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Magical Chinese Hard Drive
jamax writes "From TFA: 'A Russian friend .... works at a hard-drive repair center in a Russian town, located near the Chinese border. A couple of days ago a customer brought a broken 500GB USB-drive that he had bought in a Chinese store across the river, for an insanely low price. But the drive was not working: if you, say, save a movie onto the drive, playing the saved movie back resulted in replaying just the last 5 minutes of the film.' Apparently, the contents of the external HDD box included: two nuts, glued to the inner surface of the box with a 128MB flash drive wedged between them (image). And it was a clever hack, too — if ever an attempt was made to write a file that's too large, it got cycled — rewriting itself over and over from the beginning, while leaving the existing files intact. And it reported everything correctly — file sizes and all!"
"Ancient Chinese Secret"
Wow... Just Wow... KIRF just gets more and more technologically adept.
There Can Be Only One...
Chinese whispers - storage style. Impressively cunning non the less.
I've sent about a terabyte of critically important data to a special compression device my computer came with, called "/dev/null", and it still hasn't filled up.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
This actually made me LOL. I guess there's a sucker born every minute. Pretty clever hack!
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
That is fucking magical. I dont support this rip off, but DAMN that was a cool idea and well pulled off. This was not some back town hick, but a well thought out plan, using parts brought/found locally.
Bravo engineer/shop keep who made it!!!
Data that goes in will never come back out again! Except the lucky 128MB that escapes the data event horizon.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
is an integral part of Chinese business culture and it's not funny.
wow, something alongside a couple of nuts that's smaller than it's supposed to be.
Coming soon to Lenovo Thinkpad near you :-)
* typing this on an IBM Thinkpad T43
"Working in a "looped" mode - when it runs out of space, it starts overwriting from the beginning." This would require some sort of modified/custom filesystem. Seems quite ambitious. "And the "looped-overwriting" does not touch the other files present on the drive." This would be magic. How could it possibly do that? The firmware would need to keep track of all the contents and intervene with every io write.
I have a friend that ordered a dirt cheap 4 gig MP3 player from some outfit in Hong Kong. He got it, and plugged it in, and it dutifully reported it had 4 gig of free space. As he started loading it up, it kept locking everything up after about 2 gig. Turns out, it only had 2 gig of memory, but was doctored to report it had 4 when queried.
A friend of mine bought an usb flash drive of 128GB wich in reality was only 4GB. They rewrite the firmware in the controller to be whatever you want it to be.
This is reason 1 why your average corporation has a mini-corporation inside it that does nothing but accept packages and perform testing on their contents to be sure that requirements are being met. Doesn't matter if it's a blade server or a box of pencils. Sleaze is an industry. So is acceptance testing. But if you do it right it doesn't just prevent fraud, it increases your reliability a ton, as it keeps you from stuffing parts that are merely statistical DOA.
(Reason 2 is that without that layer, there's no tracking of who got what, and embezzlement is an industry too.)
this is the first hardware-accelerated /dev/null device.
If you go in Qio Jiang Lu in Shanghai, you can purchase a dozen of this kind of things. The most funny one is the famous 256 GB USB key sold for like 10 bucks on the street. Of course, if that USB key can even be recognized by your computer, and hold few MB, you are lucky. Tourists would blindly buy it, because they think that everything is so cheap in here! When we see those sellers, we just smile.
Your friend must be new to that computer news site then.
Someone bought an uber ThinkPad running WinXP with 2GB RAM and 160GB HD (keep in mind this was mid 2000s) only to find out that it was a cleverly disguised box running Win98 with 64MB RAM and 40GB HD. There was enough alterations done to the Windows UI to indicate it was intentional deception.
The lesson to be learn (and always kept in mind) "If it sounds too good to be true, it can't be true."
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
These devices aren't even made specifically for this hack. These are common data recorders for weather stations, EDR's for autos, etc. The genius here was probably more in the acquisition of the case and label.
