As other people have pointed out, not all of the fake chips have those markings—or any markings, for that matter. This tells me that some company special-ordered batches of chips that were silk screened with those markings, but that the part normally comes blank.
And who would want a 9" pianist figurine anyway?
But this involves TECHNOLOGY so it must be evil because without TECHNOLOGY there would be other possible way for the folks at the airport to calculate how long you might be waiting in line.
No siree, no way at all. You standing there, in full view of every person, in a public space. No way to check. None at all.
Look at how counterfeiting laws work for money. If you pay with a $100 bill in a smokey bar at night and get a $20 counterfeit bill in change, and don't realize it until the next day, you're out the $20. If you try to spend it, you're actually committing a felony - it doesn't matter if you printed the phony bill yourself, or if you just accepted it as change and are passing it forward. It also doesn't matter if you realize it's counterfeit or not, although the Secret Service agents may agree to give you a pass the first time you try to spend phony money if you claim you didn't realize it was counterfeit, and cooperate completely.
However, currency counterfeiting laws are very specific to money. Let's look at product counterfeiting, which works similarly but probably without the felony charges.
If FTDI discovered a container of devices with counterfeit chips was en route, they could tell Customs, who would order the contents of the container to be destroyed once they arrived on the dock. This would be a problem for the shipping company, who accepted the devices for shipment and never delivered them, so they would have to pay out an insurance claim. The insurer then has to deal with the liability by going back to the shipper and saying "hey, your devices were destroyed by Customs, I had to pay out for failing to deliver the goods." I expect the shipping companies deal with this all the time, though, and have a contract clause that absolves them of insurance liability in this case. In this case, the supplier is out the money. Their recourse would be to go back to the manufacturer and ask for their money back. Maybe the manufacturer will honor the request, maybe they won't.
If FTDI discovered a shipment of devices with counterfeit chips already went to MicroCenter, they would call the Secret Service, who would contact MicroCenter and MicroCenter would have to pull them off the shelves and destroy them, leaving MicroCenter without the money. Their only recourse would be to contact their supplier and say "hey, you sold us counterfeit goods, we want our money back." Maybe they'd get their money back, maybe they wouldn't. It's a risk.
So FTDI has now found a way to destroy a consumer device. As above, the consumer is similarly out of luck. Their recourse is to go back to MicroCenter and say "hey, this adapter, it's broke." Maybe they'll get their money back, maybe they won't. It's a risk. MicroCenter might eat the losses, or they might go back to their supplier, who might go back to the manufacturer.
In every case when the counterfeits are discovered they are destroyed, leaving somebody without the device and without the money.
I think FTDI may have a pretty solid legal ground for behaving like this, even though it's always a crappy experience to the person who got stuck with the phony. The main difference is that FTDI is doing this without asking the Secret Service to investigate the counterfeits first.
First, there's no such thing as "illegal access to software". The customer may be violating a licensing agreement, but as a rule, that's not a criminal offense.
Second, I'm pretty sure there are third-party FTDI drivers out there. So you really can't make the argument that the clone chip vendors don't have an alternate driver. The best you can do is state that if a clone gets bricked, it means that the commercial FTDI driver was loaded at least once by the customer for some reason (possibly with the intent to use it with the clone hardware, but possibly to use it with some other device), and that it matched the clone because it was attached while that driver was loaded.
Besides, they aren't FTDI's chips, so FTDI's statement about what uses their chips are certified for is irrelevant.
Actually, if you sell it as a "USB/Serial converter", then you are, because the USB mark is trademarked.
Only if they use the USB trident mark. The letters "USB" are likely to be held as descriptive.
If some medical device manufacturer uses a consumer-grade FTDI chip - counterfeit or not - in a medical appliance, then that manufacturer is the one who would be liable, as FTDI has already made it clear that these chips are not certified for such uses.
