degree rotation from the toes, nothing too dramatic.

In an instant flames were shooting out of the chest. Flames, not smoke. Since we were in the garage it was an easy matter to open the door and toss the thing onto the driveway.

Upon inspection we found a crater at the center of the ARM processor on the main board. It failed and took a bunch of other parts with it.

I contacted the company and very specifically asked about the source of this processor. We were actually considering importing and modifying this robot in quantity for educational purposes. In other words, we had established an engineering relationship with this company, this wasn't a case of just another consumer buying their product.

They pretty much told me they bought the cheapest ARM processor clone they could source in China.

This was and was not a revelation to me. Having done business with China for some time, as well as having a number of friends and business acquaintances doing business in China, nothing surprises me any more.

The degree of supervision and cross checking you have to engage in when doing business with China is impossible for someone outside of manufacturing to grasp. It takes a lot of work to ensure safe products are landed in Europe and the US. When you deal with European or US companies this requirement almost disappears because you can generally trust they will deliver what they agreed to supply at the required level of quality.

Taking the case of this real product, this robot, as an example, it would have been far better if --through whatever mechanism-- the thing had been bricked by the processor manufacturer before it got into the hands of any consumer.

I cringe to think that this company likely sold tens of thousands of these units into homes and schools that could, due to fake chip issues and low component quality, go up in flames any time. We got lucky in that the robot ignited while we were there and under circumstances that were easy to control. This could have happened in the middle of the night and the story would have been potentially horrific.

Be careful to think that allowing consumers to be fed fake products of unknown quality and traceability equates to having a pro-consumer stance.

Due to this FTDI event it is likely consumers today have no clue what quality and safety has gone into the products they are using. This is not a good outcome. The right path would have been to take the pain of fixing the real problem and make consumers whole through both corporate responsibility and the legal system.

In other words, FTDI is a victim and consumers are now even larger victims because the fake chip content of their devices is likely to go well beyond a little USB chip. No way to know how far and wide this has gone. A clear case of good intentions actually causing more damage to consumers.

OK, I'm done. I don't expect to change anyone's mind. Just stating a perspective I think many don't have because they don't have practical experience at scale in the world of hardware manufacturing and support. If it makes even one person think this through, research and perhaps understand, I am satisfied.

Be tolerant of contrasting perspectives...you might just be wrong and not know it...or, even worse, one day you will be correct and the mob will dismiss you just as you have to others when you think you are right.

Tolerance is important. Don't punish, dismiss and ignore those who you do not agree with because one day that person could be you.