I bought a 2GB micro SD off ebay for cheap, received it and it reported the size correctly, except when it got past 32MB (yes megabytes) i got IO errors. Turns out, the FAT table was written as 2GB on a 32MB card. Writing zeroes then reformatting revealed only 32MB partition onward.
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
...And it reported everything correctly — file sizes and all!"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAT32#File_Allocation_Table
Samsung generally doesn't have obvious typos on the front face of its products, eg. "Compiant" instead of compliant , "fie fon" ???, and of course it is hard for an external drive to be USB, SATA, and PATA all at once...especially since it obviously doesn't have SATA or PATA connectors. The last one MIGHT have been excusable since they COULD be referencing the drive itself instead of the device as a whole, but I can't imagine them doing that.
Not terribly funny. A little clever. Simple fraud is the most accurate.
Think of it in these terms - the "firmware" of these devices is like a financial statement created by Bernie Madoff. The "storage area" is the actual wealth reported on the paperwork.
Why is "fake storage" fraud any funnier than financial fraud. Hey, how about a "funny" story about some discount pharmaceuticals?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Years ago I was in shenzen and thought I had an incredible deal on some USB flash drives.
Of course I asked to test some, the seller allowed me to write some small files which worked. Since the overall size was correct I assumed that they were fine.
I blew almost $500 buying them. I'm embarrassed so that's why I'm posting as an a/c.
I saw USB sticks like this years ago. They were labeled for multi gigabyte storage, but in reality they just were small 128MB sticks formatted to bigger sizes. You can easily try this yourself with little hacking. However, i have never heard about fake hard drives :)
The Chinese are within 128MB of creating perfect write-only media.
I bought a so-called chi-pod (chinese ipod knockoff) from ebay several years ago. It was advertised as 8Gb, and I got it for around $20. It had the same problem -- if I tried to store too much on it, I started getting disk errors. I tried reformatting several times, but no joy.
The fine folks at mympx.org came to my rescue then. Using their tools, I discovered that my "8Gb" mp3 player was really a 2Gb mp3 player that had been low-level hacked to report 8Gb. After I reformatted it (again, using their tools, because fdisk and mkfs wouldn't work properly) it worked just fine as a 2Gb player.
I reported this to the ebay seller, who claimed that it was his supplier's fault, not his. He refunded $8 of my price and I left no feedback.
Still and all, $12 for an mp3 player that can also do videos wasn't bad. I'm still using it, in fact.
You've heard of WORM (write once read many), now we have WARN (write
always, read never).
Good to know. I'll be sure to double-check my storage in future, before I trust any of my data to it.
Interestingly, the standard read/write tests won't identify this as a fraud, because they read back the data just after they've written it. You'd need something more like,
That'll catch this sort of thing.
When there is not much of repeat custom, sometimes a trusted third party would certify the goods as good. Only when trust develops between buyer and seller the economy would flourish. Can I explain the important role played by that federal bureaucrat who defines the difference between tomato sauce and tomato ketchup to a tea partier in 30 seconds? No way. Well, that would off topic here too.
I saw several anti-Chinese racist comments in that link. I am very sure there are anti-American racist comments in Chinese sites ranting against Standard & Poor granting top AAA ratings to CDOs structured by cows. It is not the race, it is just commerce. In Chapter 13, Nice Guys Finish First, in the book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins gives a very nice theory of the development of trust and altruism purely based on self interest.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If something sounds too good to be true, it usually isn't.
Are those the customer's nuts inside?
This is really just the logical continuation of our throw-away consume society. Yes, the shop that made this "drive" is committing fraud, but it's just a small step further than most consumer products made by big companies today. Like DVD players that come with firmware that's so buggy that they basically don't work (like one Sony model I bought some years ago) or cellphones that crash 20% of the time when a call comes in (like all 4 of the Nokia 1616s I recently bought).
