Oh, and since were on the topic of cgminer.....   BEGIN RANT.

Someone f-ed up big time when programming/designing the cgminer to bitforce interface.


Its funny, because I happen to find a program that was transmitting on all FTDI serial ports every 10 seconds at 115200 baud.

It turns out that one of the "miners" called cgminer has code in it that wrecklessly opens ALL FTDI ports and transmits on them.
Its a program that is trying to find a device called "bitforce". (its a fpga hashing cpu) to mine digital hashes.
The problem is, that it opens ports to other devices that use the FTDI chip ALSO, and transmits ZXG every 10 seconds on ALL FTDI ports at 115200 baud.
From a bitforce perspective, they don't give a shit, they just want their product to work.
From a 3rd party hardware engineer, that is really really mean to do to other hardware developers that develop using the FTDI CHIP.
 (tons of microcontroller programmers and devices use it)

I know no one will change the code to be more "serial port" and other device friendly, and I also know you won't mention it to the developer.
But it really IS bad practice to open ALL ports every 10 seconds, not just open them, but actaully transmitt, and operate the DTR lines(many devices use the DTR to operate the reset line on the microcontroller/chip.

https://github.com/ckolivas/cgminer/...ver-bitforce.c
This code is included in almost all "miners" and so most computers that run a miner program most likely have this FTDI port access every 10 seconds
It will transmit "ZGX" at 115200 baud every 10 seconds on all FTDI ports.

Why a simple switch couldn't have been implemented to turn the bitforce port attacking ON, instead of having it run 24/7, till it finds a bitforce device, beats me.

Most of you have no idea that your cgminers are doing this to every serial port on your computer, every 10 seconds, because most of you don't do hardware development.
But if a hardware developer were to see this activity from a program, that hardware developer would have a few CHOICE words to use, and they wouldn't be pretty.