Google engineer finds USB Type-C cable that’s so bad it fried his Chromebook (opens in new tab)

(arstechnica.co.uk)

168 pointsluastoned10y ago89 comments

89 comments

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11021665

I'm not an electrical engineer, but wiring something other than ground to the ground pin is...well, I suspect it's straight-up malicious, although why you'd want to do something like this, I don't know.

Someone123410y ago

> I suspect it's straight-up malicious

Hanlon's razor: "never assume malice when stupidity will suffice."

It doesn't even make rational sense for a business creating cables to intentionally damage equipment. They'd just get sued, tons of bad PR/reviews, and gain nothing obvious.

More likely they just had production line issues, lack of QA, and poor training for staff. Resulted in malfunctioning equipment being sold. Most people that build cables don't understand how the cable works, they just follow instructions they're given (e.g. "red cable into position #1, white/black cable into #2, yellow into #3," etc).

Ultimately this might just be one incorrectly assembled cable; but the issue here is that they don't QA cables before they leave the shop. Electrical testing on most cables is quick, inexpensive, and automatable. They likely saved a few cent per cable by skipping it, but in the cable industry that might be significant savings.

latj10y ago

My money is on incompetence too, but it certainly could be malicious. For example, imagine a small company run by two frat brother entrepreneur guys. They bribe some factory supervisor in Taiwan for the designs to a product. They cant understand anything about it but they decide to tweak it to make it cheaper. Their greatly underpaid sole engineer discovers his girlfriend is cheating with the main entrepreneur guy. This is pretty disgusting because engineer man is a good guy and main guy has an underage girlfriend living in a plywood loft built inside a storage unit. One day engineer man says "fuck this I'm going to be a fucking farmer now". He modifies the designs to suck before grabbing a check from the middle of the stack in the printer and heads out the door. Six months later the factory in Taiwan wants the designs for the new product. Main guy digs around on the file system and finds the modified stuff. His new engineer just started and isnt really an engineer but rather an engineering student- he says he will "do the needful". Instead of looking over the designs new engineer plays rocket league and smokes weed. Another six months later engineer guy is growing organic carrots and heritage lambs with his new gf who has kind of fucked up feet and not great teeth but she's nice to him and is good at farm chores. At night he goes to read /r/girlsgoodatfarmchores and at some point sees a link to a video of a cable frying the shit out of the thing its plugged into. "Huh, I really ought to clean this shit out from under my fingernails" he thinks.

2 more replies

TeMPOraL10y ago

Given all the other problems with this cable, it seems to be yet another case of an "entrepreneur" trying to make a quick buck, except this one happened to (probably accidentally) add destruction to fraud.

I still wonder, what's in the minds of people who sell this kind of crap, and where did their conscience go? I wish we'd have a reliable way of getting rid of such vendors.

dawnbreez10y ago

My point is that it may be more complicated to assume stupidity, because the process of getting someone that incredibly dumb into a position where he's dictating the wiring pattern of the cable, with nobody telling him he's an idiot in the process, is far more complex than most forms of stupidity. Hanlon and Occam may be at odds here.

MatthewWilkes10y ago

So, there's a couple of interesting bits of context. Firstly, the way these dodgy cables try and suck more juice out of sockets is by putting passives between the data lines to trick the phone into a genuine OEM charger from the same manufacturer, so it ignores the USB power specs.

Secondly, the way USB declares that something is a host is by tying ground to the sheath.

So, there's precedent for tying things together (through a passive), and tying things to ground (but only things that are floating). MY guess is that they bought some connectors designed for USB host that had the sheath tied to ground and in their attempts to tie D+ and D- together shorted to ground. Only a guess though, you really don't want to do this.

josteink10y ago

Does anyone else find it concerning that our new and best technology is so fragile that even the slightest fezz-up in what should be a passive signal-cable can cause our otherwise state of the art equipment to fry itself?

Is reliability, durability and robustness nowhere to be found in any single spec for our new standards?

sharpneli10y ago

It was not a slight fezz-up. It was miswiring in a power cable. It's like electrician wiring the live pin into ground pin and then wondering why one gets electrocuted by so many devices.

No specification can defend against a hostile, or sufficiently incompetent, implementer.

nemik10y ago

It's what fuses and diodes are used for. You know how when you write a program you never trust user-input? This should be the same thing, but physically. A well-designed USB port wouldn't fry the computer like it did.