More and more the products we buy don't really work, or work just long enough that we don't notice how broken they are before we buy the next one because the fashion (or technology) has moved on.
These Chinese con men are really just embracing the highest credo of modern capitalism... profit above product. Can you blame them?
It's a write-only memory (WOM). /M
There is also a Wikipedia article about it! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write-only_memory
"Calgon, ancient Chinese Secret, huh?"
It dont see a scam here, the USB stick was just set to write-only!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Why not market it as a 500TB drive with an INSANELY LOW PRICE!!!!!
Aren't all hard drives made in china anyway? :0)
The purpose of existence is to make money.
Off-brand MP3 players do this, too.
The "manufacturer" puts in a memory module of 1/2 or 1/5 the size it says on the box and they disable "media full" errors which results in the looping effect that the drive in the article had.
Kriston
A cursed bag of holding?
I was in India/Delhi in the summer and was in need of a thumb drive, so brought a '32GB Kingston' with the proper emballage as seen before. These guys made the same trick with the FAT table, just a 64MB flash drive formatted as 32GB. It also just kept working as a /dev/null source whenever you wrote somewith beyond 64MB. I should've known better and it was dirt cheap - but fun experience figuring out the hack they made. :)
A Russian friend of mine has posted this absolutely amazing story.
These people are easily amazed.
Yuengling - one of the finest beers in the bud-light-piss country, if not the finest.
I got my hands on a 64GB "Sony" flash drive given to me by a student who bought it on e-bay and kept losing data on it. Since the largest drive I had ever seen was 16GB at the time, I was curious how a 64GB just popped out of the woodwork. Turns out, the maximum capacity was 128MB, however, the file system reported 64GB on Windows, Mac OS and Linux.
When writing data to the drive, Windows would allow the drive to loop and continually overwrite itself while the Mac OS and Linux boxes would hit the 128MB limit and start throwing I/O errors.
This was about 2 years ago...good to see they're still at it and have expanded into the SSD arena. /sarcasm
This would be way to easy to spot if you pick it up when is powered up. Unless it's being sold as a SSD, there will be a noticeable gyroscopic effect when you pick up the drive and change the angle you are holding it in relation to the floor. At the end of TFA it even states that the salesman saved data to the drive. I'm sorry, but anyone who would not notice this when testing it at the store deserves to be ripped off.
Never, ever, under any circumstances, do business with Chinese. They cannot be trusted, and this story illustrates why.
They are lying, deceitful and untrustworthy, and think everything can be done for free or cheap, or by outright conning people.
Posting AC because I'm a senior manager at a Chinese-owned company and I have seen all of their shit firsthand. And yes, I'm trying to leave, because I don't approve of it.
Wow - finding 128 MB Flash drives is pretty tough these days! He must have gotten some really cheap leftovers.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Back in the 80s, one of my cow-orkers bought a VCR "off the back of a truck" in New York. It was really a VCR case with a brick in it.
These days when I've had bricked electronics, it just means that the firmware has gotten too hosed to boot, but this was genuine brick.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The Bastard Operator From Hell is going to be pissed that he didn't think of this.
If he bought it from a store nearby, you'd think the store would worry about him showing up and insisting on his money back plus some extra for his trouble.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Those nuts probably cost more than the flash drive.
...an hour later, you're always hungry again!
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
There are cons everywhere and not just China.
Samsung generally doesn't have obvious typos on the front face of its products, eg. "Compiant" instead of compliant , "fie fon" ???, and of course it is hard for an external drive to be USB, SATA, and PATA all at once...especially since it obviously doesn't have SATA or PATA connectors. The last one MIGHT have been excusable since they COULD be referencing the drive itself instead of the device as a whole, but I can't imagine them doing that.
At the local computer swap meet I also avoid the game cartridges labeled Ninfendo. :-)
Something like that happened to my brother, he bought like five "8GB" flash drives for cheap, like 3 or 4 years ago, they worked fine... that is, if they had less than 512MB of data written on them, after that they started to crap themselves and damage all the files, which, of course were all still there, with the correct sizes being shown.
