Amazon.com Now Bans USB Type-C Cables That Aren't Up To Spec (google.com)

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.

Comments

Great News?

[Luthair]

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.

Re:Great News?

[tnk1]

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?

[Luthair]

El Cheapo Cables Inc. would just call themselves Sir Cheap Cables Inc. and signup again.

Re:Great News?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's supposed to be the difference?

Re:Great News?

[shawn2772]

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.

Re:Great News?

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

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 they probably don't want to start down that path. Plus, maybe they'd get a fully-compliant cable from ABC Cable Company one day and then after passing certification, the company reverts to a non-compliant cable to save a few pennies.

As for relying on customer feedback, that would take a while to accumulate enough ratings and reviews before it was reliable, and it wouldn't help the people who bought the crap cables before the reviews came in, essentially turning them into guinea pigs or blind product testers.

I don't see a good solution to this kind of problem (and it's not just USB cables that this applies to, unfortunately). The "meet the specs or be banned" is a good first step, but any really shady supplier will just keep popping up under different names and selling their stuff.

Re:Great News?

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

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.

Re:Great News?

[Coren22]

Unless you just buy from reputable companies like Anker...

Re:Great News?

[shubus]

So many have been stung by those El Cheapo Cables (me included!) that Amazon's move is most welcome. Now who is testing these cables and telling Amazon whether they meet spec and go on the white lit or don't meet spec and get de-listed?

Re:Great News?

[Shoten]

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.

Re:Great News?

[tripleevenfall]

There has to be some middle ground between exorbitantly priced mediocre cables and garbage that will burn your house down.

Re:Great News?

[tripleevenfall]

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.

Re:Great News?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been buying cables from Monoprice for years now never had a problem. They also sell on Amazon now apparently.

Re:Great News?

[Coren22]

http://smile.amazon.com/Anker-...

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)

Re:Great News?

[tripleevenfall]

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?

[Richard Dick Head]

At least someone is FINALLY giving some pushback. Look at current state of USB 2.0 Micro. How many other cable types have you ever had that needed to be replaced weekly if used a lot, and yes I'm talking about every brand, even the expensive ones.

Re: Great News?

[bill_mcgonigle]

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?

Re: Great News?

[sjames]

Perhaps poor quality stranded wire that sometimes breaks rather than bend?

As you lose more strands, conductivity goes down.

Re:Great News?

[CauseBy]

Monoprice? or is there a new better option?

Re:Great News?

[swb]

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 variants.

Re:Great News?

[Reziac]

And even if they test a sample, what's to prevent a company from providing a quality sample, then selling shit?

Re:Great News?

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

And even if they test a sample, what's to prevent a company from providing a quality sample, then selling shit?

Exactly....and this is why Amazon probably doesn't want to go down this path.

Re:Great News?

[Reziac]

I don't blame 'em.

And this is why I read all the negative reviews before I buy a product. Which has let me leave some very positive reviews for what I eventually bought... cuz I didn't buy the ones with tons of complaints.

Re:Great News?

[Bruce Perens]

That might be because the design of the USB micro connector sucks. The major problem is that there isn't a detent. USB C has some sort of internal detent but I don't know how long it will survive in use. There is reason to question a standard that has gone through 7 connector designs. And if you ever design a USB driver, you'll find out that the standard requires rather significant host complexity as a trade-off to allow dirt-cheap peripheral devices. It works. It sure isn't pretty.

In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot bans postings that aren't up to spec. Like this one.

Re:In other news

[quonsar]

I buy all my Slashdot posts on Amazon.

Oh Look! Amazon Basics Cables!

[Aero77]

I guess we just need to buy the Amazon brand cables to be sure.

Re:Oh Look! Amazon Basics Cables!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sneer aside, this is actually a good step in the right direction.

Re:Oh Look! Amazon Basics Cables!

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

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.

Re:Oh Look! Amazon Basics Cables!

[Anonymous Coward]

I just bought some. They're relatively cheap and one would assume they're spec-compliant, so I can't say that I really need any more than that.

Re:Oh Look! Amazon Basics Cables!

[gumbi west]

Unless we buy from Amazon. Then we expect it to fry our computer.

Re:Oh Look! Amazon Basics Cables!

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless we buy from Amazon. Then we expect it to fry our computer.

Funny, my Amazon cable made my computer hot and swampy.

Re:Oh Look! Amazon Basics Cables!

[sexconker]

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 connected to the same controller, or even the controller.
Any decent mobo will have individually fused USB ports with various fault detection and protection mechanisms. This was common as far back as the Windows XP days - MS had error messages ready to go when the controller decides to disable an individual port. (I was reminded of these messages recently when configuring an older box in an environment that had no grounding to speak of, causing certain USB devices to fail when the machine was placed on certain surfaces.)
Even an intentionally malicious device shouldn't be able to do anything but fry an individual port. (And on a good board, that port should come back up after a power cycle.)

I'm all for getting bad cables (and devices) off the market. But I'm also all for making sure the ports and controller are built well. I'm also against this Google engineer going on his little crusade. He fried three devices. The first is understandable, it can happen to anyone. The second time is understandable for a layman, but not for a Google engineer who won't stop talking about how he's a Google engineer. The third time is pathetic, for anyone.

This guy is waging a war out of embarrassment more than anything else.

Re:Oh Look! Amazon Basics Cables!

[DeBaas]

so that's why they call their tablet fire...

Re:Oh Look! Amazon Basics Cables!

[nedlohs]

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".

Re:Oh Look! Amazon Basics Cables!

[tibit]

Well, it was a Chromebook. What did you expect. It's wouldn't be cheap if they keept adding $0.30 worth of fuses here, some other protection there. It's a barebones piece of hardware that will play nice with compliant peripeharals, and that's about it.

