HFU HF Underground
General Category => Huh? => Topic started by: ChrisSmolinski on October 23, 2014, 1048 UTC
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USB-serial imitators whacked by driver update
Reports are emerging that chip-maker FTDI has declared war on chip counterfeiters with a driver update that bricks USB devices recognised as fakes.
Hackaday reports that the issue has been noticed in various forums – EEVBlog and Arduino among them – and pins the issue down to drivers setting the USB product ID to 0 if a USB device contains a fake FTDI FT232 USB-to-serial bridge in it.
The driver was delivered as part of recent Windows updates, but once the product ID is zeroed, Windows, Linux and OS X will all fail to recognise the chip, Hackaday says.
Full article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/23/ftdi_turning_counterfeit_chips_into_bricks/