I got my education on this issue early on, in the 80's. I was running a popular BBS and had a boner for one of those new-fangled ripping-fast 1200 baud modems. I just knew my life would be better if I could get one, but couldn't afford the prices. Then I went to a computer show and saw it in its plain white box: a Genuine "Hi-Fidelity" brand 1200 baud internal modem for no more than 80 or 90 bucks. Well Now! I went home that night and slipped it into an ISA slot on my Wells-American 12MHz '286 and It Worked! I was thrilled, until I started trying to tie it into the BBS software. Everything ran without a complaint, until it was time for the modem to actually behave as it was being told to do; setting for auto-answer, how many rings to wait before answering, setting a particular baud rate, anything of that sort that went beyond ATDT or ATA (dial a number or answer a call) just didn't seem to be working out.
I stayed up for hours into the night trying to figure out what I could possibly be doing wrong, issuing Hayes commands from a terminal, seeing them accepted and tearing my hair out while the system acted as if I had done none of the "right" things to make everything work. Around 2 or 3am with the beer and my patience running out, I sat down in front of the terminal and typed "ATFUCKYOU" and hit . The damnable thing answered back "OK" and I realized I had been had.
It would answer "OK" to -any- string as long as it had an AT in front of it. Us round-eye devils wanted Hayes command set compatibility and they'd give it to us... on their terms, and run away with the money. It was an expensive (in 1984 or so dollars) lesson in the psychology of Chinese technology vendors that I have never forgotten. Don't trust them, don't trust even what you see unless you can confirm it all the way to the end of the test chain, and then don't assume the next one out of the box is going to act anything like the one you just tested.
Imagine if that happened to a web server. You'd post so much content and then suddenly you get garbage without warning. It's a good thing the alert techies at slashd;'~ &f{' k, * - ~ ^ . [ ~
Table-ized A.I.
I lived in China for several years. This doesn't even make the top ten of scams there. Westerners always fall for them because it just doesn't occur to us that anyone would be so petty or short-sighted or whatever. The world is full of people who will spend $100 to trick you out of your $200. But China is really the only place on earth where people will spend $10,000 to scam you out of $10,000.01.
Some examples:
* Black sesame seeds that are actually white sesame seeds that have been painted black.
* Dogs that have had their hair cut to look like cats (or was it the other way around? I forget.)
* Cherries that are actually plums that have been painted to look like cherries. I mean, how cheap does labor have to be before you can make a spread on painting plums?
* and my favorite: fake eggs: eggs where someone made a tiny hole, drained out the egg, refilled it with something that feels like an egg when you shake it, and then fill the hole back in carefully. Again, you have to picture that somewhere in Jiangxi there is a gradeschool full of kids making fake eggs for $0.17/day.
If you ever wanted evidence that Kant was incorrect, and that what we call "morality" is a cultural phenomenon, just spend a few years in Chinese contract law.
Also - to be clear - I am not saying that Chinese are immoral - it is just that their morality is very different from that of the west. They have an equally long list of things that they respect that Westerners don't understand or care about.
The product is NOT defective - it's a modern implementation of National's Write Only Memory chip. See this link at http://www.national.com/rap/Story/WOMorigin.html
"My friend said they're still trying to figure out how did the Chinese do that."
Isn't that kind of racist? Are they saying they are surprised because Chinese people have less technical abilities than other people? If it was from Japan they wouldn't question their ability to make this device. But China, a country with more people than Europe, it's unfathomable.
In Soviet Russia... its all backwards... but in a terrible way.
