Hacker News Reader

Chip inside of the computer with a little telephone hidden inside.

You don't mind if your computer will dial in to China sometime, do you?

Not the premise. This is an issue of taking a cheap, touch-tone chip and repackaging it as a more expensive product. The chip itself is not dialing out to anywhere since the final product wouldn't even work when installed. Just a counterfeiting scam.

Comparing the die shot to the 3101 die shot, it appears that the DTMF chip is significantly more expensive to produce than the 64 bit RAM chip.

But perhaps they had a large stockpile of DTMF chips they wanted to get rid of.

Maybe this was labeled a decade+ ago and the ebayer is just some salvager going through a warehouse. There's no way someone would go through that effort today, with neither chip being that expensive.

probably quite the opposite: e-waste disposal companies inventorying useless ICs for pin count vs barely useful ones and relabeling.. spend .01c to get .05c times 1 bazillion and you might actually make some money

A little telephone? This just produces DTMF tones...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com