Fake hardware could open the door to malicious malware and critical failures

> I think the IEEE is just ethical. Faithfully build the thing you're paid to build.

The important questions in business ethics are not whether you faithfully build the thing you're paid to build or build it unfaithfully, but whether that thing ought to be built at all.

DRM and DRM circumvention tools can fall on both sides of that divide, it's not an easy question.

No. Call it exactly what it is encryption-free-HDMI-splitter.

The answer is very, very simple once you've taken a loan out on your family home to finance the development of a product that is then stolen.

Everything is academic and sterile from almost any other perspective.

Government sponsored theft --which is what's happening in China-- is a massive destructive force. It is good in China because it brings in billions of dollars from all around the globe. That's why the Chinese government doesn't do a thing about it. They "sponsor" it do the extent that inaction becomes indistinguishable from sponsorship.

Exactly. I have, in my mind, this image of a river of money flowing from the US to China for counterfeit goods. They results in the destruction of businesses and jobs as well as taking a significant amount of money out of our economy and into theirs.

Risk taking is a necessary part of progress. Without it the very computers we are using to communicate would not exist.

Risk taking doesn't need to be dampened, it needs to be encouraged and protected.

China is getting richer by the day by being thieves. Sure, they do make a lot of legitimate products there. Yet, their theft "cartels" bring in hundreds of billions of dollars into their economy at the detriment of the economies they attack using such techniques.

I'm sorry, that makes no sense at all.

Go build a company and have your products stolen. Then you'll understand.

Go build a product in a competitive market and then have someone with zero business experience it's overpriced.

Here, I'll help you. You don't even need to make physical products:

Create a website that will host authoritative articles about, I don't know, auto repairs.

You will personally write all the articles.

You devote a whole year to researching and writing them. You also hire a graphic artist to create illustrations for every single article. Let's say each article takes an hour of your time (if you are really good at it) and half an hour of the artist time. In the aggregate each article cost you about $200 to produce, in time and hard costs.

At the end of twelve months you publish your website with 1,000 fresh articles that cost you no less than $200K to produce. You devoted a whole year to this, so one could very well argue there's an opportunity cost associated with the success or failure of this website. I'll place that at $100K. You invested $300K to launch this site. And then someone comes along and tells you it's overpriced.

That aside, as soon as you launch I hire a bunch of people on Fiverr to take your articles and modify them just enough to maintain the value of your research yet look and feel a little different. I pay $10 per article to steal and change your product. I invest a total of $10,000 and can probably get the work done inside of a month.

I now launch a new website to compete with yours. I can spend a few tens of thousands of dollars in marketing and outrank you with what effectively is your own content. I stole a year of your hard work and investment and made your website irrelevant by throwing money at marketing. Money you don't have because you spent it all researching and developing your product.

That is, in many ways, what is happening with the cloning of products out of China. There's nothing whatsoever good about it no matter how hard someone might want to try and distort reality to put lipstick on that pig.

And to be clear, the article is talking about that last kind. I think its terminology is rather off: I'd consider a "clone" to be something built to be similar, maybe compatible, but clearly marketed as its own thing, and the subject of the article would be "counterfeits." But for some reason they're using "clones" to describe stuff that's passed off as the original.

There's a certain amount of software out there that requires the non-standard bit banging features of the FTDI adapters. The cloners have done a really good job of implementing this (works better than the real thing, apparently).

For electronics you go to the old school distributors to get legit tools and chips.