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Google engineer finds USB Type-C cable that’s so bad it fried his Chromebook

168 points by luastoned 11y ago

Sami_Lehtinen 11y ago
Sounds strange. AFAIK USB shouldn't get fried without external power source. So the Chromebook was bad, not the cable? Down votes? Did I misunderstand something? Just comment with reference that I'm wrong and I'm very happy. Why bother building 'USB Killer' if simple paper clip would fry the motherboard?
- mkuhn 11y ago
  He tried to charge a Chromebook Pixel with the cable. At least that is how I read the article...
- skj 11y ago
  The external power source was presumably a wall outlet, since he was testing its ability to charge.
  - gravypod 11y ago
    Well that is an entirely different story. I thought that the cable was plugged into a phone and his chromebook (Just like parent). I was concerned that this might be a flaw in the chrome book, not the cable. The USB bus should be fine to use such a cable, charging is another thing. When you add the external power source, that completely changes the game.
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      Best i understand, the guy involved works for Google on USB support in their software and hardware. What got fried was a Chromebook Pixel. A Chromebook designed and sold by Google directly. He has been using it and various test instruments to check up on A-to-C adapter cables, as they need to have a specific resistor in them to indicate their nature.
- mjlee 11y ago
  More details here: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2XDBFUD9CTN2R/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm https://www.amazon.com/review/R2XDBFUD9CTN2R/ref=cm_cr_rdp_p... The source was a "1st party Apple 12W iPad charger"
uptown 11y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11021665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11021665
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    The provided link is to an HN discussion from yesterday of this same story (not the same article, but Benson Leung announcing the dangerous cable).
    - rahimnathwani 11y ago
      Oops. My bad.
Kiro 11y ago
I'm trying to find info about SurjTech with no luck. Does this company even exist?
- paulgb 11y ago
  I've noticed that a lot of "brands" on Amazon, especially for cheap electronics, seem to only exist on Amazon. I assume people are buying things in bulk from Alibaba or similar and sticking their label on it.
  - jacobolus 11y ago
    Not necessarily. Here’s a fascinating story about one Amazon retailer: http://www.fastcompany.com/3021229/chaim-pikarski-the-amazon-whisperer http://www.fastcompany.com/3021229/chaim-pikarski-the-amazon...
    - edc117 11y ago
      This is kinda cool. At first I thought 'ugh, bottom feeder, must be cheap knockoff crap', but the more I read about the business the more respect I got for how he runs it. The fast feedback loop, the quick product iteration...he's going to eat more than one big name's margins. Thanks for sharing.
josteink 11y 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?
- randallsquared 11y ago
  USB C is not a passive signal cable.
  - josteink 11y ago
    Tomay-to/tomay-to. Yes, USB C can also be used to provide power (which is also a form of signal), but again my point is that a cable like this is largely expected to be a passive component. That a crap charger can do bad things would probably surprise no one, but hooking a good charger up to a good unit shouldn't be able to fry anything, ever. Wasn't USB C supposed to make our lives easier? If we need to ensure all our USB C gadgets, cables and chargers are all not-exploding certified, in parts and in combination, I may just go back to plain old regular USB.
    - Vendan 11y ago
      Pretty sure you could make a "plain old regular" usb cable that would do similar. Maybe you should go back to RS-232? You should also beware of just about any usb device you see, as it could be a http://kukuruku.co/hub/diy/usb-killer http://kukuruku.co/hub/diy/usb-killer in disguise
    - sharpneli 11y ago
      Hooking up a good charger up to a good unit with the ground and voltage wires reversed can fry things. You can try it with your laptop. Cut the cable after the transformer, flip the ground and live wires and start it. It will get fried. Is this the fault of the specification or the person who intentionally flipped the wires? The manufacturer was the person flipping the wires in this case.
jonawesomegreen 11y ago
I wonder if he will be able to recover any of his losses from this company? I know he is reviewing these cables, so hes taking a certain amount of risk, but imagine if someone bought this cable for their new device. I would be pretty pissed if I bought a new device and a new USB cord to charge it and poof out goes the magical smoke and my USB didn't work anymore.
- sharpneli 11y ago
