$5 Million and 20 years in jail?!

Worth reading! On Counterfeit Chips in US Military Hardware « bunnie's blog

Yeah, bureaucrats who know nothing about what they are making laws about. Reminds me of the famous , “The internet is a series of tubes.”

It is actually $5 Million and 20 years in jail.

So the parts aren’t real in terms of the fact that they don’t work?

No, I don’t think that was the issue. They are counterfeit in terms of they aren’t what the people selling them to the military claim them to be. Although this article didn’t touch on it. Another part of the underlying cause for this is probably the fact that there have been a number of chips coming from China used in U.S. military applications over the past several years that have been detected with spy/espionage features added. It is, however, totally unrealistic and unfair to expect end-user companies to test every chip for authenticity.

Its not even that there may be spy features in the chips. The chips are not entirely up to spec and can result it systemic failures. Counterfiet chips have been the cause of alot of warantee returns in consumer electronics as well.
The end user does not know or care that the failed came from a counterfieter, all they know is that there device has failed and is responsible.

Remember that this is part of the Defense Authorization Act. There do not appear to be any consumer electronics protections included.

Ah, true but military electronic manufactures are even more anal about what parts get used because where if as a component fails in your iPod you are deprived of a few minutes of Crux Shadow, if a component fails in military equipment it could mean the loss of a life or expensive piece of equipment.
Who knows saving a few cents by using unreliabled counterfiet parts may have been responsible for the loss of control of the drone lost in Afganistan recently. ( I have no personal knowledge of what happened just speculating based on what I have seen happen here)
I used the consumer electronics issue to show that it is not just a military problem it can affect you and I as well.
It could easilly have been counterfiet parts that caused the overheating Panda 3.3v regulator last summer.
Manufactures and the military spec certain parts because the believe them to be better than the ones that could be substituted for them. Just because it seems to work does not mean that it meets the specified requirements.
The defense Authorization Act is just another example of what is needed to protect ourselves from real or imaginary effects of counterfiet parts.

It’s an interesting topic. My recent foray into RC (IR) helicopters has given me direct experience with this. I ordered a pair of Syma 107 helicopters off Amazon, and both of the ones I got were rip-offs, at least based on the info available on the web for spotting clones of the Syma 107.

On the plus side, the one that I’ve tested actually flies better than the genuine S107 I own. But the minus is that they use a completely different IR protocol, which means that without reverse engineering that protocol, I can’t control them with the Gadgeteer program I wrote for that purpose. :frowning:

I think they want to address this kind of problem: Collaboration between DefenseTech and LEON

Yep. But as is expected, the government has no clue how to actually solve the problem. Of course their answer is to punish U.S. citizens & companies rather than those at the source of the problem. This is probably not the right place to continue this discussion…