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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.