I've been whining for months about the crap sandwich Apple and Google created by adopting USB-C for their new laptops without supporting the ecosystem: a writhing sea of dangerously low-quality third-party cables and adapters. Amazon is taking action, banning low-quality USB-C gadgetry from the store.

The crackdown is almost certainly in response to the glut of cheap USB Type-C cables that have flooded Amazon over the past year—and to at least one example of a dodgy cable frying a Google engineer's Chromebook Pixel. In that case, the third-party seller stated that it was a standards-compliant USB 3.1 Type-C cable with SuperSpeed. As it turned out, the cable was completely missing the extra wires needed for SuperSpeed and two of the other wires had been transposed. The miswired cable killed his laptop instantly.

Ken Shirriff embarked upon a teardown of counterfeit Apple laptop chargers. On the outside, they're typo-free and very convincing. Inside, though, they're a dangerous mangle of cheap parts and inexplicably bad decisions.

The most important feature of a charger is the isolation between the potentially-dangerous AC input and the low-voltage output… The counterfeit MagSafe charger has a dangerously small distance between the low voltage side (top) and the high voltage side (bottom). This is why you shouldn't buy counterfeit chargers.

I'm puzzled as to why counterfeit chargers never manage to have sufficient clearance distances. They use simple, low-complexity circuits so the circuit board layout should be straightforward. Except in the smallest cube phone chargers, they aren't fighting for every millimeter of space. It shouldn't take much additional effort to make the boards safer.

Matthew Garrett "bought some awful light bulbs so you don't have to." And you really, really shouldn't buy the iRainbow light bulb set: the controller box runs all sorts of insecure services, including an open WiFi hotspot that lets anyone into your home network. Read the rest