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USB-C Power Meter Helps You Spot Counterfeit Accessories Before They Fry Your Gadgets (gizmodo.com)
USB Type-C cables are not all created equally. In fact, some USB Type-C cables fail so badly that they will permanently damage your hardware. Benson Leung, an engineer on Google's Pixel team, discovered early last year that there's even more risk to your electronics when you've got a cheap USB-C cable with an older USB connector on the other end that doesn't properly regulate power draw. In an effort to weed out the bad cables from the good, a company called Satechi has released a "Type-C Power Meter" that makes it easy to tell if your USB-C gadgets are at risk of getting fried, or under-powered, by a sketchy accessory. Gizmodo reports: The simple pass-through adapter connects between a USB-C cable and a USB-C device, providing real-time data about the power draw, in either direction, including details about voltage, amps, and the amount of energy that's been transferred since it was first plugged in. The monitor can let you know if an external battery pack is providing the proper amount of power to a smartphone that it claims to, or if your MacBook or Chromebook is receiving sufficient power from a charging cable connected to its USB-C port to actually charge the battery. What the monitor can't do, however, is protect a device if there's a detected problem in the power flow. It's not a surge protector, nor does it have any built-in alarms or warnings because it has no idea what the power requirements are for whatever device you're using it with. You'll have to make sure you're aware of how much power a device is supposed to be drawing, and confirm that it matches what the Type-C Power Meter is reporting, as soon as you plug it in.
I use only the spun-gold Monster Type-C cables. I know, they cost quite a bit at a little over $600 a foot, but the power is so smooth, and a certified genuine Yogi meditated over them. If you really care about the performance of your equipment, you buys these and do without food.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
What bugs me about USB power is that the negotation for more than a tenth-amp (half-watt) takes place partly on the data lines. That means they need to be connected between the peripheral and the source.
So any charger device for a power-hungry gadget (such as a smartphone) will have a full four-wire connection and have the opportunity to attempt to exploit any USB port vulnerabilities of the device. Making a "condom" adapter to only connect the +5 and ground wires will normally provide reduce performance (if it works at all). Vetting one that does connect to the data lines on both sides is difficult - both to insure that it does what's intended and doesn't have a backdoor, and that it, itself, isn't such an attacking device.
Given that Russian intelligence was already caught handing out phone-cracking "USB chargers" to many countries' high officials at an international conference, the threat not just a hypothetical.
(Note that some powered hubs just tie +5 and ground to the supply, rather than try to negotiate and enforce per-port power limits, too.)
IMHO: A USB device that depends on its power source to limit its input current, and can be damaged by a host that is willing to deliver more current that it requested, is defective by design. The negotiation and enforcement is for the benefit of the power source (for instance, a laptop trying to protect its battery life).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"Stop being cheap and buy known certified products from official channels"
Please, there's plenty of UL/CE-listed crap out there where the second you take the power transformer apart you can find violations.
Certification means jack shit in this day and age.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I agree. A short cheap cable with an inline fuse could solve this problem. No reason to turn the function of a fuse into a fancy overpriced gadget.
No it couldn't.
USB-C is the standard that charges tiny little Bluetooth headsets and your MacBook. Same cable. It's also the standard that's supposed to be able to tell the difference between the big power supply for the MacBook and the little one that came with the Bluetooth headset, so that the MacBook knows that it's not going to get what it needs unless the big power supply is at the other end. Conversely, it also keeps the big power supply from totally detonating the Bluetooth headset.
The key to this technology is the ability for the cable and the devices at either end to essentially have a conversation about what's charging what. The problem here is when that conversation gets a bit garbled...and the capacity at one end and need at the other end are allowed to misalign, catastrophically. Sure, you could put a fuse inline to keep your Bluetooth headset from melting...but then you'd only be able to charge your Bluetooth headset with that cable. And the whole point of USB-C is about getting away from that paradigm.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
No, the main reason is bad standards and poor regulation. Even for the well educated, there's no good way to tell apart a bad device from a good one.