Amazon.com Now Bans USB Type-C Cables That Aren't Up To Spec (google.com) 193
Google engineer, Benson Leung has been on a mission to get rid of USB Type-C cables that aren't compliant with Type-C 1.1 spec. He reminds us that these cables could potentially lead to damage. Over the past few months, he has reviewed over a dozen of USB Type-C cables on Amazon.com and concluded that the vast majority of them aren't compliant with the aforementioned standard. Now he reports: Amazon.com has just made a change to their "Prohibited listings" for Electronics. They've added the following line: Any USB-C (or USB Type-C) cable or adapter product that is not compliant with standard specifications issued by "USB Implementers Forum Inc." What does this mean? It means that cable manufacturers who sell poorly made or intentionally deceptive USB Type-C cables and adapters are banned from Amazon, officially. Really great news, but we all have to continue to be vigilant and call out any bad products we find on Amazon and other stores (both online and brick and mortar) as we find them.
Great News? (Score:5, Insightful)
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On the other hand, El Cheapo Cables Inc. might be concerned about losing their ability to sell to Amazon if they keep breaking the ToS. It's not like Amazon gives a crap about one cheap-ass cable maker.
Re:Great News? (Score:5, Insightful)
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El Cheapo Cables Inc. would just call themselves Sir Cheap Cables Inc. and signup again.
Exactly. They'd be a moving target with a series of company names and you'd never know if they were legit or not.
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Unless you just buy from reputable companies like Anker...
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There has to be some middle ground between exorbitantly priced mediocre cables and garbage that will burn your house down.
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http://smile.amazon.com/Anker-... [amazon.com]
I don't exactly think that $10 is expensive for a USB-C cable, and in fact, all of these cables that are bad are in that ballpark.
Second Monoprice, but I have never bought something like a USB-C cable from them. (USB-C to C cables peak at 3 A, that is a huge amount of power to put through little cables)
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I have bought Amazon Basics cables for a while now, because the value proposition is decent on them.
One wonders if Amazon has one eye on their Basics business in all of this.
Re: Great News? (Score:2)
I liked that Monoprice has 24-ga cables for a fair price and that they would support 1200mA or better out of the box.
Now some of them, after only a year of light use will only support 800 or even 480mA charge rates on known-good chargers. I don't even have a theory about why this might be true, but it is, empirically. How is this even possible?
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Perhaps poor quality stranded wire that sometimes breaks rather than bend?
As you lose more strands, conductivity goes down.
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Monoprice? or is there a new better option?
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But how did Anker get to be a reputable company? I'd never heard of them until I bought some highly-rated charger off Amazon. I've since bought a couple other Anker products which have been fine, but overall Amazon is a total bazaar of nearly identical products from dozens of brands you've never heard of.
I will often buy the Amazon Basics variation if it exists because I feel pretty confident that Amazon has put the effort into making sure it's a decent product and just can't tell about the dozen other va
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El Cheapo Cables Inc. would just call themselves Sir Cheap Cables Inc. and signup again.
Exactly. They'd be a moving target with a series of company names and you'd never know if they were legit or not.
Yes, but this is not trivial in terms of either cost or time. For them to have to re-apply to be a vendor on Amazon just to sell cheap cables is probably not worth it.
There are ways to overcome every possible obstacle that Amazon could throw in their path. The point isn't to produce one that cannot be overcome, but to produce one that is hard enough to keep it from being worthwhile to keep trying.
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If they cracked down on people selling their cables as "OEM" when they most definitely are not, or the downright counterfeit Apple cables that are sold on the site, things would be much better.
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Great news would be Amazon white-listing compliant cables, I have a hard time imaging El Cheapo Cables Inc. being overly concerned about a bullet point in the amazon ToS.
They'll care when Amazon bans them because Benson reported their cable as non-compliant.
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Great news would be Amazon white-listing compliant cables,
This would be the ideal solution, but I'm unsure how they'd go about it without testing cables themselves or relying on customer feedback.
Amazon could certainly afford to test USB cables, but that would also open up a can of worms in that they might then be expected to test other items they sell. I'm pretty sure they don't want to dip their toe in that pool, even for something as simple as a USB cable. It would be great for their customers and the "goodwill" factor, but it'll cost them time and money and th
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What ever happened to Caveat Emptor? Don't buy a cable from El Cheapo Cables Inc. There's plenty of reputable brands to choose from.
