Hacker News Reader

Comment by jk2323 | Hacker News Reader

"Why would someone go to the effort of creating counterfeit memory chips that couldn't possibly work? The 74LS189 is a fairly obscure part, so I wouldn't have expected counterfeiting it to be worth the effort. The chips sell for about a dollar on eBay, so there's not a huge profit opportunity. "

This sounds obscure. Small/Tiny mark up. Small market. High fake detection rate. I wonder if there is something about the story that we miss.

View on HN

My guess: someone found a lot of these chips, realized there was hardly a market for them and had them relabeled as just about anything available in the same package to generate sales.

Also, pushing fakes in small quantities may not be such a bad idea; after all - rip someone off for $1 and chances are he'll curse you and let it go; rip someone off for $1M and chances are he'll curse you and get law enforcement involved.

Probably more likely that someone found themselves with a bunch of warehoused touch tone dialer chips (essentially worthless now), and decided to label them as something else -- anything else -- to be able to salvage at least a few bucks out of it.

Either that or a plain old mistake. The new guy loaded the wrong data into the printer.

> Either that or a plain old mistake. The new guy loaded the wrong data into the printer.

I'd also like to think that Hanlon's Razor applies here. Chips were mislabeled, wasn't worth the time / effort / ink to relabel something that costs pennies to manufacture so they're earmarked for the incinerator but somehow end up back in the supply chain. Stuff like this happens.

> High fake detection rate.

Maybe not in time. The companies buy lots of stuff that never gets used. It seems totally plausible for them to use up their end-of-year-budget stocking up on parts they don't necessarily need or expect to use through non-conventional channels.

Plus, unless you dig into it like this guy did, he can just say what he did and give a refund.

I'd like to second the "not it time" thought. Let's say some government agency needs 1K of these parts. Some company can find ten lots of 100 from all over the place including one in Shenzen. They put them all in nice tubes or trays or whatever and sell them off to the customer, who, a year or two later, wonders why 10% of their boards are failing initial power-on tests. Or, even worse, the parts are similar enough that the board passes some tests, and they don't fail hard until they're in the field...

> The companies buy lots of stuff that never gets used

I seem to recall a few years ago, when looking for arcade ICs (Defender RAM IIRC) that unscrupulous sellers would put working ICs at either end of the tube, and fakes/faulty parts in the middle. Unless you were using them all to do a full RAM replacement, you wouldn't know your spares were faulty.

I worked in a PC shop in 1990 and we got RAM chips in bulk and in plastic tubes. The dealers would put in counterfet chips that would not work because of shortages. Then issue a refund later on. Some PC shops also ripped off other PC shops doing horse trading involving RAM or CPU chips. Had a high defective rate back then. Nobody thpught to examine the chips, either threw them away, horsetraded them, or sent them back to dealer for a refund.

Not necessarily high detection rate. Most of people don't know what they got in the box. I remember a few court cases, where cache chips were fake ones. System would just work well, without the cache. The cache chips were fakes and on board, just that user can see those are in place and pay for those.

There are surprisingly many things in computer which you don't actually need and don't know if those are working or not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com