  He might have a case. It was sold as an USB cable but clearly it is not actually an USB cable. False advertisement if not anything else.
  - esquivalience 11y ago
    He may even have a case against Amazon directly, depending on the circumstances of listing.
    - dcherman 11y ago
      Honestly, I don't think he'd need a case against Amazon for this. If the original company refuses to pony up and Amazon was made aware, I feel like they'd just do it since it would be good PR to help make it right since what he's doing is a huge service for Amazon's customers.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    Establishing liability seems easy. Winning a judgment in small claims court ought to be straightforward. Actually collecting on that judgment could be a challenge depending on where the company is located and how they do business.
    - jonawesomegreen 11y ago
      I agree. That is really what I was wondering. Will he be able to see any money from this.
  - 11y ago
hagope 11y ago
I find my micro USB type-B connectors all eventually fail, and I've been combing through Amazon to find a reliable cable manufacturer, any suggestions?
- coffeedrinker 11y ago
  Anker.
  - hagope 11y ago
    I like their charging products, but the cables have been failing at the connector...
    - kimdouglasmason 11y ago
      Which kind of cable? If it's micro USB, they're designed to fail under low amounts of stress (thus sparing the much more difficult to replace port). Unless handled with kid gloves, Micro USB cables from all manufacturer break easily.
  - lorenzhs 11y ago
    Yup, I've never had a problem with any of my Anker gear. Cables aren't as flimsy as most of the cheaper ones - they seem pretty sturdy - and their other stuff (I have a 5-port wall charger and a power bank) is top notch as well. I usually don't like advertising a brand like that, but they seem to be doing everything right so far and I'd buy it all again.
- Bjartr 11y ago
  This is actually by design, kind of. Mini USB didn't have this problem with cable connectors because the complexity was in the jack. Unfortunately that meant that when a failure did occur it was on the divide and couldn't easily be fixed. Micro USB improved on that by shifting the complexity to the plug side. So the cable failing eventually is down to a lesser of two evils engineering tradeoff.
  - 11y ago
sergiotapia 11y ago
I thought type-c was supposed to be the end-all compatibility design. You buy any type-c and it works to spec. What gives?
- mikeash 11y ago
  What gives is that this was not actually a type C cable, but an evil, broken cable mislabeled as a USB-C cable.
  - Arnt 11y ago
    Right... but two questions stick their head up and want answers: First, USB outlets are supposed to have a bit of a fuse. Why was this upfuckage so spectacular? Second, why do USB type C ports/cables have 24 pins if there are only 4 wires? I can understand having a couple of extra ones for type/orientation detection and a doubling to support reversion, but 24 is a lot.
    - Vendan 11y ago
      well, usb type C is supposed to have at least 9 wires, if I recall correctly. This is not a valid type C cable, but it was being sold as one, which is part of the outrage. (aside from the "killing devices" bit)
      - cesarb 11y ago
        A "USB Type-C to USB 2.0 Type-A cable" has 4 wires (same as any USB 2.0 cable, really; only the plug in one end is different). The problem is that this was being sold as a "USB Type-C to USB 3.1 Type-A cable", which is supposed to have 10 wires. (A full USB Type-C cable has some 18 wires, since it wires both sides separately so the alternate modes which use both sides separately can work.)
    - zyxley 11y ago
      > Why was this upfuckage so spectacular? Because it had power wired to ground. This would be incredibly absurd in ANY variety of powered cable. This is not merely "noncompliant with spec", it's "actively dangerous because it could start a fire and kill somebody".
dawnbreez 11y ago
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.
- Someone1234 11y 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.
  - TeMPOraL 11y 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.
  - latj 11y 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.
DannyBee 11y ago
I think this is a little far to go to try to get a new laptop outside of whatever Google's laptop upgrade/refresh policy is.
bb88 11y ago
Surjtech. Aka surge-tech. It sounds like they were trying to be honest at least.
yaur 11y ago
I wonder how many of the other products using the exact same marketing copy[1] are the same part. [1]https://www.google.com/search?q=%22The+combination+of+sturdy+construction+with+a+flexible+jacket+and+USB+3.1+Type+C+connector+with+molded+strain+relief+provides+a+cable+with+reliable+performance+and+long+life.%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22The+combination+of+sturdy...
pmarreck 11y ago
https://usbccompliant.com/ https://usbccompliant.com/ is one output of the engineer's work, for anyone curious

