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Spotted over at Hackernews is a link to an eevblog posting on FTDI drivers recognising and disabling "fake" devices.
Future Technology Devices International, commonly known by its abbreviation FTDI, is a Scottish privately held semiconductor device company, specializing in Universal Serial Bus technology.
The FTDI FT232 is a widely used USB to serial converter component; there are, however, some cases of compatible "clone" devices being used in products rather than the official FTDI chips.
It appears that the latest official FTDI driver now recognises these devices and when it encounters them it reprograms the product ID so that the device is no longer recognised, and will not work. (These devices can, however, be reprogrammed and recovered using Windows/XP or Linux.) FTDI have stated that the user has allowed them to do this as part of the driver license agreement.
The Linux driver is still safe, but the binary blob from Windows update is now something that we should all blacklist and uninstall, for our own safety. I've already bricked one of my FTDI boards. Will FTDI reimburse me for the purchase and time it will now take to undo all this damage? I doubt it. Did they think this fully through before launching a hostile attack on their end-users? I doubt that, too.
More comments on the original hackernews thread.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 24 2014, @12:05AM
> Rewriting the device ID is perhaps going a step too far.
Massive understatement.
> Though to most end users, they'll see the same result: "it doesn't work".
Most end-users will then roll the driver back. At which point everything would work just fine if FTDI hadn't explicitly broken their hardware.