Re: Oh Look! Amazon Basics Cables!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this idiot modded up?
Really, Benson IS doing a good service for everyone.
Of course, he himself isn't using shitty gear as default, he's demonstrating the potential unlucky outcomes a customer could have.
Just because you shouldn't use poor chargers, doesn't mean that on holiday for example, you don't plug your phone into a USBjack somewhere.

These NON SPEC products, simply shouldn't exist, period.

Re:Oh Look! Amazon Basics Cables!

[BronsCon]

It was a Chromebook Pixel. Those start at $1299.00 so they're not exactly cheap.

You mean APP cables!

[Anonymous Coward]

Modern app appers use app cables to app apps on app apping apps, NOT LUDDITE USB CABLES!

Apps!

Re:You mean APP cables!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the app version is fukoff, and it's a social media web 2.0 app!

Re:You mean APP cables!

[desdinova 216]

Lighten up Francis.

Shitty standard

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[Austerity Empowers]

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.

Re:Shitty standard

[SumDog]

I kinda have to agree with you on this. Why is USB-C setup so that a bad cable can fry your laptop?

Re:Shitty standard

[silas_moeckel]

It's USB it's always been a shitty standard to make it cheap. Friction fit, a device model that everything seems to need a driver for, a slew of put a resistor between these lines to say you're this or that BS. It's realy not that hard to require you draw no more than x to enumerate and get the ok to draw more. But that means you need some intelligence at both ends.

Re:Shitty standard

[evilviper]

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.

Re:Shitty standard

[Anonymous Coward]

You need a crowbar circuit and a polyfuse in every USB socket. It's not rocket surgery.

Re:Shitty standard

[danbob999]

A resistor is now considered intelligence?

Re:Shitty standard

[gumbi west]

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.

Re:Shitty standard

[gumbi west]

If we wanted good interfaces we'd be using firewire. USB wins because it is inexpensive.

Re:Shitty standard

[Megol]

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.

Re:Shitty standard

[Anonymous Coward]

The resistor thing is ridiculous. Other serial protocols do this instead by doing out-of-band training. For example, SATA will downtrain from 6G to 3G to 1.5G and use whatever sticks, and likewise SAS will uptrain from 1.5->3->6->12G... all without the need for sense resistors. I don't understand why USB had to be different

Re:Shitty standard

[marcansoft]

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.

Re:Shitty standard

[ncc74656]

a device model that everything seems to need a driver for

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.

Re:Shitty standard

[Bing Tsher E]

USB wins because it's a standard, not an Apple trademark.

But then, I just admitted you're right, that it's inexpensive.

Re:Shitty standard

[bws111]

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.

Re:Shitty standard

[Anonymous Coward]

What's worse is the rampant counterfeit goods, that Amazon doesn't appear to do anything about.

Re:Shitty standard

[Anonymous Coward]

The ones that fried devices were spectacularly terrible. One had a power line where ground should have been.

Re:Shitty standard

[silas_moeckel]

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.

Re:Shitty standard

[sexconker]

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

[Immerman]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

... 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.

You say this as if it actually works...
I have ports on both my monitor and motherboard that claim "USB Fast Charging Capable" of up to 1.5A draw. However those ports never provide that current to my phone. Supposedly there is software that will allow me to force that feature to be enabled through the driver, however that is not my definition of "intelligent negotiation". That's just broken and not providing me the full advertised featureset--extra steps shouldn't be required.

Re:Shitty standard

[silas_moeckel]

It's still a question of making a million one off drivers vs coming together for a standard.

Re:Shitty standard

[Anonymous Coward]

"Firewire" (aka: IEEE-1394) was the trademark for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers standard created by the P1394 working group. It *is* a standard. The initial IEEE-1394 standard had capabilities, beyond the *much* faster transfer rates, that USB didn't pick up until USB 3.0.

The implication that 'Firewire', isn't a standard is just as dumb as saying 'USB' isn't a standard, because it is also a trademark.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1394]

Re:Shitty standard

[Immerman]

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 drivers for attached hardware, and dedicated ps2 mouse and keyboard ports which "just worked" but couldn't handle anything else - even carelessly swapping the plugs meant the computer couldn't talk to either device.

USB was a general purpose "one size fits most" one-to-many data interconnect, and many other de-facto standards were then constructed upon it to simplify communications with "standardized" hardware - for example the HID (human interface device) standard backed by Microsoft that theoretically allows any standard USB mouse, keyboard, or joystick to "just work"(and on most OSes they do so). There's also standards for external storage devices, webcams, scanners, etc. But sadly, it seems every device maker has their own "secret sauce" they want to spin into their drivers, or just couldn't be bothered to comply with the specs exactly. But that's all at the OS level, USB's job is pretty much finished once data gets delivered to/from the OS.

As for friction-fit, what would you prefer? As soon as you get "fiddly bits" involved you're just asking for breakage in both the device and cable. Can't tell you how many jammed-up serial/parallel/video "screw secured" cables I've seen over the years before USB came on the scene, and it's gross overkill for most applications. Meanwhile, having used USB devices since Win95b, I can only think of a handful of times when they disconnected accidentally (unlike serial/parallel/video cables whose "friction fit" was not really up to the job on its own)

I'll admit though that I'd like to see something along those lines return as an option for Type-C ports though - seems like that little connector promises to be every bit as fiddly and unreliable as micro-USB connectors - acceptable for charging and occasional use, but lacking for mission-critical reliability.

Re:Shitty standard

[operagost]

I don't understand. There isn't any logic in the cable; it's just one set of pins to another. The problem is with the quality of the materials and their construction. Or do you suggest that someone one should be able to connect a bundle of wires attached randomly and let the devices sort it out somehow?

Re:Shitty standard

[Anonymous Coward]

The max current at any power level is 5A. The 100W spec is 5A at 20V.

Re:Shitty standard

[tibit]

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.