Liability is not binary. If the failure were accidental, you'd be correct. Because it is deliberate, at best, both companies would be held liable—the medical device vendor for choosing an unsuitable part and FTDI for deliberately breaking it, and at worst, FTDI would be held solely liable for deliberately breaking it.
No, I haven't solved any of the hard problems, because determining whether a colored ball or arrow is meaningful really isn't one of them. The hard problems are things like:
Traffic lights are relatively straightforward by comparison, so long as they are working.
No, that's the next generation, when they add backscatter and/or millimeter-wave scanners.
Describe for me, programmatically, the difference between a stoplight and a taillight.
That's easy. The stoplight is above you. Two cameras at different angle provide sufficient parallax to tell the difference between something far away on a hill and something nearby above the car. And you're done.
and a police light
Same answer.
and a neon sign
Same answer, plus the stoplight is not on the side of the road, as computed based on distance to the edge of the road when looking forward.
and also, please include all the many shapes and sizes of the various stoplights all over the country.
No need. Humans can't see the shape of the fixture when driving at night, but that limitation has never been a problem. You just need to know the color and to be able to figure out which colored light corresponds with which lane.
its video cameras can sometimes be blinded by the sun when trying to detect the color of a traffic signal.
So can people. One possible solution would be radio signals in every traffic light to indicate the light's state. No signal and can't see the light? Stop the car and tell the driver to take over. This would be useful for eliminating confusion when you have multiple lights as well, so it might be worth pursuing.
That said, the simpler fix is to use a higher quality camera with better lens coatings. I can't remember the last time I saw lens flare that blew out a picture to the point that it was truly unusable except when using old camera gear with uncoated lenses. For additional robustness, put more than one camera on the front, pointed in different directions. That way, lens flare should never be a problem, in practice. (Lens flare tends to be angle-specific, and the sun is in one spot, so if a lens at one angle is in a position to flare badly, a second lens at a different angle probably won't be, assuming your lenses aren't old, uncoated nightmares.)
it can't tell the difference between a big rock and a crumbled-up piece of newspaper
Neither can people, reliably, unless it is blowing. Whatever you see in the road, it is best to avoid it.
Really, the problem is that "when children are present" is kind of ambiguous. What if there's only one child? And is the concern really all children, or just unaccompanied children? Are high school students children? Do kids in strollers count? And so on.
Most drivers would assume that the intended purpose is to increase safety around the time when kids are arriving at school or leaving school en masse. So they would interpret it to mean "Speed Limit [X] on Monday through Friday, from 7:15–8:00 and from 2:30–3:15". If the signs just said that instead of "when children are present", then automated cars could easily do the right thing every time. Also, by being more concrete, the signs would eliminate the selective blindness that causes many human drivers to ignore the lower speed limit.
Nope. Legal protections for intellectual property include patents, trademarks, and copyright. However, all these have limited lifetimes. Having a trade secret means you forgo any legal protection, and you take on defending your secret through your own security systems. That means you can retain a trade secret for as long as you can keep it secret, but once the genie's out of the bottle, too bad. The courts can't help you directly, but you could sue a disgruntled employee if he published the 11 secret herbs and spices in breach of his employment contract.
On the one hand, there is the philosophy that "locks only keep honest people out." If someone is using a hack to bypass their door security, the current legal framework could be used to charge them with trespassing, breaking and entering, illegal use of lock-picking equipment, possession of burglary tools, or some other charge. If a prosecutor wants to file charges against you for using such a device, he will. To that end, HID may feel they have to try to defend their system through the legal system, or the courts may not take their products seriously as a security system.
On the other hand, anyone who has such a system protecting their buildings and grounds is now at Pucker-Factor One. These SLAPP lawsuits are just confirmation that HID acknowledges the threat to their systems is real, and the attack code is already in the hands of vandals and bad guys. If building security was my job I'd be on the phone to HID today, and googling the competition while their account manager lied in my ear about how it's not a crisis.
I've noticed several design suggestions in your code.