You do realise do you that "El Cheapo Cables Inc" is a ficticious name being used as an example and that no electronics company would really call itself something that sounds cheap and nasty? So unless you are a pro or an enthusiast familiar with the business you will not know what the "plenty of reputable brands" are. And you cannot necessarily go by price as a company making rubbish might charge a higher price just because there are always people (like yourself?) who assume that a higher price means high
In other news (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot bans postings that aren't up to spec. Like this one.
Oh Look! Amazon Basics Cables! (Score:2)
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Sneer aside, this is actually a good step in the right direction.
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Sneer aside, this is actually a good step in the right direction.
Quoted for agreement. We all expect that if we purchase a USB cable it won't fry our hardware.
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Unless we buy from Amazon. Then we expect it to fry our computer.
Re:Oh Look! Amazon Basics Cables! (Score:5, Funny)
so that's why they call their tablet fire...
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I for one expect a Google engineer who won't shut up about being a Google engineer to not:
1 - Buy the cheapest, shittiest, "100% Super Plus A-OK" cable from Amazon.
2 - Use a host device that has shitty USB ports that don't have fuses.
3 - Repeat the mistake after frying his shit.
4 - Repeat the mistake again after frying his shit a second time.
Shitty cables and devices suck, but the real problem is the ports on Intel's boards. On most of them, frying a single port will take out multiple ports, all ports conn
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If you are buying cables in order to review if they are to spec or not, then it would seem to me you would much rather be able to write the review "It set my computer on fire" than "It failed test 18".
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Shitty standard (Score:2, Interesting)
The better solution would be to get rid of the idiotic standard that requires the cables to have intelligence built in. Put it in the devices where it belongs.
Re:Shitty standard (Score:5, Insightful)
Put it in the devices where it belongs.
So back in the day when I did motherboard design, the biggest headache we had during our automated testing was USB keys and USB hard disks that had bad FW such that they would randomly disconnect, or otherwise hang up host-side code. MS Windows is least tolerant of this, and would often blue-screen. It seems every generation during our testing we'd get either blue-screens or BIOS lockups with some of these devices, have to go on a 2-3 week crusade of signal integrity analysis and measurements to prove that electrically nothing was wrong. Then inevitably we'd hook up a protocol analyzer and see things that just plain didn't make sense: the disconnects happened for NO reason. They happened with some vendors and not others, or certain devices from one vendor but not others.
Lots of money spent, lots of time wasted, but it turns out that that cheap overseas shit we all love so much doesn't always work so great. The bottom line is if you are going to have a standard you have to have some way of keeping people from sticking your logo on it if they cannot meet the requirements. It's great this Google engineer took up the mantle of shaming bad products, but the problem is more widespread than mere cables.
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I agree. I simply don't buy inexpensive electronics from Amazon unless I know the manufacturer and seller now. Which basically means Amazon is no longer a good retailer for inexpensive electronics.
Trademark Law (Score:2)
The bottom line is if you are going to have a standard you have to have some way of keeping people from sticking your logo on it if they cannot meet the requirements. It's great this Google engineer took up the mantle of shaming bad products, but the problem is more widespread than mere cables.
The solution would be Trademark Law, perhaps combined with automated testing. The Trademark indicates the source of a product is licensed for use (without a fee or perhaps for a nominal fee that helps cover testing and enforcement) on cables that meet the standard, and if you use the mark on cables or advertising for cables that don't meet the standard you get sued by industry or your imports get held at customs. It would be cheaper than all the time even the industry experts waste dealing with bad cables
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Well, yes, and the USB Implementers Forum, Inc. owns the USB trademarks which are molded into virtually every cable, compatible or not. The problem is they don't work very hard at enforcing its use, and even if they did, trying to enforce it on CCC (Cheap Chinese Crap) would simply be a huge and pointless game of whack-a-mole.
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Yes you should. I would not however, even ignoring USB-C. A lot of systems have absolutely no current limiter between the PSU/Battery and that 5V pin, short of the PSU current limit itself or the voltage regulator they have producing 5V (which itself may blow and leave that port non-functional).
USB is wildly popular, but it is insanely weak on compliance. It has been out of control for a long time, but like so many things in the PC world it works "good enough" for most people, and is so cheap, that they jus
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I kinda have to agree with you on this. Why is USB-C setup so that a bad cable can fry your laptop?
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If your laptop gets fried, that is the fault of your laptop for not having any over-current protection on the USB power lines. The bad cable just tells the other device that your laptop can provide more power than it actually can.