Re:Shitty standard

[comrade.putin]

Except Firewire was proven almost a decade ago to be very vulnerable to DMA attack

Re:Shitty standard

[mattventura]

Things I can list off the top of my head (these may have changed in more recent USB specs):
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 USB.
3. Introduces new connectors every time they feel like it.
The problem is that it's a jack of all trades, master of none. From a technical standpoint, PS/2 is better for simple keyboards and mice, SATA/eSATA is better for storage, and USB just plain doesn't work for many things such as eGPUs because of the lack of DMA.

Re:Shitty standard

[Anonymous Coward]

I said crowbar circuit and a polyfuse, not just a polyfuse. The fuse is there to protect the crowbar circuit, which is usually designed to handle the voltages and currents until the polyfuse turns them off.

Re:Shitty standard

[Immerman]

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...

Re:Shitty standard

[skids]

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

[gumbi west]

So... you're thinking USB is somehow secure? If so, I'll send you a device to plus in to your USB port.

Re:Shitty standard

[gumbi west]

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.

Re:Shitty standard

[silas_moeckel]

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 interconnect that also got you far better power.

Friction fit is generally an issue, displayport got it about right, friction with a pretty simple to implement retention clip. Frankly DB9 and DB25 fiction fit just fine, for SCSI those 50 pin centronics never did but the 68 pin(was it 68?) for wide scsi did fine but all had positive locking. I've seen far more USB A female ports loose their plastic tongue than any failed legacy ports. Mind you have many more issues with the legacy cables themselves many a bent HDB15 pin on a VGA cable. Spec wise having the receiving half of a positive locking connector be spec is about right, quality cables can use it for proper latching but the cheap consumer stuff can ignore it. Now cable wise the only thing I've put more in the VGA/PS2 is cat5 etc, now thats mostly gone as IPMI has replace the needed for KVM gear for servers, I will say that USB + VGA cables were awful at pulling out when servers got worked on.

USB-C seems so much like a connector looking for a purpose, for phones Qi and similar wireless charging made more sense. In the server end it was problematic as PCI-E cards need aux power to run them making adding them to legacy servers often impossible.

Re:Shitty standard

[skids]

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 seems to have no trouble responsibly negotiating power and dealing with wiring faults. They'll eventually imitate it as well, but messier, of course.)

Re:Shitty standard

[skids]

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 too many varieties of them. The cabling, though, really went overboard on sacrificing performance for the sake of a few pennies.

Re:Shitty standard

[Immerman]

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 interface that mouse-using programs could interface with. And there were a handful of competing "standards" for how to talk with mice - I remember having a collection of drivers available to try whenever someone got their hands on an old mouse - one of them would probably work. Modems? There were a handful of different standards there too, largely characterized by different initialization strings - I remember spending hours with oddball modems, trying to find an initialization string that would coax it into working properly. Nothing nearly as sophisticated as a modern driver, but in essence it performs the same function - preparing the hardware to behave in a standardized manner through a standardized interface. And more esoteric devices? Digitizers, 6-axis controllers, scientific equipment, etc,etc,etc - you'd better have software that knew how to talk to them or they'd be completely useless.

And that's essentially what a driver is - a chunk of software that does the raw talking to hardware with all its quirks and presents it as a standardized software interface - we didn't have a lot of serial-device drivers back in the day in large part because the applications talked to the hardware directly, with no abstraction layer. And the result was that you could generally only use hardware with applications specifically designed to use it. Drivers became more popular initially as a solution to that problem: "break off" the part of the program that talks directly to the hardware and run it separately, then the application developer need only write to the driver interface, and it can handle the peculiarities of the hardware. They also solve the contention issue: two different programs couldn't talk to the same hardware at once, but they *could* talk to a singular driver responsible for talking with that hardware.

Re:Shitty standard

[Immerman]

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 people making the hardware - the difference being that software needs only be paid for once, while hardware must be paid for with every unit. Penny pinching on the hardware side make wonderful sense for mass-production.

Re:Shitty standard

[perryizgr8]

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

[Razed By TV]

I don't understand. There isn't any logic in the cable; it's just one set of pins to another.

No logic in the sense of IC's or gates, yes. However, there is a resistor in line that determines the max current your device can demand. Apparently this is allowing devices hooked up through cheap cables to demand more than can safely be supplied.

Personally, I prefer to have a cable be a cable, and let the two devices determine the limits.

Re:Shitty standard

[thegarbz]

3. To their credit the connectors they have introduced have been backwards compatible between devices with only the appropriate cheap cable required. This is a good thing.

As for PS/2 being better for keyboards and mice, tell me why I should care as a user? I am happier with a universal plug and play device as opposed to something that got enumerated at boot time and couldn't be unplugged while live. Likewise with eSATA, my USB3.0 external HDD is no faster than my eSATA one. Admittedly neither of them are SSDs, but then for most of the market that's not a problem and where actual speed is critical eSATA is actually available in select places. USB on the other hand is available *everywhere* and I can plug my fancy USB3 HDD into an ancient USB1.1 host and still get data off it.

It's not a jack of al trades. It's a king of compatibility which for most people is a fare more critical requirement than some technical superiority of some barely used standard.

Re:Shitty standard

[thegarbz]

It's USB it's always been a shitty standard to make it cheap. Friction fit, a device model that everything seems to need a driver for, a slew of put a resistor between these lines to say you're this or that BS. It's realy not that hard to require you draw no more than x to enumerate and get the ok to draw more. But that means you need some intelligence at both ends.

Interesting you blame this on the standard. The USB-IF specifies enumeration and power as part of the standard, it always has.

So why is it a shitty standard if some companies botch their way around it to make it cheap and non-standard (looking at Apple here).

Also friction fit is a good thing. Less damage when someone trips on a cable.