168 points by luastoned 11y ago

Sounds strange. AFAIK USB shouldn't get fried without external power source. So the Chromebook was bad, not the cable? Down votes? Did I misunderstand something? Just comment with reference that I'm wrong and I'm very happy. Why bother building 'USB Killer' if simple paper clip would fry the motherboard?

mkuhn 11y ago
He tried to charge a Chromebook Pixel with the cable. At least that is how I read the article...
skj 11y ago
The external power source was presumably a wall outlet, since he was testing its ability to charge.
- gravypod 11y ago
  Well that is an entirely different story. I thought that the cable was plugged into a phone and his chromebook (Just like parent). I was concerned that this might be a flaw in the chrome book, not the cable. The USB bus should be fine to use such a cable, charging is another thing. When you add the external power source, that completely changes the game.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Best i understand, the guy involved works for Google on USB support in their software and hardware. What got fried was a Chromebook Pixel. A Chromebook designed and sold by Google directly. He has been using it and various test instruments to check up on A-to-C adapter cables, as they need to have a specific resistor in them to indicate their nature.
mjlee 11y ago
More details here: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2XDBFUD9CTN2R/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm https://www.amazon.com/review/R2XDBFUD9CTN2R/ref=cm_cr_rdp_p... The source was a "1st party Apple 12W iPad charger"

uptown 11y ago

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

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- maxerickson 11y ago
  The provided link is to an HN discussion from yesterday of this same story (not the same article, but Benson Leung announcing the dangerous cable).
  - rahimnathwani 11y ago
    Oops. My bad.

Kiro 11y ago

I'm trying to find info about SurjTech with no luck. Does this company even exist?

paulgb 11y ago
I've noticed that a lot of "brands" on Amazon, especially for cheap electronics, seem to only exist on Amazon. I assume people are buying things in bulk from Alibaba or similar and sticking their label on it.
- jacobolus 11y ago
  Not necessarily. Here’s a fascinating story about one Amazon retailer: http://www.fastcompany.com/3021229/chaim-pikarski-the-amazon-whisperer http://www.fastcompany.com/3021229/chaim-pikarski-the-amazon...
  - edc117 11y ago
    This is kinda cool. At first I thought 'ugh, bottom feeder, must be cheap knockoff crap', but the more I read about the business the more respect I got for how he runs it. The fast feedback loop, the quick product iteration...he's going to eat more than one big name's margins. Thanks for sharing.

josteink 11y 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?

randallsquared 11y ago
USB C is not a passive signal cable.
- josteink 11y ago
  Tomay-to/tomay-to. Yes, USB C can also be used to provide power (which is also a form of signal), but again my point is that a cable like this is largely expected to be a passive component. That a crap charger can do bad things would probably surprise no one, but hooking a good charger up to a good unit shouldn't be able to fry anything, ever. Wasn't USB C supposed to make our lives easier? If we need to ensure all our USB C gadgets, cables and chargers are all not-exploding certified, in parts and in combination, I may just go back to plain old regular USB.
  - Vendan 11y ago
    Pretty sure you could make a "plain old regular" usb cable that would do similar. Maybe you should go back to RS-232? You should also beware of just about any usb device you see, as it could be a http://kukuruku.co/hub/diy/usb-killer http://kukuruku.co/hub/diy/usb-killer in disguise
  - sharpneli 11y ago
    Hooking up a good charger up to a good unit with the ground and voltage wires reversed can fry things. You can try it with your laptop. Cut the cable after the transformer, flip the ground and live wires and start it. It will get fried. Is this the fault of the specification or the person who intentionally flipped the wires? The manufacturer was the person flipping the wires in this case.

jonawesomegreen 11y ago

I wonder if he will be able to recover any of his losses from this company? I know he is reviewing these cables, so hes taking a certain amount of risk, but imagine if someone bought this cable for their new device. I would be pretty pissed if I bought a new device and a new USB cord to charge it and poof out goes the magical smoke and my USB didn't work anymore.

