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Some Reversible USB-C Cables/Adapters Could Cause Irreversible Damage
TheRealHocusLocus writes: Three Decembers ago I lauded the impending death of the trapezoid. Celebration of the rectangle might be premature however, because in the rush-to-market an appalling number of chargers, cables and legacy adapters have been discovered to be non-compliant. There have been performance issues with bad USB implementation all along, but now — with improved conductors USB-C offers to negotiate up to 3A in addition the 900ma base, so use of a non-compliant adapter may result in damage. Google engineer and hero Benson Leung has been waging a one-man compliance campaign of Amazon reviews to warn of dodgy devices and praise the good. Reddit user bmcclure937 offers a spreadsheet summary of the reviews. It's a jungle out there, don't get fried.
Yup, USB is a joke, and the rapid shitfest of OTG, 3.0, 3.1, C, etc. doesn't help.
This "issue" only came about because said Google "engineer" and "hero" cheaped out and bought a POS cable from a POS company and hooked it up to a POS device that doesn't have fuses protecting the USB ports (the Pixel), then proceeded to hook it up to several other devices only to fry them as well. He's now waging a war about it so publicly because of the shame he feels for frying not one (could happen to anyone), not two (understandable, but not for an engineer), but three (lol) separate devices with the same bogus cable.
And this is old news even for Slashdot's standards. Poor timothy.