Also what do you need drivers for? I've never needed drivers for mice, keyboards, harddisks, cameras, scanners, bluetooth receivers, hubs, and I'm short on coffee so I can't think of other equipment now. The USB standard specifies a lot of common interfaces. The only time you need drivers is when you do something non-standard, and it's a credit to USB that it allows you to do something like that in the first place.

Re:Shitty standard

[silas_moeckel]

There is a huge difference between having standardized drivers that fit 99% of the use cases and the ability to extend etc for the rest. For example a generic camera driver might expose resolutions and formats for the computer to pick from. USB failed at that it let everybody roll there own hell half the camera drivers purpose seems to be to hide that it's not realy a 300mp sensor but vga with a lot of software "magic".

The power side it was supposed to be enumerated then companies start throwing sense resistors at it to be cheaper. As a standards body they should have gone nope can not call that usb. At the end of the day if the standards body can not enforce them it quickly turns into embrace/extend nastyness.

Re:Shitty standard

[Immerman]

Again - cameras etc. have nothing to do with the USB standard. USB is a data-bus standard, like PCI or ISA, NOT a device standard. You're asking for something analogous to the parallel port standard defining printer and external drive protocols - they would have sucked, and nobody would have used them, because the people making the data-bus standard are not in the printer or external drive business. Want a common printer interface? Get the major printer folks together to agree on one.

Plus things like webcams didn't even *exist* when USB was defined. If the manufacturers, who would be saving money not having to maintain their own drivers, can't get together to agree on a standard, what makes you think the USB inventors would be able to change that? Should they just arbitrarily say "this manufacturers interface is now the official standard, everybody else has to rewrite their camera firmware to continue using the USB compatible sticker"? Or maybe "now we've created a whole new camera communication standard, EVERYBODY has to rewrite their camera firmware". Plus then anybody who did want to add extra features to their camera wouldn't be able to claim USB compatibiility anymore, despite 100% adherence to the data-bus standard.

And the resistor stuff was actually part of the USB standard - once it started getting used as a standard power source, it was pretty obvious you needed a cheap, simple way to indicate power capacity - there were really only two other options: Well-behaved devices would only draw the 0.1A non-negotiated power, or $2 wall-warts would have to incorporate a $10 USB host controller chip and supporting electronics to negotiate greater power (call it a $20 price bump after supply-line markups) Neither option would have flown, and you'd have millions of non-compliant USB devices around using the same plugs.

Re:Shitty standard

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm afraid you don't know what double insulated means. ...and indeed, even in devices that aren't double insulated, you still don't electrocute someone by swapping the hot and neutral.

In a properly designed circuit, neither the neutral nor the hot come into contact with the user. Coming into contact with the user is what the ground is for, and even that is done only when double-insulated design isn't an option.

Re:Shitty standard

[david_thornley]

I'd estimate that, for more than half the computer users in the world, a blown fuse is sufficient to stop the computer from working until a visit to a computer repair shop.

Re:Shitty standard

[silas_moeckel]

You're entirely missing the devices classes that are part of the USB spec. I'm saying it's failure to enforce those standards is a reason it's a crappy interface.

It's an extendable interface not like everything needed to be defined day one merely enforcing that companies wanting to use it's standard went through the trouble to define one and use it. Extending standard interfaces is also easy compatible with camera class 1 class 1.1 class 2.4 etc. Adding new features is also pretty easy.

The resister bits got added later one because of a failure to standardize what's turned into a universal way to deliver low voltage power. That failure is a lot of what's leading to the original article issues with defective cables.

Re:Shitty standard

[Immerman]

Am I mistaken in believing that most of those classifications came *after* the corresponding devices became popular, and it's thus entirely reasonable for them to be disregarded by those who already established their own protocols? (though less reasonable for the many, many "also rans" who came later. Perhaps they were just too cheap/lazy for proper testing? ) As I recall most of those devices didn't even exist until the USB protocol had undergone several revisions, and for those that do I suspect the protocol was wildly inadequate (hey, maybe people will want to do X - nobody's doing it yet, and it's far outside our area of expertise, but I bet we can create an extensible standard that can handle all common use-cases!)

I'm asking seriously, and would appreciate citations if I'm wrong.

Regardless though - to deny certification to what is, primarily, a data-bus (and later power supply) standard over subtleties in non-central concerns, is to invite that standard to fragment to the point that plugging any physically-compatible "USB" device into another is to court disaster, rendering the entire standard irrelevant.

Re:Shitty standard

[Holi]

There is an expensive asic running that 10gbe interface, I doubt you want to add $100 to your usb devices price.

Re:Shitty standard

[evilviper]

I'm afraid you don't know what double insulated means.

I know precisely what double insulated means.

you still don't electrocute someone by swapping the hot and neutral.

Go swap the wiring on a basic table/floor lamp with E27 socket, plug it in, and change the bulb (preferably with wet hands, while holding onto a faucet). Then get back to me.

In a properly designed circuit,

No true Scotsman.

Re:Shitty standard

[skids]

I'd disagree on that last point. The vendors did write (crummy) drivers and (balefully inadequate) documentation, but the OS/firmware vendors had to rewrite everything to actually work reliably, and then continue to rewrite everything when moving to new driver models as OSes evolve, and to new bus architectures/timings.

Re:Shitty standard

[skids]

Ahem, 10Gbe adaptors are available for less than that, and that's in the server market where vendors are still milking corporate purchase orders.

Re:Shitty standard

[Immerman]

You are assuming the point of mass production is quality, long-lived hardware. I'd say a walk through Walmart should relieve you of that ridiculous notion. Shifting the initial production cost from hardware to software allowed the hardware to be sold far more cheaply, which in turn is probably largely responsible for the wide uptake of the USB standard.