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This is it. USB 1 and 2 have had overcurrent protection for a decade. These frying incidents are probably on cheap, consumer-grade laptops that skimped on the protections.
Re:Shitty standard (Score:4, Informative)
It's the port design on shitty (Intel, mainly) mobos. They're not individually fused (or fused at all).
The cable in question simply had the wrong pinout, and threw voltage onto lines that shouldn't have had that voltage.
You can't physically stop someone from applying potential to your exposed pins, but you can reasonably guard against it. Intel mobos typically don't (or didn't). All the brands people use for building their own (ASUS, GIGABYTE, ASRock, EVGA, MSI, Biostar, etc.) advertised USB (and other) short/spike/etc. protection as a feature years ago when it was becoming a frequent problem.
Re:Shitty standard (Score:4, Informative)
USB-C is designed to be able to deliver 100W DC (20A) - brains or not, swapped wires in such a cable is quite likely to be able to fry something. Lots of electronics aren't going to be able to survive up to 20A of current in a reversed polarity, or delivered on a pin that was supposed to be an outgoing signal or voltage.
In this case it sounds much simpler - and is a problem that could affect standard USB 2 and 3 cables as well: The wrong identifying resistor was included in a C-to-A adapter, making the device think it was plugged into a high-current power source, when the reality was that the USB C port was only able to deliver 2 amps. The resulting current draw then fried the USB port's power source, destroying the port and possibly the connected device.
A related problem is commonly responsible for slow charging with old-fashioned USB ports: The spec defines a 0.1A maximum current draw unless the device has negotiated for more. But having to talk to electronics makes for expensive wall-warts, so an auxiliary standard was created whereby the port could identify itself as a "dumb charger capable of delivering X amps" by including a ingle resistor, whose resistance was used to specify X within a few tiers, including tiers far in excess of what a "real" USB port can deliver (As I recall USB 2 ports are specced up to ~2A, assuming the connected device successfully negotiates for more than it's default 0.1A. Dumb chargers can be specced up to 5A with the right resistor) Some cables can interfere with that, generally resulting in well-behaved electronics "failing gracefully" and charging at a much slower pace
Not being versed in the intricacies of type--C lore, it sounds like what probably happened is that adapter cable *should* have identified itself as something like a normal low-current type-A port to connected devices, but instead delivered a garbage resistance that got interpreted as "take all the power you want", and the type-C port just couldn't handle the resulting load.
Re:Shitty standard (Score:4, Informative)
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My mistake. And that just makes things potentially even worse. For the sake of my sanity I'm going to give the designers the benefit of the doubt and assume that higher voltage modes require active negotiation and/or is delivered on completely separate lines. Though the latter would still invite disaster from mis-wired cables - 20V delivered on what should be a low-voltage line, with 5A backing it up...
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You know, if you swap the two wires on a polarized plug ("double insulated"), you can easily electrocute someone. There's only so much you can do when the wrong thing gets hooked up in the wrong place... You'd need all the circuitry of a switching power supply in every single USB socket.
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If we wanted good interfaces we'd be using firewire. USB wins because it is inexpensive.
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So... you're thinking USB is somehow secure? If so, I'll send you a device to plus in to your USB port.
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Firewire comes much closer to its nominal transfer rate than USB. Basically, the S in USB means that you have to spend a fair amount of time waiting to see if anyone new wants to talk.
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A polyfuse is way, way too slow to protect semiconductor voltage regulators. If you apply -20V to a USB-C port's VBUS, no polyfuse will protect you. You'll need active semiconductor protection, like an ideal diode controlled by a current limiter.
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A resistor is now considered intelligence?
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Because this has nothing to do with link speed. SATA doesn't deliver power over the data cable, and nobody wants to put a SATA (or USB) transceiver in USB power bricks. The resistor is used to signal current supply capability between "dumb" devices. USB devices already do intelligent negotiation of current capability and speed when the other end is a host and not a wall charger.
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Seriously what the hell is wrong with USB that they can't reliably push 10Gbps a few feet over a custom-built cable where 10G-BaseT can go hundreds of feet over commonly available standardized CAT-6A UTP cable?
When 802.3bt starts shipping can we please just get rid of USB entirely?
Re:Shitty standard (Score:4, Insightful)
I wonder what you are comparing to? The USB is a good standard and all common devices need no specific driver. Keyboards, mice, joysticks, printers, Ethernet adapters etc. just simply work with a common USB stack. So why do you call it shitty?