Does this guy sell stealth fighters too? I bought a solar-powered cellphone charger on eBay from China. Let it sit in sunlight for a day and it charged up an iPhone maybe 2% when it's suppose to do 100%. Took it apart and found a battery tinyer than a AAA. Left negative feedback and was done.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Sweet, Plug this into a dvr with a camera, and it will be like the digital equivilent of keeping the same tape in your old security camera every day
Oh! I know this one!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fGujzulsas
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I spent two years backpacking around the world - a one way trip. Here are some of the surprising fakes I noticed:
Rechargeable batteries ... 3000maH AA rechargeables in a small store in Vietnam.. featherweight.. you have to be suspicious.
Digital cameras.. supposedly they piece together real parts with fake ones. I couldn't verify this one.
Knock-off cell phones - again it's fake batteries.
I took a chance on this one and my dual-sim knock-off is still hanging in 2 years later... but with a genuine battery.
I saw the full extent of the fake usb memory keys in Delhi.
Not just a formatting trick.. some of these are mass-manufactured hardware hacks!
China has fakes of everything.. Shoes ( will last 3 weeks), Jackets ( Gore-tex!! NOT!!! Better to buy the one without the fake Gore-tex layer which just flakes apart after a month).
Nepal was big on fake hiking gear. You'd be surprised at a backpack's ability to fall apart at the most inopportune times!
I'm starting to feel nostalgic!
First, the thing about playing the file with the header missing: It is perfectly possible that the device wouldn't cycle to the beginning of the file, but instead to some point a bit into the file, allowing for the header to be included. Most movie players probably would happily play the file if the header was intact even if there was a jump in the frames. It's interesting to ponder how the author went about implementing this. A USB disk is a block device so it isn't aware of the concept of files - all it receives are requests for reading individual sectors. There are several ways to approach the problem. I have three suggestions of which I think the last is the one that is most probably employed by this device. 1) One possibility is that the USB device 'cheated' and installed a custom device driver when plugged in. Such a device driver could intercept file system calls (sitting a file system filter if on Windows) and could pull off the feat. One problem is that a unique device driver would be required for each platform, at least if the platform is to display the behavior described when writing the file. 1) A more full solution would instead involve the device interpreting the file system structures written by the operating system. It would tell the operating system it was a 500Gig device and the o/s would put a 500G file system on it. However, the device would interpret the file system structures so that it could understand which files were stored where and hence being able to detect the writing of big files and - when it wanted to cycle back upon the beginning of the file - start redirecting write requests to the trailing sectors, so that they would be written to where the beginning of the file is. Such a solution is definitely possible and doesn't require a device driver. But it is file system dependent and probably quite complex to implement. For FAT32 it is probably doable, for NTFS it is probably impractical. Given the large (claimed) size of the device the user would likely format with NTFS. For this reason, I think this is unlikely to be the method employed. 3) A much simpler and probably more likely solution is the following: When the device detects a series of sequential writes that goes beyond the actual capacity of the drive, it simply starts redirecting those writes to the sectors written in the beginning (or, near the beginning) of the current sequential write series. This solution would not be specific to a given o/s or file system, but is dependent on the o/s handling copying large files through sequential writes - or almost sequential, depending on how much logic is put into the detection routine of the device (for instance it could be tolerant to intermittent writes to the file system structures as long as it saw continued sequentiality etc.). The hacker could have analyzed the writing patterns of common operating and file systems to come up with a simple algorithm that would work most all the time. However, the solution might run into trouble in case of fragmented drives, but given that the purpose is just to convince a potential customer and that such a demonstration would likely take place on a freshly formatted drive, this shortcoming is probably irrelevant.
Same old story - when you try to get something for nothing, you often get nothing for something.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these.
Power consumption and heat are negligible, and it's probably way more resistant to being dropped than one of those stupid non-magical hard drives. And all for a just a tiny reduction in capacity! I want 10!
compulsive liars, cheats and thieves who will do absolutely anything to win. And it's ingrained behaviour that will never change. Even 200 years ago, British traders knew very well that the Chinese simply couldn't be trusted.
Which is why when the West declines and the Chinese rule the world, we're all fucked.