Moreover, if the hardware producers actually cared about delivering a reliable, long-lived product, they could have done a far better job of delivering well-documented hardware with adequate drivers while still maintaining wider profit margins than if they had inflated per-item costs - I mean really, there's no shortcoming in the USB spec that's not mostly shared by the serial-port spec, interrupts aside.

Re:Shitty standard

[Bruce Perens]

No, double-insulated is not referring to the plug being polarized. It refers to the device being designed to not be capable of shocking the user through a hot-to-ground connection. A double-insulated device does not need a ground pin and doesn't particularly care which conductor is hot and which is neutral.

Re:Shitty standard

[evilviper]

You seriously should read other replies to a comment before chiming-in, yourself. Particularly when you're several days late to the discussion.

Re:Shitty standard

[Bruce Perens]

Well, I read your comment stating that you know exactly what double-insulated means, and maybe you do in your head but what you write isn't communicating that understanding to other people. Let's look at the two substantive comments which you wrote:

Go swap the wiring on a basic table/floor lamp with E27 socket, plug it in, and change the bulb (preferably with wet hands, while holding onto a faucet). Then get back to me.

You can do this at an old fuse panel too. But it doesn't really have anything to do with double-insulation, because an Edison fixture is not double-insulated, it does provide a clear method for the user to touch the hot wire by sticking their finger in an empty socket.

if you swap the two wires on a polarized plug ("double insulated"

If you want to use the definition best accepted in the electrical industry today, you need to comply with all of UL 1097, which unfortunately they don't want us to read online. But the less formal definition of double insulation is a device which does not provide any path for the user to touch anything connected to the hot wire even when hot and neutral are reversed, and thus does not require a ground connection to remove the potential for the user to be electrocuted by touching a metallic case which has become energized through damage or miswiring.

I am wary of communicating an erroneous understanding of electrical safety to Slashdot readers, or I would not have answered.

USB cables are getting too damn complicated

[Anonymous Coward]

They've got the old four-wire USB in there, plus a whole new set of wires for the faster USB. It's like they forgot what the S in USB means. IMHO they should just abandon that festering standard and switch to Ethernet cables: Dirt cheap, work every time.

Re:USB cables are getting too damn complicated

[Megol]

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.

Re:USB cables are getting too damn complicated

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

But ethernet can already provide faster data transfer speeds over longer distances *and* more power, all with unlimited protocols.

We should just make a new plug for ethernet that can handle more plug/unplug cycles. Done.

Re:USB cables are getting too damn complicated

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you even get PoE over 1Gb/s? Why would you want 100Gb/s mouse with a separate power cable?
PoE can only provide 40W of power, USB 3.1 can go up to 100W.

Re:USB cables are getting too damn complicated

[tibit]

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.

Re:USB cables are getting too damn complicated

[Anonymous Coward]

But how would it work over a 10gbe interface?

Re:USB cables are getting too damn complicated

[petermgreen]

Same way it works over gigabit. Data travels as a differential signal within the pairs, power travels as a DC voltage between the pairs.

The real problem with using ethernet as a device interface is that the tradeoff for high speeds over long cheap cables is that the interfaces are realtively expensive and power hungry. This is especially a problem at 10 gigabit speeds.

Counterfit Sex Toys

[SumDog]

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.

Re:Counterfit Sex Toys

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of their products are low quality, counterfeits of more respectable brands.

As someone who is not up to speed with the sex toy industry, would you identify for me the respectable brands, and tell me where on the toys I should look to find the official anti-counterfeit logo?

Re:Counterfit Sex Toys

[known_coward_69]

shopping on amazon be wary of anything not sold and shipped by amazon itself. all those small sellers are the small businesses like the scam NYC electronics shops you are told to avoid when visiting NYC.

Re:Counterfit Sex Toys

[Anonymous Coward]

Specifically he's likely talking about hitachi magic wand knockoffs.

captcha: Tingle

Re:Counterfit Sex Toys

[Qzukk]

You mean that 50 gallon drum of lube may not be authentic?!

Re:Counterfit Sex Toys

[lgw]

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).

Re:Counterfit Sex Toys

[dpiven]

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.

So stop buying refurbs, fer crissakes.

Re:Counterfit Sex Toys

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I have seen at least a couple of videos in which a mains-powered device short circuits during use, causing sparks, smoke, or otherwise surprises the operator of the device. Such videos are very amusing, although the failure of the device generally interrupts both the performer and the viewer.

Re:Counterfit Sex Toys

[CauseBy]

Adam & Eve dot com has everything you need, all high quality

Why call them such if they aren't up to spec?

[bogaboga]

Isn't the reason they woiuld be called USB type-C cables; that they meet the "spec" so to speak?

Re:Why call them such if they aren't up to spec?

[NotDrWho]

You can call a cat a fish, but that won't make it not blow up your computer.

Re:Why call them such if they aren't up to spec?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you could call it a catfish.

It's all fun and games until something blows up

[NotDrWho]

Still think USB cables are fun, kids?

Cat7 ethernet with rj45 next please

[Anonymous Coward]

rj45 is not compatible with cat7!

Re:Cat7 ethernet with rj45 next please

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not seeing anything, anywhere about this incompatibility, other than problems caused by people using shitty connectors and people who don't know the correct wiring. 10G Base-T is a thing that exists, and uses RJ-45 connectors on 6A or 7 cables. It looks like it's less popular than SFP+, at least in dense installations.

How to do it

[evilviper]

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:

Note: If your post is about a product you think might be unsafe, please report this information to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) or contact Amazon directly at product-safety@amazon.com.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help...

I would add UL (underwriters laboratories) 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.

Re:How to do it

[wkwilley2]

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.

Re:How to do it

[Megane]

You can fix that issue very simply by only buying name brand memory.

Or maybe not so simply.

