

How to spot a fake Canon flash - unwind
http://petapixel.com/2013/09/03/spot-fake-canon-flash-learned-hard-way/

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dangero
Having worked with factories in China I'm not sure the sleuthing relating to
glue types, etc really mean a lot. Our vendors regularly changed things like
that, sometimes without even consulting us first. (Although they should have).
Also, we made running changes on things like that all the time as well.

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.

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dhekir
What prevents factories from implementing some online verification mechanism
for serial IDs? At least for products which cost a few hundred bucks, this
should be economically feasible, no? Then, before buying, you could scan a QR
code and have the site tell you if it's a valid serial.

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PanMan
Then all the counterfeiters have to have is one valid serial number, and print
it on all their products. The online lookup says it is real!

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cantrevealname
If we're talking about _online_ lookup, then there's a simple countermeasure:
if the system has already seen the same serial number 50 times, or it sees the
serial number in Shanghai then fifteen minutes later in Frankfurt, or any
number of other heuristics, it'll report that it's a fake. True, this might
inconvenience the one legitimate customer who had that original serial number.

Also, you need to make sure that the serial numbers are long and random-
looking, so that they are not auto-generated.

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umsm
I don't know if this will inconvenience the one customer unless they bought it
used. Someone with connections to the counterfeiters would have owned that
valid product for some short period of time and probably kept it.

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saalweachter
Is it just me or is the point of this article "you can't"? Professionals who
deal with real Canons all day every day were fooled for an absurdly long time,
the silver bullet relies on extremely niche domain knowledge (the structure of
serial numbers) which the counterfeiters don't _have_ to get wrong, and the
author was only able to spot minute differences in shades of colors, etc,
while staring at a real and fake flash side by side. If I don't have a real
flash already, how can I know if the shade of the glass is slightly too blue?

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wmeredith
That was totally the take away for me. If a fake is this good, there's no way
I'm going to be able to spot it without a LOT of domain knowledge.

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hayksaakian
The biggest Red Flag I noticed was the software incompatibility.

The flash would inconsistently show up in the camera's settings.

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slacka
Living and working in China, I quickly discovered that it's a buyer-beware
market. Within a few weeks I had learned to always buy my electronics from the
official stores in shops like Guomao. From ICs to smartphones, the fakes run
the whole gamut.

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.

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yardie
One of those fakes cost me my contract. I bought a USB key from a big box
store. And used it to store some client work on it. Brought it into their
office and nothing worked. I tested it on my servers and everything was fine.
A few days later after constantly trying to debug it I copied the version from
my USB key to my servers and bam! I finally get the same errors as the client.

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).

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driverdan
1\. Why do you think it was a fake?

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.

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yardie
1\. Because the advertised capacity was 8GB but the real capacity was <1GB.
There was a lot of coverage about this a few years ago. Including Bunnie Huang
who had a problem with bad, fake SD cards being in his Chumbys'. The
controller reported 8GB to the OS and so as it reached real capacity the
controller would overwrite the first blocks.

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.

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rthomas6
I'm with the group that thinks that this flash was probably made in the same
factory that makes the real flashes. My question is why would the fake flash
stop working? Why would a "fake" product, which in this case is more likely a
product made in an extra factory shift, be more likely to fail than an
official product?

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diydsp
I'm with the two posters currently below me. When the factory runs out of the
proper parts, they can do some "counterfeit" or sub-quality runs with near
matches and most features will probably still work under most conditions.

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! :)

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JulianMorrison
A philosopher could have a lot of fun with this one. At what point does
perfect imitation cross the boundary of identity?

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annnnd
Especially when the person making both of them is the same. :)

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beaker52
I've never seen such a convincing fake product. A lot of attention to detail.
If they got the serial number right then it'd be impossible to tell without
opening up (or at least peeling that tape).

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troels
Maybe you have.

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legec
With the new informations available, I'm confident the next round of
counterfeit flash will be of even greater quality ...

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crististm
I don't get this - How are you supposed to know that the serial numbers don't
start with letters? It's not like you buy tons of identical devices and then
start making diffs on them.

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lyndonh
I think the evidence presented with this article is at best inconclusive.

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.

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gpvos
Uh yeah, an official Canon repair shop. He writes about "Canon employees"
later in the article.

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lyndonh
In the article he talks as if the repair shop is the first place he took it
to, only one month after buying it. Then later he says "This one had fooled
camera repair shops, professional photographers and Canon employees for way
longer than we all probably would care to admit". His story doesn't add up.

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.

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jonmrodriguez
What is the benefit of applying the glue in a "delicate grid" of "fine,
intersecting lines" (as opposed to the bad "solid slab" of glue)?

Also, how are the "fine, intersecting lines" of glue extruded?

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lotyrin
Probably just greater consistency, so one fewer variable when it comes to QC.

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jonmrodriguez
How do you think they extruded glue in a grid? Would it be an extrusion nozzle
on an XY gantry (like a MakerBot), or am I overthinking this?

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?

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ygra
Can't one just spray the glue in that pattern with some kind of inkjet head?
Or is that bound to fail due to glue's ability to ... well ... glue things
together?

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jonmrodriguez
If the glue is standard cyanoacrylate ("super glue"), then, since the glue is
moisture-activated, maybe you could do it without the nozzle getting clogged
as long as you have some kind of amazing material for the nozzle that repels
moisture.

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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanoacrylate)

\--

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)?

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Kliment
Stencil application, usually. Similar to the process used for solder paste or
screen printing. You can use polypropylene or acetal nozzles, cyanoacrylate
won't stick to those.

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jonmrodriguez
Awesome, thank you

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eksith
I thought I spotted the fake on the left because of the small, white,
rectangular piece right below the red LED. On the left, the thing is looking
much darker. Because there aren't high res images, ironically, it's a bit hard
to tell.

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.

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bruceb
When you are on ebay or Chinese sites and you see flash drives and SD cards
for really cheap...they are fake.

Those cheap ADATA cards are fake even if the packaging looks good.

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nemo
Why not just test if High Speed Sync works? That seems to be the indicator
that initiated looking for these other differences.

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drdaeman
So, no visual difference. And no functional difference, as he took a shot and
it went fine (so, I presume it synced before those 2 months passed?). That
leaves a shorter expected life-without-malfunctions time for a cheaper price.
Now, if they'd be only be properly labelled as clones...

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topbanana
Not sure I'd risk a fake flash in wet environments.

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KnightHawk3
I think the idea is that you risk the fake one over the real one. (IE: You are
willing to break the fake one.)

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MasterScrat
Probably he meant, he wouldn't risk _himself_ with the fake one. As in,
electricity burst + water near your face = danger.

