Hacker News Reader

Comment by ShellfishMeme | Hacker News Reader

I've once received a USB-C charger with a portable breast milk warmer device that outputted 18V at 2A without doing PD negotiation.

That fried another device when I plugged it in.

This is non compliant in the EU, but when I reported it to the responsible authorities, they didn't feel like doing anything about it.

We are talking about a charger that can fry any device and potentially cause a fire, coming with a product aimed at people with babies, that's clearly non compliant to be sold in the EU, and they are doing nothing at all. Pretty shocking if you ask me.

View on HN

> but when I reported it to the responsible authorities, they didn't feel like doing anything about it.

One problem with EU regulation (or at least most regulations; a few have union-wide regulators) is that you're really quite dependent on whether your national responsible body is any good.

For something like this (assuming it's sold union-wide and not just in your country), it might actually be useful to notify the responsible bodies on _other countries_ (once it's actually investigated and recalled the recall should be union-wide).

I recently bought a really cheap Android Auto screen for my car. It had a USB-C power input. Suspicious, I opened up the supplied cigarette power adapter. The USB power pins were hooked straight to the car battery rail. On most vehicles that's connected straight back to the alternator. Hilarious. I wonder how many people fried their phones because they thought "oh, I forgot my charging cable, but I can borrow my nav screen's for a bit"...

I got a mini PC with such a charger (Mele Quieter). I was so shocked I immediately put a label on the USB end with a stark warning not to plug into anything.

Yeah, I'm surprised that I'm being down-voted for this comment for this exact reason. Manufacturers are adding non-compliant USB-C plugs to tons of equipment and it causes these types of issues.

It's possibly because of conflating USB-C (the connector) with the USB protocols (what goes down the wires).

I could put a USB-C connector on a device and have it not even try to do any USB protocol over the wire. If not being careful about pinouts, it could be super easy to destroy either device if plugged into some other USB-compliant device.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com