Re:How to do it

[comrade.putin]

You can't simply rely on a brand name. You also have to buy from a trusted supplier.
Sandisk regularly releases guides on how to spot a fake, and often times the differences are very subtle

Re:How to do it

[wkwilley2]

This is very true. I'll normally only buy electronics from either Newegg or if it's an order that fulfilled by Amazon under the name of the MFG of the thing I'm buying.

This should go without saying, but if the price seems too good to be true, it probably is, just like with anything else you buy.

Yay corporate self regulation

[thegarbz]

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?

Re:Yay corporate self regulation

[Anonymous Coward]

That should get the importer in legal hot water

Xenophobe.

Re:Yay corporate self regulation

[bws111]

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.

Re:Yay corporate self regulation

[Anonymous Coward]

corporate self regulation

I thought Google was a corporation. Silly me.

Re:Yay corporate self regulation

[rahvin112]

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.

Re:Yay corporate self regulation

[Coren22]

Good luck with your trademark lawsuit against a Chinese company operating out of China.

Re:Yay corporate self regulation

[bws111]

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.

Re:Yay corporate self regulation

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't take it too seriously: the other posters are merely the type that cries out for supervision as they are unwilling to assume any responsibility for their purchases, i.e. they won't do any leg work and check whether the brand sold is certified compliant (by whoever) and will demand someone else protect them -- despite the excessive cost of such arrangement and inefficiencies.

Re:Yay corporate self regulation

[thegarbz]

The correct law for this is trademark law.

I prefer the Trade Practices Act. It not only covers the above trademark, but also covers deceptive advertising for things that aren't covered by trademarks and standards.

Re:Yay corporate self regulation

[thegarbz]

Amazon is a Chinese company now?

No they are a platform that is not Chinese that should be held accountable for things that move across it's store.

Re:Yay corporate self regulation

[Coren22]

Is Amazon misusing trademarks? How would you do a trademark lawsuit against Amazon? They haven't misused the trademark in any way.

Re:Yay corporate self regulation

[petermgreen]

The problem is afaict the marketplace sites model avoids most of the legal protections. Amazon/Ebay get off because they aren't actually the seller or the importer. The seller gets off because they are outside our legal system. Customs don't have the resources to open more than a tiny fraction of incoming packages and there is no reasonable way to tell from the outside of the package whether goods are legitimate or counterfiet.

I'm not sure what the soloution to this is. All the cures I can think of are worse than the disease. Tight regulation of marketplace sites would just drive the buisness to offshore sites that do an even. Having customs open and carefully inspect every small package that comes in would make it virtually impossible to buy stuff from overseas.

If only

[PopeRatzo]

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.

Re:If only

[gumbi west]

The odd thing is that you still shop there.

Re:If only

[cfalcon]

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.

Re:If only

[Anonymous Coward]

Also the length itself could be an issue.

Re:If only

[Bing Tsher E]

'Long' and 'High Speed' don't work together, especially not when it's an inexpensive commodity cable. There are maximum lengths for USB cable categories.

Re: If only

[Anonymous Coward]

Maximum length of USB 3.0 / USB 3.1 cable: The 3.0/3.1 specification does not specify a maximum cable length between USB 3.0/3.1 devices (SuperSpeed or SuperSpeed+), but there is a recommended length of 3 meters (or about 9 feet and 10 inches).

Re:If only

[Coren22]

Buy only Anker cables? They are sold on Amazon, and are very high quality for pretty low prices.

Re:If only

[PopeRatzo]

Yeah, that's what I've started to do. Anker products are pretty nice and reasonable.

Re:If only

[PopeRatzo]

The odd thing is that you still shop there.

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.

Re:If only

[Anonymous Coward]

Buy a good brand, and make sure it is shipped directly by Amazon (unless you really trust the seller). Lately I've been buying Aukey's USB cables which seem to be fairly well made and a good price. As recommended by others Anker are a good brand with a good reputation, so I presume they also make good cables, but not tried them myself.

There are lots of cheap crappy cables on Amazon, along with loads of other cheap crappy products. When buying from Amazon (like Ebay) it is very much a case of buyer beware.

Re:If only

[tibit]

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.

Re:If only

[gumbi west]

'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.

Re:If only

[Anonymous Coward]

because ethernet was designed to be fast over long runs, USB was not. You have to design both the protocol and electrical interface differently for long runs that are very fast. Among other things, speed of light, full vs half duplex, the exact shielding used, common ground, the number of turns per foot and termination all affect maximum cable length/speed in interrelated ways.

one of the most important ways they differ is ethernet is signalling into a controlled low impedance, a loop of wire that actually shorts the two ends together, this 'eats' any reflected wave by dissipating it as heat in the magnetics. , it can take a few watts just to power the ethernet driver at speed, ethernet has to put a lot of ooomph behind its signal to get its speeds, it's not just voltage, but the current capability to back it up. it can easily be the most power hungry thing on your laptop by a long shot including the screen and backlight.

USB was designed for low power and basically drives a high impedance line this means the voltage won't drop as much at the other end so you can get by with smaller voltages and almost no current, but also that signals reflect. long cables mean reflected signals in flight longer interfering and jumpling new data and long delays to wait for them to flush. With a maximum length, you can just wait for any reflection to run its course in a small, finite amount of time.

another huge important thing is a common ground, ethernet creates no electrical connection between devices, each side is isolated, meaning the grounds of the devices can float 50 volts from each other and still won't affect signal integrity, USB needs a common ground on both sides, over long runs, that ground can diverge, usb signals are at about 400millivolts, easily swamped by any ground noise flowing between your devices. Ethernet is immune to this due to magnetic coupling.

short answer, usb doesn't work over long runs of passive cable because it was not a design requirement and adding it would greatly complicate the design and increase the cost, for something that has no use in the common case. that's why there are repeater cables that have an active chip every few meters to rebroadcast the packets. High quality passive cables just can't help beyond a point.

Re:If only

[gumbi west]

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?