The complication we are talking about here is that the _cable_ between a host and a device surprisingly need to be specified to tolerate the currents it conducts (yes it's a strange thing). Enumeration is between the host and the device, not between the cable, the host and the device.
This isn't a problem with the USB standard, it is a problem of manufacturers making crap and not caring of potential hazards.
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Serial ports under windows, the drivers were spelled out but then allowed to diverge. Devices that look identical same identifying bits but need to be handled differently depending on the version of the chip (a lot of USB 3 to sata lately). Every ethernet adapter needs it's own driver etc etc etc.
Apart from usb PD you realy can not have a cable unable of passing several amps and have it be made practically.
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1. Lack of DMA support. In the age of the IOMMU, it's no longer a security risk.
2. It's a purely polled interface. The host must initiate all communications with the device, rather than the device being able to do it. In many cases, the polling rate has to be quite high such as to not introduce unacceptable latency, but then this increases power usage. There's a reason laptop keyboards tend to use PS/2 rather than
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They worked out 1 and 2. With horrible extensions that make driver code utterly crummy compared to firewire where the features were designed in from the start.
USB follows the popular market model of "undercut", "embrace", "imitate" that gradually made ugly old IDE into ATA tunneling SCSI protocols after undercutting SCSI. There's just so many technologies like this, and we've accumulated a lot of junk DNA in the codebase as a result. Rarely do we see a benefit from that, it's all just technical debt.
(PoE
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That seems to mostly be a Windows thing. Consider webcams as an example: maybe a dozen or so drivers on Linux support most of the webcams that have ever been sold (the gspca and uvc drivers account for a fairly large percentage all by themselves), while on Windows, you need the manufacturer-provided driver for each different webcam.
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It's still a question of making a million one off drivers vs coming together for a standard.
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The drivers have nothing to do with the spec - as I recall USB originally defined a data-exchange spec, with no assumptions made as to the meaning of the data. That allows for the data-stream to be used for any outlandish hardware you can dream up, but obviously requires that the PC have software designed to interpret the data-stream appropriately (aka the driver). Contrast that with the combination of ports that preceded it: general purpose serial, parallel, and SCSI ports which all needed dedicated dr
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USB has many device class specs but they are often ignored or special sauce added in a proprietary manner. Thats one of the issues weak controls of the spec. A driver for the local interface is no different than needing one for the USB root hub. It was pretty rare to need a driver for basic serial or parallel ports. PS2 was a couple of serial ports in a different connector with a well defined data structure.
USB won out because the alternatives cost more, firewire was a far better standard for high speed
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Well, no, you didn't need drivers for the serial ports - they were pretty well standardized, and software generally accessed them with direct hardware commands, no intervening software layers required . But there aren't really many problems with USB *port* drivers either, the problem is with *device* drivers, and you absolutely did need those (or their elder-day analogues)
Did you want your serial mouse to work in DOS? You needed to run a TSR (aka olden-day driver) to talk with it and create a software in
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The trouble with PIO/polling drivers was already very well known when USB hit the market, but the chipset manufacturers went for that anyway, and in part it was the fault of the standard for promoting excessive levels of penny pinching in device design, thus externalizing costs onto the software/firmware industry which had to waste time putting humpty dumpty back together again.
I never really had a problem with the friction fit aspect. Sure beat the heck out of PCMCIA. The plugs were fine just there were
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Granted. I'm not sure anyone really imagined the ubiquity that USB achieved though - there were after al already a few technically superior interfaces for demanding applications, I always had the feeling that USB was imagined as the generic "all that other junk" interface for which performance was largely irrelevant, basically a replacement for the old serial, ps2/XT/AT, and perhaps parallel ports.
Meanwhile that penny pinching helped it gain its ubiquity, and the software/firmware cost was born by the same
Counterfit Sex Toys (Score:5, Informative)
Now Amazon needs to deal with their entire counterfeit sex toy problem. If you're not aware, never buy sex toys off Amazon. Most of their products are low quality, counterfeits of more respectable brands. Often they're unsafe or made to low standards. Most manufactures will stop selling to any store that uses Amazon.
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You mean that 50 gallon drum of lube may not be authentic?!
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None of that is specific to Amazon - it's just a shady industry. I'm pretty sure Amazon is now the worlds largest market for sex toys, though, so I'm dubious of your claims about "manufacturers". Heck, I'd make a blind bet that the "counterfeits" are the same items made in the same Chinese factory as the "originals", just sold via someone less scrupulous about defects (that's a very common theme for discount items on Amazon: same Chinese factory, less QA).
