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Comment by hkmurakami | Hacker News Reader

A Googler reviewing every USB Type C cable (and leaving scathing reviews for ones that suck) comes to mind.

http://gizmodo.com/a-google-engineer-is-publicly-shaming-cra...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A25GROL6KJV3QG/ref=cm_c...

That's a great example too, because Amazon actually ended up following up and banning cables that were found to be non-compliant with the spec, largely based on his reviews: http://lifehacker.com/amazon-bans-non-compliant-usb-c-cables...

I like that they've said they'll start banning the cables, but I'm disappointed that - from my reading of the article - Amazon isn't doing any testing to detect these bad cables and are instead relying on customer reviews to report bad cables. That means for most cables someone's going to have to buy a cable and have it damage their device or have the equipment and know-how to detect it ahead of time.

Having Amazon test every cable obviously doesn't scale either but couldn't they require the vendors to provide test results showing that the cable is spec compliant? Of course the vendor could forge the results, but that's intentionally malicious and this would at least catch non-malicious accidents.

Are these bad cables UL listed? That seems like it would be an easy enough filter for someone like Amazon to employ.

Electricity goes through it. Check. UL listed? Check. Okay, goes on the suggestions page.

This sort of thing is very hard to catch because the products themselves can change without a SKU changing which means you have to constantly test them. It's not Amazon's model, but from the customer's point of view it's probably better to severely limit the number of vendors for something commoditized like a USB cable.

He recently fried a Chromebook with one of those bad cables. Can't find the source right now but it was posted here on Hacker News.

Here's another one that comes to mind. He does GPS watches geared toward activity and fitness use cases: http://www.dcrainmaker.com/blog

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