Vast Majority of 13 Items

[Anonymous Coward]

How many more than 7 items would be need to fail the test to be considered a 'vast' majority?

Why are these cables $10-15?

[danbob999]

Can't a compliant cable be made for $3 in China?

Re:Why are these cables $10-15?

[Anonymous Coward]

apparently not.

Re:Why are these cables $10-15?

[lgw]

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.

Re:Why are these cables $10-15?

[Anonymous Coward]

Poke around and you'll notice that there appears to be some minimum price you can sell a cable for on Amazon

This should be safe then

Re:Why are these cables $10-15?

[Immerman]

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 costs to you and you're easily in the $5-$10 range.

Plus there's the always fun "sure, I could sell you an adequate cable for $3 and make a modest profit, or I could sell you a piece of junk and make a *good* profit. You're on the other side of the planet, and my "company" is an incorporated mailbox. What are you going to do about it?"

You could probably get a much better cable direct from the manufacturer for $3, international shipping included, but only if you're ordering at least 100,000 units. Smaller orders are likely to involve a substantial markup and large non-predictable delays as they squeeze you in during idle time between production runs for customers they actually care about.

Meanwhile, the "good brands" probably cut out a middle-man or two, may even make it themselves, but what possible motive do they have to undercut the "competition"? You're going to buy their cables eventually anyway, and they're enjoying almost pure profit with every sale, but have to keep marketing their brand to maintain that cozy state of affairs.

Standards?

[cptdondo]

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,

Re:Standards?

[bws111]

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-current. Neither of those conditions are the fault of the standard.

Re:Standards?

[lgw]

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.

Re:Standards?

[bws111]

Nonsense. The standard is about interoperability. A device protecting itself has nothing to do with interoperability, therefore it does not belong in the standard.

Re:Standards?

[lgw]

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).

Re:Standards?

[Immerman]

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 indicates the original USB power standard: You can draw at most 100mA unless you've negotiated more with the host controller. Drawing more power than that without first being granted permission is a blatant violation of the standard, albeit one that is semi-commonly ignored even by reputable hardware companies, and very often by "USB accessory" fans, lamps, drink-warmers, etc. Occasionally with similarly bad results, but usually such devices draw considerably less power than a standard port is physically capable of delivering, so they rarely cause physical damage, just potential instability.

Re:Standards?

[thegarbz]

Hardly. I don't know of any standard computer interface that tolerates an unrestricted number of of faults across any I/O pins. Implementing something like this is actually incredibly difficult and the result would be a standard so prescriptive that it would barely get off the ground. Remember the reason of USB's success was that it was cheap and brain dead easy to implement, and tolerant about being widely out of spec.

But I challenge you to put -20v in any port on your computer (power socket excepted) and see if it still works after.

Re:How to do it (fake SD cards)

[Anonymous Coward]

Or the 32GB SD cards that are actually 8GB. I got one of those in 2014 and Amazon didn't even argue. They just refunded my money.

Amazon Review Link

[31415926535897]

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/...

That isn't the actual problem!

[Anonymous Coward]

The actual problem especially on Amazon is knockoffs. Vendors putting up cables, batteries, etc. and stating it's official or works with a certain device when it is not certified.

Most of the time these vendors get away with it; because of the cheap prices. When caught by the user, they will tell you if you ship it back for full refund it will cost you more than the product itself as they will not reimburse you for return shipping. So they will do you a favor and give you half back as they are being nice.

Benson fried his Pixel C; USB C cables DIFFER

[Streetlight]

One of these cheap cables wasn't wired correctly and when Benson connected it to a Pixel C to charge some device (Nexus Phone?), the Pixel was destroyed. Apparently during manufacture two wires in one of the connectors were switched.

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...

Re:Benson fried his Pixel C; USB C cables DIFFER

[Anonymous Coward]

Power supplies frying when they are asked to deliver more current than they are spec'd for are defective by design - they should have current limiting (and perhaps foldback) built in.

Re:Benson fried his Pixel C; USB C cables DIFFER

[perryizgr8]

>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:Benson fried his Pixel C; USB C cables DIFFER

[thegarbz]

What a stupid comment to make. Putting up with something out of spec inherently does not mean a design is defect. After all it's the damn spec. You want foldback current limiting? Put it in the spec.

Re:Benson fried his Pixel C; USB C cables DIFFER

[Bruce Perens]

Self-healing fuses are common in the industry and cost pennies. There isn't really an excuse for a device that fries simply because it is asked, in error, to deliver too much current. In contrast, there are other ways that a mis-wire could damage equipment that the manufacturer would have a hard time protecting against.

Re:Benson fried his Pixel C; USB C cables DIFFER

[thegarbz]

Self-healing fuses are common in the industry and cost pennies.

Yep, and they are also the source of many problems with USB devices and controllers. They were once common place and were then removed because they are big physically taking up a lot of board space and they started getting very flaky as power deliveries from USB steadily increased.

But hey since we're talking about spec, is it too much to expect a downstream device to only request the spec'd amount of power?

There isn't really an excuse for a device that fries simply because it is asked, in error, to deliver too much current.

Of course there is. Firstly self destructing designs are protection features in itself, and secondly there's no free lunch, and in the electronics world sometimes there's not even a cheap lunch. All sorts of fusing, current limiting, fold back, or otherwise circuitry doesn't come with just a cost, but also comes with an impact on the system it's protecting, especially if you do something like read through the USB spec and realise there was a correct negotiation technique for determining power levels in the first place.

Re:Benson fried his Pixel C; USB C cables DIFFER

[Bruce Perens]

If you look at the TI chip for USB C power delivery, here, overcurrent and overvoltage protection is specified as a feature. This is not to say that I have first-hand data on how he blew his Pixel C or what chip Google used. I do notice, though, that Google is not offering a protection policy for Pixel C as they do for the phones sold in the Play store. I hope the design isn't problematical.

