FTDI removes counterfeit-bricking driver from Windows Update

Re:FTDI removes counterfeit-bricking driver from Windows Update by HCIdivision17 on Friday October 24, 2014 @10:50AM (#8503936)

You'd be right if this weren't just a chip buried in a device. To properly implement that, we'd need to be able to safely scan and verify devices on the chip-level. That's not really an option. The end user is only ever going to be informed by the driver telling them it's invalid; in this case the notification is the silent crippling of the gizmo, with no feed back or diagnostics.

As many have noted, all that's needed is an alert for the user that the driver's incompatible. That way the user can take rectification measures, be it getting new compatible chips/devices, or using unofficial drivers.

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Re:FTDI removes counterfeit-bricking driver from Windows Update by kabdib on Friday October 24, 2014 @11:37AM (#8504172)

Alerting the user from a driver is a bad, bad thing.

I believe it is not allowed by WHQL certified drivers.

(It's also non-trivial to do in a Windows kernel driver. You can't call MessageBox(), you can't process user input, you can't even get a context to draw on the screen. Basically you have to rely on a user-mode helper app that gets launched at boot time, which is one of the reasons you see so many device-tweaking utilities for graphics cards and sound cards).

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Re:FTDI removes counterfeit-bricking driver from Windows Update by HCIdivision17 on Friday October 24, 2014 @11:57AM (#8504247)

Oh absolutely. To me, it's just choosing the lesser of two evils.

Like, I'd rather go to jail and be inconvenienced instead of shot on sight, but I feel both are overkill for a parking ticket.

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