Tedium - Counterfeit Computing 🖥

Today in Tedium: You probably haven’t thought about it lately, but we’re closing in on the 20th anniversary of one of the greatest scam-busting incidents of the early internet era. It happened on the Something Awful forums, and involved an eBay buyer’s attempt to purchase an Apple PowerBook using an escrow service, a clear and obvious scam. Seeing an opportunity to screw over a scammer, the forums collectively came up with the idea of making a fake computer out of a three-ring binder, which became known as P-P-P-Powerbook!, and it was then shipped to the scammer—with a forum member waiting directly outside the delivery location (a combination barbershop/internet café) to see their reaction as they received this physical form of comedy. (The internet was more fun back then.) This got me thinking about computer-related scams, particularly counterfeits. (I’d argue that P-P-P-Powerbook! is a reverse counterfeit, honestly.) Like, why would someone go to the length of making a counterfeit CPU? Today’s Tedium considers the evolution of counterfeit computing. Are you getting the real deal or not? — Ernie @ Tedium

By the way, I know it’s a small thing, but as I lean more into Linux, I’m trying to wean myself off of Photoshop as much as I can right now—which has been frustrating because frame-based animation is something I need. But hey, I got it to work. Tonight’s GIF was built using Krita.

(Marcin Wichary/Flickr)

The counterfeit option du jour at the dawn of computing? The Apple II

As I’ve written about in the past, Apple had a bit of a clone problem with the Apple II, whose popularity and wide software base made it an obvious choice for clone-makers. Apple’s aggressive attempts to fight these clone-makers didn’t always go well, but they stopped at least some manufacturers dead in their tracks.

Why were they so aggressive? One reason for that, beyond what we know about Apple’s famously hard-driving culture, might have something to do with the level of counterfeiting it experienced during the period. As highlighted in Unfair Foreign Trade Practices: Stealing American Intellectual Property, a document produced for the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Apple was seeing some aggressive ripoffs:

The flood of pirate Apple personal computers into markets throughout the world graphically illustrates what counterfeiters can do to a company or even a market for a product. The Apple II has the dubious distinction of being the pirate’s choice by virtue of its popularity and the very large number of software programs, more than 15,000, written for the machine.

According to Albert Eisenstat, Vice-President and General Counsel of Apple Computer, look-alike Apple II computers began appearing in the Far East in early 1982. Most were assembled by small, household sized shops. Counterfeit Apples, which were virtually identical to the original, began to reach the U.S. market within a few months. Despite registering its trademarks and copyrights with Customs in July 1982, filing numerous lawsuits and, most recently, bringing an action before the International Trade Commission, the volume of counterfeit Apples grew. Large firms have moved into the market with the capability to produce and distribute piratical Apples in the U.S. by the thousands.

(Side note: “piratical” is my new favorite word.)

The document then explained how pirates would use aggressive tactics to hide their counterfeit productions, including scrambling official Apple software and including nonsense chips during a customs check, only to replace them with chips containing copyrighted Apple software after the fact.

A couple of years back, my pal Harry McCracken of Fast Company uncovered a report on the public television show New Tech Times, hosted by onetime Detroiters costar Mort Crim, that showed the depths of the Apple II clone problem—with machines very closely ripping off Apple’s original designs, even going so far as to recreate old manuals, replacing the name of Apple’s product with their own—while still leaving in author Steve Wozniak’s name.

“They’re believed to be a billion-dollar threat to the U.S. economy,” Crim, who also used the word “piratical” in his report, at one point says.

To be clear, people went to prison for this, in part because Apple took an aggressive stance against such practices. In 1984, a 29-year-old college student, Joel M. Isadore, received a six-month sentence for his role in smuggling such devices, becoming the first American to be sentenced in the scheme.

Early Macs weren’t targeted with this kind of counterfeiting so much, though it did happen. In Brazil—where legal regulations prevented Apple from operating—the company Unitron developed a clone of the Mac 512K that mimicked the Apple system closely. It was hinted that the system software was reverse-engineered, which would have made it a legal clone. But odds are, it was actually copied illegally, which would make it counterfeit.

(Fritzchens Frit/Flickr)

Why would someone go to the lengths of counterfeiting a CPU?

If you wander around the Intel site enough, you can find a little page that offers a simple app that detects whether your chip is authentic or not. This tool, called the Intel Processor Diagnostic Tool, can help confirm that the product name matches what it says on the integrated heat spreader.

(Windows-only, unfortunately.)

As weird and wild as this sounds, it ultimately reflects the fact that processors are popular counterfeiting targets, and it’s been happening for a very long time. (After all, they use the phrase “Intel Inside” for a reason, right?)

And this is not a historic problem, either. A few months ago, a buyer on Amazon’s UK store purchased a top-of-the-line Core i9-13900K processor, only to get it home and test it, and realize that the chip was replaced with an i7-13700K. Someone went to the trouble of replacing the integrated heat spreader with a less powerful processor—not a particularly easy process, as it involves “delidding,” something that you usually have to use a razor blade or custom tool to do.

(Hey, it could be worse—they could have ordered an AMD chip and received a pin-incompatible Intel chip instead. Side note, AMD uses tamper-evident packaging for this reason.)

I wondered how far stuff like this went back, and I uncovered a lawsuit between Intel and the company Terabyte International, which was nailed in the early 1990s for selling math coprocessors labeled with faster speeds than the coprocessors (the 80287 and 80387, in case you were wondering) actually offered.

From a legal summary of the case:

After receiving complaints from its authorized distributors that math coprocessors were available at prices below cost, Intel launched an investigation. It discovered that slower math coprocessors were being redesignated and sold as faster and more expensive math coprocessors. Intel tracked some of those “remarked” math coprocessors to Terabyte. Between July 1990 and January 1991, Intel, acting as an undercover customer, purchased math coprocessors from Terabyte, the great majority of which were remarked. On some of those math coprocessors, the original Intel markings could be detected beneath the remarkings. Each time Intel bought math coprocessors from Terabyte, the box containing the product was already opened. Based on those purchases, Intel sought and obtained an ex parte seizure order against Terabyte. The order was executed on February 26, 1991. One hundred twenty-five math coprocessors were seized; all were remarked.

(For its part, Terabyte appeared to have bought the math coprocessors from a source they thought was an Intel employee. Turns out, he wasn’t!)

The awesome YouTube channel CPU Galaxy, which covers numerous weird old processors, did a whole video on the Pentium counterfeiting scams of the ’90s, in case you want to learn more.

Later on, as the Pentium chipset went mainstream, making Intel’s offering much more of a consumer play, counterfeit schemes became even more prominent. In one case, counterfeit Pentium IIs started showing up in the United States and other parts of the world throughout 1998. Literally thousands of chips were hitting the market.

The German computer magazine c’t caught the issue and later offered a software tool for detecting the issue.

“Since 1994 c’t has reported on counterfeit processors being sold in ever-changing varieties,” the magazine reported. “The current wave mainly consists of Pentium II 233 or Pentium II 266, sold with forged casing as 300 MHz versions. In this case, there’s the unique chance to expose the frauds through software.”

What stopped them from overwhelming the market? Easy—starting in the early 2000s, Intel and AMD started labeling the chips in the hardware’s flash memory, making it easy to detect what the chip actually was without visual cues on the physical hardware.

But even then, you have to actually plug the CPU into the socket to see if you got something legitimate.

More recently, the rise of e-commerce has made chips like these easier to surface. After all, if you buy this stuff online, it’s not like you can be sure it’s going to show up.