New FTDI Driver Bricks Knockoff Chips

Do you use Arduino?
How about USB to Serial converters?
If so, then you might want to read this: http://www.metafilter.com/143836/FTDI-driver-destroys-devices

Jesus. That sucks, you buy a USB-serial that unknowingly has a fake chip in it and you are screwed.

I guess then I will only program my Arduino on my Linux box.

It's a little hard to tell but I think it may be more of a "soft" brick, people are posting work-arounds.

Here's an article that describes the driver kerfuffle. It looks like the offending drivers have now been pulled from windows update. http://arstechnica.com/information-...usb-serial-chips-beloved-of-hardware-hackers/

"Our engineering team is engaging with FTDI to prevent these problems with their future driver updates via Windows Update."

I read this as: "You try this again and *all* of your drivers will be removed from Microsoft Update."