sharpneli 11y ago
He might have a case. It was sold as an USB cable but clearly it is not actually an USB cable. False advertisement if not anything else.
- esquivalience 11y ago
  He may even have a case against Amazon directly, depending on the circumstances of listing.
  - dcherman 11y ago
    Honestly, I don't think he'd need a case against Amazon for this. If the original company refuses to pony up and Amazon was made aware, I feel like they'd just do it since it would be good PR to help make it right since what he's doing is a huge service for Amazon's customers.
- mikeash 11y ago
  Establishing liability seems easy. Winning a judgment in small claims court ought to be straightforward. Actually collecting on that judgment could be a challenge depending on where the company is located and how they do business.
  - jonawesomegreen 11y ago
    I agree. That is really what I was wondering. Will he be able to see any money from this.
- 11y ago

hagope 11y ago

I find my micro USB type-B connectors all eventually fail, and I've been combing through Amazon to find a reliable cable manufacturer, any suggestions?

coffeedrinker 11y ago
Anker.
- hagope 11y ago
  I like their charging products, but the cables have been failing at the connector...
  - kimdouglasmason 11y ago
    Which kind of cable? If it's micro USB, they're designed to fail under low amounts of stress (thus sparing the much more difficult to replace port). Unless handled with kid gloves, Micro USB cables from all manufacturer break easily.
- lorenzhs 11y ago
  Yup, I've never had a problem with any of my Anker gear. Cables aren't as flimsy as most of the cheaper ones - they seem pretty sturdy - and their other stuff (I have a 5-port wall charger and a power bank) is top notch as well. I usually don't like advertising a brand like that, but they seem to be doing everything right so far and I'd buy it all again.
Bjartr 11y ago
This is actually by design, kind of. Mini USB didn't have this problem with cable connectors because the complexity was in the jack. Unfortunately that meant that when a failure did occur it was on the divide and couldn't easily be fixed. Micro USB improved on that by shifting the complexity to the plug side. So the cable failing eventually is down to a lesser of two evils engineering tradeoff.
- 11y ago

sergiotapia 11y ago

I thought type-c was supposed to be the end-all compatibility design. You buy any type-c and it works to spec. What gives?

mikeash 11y ago
What gives is that this was not actually a type C cable, but an evil, broken cable mislabeled as a USB-C cable.
- Arnt 11y ago
  Right... but two questions stick their head up and want answers: First, USB outlets are supposed to have a bit of a fuse. Why was this upfuckage so spectacular? Second, why do USB type C ports/cables have 24 pins if there are only 4 wires? I can understand having a couple of extra ones for type/orientation detection and a doubling to support reversion, but 24 is a lot.
  - Vendan 11y ago
    well, usb type C is supposed to have at least 9 wires, if I recall correctly. This is not a valid type C cable, but it was being sold as one, which is part of the outrage. (aside from the "killing devices" bit)
    - cesarb 11y ago
      A "USB Type-C to USB 2.0 Type-A cable" has 4 wires (same as any USB 2.0 cable, really; only the plug in one end is different). The problem is that this was being sold as a "USB Type-C to USB 3.1 Type-A cable", which is supposed to have 10 wires. (A full USB Type-C cable has some 18 wires, since it wires both sides separately so the alternate modes which use both sides separately can work.)
  - zyxley 11y ago
    > Why was this upfuckage so spectacular? Because it had power wired to ground. This would be incredibly absurd in ANY variety of powered cable. This is not merely "noncompliant with spec", it's "actively dangerous because it could start a fire and kill somebody".

dawnbreez 11y ago

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.

Someone1234 11y 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.
- TeMPOraL 11y 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.
- latj 11y 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.

DannyBee 11y ago

I think this is a little far to go to try to get a new laptop outside of whatever Google's laptop upgrade/refresh policy is.

bb88 11y ago

Surjtech. Aka surge-tech. It sounds like they were trying to be honest at least.

yaur 11y ago

I wonder how many of the other products using the exact same marketing copy[1] are the same part. [1]https://www.google.com/search?q=%22The+combination+of+sturdy+construction+with+a+flexible+jacket+and+USB+3.1+Type+C+connector+with+molded+strain+relief+provides+a+cable+with+reliable+performance+and+long+life.%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22The+combination+of+sturdy...

pmarreck 11y ago

https://usbccompliant.com/ https://usbccompliant.com/ is one output of the engineer's work, for anyone curious