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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.
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.
Sneer aside, this is actually a good step in the right direction.
Amazon has gotten better about such things. You no longer have to go through the foreign support people with the forms and scripts. They now have a direct contact for unsafe product issues:
I would add UL (underwriters laboratories) 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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
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.