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Comment by howdydoo | Hacker News Reader

> supply chain tampering

Naive question, I don't know much about this industry. But if someone from China or the NSA wanted to make counterfeit chips, why would they risk putting something different on the label? It seems like a weird place to draw the line. Would the NSA really say "oh no, we can't violate anyone's trademark!" and misspell the label and hope their entire operation isn't exposed?

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Counterfeit chips aren't just a state-level actor problem, companies do it for profit as well. I think the worry is just, if the person who was supposed to be checking for counterfeits missed this, how would they have any chance of catching a more sophisticated counterfeit?

What the original author isn't aware of is the fact genuine product stickers often will include minor differences (two transposed letters, a line of text being slightly off to one side, a copyright symbol with a misprint, etc) that are used to quickly visually verify the stickers. This works incredibly well because forgers try to get everything right, and often won't detect these subtle differences from the photos they are working with.

The military does the same thing on badges for secure areas. They will have a misspelling of the base name or two shades of the same color on the front/back so guards can visually verify them as legitimate.

Sometimes bandits are sloppy or have Dunning-Kruger, e.g. with pirated DVDs the sleeve art is just a hot mess of random words, but I guess if they were making fake chips they'd be a bit better at it. Or the guy they hired to do the Photoshop says he's real good but he's actually sloppy, and everyone else just sees random glyphs (imagine if you were having to copy an Arabic label, I assume you can't read Arabic).

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