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Why call them such if they aren't up to spec? (Score:2)
Isn't the reason they woiuld be called USB type-C cables; that they meet the "spec" so to speak?
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You can call a cat a fish, but that won't make it not blow up your computer.
It's all fun and games until something blows up (Score:2)
Still think USB cables are fun, kids?
How to do it (Score:4, Interesting)
Amazon has gotten better about such things. You no longer have to go through the foreign support people with the forms and scripts. They now have a direct contact for unsafe product issues:
I would add UL (underwriters laboratories) [ul.com] and several others. UL moves a bit slow and reactive instead of proactive, but they certainly are zealous about protecting their brand. Products with their mark, that test out unsafe, will be quickly dropped from Amazon and elsewhere.
Unfortunately, this doesn't help with all those 2GB USB flash drives from China, which are labeled and firmware hacked to appear to have 64+ gigabytes of usable space.
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Unfortunately, this doesn't help with all those 2GB USB flash drives from China, which are labeled and firmware hacked to appear to have 64+ gigabytes of usable space.
You can fix that issue very simply by only buying name brand memory. (Sandisk and Kingston are my most trusted) It's not that expensive, especially considering that you'll actually get what you pay for.
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You can fix that issue very simply by only buying name brand memory.
Or maybe not so simply. [bunniestudios.com]
Yay corporate self regulation (Score:3)
What ever happened to consumer protection laws? A product saying it's compliant with the spec but isn't actually? That should get the importer in legal hot water, not just a dot point in a terms of service agreement.
Shit why don't Amazon go all out and say in their Terms of Service that product descriptions must not contain lies?
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The correct law for this is trademark law. USB is a trademark. Amazon is probably doing this because the USB Implementers Forum (owner of the mark) threatened them for selling counterfeit goods.
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Good luck with your trademark lawsuit against a Chinese company operating out of China.
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Oddly enough, I didn't say anything about suing a Chinese company operating out of China. I said Amazon (not a Chinese company) could be being threatened. As for the Chinese companies, they can be dealt with by Customs. But it is probably much easier and more efficient to just tell Amazon to stop selling that crap.
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Good luck with those laws when one of the parties is in a country (China) that doesn't give two shits about those laws. Welcome to Globalization, where all laws and standards move to the lowest common denominator and all the wealthy laugh all the way to bank.
If only (Score:2)
Now, it would be nice if Amazon banned usb cables that don't actually allow you to charge or connect your Android device to your computer. I've bought so many bum cables on Amazon, it's not funny.
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The odd thing is that you still shop there.
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I have a business relationship with those scumbags, so I get a Prime membership. That's the only reason I mess with them at all.
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I wanted a longer USB 3.0 cable for my external hard drive, so it could be located somewhere not absurd. Three cables later, I just gave up- one didn't work, the other two don't support USB 3.0 speeds. I feel I should be able to choose from a variety of materials, patterns, colors, and still have cables that work- but this is all nonsense. The problem is not just with Amazon, of course- that just makes it harder to return the non-working thing.
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Frankly said, if you're in the U.S. and want USB cables, you buy them from DigiKey, Newark, Mouser, or Allied Electronics. That's it. There's literally no other vendor I'd trust. As far as I'm concerned, these are the only legitimate sources of compliant cables at competitive prices.
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'Long' and 'High Speed' don't work together
So, how is it that I can get essentially ethernet faster than my hard drive between my work and other sites thousands of miles away?
On a smaller scale thunderbolt will go to 60 meters.
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I think we agree. Long and high speed do work together. You just have to plan for it.
BTW, I've always wondered about ground drift. The power company runs just the hot line to my house and then I set neutral to ground at the box. If there is big ground drift then might I be getting -200 to -80 V (relative to the neutral) out of any individual phase? If so, how does shit work?
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Buy only Anker cables? They are sold on Amazon, and are very high quality for pretty low prices.
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Yeah, that's what I've started to do. Anker products are pretty nice and reasonable.
Why are these cables $10-15? (Score:2)
Can't a compliant cable be made for $3 in China?
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Poke around and you'll notice that there appears to be some minimum price you can sell a cable for on Amazon. I've never seen anything under $5, but if you look for 2-paks suddenly there's a lot in the $5-10 range (so $2.50-5 each). No clue if this is a real Amazon policy or anything, but the pattern is there.
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Sure it can. And Monster Cables will happily sell them to you for $60.
