How to spot a fake Canon flash
petapixel.com
petapixel.com
There is no reason why silk screen printing on a counterfeit product should be any less sharp, so I don't understand the relevance of saying the Canon logo will be a little blurred on a fake one.
The premise "How to spot a fake Canon flash" is nonsensical because as mentioned by gaius, often fakes are made in the same factory. In the case of a company I used to work for, their product was copied which included identical custom board layout and a copy of our firmware burned into the chips too. Obviously someone on the inside of our factory took all our designs and ip and was using it to build exact replicas. The only recourse, which worked for us, was to notify the Chinese government and they took action to shut down the people making the counterfeit products.
Depending on the nature of your product and your supply chain, you could try to only flash the firmware once the finished products arrive in America (assuming the packaging isn't sealed yet). And do your best to make it hard to completely dump the firmware (maybe make part of it encrypted with a key that's in a one-time programmable memory that can't be read except by the decrypter, if one of your chips has this feature).
What types of intellectual property did you have that gave you any Chinese legal right to exclusive use of your designs?
Chinese parents? Anything else, such as Chinese copyright or Chinese NDA?
One could easily and non-invasively (preserving packaging) check authenticity against $BrandName's website. It would cost less than printing UUIDs outside the packaging and maybe make a dent in knock-offs by both increasing cost of reproduction and fear of being 'shamed' by others being able to validate your items in-person. It would also allow Marketing folks to provide backstorys on their products and a way to directly interface with people realizing their goods are fake...
Also, you need to make sure that the serial numbers are long and random-looking, so that they are not auto-generated.
We were idiots, and the products we made were not the quality a customer would have expected. But we were fully legit.
I suspect that a team of people creating extra units, skimming those off and selling them via ebay or such, would have been achievable for some products. There'd need to be coordination across a range of departments.
Clothing is a lot easier to judge, though.
The flash would inconsistently show up in the camera's settings.
In shops like Shenzhen's SEG, I've watched them apply brand stickers in public. When asked if they're real, they told me with a straight face that it was and came from the same factory. Yeah right. One of my coworkers lost all his photos from the trip, when his fake SD with a bogus size reached the internal limit and started overwriting his earliest pictures.
In the end I wasted needless hours and missed a deadline over a $20 USB key (you know the cheap ones they keep at the checkout line).
2. If you knew a deadline was approaching why would you waste your time debugging a USB drive? There are plenty of other ways (including a new USB drive) to transfer the data.
2. If the code works on your computer yet doesn't work on the clients computer you would be lead to believe the problem is on the client's side. Honestly, how many people actually check their storage media? I didn't debug the USB drive I ran the code from the USB drive after recompiling 50 million times.
I don't see a lot of programmers trying to run diskcheck or memcheck every time they have an unexplainable crash.
Counterfeits would probably use more of these defective materials and go through less QA.
The simplest example I can think of would be components value such as capacitors and resistors. If a design uses an uncommon part value (like 5.0uF) and the factory runs out, they can build with a common value (like 4.7uF) and come very close.
This is most likely to happen at the end of a production run. There aren't enough parts leftover for the actual quality device, but you can make substitutions and get some more near-quality units out instead of throwing out all of the rest of the good parts.
Another example I could foresee from the OP is that different revs of firmware were available at different times. e.g. a bug was discovered after the ROMs were masked or flashed and that run of chips should have been destroyed but weren't. (Hell, they might still be upgradeable!)
Ironically, the serial number was possibly intended to distinguish the official runs from sub-quality runs... The "counterfeiters" might not have been trying to fool everyone, but instead, to distinguish between official and ghost shifts. Welcome to the new age! :)
Or I take product that has already been rejected on test and ship it through my unofficial channel.
So a couple of guys at the repair shop guessed it's a fake. The comparison flash is a couple of years old.
If on the other hand the author had sent the flash to Canon for repair and they said it was fake, then I would say he has proved it.
If you read the comments you can see many people have Canon parts with serial numbers that start with a letter. Unless you think they are all fakes too.
This is why I say inconclusive.
Also, how are the "fine, intersecting lines" of glue extruded?
Which is weird, actually. A lot of Chinese counterfeiting happens in the same factory. Say you're a famous clothing brand and you outsource making 10,000 of your ski jackets to a Chinese factory with Gore-tex. They make them and ship them back to you, then they keep the production line running with nylon, make 10,000 more and ship those to market vendors, eBay merchants, etc.
Maybe a simpler approach would be to extrude through a mask that has a grid-like pattern of holes? Obviously you could only make isolated dots of glue, but not overlapping lines of glue (you can't have floating islands in your mask layer). So although it wasn't the technique used in this article, I guess it could work just as well, right?
Maybe someone with experience using cyanoacrylate in industrial settings can speak to this. All I know is that my hobby-store super glue nozzles (cheap plastic) get clogged almost instantly. :P
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanoacrylate
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But, my main concern with any kind of XY gantry (as in an inkjet printer like you describe), is that it would take frigging FOREVER. There's no way you want this glueing step to take 45 seconds per unit or more. That's the puzzle, I think, is how did they create this glue grid so quickly that it rivals the blob approach (1 - 2 seconds)?
[1] http://equipment.loctite.com/productLineDetail.cfm?pl=21
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4RR67d8CC8 (larger epoxy extruder, same idea)
This saves cost, but is also better engineering. The glue has data sheets and tests and you know you're meeting the engineering requirements. Some glues 'dissolve' / 'melt' the surfaces to be bonded, and you only need a thin smear to get a good bond.
You need to control stuff like glue or conformal coating over a run of X thousand units, otherwise you find people can use crates of the stuff.
Having said all that: Maybe it's just what was drawn on the CAD drawings, and it's been followed faithfully by workers ever since, and there's no actual reason for it other than the CAD worker chose something that looked nice and not confusing.
But the best way to avoid a fake is to actually buy it from the official shops. That's not to say it too is 100% guaranteed as someone on the inside could have easily swapped the supply for a cheaper source, but it's still your best option.
Those cheap ADATA cards are fake even if the packaging looks good.