Back in 1979, as an April Fool joke, some engineers at Signetics put together a complete data sheet for a WOM chip, which could be used in such applications as post-delivery data analysis of nuclear explosions when embedded in the warhead, infinite computer data storage, etc. This they then published in one of the major engineering magazines of the time, something like EDN. I still have a copy of it that I send around to my EE friends from time to time for a chuckle. It is starting to sound like someone actually built the chip... ;-)
Never mind the lost files... what about the Chinese heavy machinery being made with two less nuts than spec..
Old news. Saw this on Facebook 22 hours ago.
Was it THAT Much cheaper to go thru all that trouble just to make a few bucks?
Real drives are not that expensive to begin with, i cant see why it would have been worth it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
A guy at work purchased several "Hi-Capacity" flash drives from chinese sources and each one was way below the spec it claimed to be ie 32GB was approx 3.2GB and i saw the same phenomenon. I suspected that the flash controller chips were reprogrammed to report larger capacities.
It sounds like this device was acting as a big cache for a much larger non-existent space.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Drobos do something a bit similar: they report a 16 terabyte NTFS filesystem -- regardless of what disks are actually in them.
As soon as you hit the 90% real capacity mark it starts throttling your write speed. The closer to full it goes, the more it throttles. Net result is that you'll never succeed in actually filling it up to the last byte.
The difference, of course, is that this is documented behaviour. As soon as you replace one of the disks with a larger one it'll rebuild and resize the array and unthrottle your writespeed.
All in all, a very funky way of doing things, with the one downside that it can take quite a long time to mount a "16 terabyte" NTFS drive :-)
What a depressingly stupid machine.
These kinds of drives have been around for a very long time. Welcome to the world of yesterday!
choina has been putting out fakes forever. before the days of ebay it was to sucker the amarcan turrest. but with ebay they can sucker them all over the world without ever leaving there home. why you never buy from a chinise seller. of course the sad part everything comes from china these days even the real items.
You can never ever have a honest 1st generation friend unless you are also a Chinese. They are clanish and closed society. Only 3rd generation American Chinese onwards could be trusted as they become assimilated into the American culture and are not totally clanish. US corporations gave away tax payer paid R&D developed product designs to China and we are now paying a price for it - unemployment. GOP has brought us back to the 1800.
This is just disgusting. There are tricksters and criminals all over the place. Possibly more where the struggle to stay afloat is harder, but even that is an unproven conjecture.
Enron, anyone?
"Anything" doesn't seem to be an exaggeration: how low do you have to be to produce fake rice from plastic and fake chicken eggs from chemicals?
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
How do you dispose of an infinite monkey array after you upgrade anyway? Can you just drop them off at Best Buy's recycling kiosk?
Yes, they were rather short on Geek Squad help buy now you'll find you can get a response almost instantly. I wouldn't complain too loudly if they don't fix your problem though, as the splattered wall on the other side of the complaint desk can attest to.
And if so, did you video tape it?
Pretty much any video tape of a Best Buy on Black Friday will give you the same raw material.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
saw an ad for a "MacBook Air" with an atom processor and Windows XP recently here in the Philippines recently. all the other specs were clearly the same for a low-end generic netbook as well, but the shell looked very much like the MacBook Air. These, along with the myriad "iPhones" that run heavily modified and broken forms of Android, and other intentionally deceptive gadgets are invariably from China.
I was once warned to never trust the Chinese...by a person who was himself Chinese.
Can we please stop sending manufacturing to China? Let them deal with their own economy, instead of screwing our own.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Flash drive sizes have been misrepresented for a long time. This is not new, its just a misrepresented flash drive in a box. Sure, its got a little extra in its file reporting, but thats not difficult to achieve. If it was difficult it would be cheaper to just put a 500 gig disc in the box.
I once bought a Mogwai off a Chinaman -- I don't even want to get into how that turned out.