The long list of requirements around approving a vendor are tiring and result in epic stories like the $500 toilet seat, etc., but they prevent stuff like this FTDI debacle from happening. For safety-critical devices, control of the supply chain is beyond good practice, it's required by federal law, precisely so bad actors can't interfere with peoples' lives. The fact that your have/had net downvotes for your comment demonstrates that consensus reality is not always reality.Īs an embedded medical devices engineer, I know you are exactly right. Oh well, here comes the downvotes because on HN you can't criticize China, only Western nations.Įdit: to the person who thinks the capacitor issue was just a 'QA issue.' It was corporate espionage against Japan from China to get around IP issues: Again, you're ignoring the real issues of how China and Taiwan and other governments do a "wink, wink, nod, nod" when its comes to IP issues and encourage and even protect counterfeiters for the sake of economic output and underselling those who respect IP. FTDI had nothing to do with putting melamine in infant formula. FTDI didn't make all the toxic dogfood that killed all those US dogs in 2007. They chose this knowingly to save cost and said 'fuck all' to any issues later down the line.ĭell didn't need to buy FTDI to have the nightmarish capacitor plague issue.
#Ch341 ftdi driver driver#
They know that a no-name manufacturer who suddenly undercuts everyone else and uses FTDI's driver is a counterfeit. Multiple people/management in the supply chain here know these things are fake. No one wants to talk about the elephant in the room: Asian manufacturer corruption and lack of accountability with IP issues in those countries. The larger issue is China, Taiwan, etc don't respect IP and hard tactics like the FTDI driver bricking becomes a reality. In countries that respect IP this isn't a problem. Those distributors also buy from 3rd parties If I were their general council, I would be looking for the vigilante engineer to sumarily fire, and put in place mechanisms to ensure that this never happens in the future. This should be a much bigger existential concern for FTDI than any amount of potential IP theft. How many of these FTDI chips do you suppose are on a 747? An elevator controller? A fire suppression system? A one-off alarm system at a power plant? A nuclear power plant? How many hoops do you have to jump through before you start to leave your comfort zone? Not many.Ī single lawsuit from a bad enough accident could end the company in one fell swoop. You have to be a special kind of delusional to think that the courts are going to care about your "good intentions" when you knowingly release a driver like this.Īnd "pacemaker" is really a placeholder for any system that could end up affecting safety of life, regardless of whether it was intentionally designed to. One of these days they're going to brick a pacemaker and kill someone. This is (still) a stupidly reckless approach to "addressing" the supply chain counterfeit problem.
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