Well, pray that your USB flash programmer (or any other USB device) does not have a clone FTDI USB interface chip on it. The latest windows drivers from FTDI will permanently brick any clone chips it sees. Whatever you do, don’t let windows auto-update your USB driver!
FTDI apparently added weasel words to their latest license agreement that says they might brick clone chips… but windoze auto-update never lets you see the new agreement and agree to it. Did I just hear a bunch of class-action lawyers getting mega-boners?
That may not work either… the CPxxxx device were also cloned and they tried to make the clones useless by modifying their official drivers to cause blue screens ’o death. At least they didn’t trash the hardware.
It’s is certainly a shitty thing to do to unsuspecting users. On the other hand, as a user, if my USB device gets bricked because its using a knock-off, my real problem is with whoever made/marketed/sold the hardware. This is even more true in the case of something that I actually paid a bit extra for because it claimed to use an FTDI chip.
In the end, I’m not sure this is all that different than an FTDI driver update breaking a bunch of devices with knock-off chips due to some bug or incompatibility. Is it really FTDI’s job to make sure that knock-offs work with their drivers?
That’s what FTDI wants consumers to think, blaming it on the fake chip vendors.
FTDI went over the line, bricking FT232 chips that consumers have bought in good faith. A simple “This is a counterfeit FTDI component.” popup and refusing to work would have been the appropriate approach. Resetting the PID to 0 and rendering the chip useless certainly has backfired.
I can understand them wanting their software to work on their legitimate chips…but to purposefully have it brick a fake chip is unconscionable…I hope they get the pants sued off of em
No, but intentionally causing permanent damage is different. Let’s say your computer is a bit slow and and you hire someone to see if they can improve it. They find out that you don’t have a valid Windows license, whether intentionally or you were sold a counterfeit. So instead of simply refusing to work on your machine and informing you of the invalid license, he goes and erases your HD. Then he doesn’t even bother to tell you why! That’s essentially what FTDI’s new driver is doing here.
It is not illegal to reverse engineer and create a compatible a chip. The problem FTDI has is that these chips are using the PID/VID that is assigned to FTDI. Which is still not a illegal.
If the chips display FTDI name or logo then there is a trademark infringement but of course FTDI’s malicious driver can not detect the printing on the chip. Even if it could, FTDI intentionally damaging end users property is not legal or in any way right.
Just talked to a friend of mine… his USB AVR programmer is now toast. Along with several arduino boards. He spent most of the day trying to figure out why nothing was working anymore. Said he was going to spend tomorrow talking with lawyers… let the party commence! :party:
Certainly not as big (widespread) but this reminds me of the Sony BMG copy protection rootkit. You can’t just do whatever you please in the name of copy protection. An individual would never get away with anything remotely similar. A company? Rarely any consequence for them.
Yep, I remember that quite well. I haven’t bought a Sony product since and NEVER will again. Also made it a bit of a hobby discouraging others from doing so. The same now applies to FTDI.
