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USB Type-C

For months, Google engineer Benson Leung has been engaged in a i-man war against a seemingly countless stream of terrible USB-C cables. As nosotros detailed back in November, Leung, who works on Google'due south Chromebook Pixel and Pixel C teams, has been testing and validating (or invalidating) dozens of cables depending on whether or not they were manufactured appropriately to USB-C spec and were uniform with Chromebooks or other devices that rely on the however-nascent port standard. Today, Leung won a major victory; Amazon has appear it will no longer sell cheap, substandard USB-C cabling.

The alter comes courtesy of an update to the Amazon terms and conditions for detail sales, and prohibits "Any USB-C™ (or USB Type-C™) cable or adapter product that is not compliant with standard specifications issued by "USB Implementers Forum Inc." Companies that endeavor to mislabel and sell such products could run into their accounts suspended if users complain.

Unfortunately, this kind of ban isn't likely to have a huge impact on whether or not third-party manufacturers keep aircraft flawed hardware. The engineers that actually blueprint the specs and the marketing and PR people who write the advert re-create are often in less-than perfect contact with each other. This problem was on display multiple times last twelvemonth when Samsung alleged it encrypted the sound information it sent over the web for processing (information technology didn't), or when Vizio told journalists you were only opted into a viewing habits monitoring programme if y'all agreed to take part (in reality, its customers were opted-in whether they agreed with beingness part of the program or not). Amazon also isn't volunteering to accept on cable testing itself, so the number of eyeballs looking at whatsoever given solution are going to exist limited.

USB Type-C port

A USB Blazon-C port next to USB 3.0

With that said, this is a step forwards, and Leung himself agrees. He writes: "Really keen news, but we all accept to go along to be vigilant and call out any bad products nosotros discover on Amazon and other stores (both online and brick and mortar) as we find them."

If you need resources on picking advisable cabling, users accept assembled both a website and a Google Docs spreadsheet to disseminate this information. We highly recommend taking advantage of this resource — bad USB-C cables don't work (at best) and can crusade catastrophic organization damage or complete device failure. Some dodgy cables volition work on some hardware but not in others, with no data provided to the user on what might be causing the trouble. It's best to avert the problem birthday. Given that edifice a compliant cable really isn't difficult compared to the harm not-compliant designs take been known to cause, the sooner we meet this problem stamped out, the amend.