Which is exactly why the "establishment" has been trying to ban it.

No, really! The Republican party had the opposition of "teaching of higher-order thinking skills, critical thinking skills and similar programs" in schools written in their platform document as one of their policy aims.

Wash post

Why would FTDI have to ensure their driver doesn't break chips that aren't theirs? There's no agreement, licensing, or goodwill. The problem is that this was not accidental. The FTDI anti-clone code in the driver is very sophisticated and actually performs a "preimage" cryptographic attack, to ensure that the clone chip doesn't detect the invalid configuration and auto-reset to factory defaults. Deliberately and with premeditation setting out to "damage" (which in legal terms includes temporary malfunction or impaired function) hardware is not legal without a court order or similar legal basis. The 2nd issue, is that of ensuring that they do not inconvenience wholly innocent parties. They failed at this. The FTDI anti-clone code will also deactivate genuine FTDI chips which have been configured with an external configuration memory in certain circumstances. This has been reported by a company which build development boards with numerous FTDI chips in different configurations; they found that the chip with an external EEPROM would get corrupted by new driver, even though the components were obtained from an authorized distributor.

However, a lot of manufacture is contracted out. If you're buying 10 or 20 chips for internal R&D you'll likely get genuine ones.

However, when you find a contract manufacturer and ask them to make 100,000. You require an XYZ, Inc. ABC123 chip and ask the manufacturing contractor to source it. Unbeknown to you, they obtain a counterfeit source. The chip is virtually identical externally, and functionally very similar, so that your product passes validation testing.

You as the device designer and seller may have no idea that you have fake chips on your device. Perhaps, your RMA rate is higher than you expected due to chip failures, or perhaps you are getting a lot of bug reports from the field which are not reproducible on your prototypes, but are on production devices.

This isn't the first time a USB->UART vendor has taken vigilante action against fakes. The vendor Prolific had major problems with low-quality, buggy and slow fake chips, causing major support headaches for customers and themselves. I believe they ended up discontinuing their main product and replacing it with an incompatible version, while poisoning the drivers so that they would BSOD/Kernel panic if they detected a fake chip.

Yes. A company called Supereal is selling enormous volumes of "FTDI" chips into the Chinese market. The chips are labelled with the FTDI name and logo and during the USB negotiation, they announce themselves using the FTDI vendor unique ID, in order to use the ubiquitous and flexible FTDI driver (rather than require any development work for their own driver).

See http://zeptobars.ru/en/read/FT... for an example of a fake chip - labelled FTDI on the outside, but supereal on the silicon.

The problem is that the fake chips are buggy and slow compared to the genuine article, causing headaches for USB peripheral designers and support and reputation headaches for FTDI. There is a huge market for USB UART chips, and it is quite competitive, but few of the products on the market are actually as reliable, fast and robust as you would expect them to be. The FTDI FT232RL is one of the best in terms of reliability and has the best drivers, while also providing some handy bonus functionality.

It appears that FTDI have reverse engineered the fake chips and found that they can be reprogrammed. When their driver detects a fake chip, it uses the internal configuration commands to erase the EEPROM memory containing the Vendor Unique ID. With this EEPROM blanked, the chip is unable to complete the device detection process in the OS's USB stack.

The aim was not to find the "best network", but the "best network without redundancy".

The point was that most networks are designed with redundancy in mind, but not all networks require that degree of reliability. For those networks where reliability is not necessary, it would be helpful to know what the lowest cost configurations are.

one or both of them are full of something. Not necessarily. They could both be right. The interlock device only defeats the starter. However, if the car lessee is defaulting on lease payments, then it is likely that they are also cutting back on scheduled maintenance and repairs. It is entirely possible that the engine is unreliable and idles poorly, being prone to stall when idling. It is perfectly possible in such a case, for a driver to reach an intersection, have the engine stall, and then be unable to restart it because the interlock has defeated the starter.

And only one variant of one JPEG protocol ever found widespread use. JPEG actually published both a lossless and a lossy compression algorithm and accompanying file format. The lossless format faded into near total obscurity, apart from some medical software, where the lossless JPEG data would be encapsulated in a medical (DICOM) container. Technically, lossless JPEG is a mandatory part of the DICOM specification, but not every product (free or commercial) supports it, and it's virtually impossible to find an opensource implementation of lossless JPEG outside of limited implementations as part of medical imaging tools. There have also been a variety of extensions published to the JPEG lossy algorithm - notably extension to 12 or 16 bit depths. Good luck finding any support for these, at all. Again, these formats were nominally supported in the DICOM standard for medical imaging, but were very poorly supported. A flurry of naive new-entrant machine vendors, ended up embracing these "novel" formats, only to cause total chaos for their customers, as they found that the files were unviewable on incumbent viewing software or untransmittable to other systems.

The SAR component of galileo is a separate service to the positioning service. The intention is that it can operate as an EPIRB receiver. Conventional emergency beacons can be located by satellites, but the resolution is poor (tens of miles) and the time to fix is long (30-60 minutes). The beacon transmits a signal, and suitably equipped satellites detect the beacon, and relay it to ground stations, which then compute the location of the beacon by measuring the change in Doppler shift as the satellite flies by. The SAR component of galileo was designed with the intention that the overhead satellites would detect the time-of-arrival of the beacon signal and cross reference it with the satellites' atomic clocks, effectively performing a reverse GPS-fix. Such a system would be able to obtain a fix within minutes or seconds, and such a fix would likely have a resolution of 1-2 miles. The SAR component is not a mandatory service. You can use the passive location service without implementing SAR in a device. You would only use the SAR service, in an emergency locator beacon device. At the time the galileo SAR system was designed, feedback was a problem with locator beacons. The user had no idea if the signal had been received. Later revisions to the system mean that modern beacons and satellites now offer two big upgrades - the beacons can contain a passive GPS reciever, and can embed the location data in the beacon signal; and the satellite system can transmit feedback to a compatible receiver telling it that it's signal has been received and a position fix made. The Galileo SAR function is therefore rather redundant, but it's often helpful to have a 2nd independent and redundant safety system available, so I can see that it would still get used.