Re:Benson fried his Pixel C; USB C cables DIFFER

[thegarbz]

That's nice, but switch to a product that actually exists like the TPS65986, then you get a full datasheet, including a table of maximum ratings.

Then note the absolute ratings go down to -0.3V on any I/O port. Scroll down to the current limiter and you see situations like still being able to provide 20A peak for over 10uS. Worse still if it's not a dead short it will still happily provide 5A for half a millisecond. Now those may not seem like much, and in terms of not exceeding thermal characteristics that's not an issue. However in a reverse voltage scenario you don't have that long, say like when you provide -5V to an I/O pin like the Pixel case did.

I'm not saying it won't work. I'm sure as hell saying that I wouldn't count on it though. My shame collection is full of things I've blown up due to miss-wiring despite having a nice and expensive Tektronix bench supply with some really fast acting CV/CC changeover characteristics (current limiting). When there's nothing in the spec requiring a port to withstand the most heinous of abuses that is backfeeding voltage into a socket then really all bets are off.

Again there's no silver bullet and no free lunch.

still a dumb standard

[Anonymous Coward]

Aside from signal integrity issues, there should be nothing wrong with using a cable made from tape and straightened paperclips. Nothing should catch fire. Nothing should get broken.

I ought to even be able to jamb a piece of foil into the connector without causing harm. Once I pick out the foil, the port should work again.

Re:still a dumb standard

[Austerity Empowers]

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 just throw out the junk. I don't like this model, but I'm both American and a hardware engineer. On a global scale that makes me a spoiled brat who won't use anything that isn't perfect, and will pay "too much" for it.

Apple's MFI certification not so dumb now

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple had a lot of problems with cheap-as-shit and noncompliant cables causing problems in the 'dock connector' era of devices.

So the implemented a testing/licensing regime with 'lightning' forward. Some call it a cynical cash grab. As someone who helps people use computing devices for a living, I call it a fucking godsend.

Apple knows some of their customers will fork out almost a 1000 dollars for a phone but then turn around and spend 99c on a charger/cable combo of dubious quality. Then, in the same breath, blame apple when things go wrong.

USB 3.1 type C really ups the game her, though. 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. Have you seen the pins on the connector? They're only a few hundredth's of an inch apart. Oh. And the connector is reversible.

Better not fuck any of that wiring up or you're going to dump power that's intended to charge a hungry lithium cell through electronics sensitive enough to decoded the untold millions of transitions per second required to shlep 10 gibits/sec through a consumer-priced, off the shelf cable you can get at wal-mart.

Re:Apple's MFI certification not so dumb now

[Tailhook]

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.

Re:Apple's MFI certification not so dumb now

[perryizgr8]

Surprisingly, other manufacturers also faced the same problems and came up with an easy, effective and cheaper solution: just build protections against shorts/over-current/over-voltage in your ports, upto a reasonable safety margin. So now my 10 year old HP desktop will show a discreet notification "The USB device on port 2 was drawing too much current and has been shut down." while the newest Macbook fries itself. Brilliant.

Trademark Law

[Etherwalk]

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.

In the meantime, people can sell something with a different name that means "doesn't quite meet the standard but good enough for printing."

Re:Trademark Law

[msauve]

"The solution would be Trademark Law,"

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.

laser pointers

[Anonymous Coward]

Laser pointers are listed as banned but there are still a lot of them listed and sold.

Caveat Emptor

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Caveat Emptor

[nukenerd]

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 higher quality. There are so many factors in the final retail price of an item like a cable that the manufactured quality has little to do with it directly.

I recently bought some leads for a test meter. I eventually bought three sets before finding one of adequate quality (the other two sets I threw away). I had never heard of any of the brands on offer (I've never bought test leads before in my life), and the best set was in fact the cheapest.

That is why standards are needed - to stop the waste of time, resources and money.

Re:Caveat Emptor

[Luthair]

The trouble is no cable manufacturer is really a household name, people assume Amazon does due diligence and things that are listed on their site are as described.

As Amazon allows random people to trade on their name by selling junk, Amazon risks being viewed as ebay is, a quagmire of garbage.

one bad product down, 999,999,999 to go

[Ymerej]

How gracious of Amazon to stop selling something crappy it's been publicly shamed about selling. Now if only they would stop selling all the other counterfeit crap that they knowingly pass on. I went though an endless loop of ordering an OEM battery for my SGS4 and returning because it was counterfeit. Each time I complained to an Amazon rep and they would agree that what they sent me must have somehow been counterfeit. Repeated complaints got broken promises to "investigate". http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-...

ebay

[Anonymous Coward]

so off to ebay they go. good help that does. Now Benson has to go and mark every one of them on ebay. haha.

User identification help?

[Keybounce]

So how am I, an end user, supposed to tell what is a good or bad cable, or charger, etc.?

I see mention/discussions of A to C cables, C to C cables, C devices being A's internally, etc., and I really don't know what I'm seeing.

I'm assuming that "A" is the old, large connector that I have on my computer or disk drive, B is the smaller one typically on cameras, and C is the tiny one on cell phones and tablets.

I know that my phone will sometimes tell me "This cable is not recommended for this device", without any explanation why, if I'm not using the company's cable.

I understand (or think I understand) that the spec calls for delivering 5A of power to a device, at different voltage levels based on what the device can handle, with 100 to 500 watts being available over normal ports/hubs (and direct connections to a computer able to get more than that).

But ... how can I tell what's a good/proper device/cable/procedure?
What makes some cables/chargers good and others not?

Counterfeit SD cards

[Anonymous Coward]

Now all they have to do is ban the myriad fake SD cards. Which they know about and have ignored for years. And after that all the fake batteries. In fact the easiest solution would just be to ban all goods sold from China...