Figure, it used to be standard practice for everyone involved in merchandising to add 50-100% to their cost to cover their own expenses and worthwhile profit margins. So say it costs the factory $1 to produce something, they sell it to a merchant for $1.5-$2. Merchant sells it to an importer for $2.25-$4 Importer adds international shipping costs (which I'll ignore) and marks it up to $3.4-$8. Tack on the embedded "free" shipping cost
Standards? (Score:3)
Although I have to wonder about a "spec" or "standard" that allows damage to core hardware if the fricking cable is bad.
Seriously? What about component failures in the cable as it ages?
Didn't the engineers think this through?
This brings me back to the Apple Mac stroke of genius non-standard DB9 serial port when you could short the Mac power supply to ground by plugging in a standard null-modem cable,
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You seem to be confusing the standard with the implementation. The standard says 'in this mode, you must be able to supply at least x amps of current'. It does not need to specify what happens if something tries to pull more current than that - that is up to the implementation. For the 'damaged hardware' scenario you need a bigger load than the supply can handle (which can happen if the cable lies about how much power can be provided) AND a poor implementation that does not protect itself from over-curre
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Easily foreseeable poor implementation choices are certainly the fault of the standard. At the very least the standard could require either safe operation or failsafe in that scenario.
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Nonsense. The standard is about interoperability. A device protecting itself has nothing to do with interoperability, therefore it does not belong in the standard.
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Some standards are about interoperability. Some are about safety. Some are about the ideal dog for that breed. All sorts of things are standards. In this case, it's both a data standard (so, interoperability) and a power standard (so, safety).
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From the sound of it this isn't the sort of problem a failing cable would be likely to cause. It sounds like they included the wrong resistor in a USB-C-to-A adapter - probably with the result that instead of the cable identifying itself as an adapter cable requiring standard power negotiation, it identified itself as a dumb charger capable of delivering far more power than the port could actually deliver.
Meanwhile a failing cable will tend to report infinite resistance (open circuit), which I believe indi
Amazon Review Link (Score:4, Informative)
This is an important issue to me because I have devices that need good USB-C cables. If anyone else is in the same boat, here's a direct link to Benson Leung's reviews. Focus in on the 5-star ones and look for the value buys (if the product is still available):
https://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/... [amazon.com]
Benson fried his Pixel C; USB C cables DIFFER (Score:4, Informative)
One difference between older USB cables is that the Type C cables contain a 56 k ohm pull up resistor for current control purpose. Some of the out of spec USB C cables with at least one USB Type C plug - probably a USB Type A plug at the other end - have a lower valued resistor and can cause problems. The problem is that if a lower resistance is used with a power supply that can only provide 1 Amp instead of 3 Amps at 5 Volts, the power supply can be fried as it tries to deliver 3 Amps. This could be the case for powered USB ports on computers. I've read that Apple laptops with a Type A compatible connector cannot deliver 3 Amps (1 Amp?) and might be at risk of damage when using an out of spec USB Type C connector cable with the wrong resistor. Further more, these out of spec cables may not be cheap. For more information, check the linked page and scroll down a bit:
http://www.androidauthority.co... [androidauthority.com]
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>when Benson connected it to a Pixel C to charge some device (Nexus Phone?), the Pixel was destroyed
This just indicates the poor quality of the Pixel's USB implementation. In this case, even an external power supply wasn't involved. Just a fucked up cable. So essentially, the Pixel fried itself just because of some shorted pins. I guess companies will keep making sub-standard products as long as idiots keep buying.
Re:USB cables are getting too damn complicated (Score:5, Interesting)
USB is still a serial protocol with the change between USB 2 and 3 was 1) splitting a common pair used for sending and receiving (simplex) to two pairs to allow for duplex transfer 2) specifying the higher speed pairs to have tighter ratings to enable higher bit rates.
The idea that Ethernet (assuming you mean common Cat 5/6 cables) works better than USB cables is ludicrous! They aren't specified to tolerate the plug/unplug cycles of even a cheap USB cable and the plug itself is fragile.
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LTPoE++ gives you 90W, so power isn't a problem, and it works over 1Gb/s no problem. I don't know if there's any IEEE standard for 90W POE, though. LTPoE++ is good enough for me - I design it in and it works great.
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Suposedly the charging standard allows for up to 100 watts over the same cable you're going to be shuffling many gigabits of data over.
5W at 20V. 100W of power for battery chargers, displays, sex toys, whatever. Yes, the bozo manufacturers have to be weeded out of this market before the bozo "sort by cheapest" shoppers burn everything down.