What, you expect the flash drives they hand out for free at trade shows to be decent quality?
They are intended to be used to distribute advertising materials, not be rewritten multiple times.
E-waste, I say no to these same as I say no to straws, or plastic forks for takeout.
A business card with a link to the content would be a lot less wasteful.
Yep, and everyone understands a QR code these days
I remember some kid at a job fair in college handing out his resume on flash drives. I remember one of the booths saying “yeah, that’s not getting read.”
It'd be an awful security risk if they did. You can't trust that the USB stick contains the resume to begin with.
A smart kid would have written a Stuxnet type malware that finds its way to any payroll system and adds him silently to it.
A smarter kid would then have it auto email their cyber dept with their resume and point out the vulnerability, and have their malware autoremove himself from the system before getting paid so he doesn't go to jail for it. And even then, it's illegal and a risky move just to try to get a job.
Taking the joke a little too seriously, huh?
Smarter, or delusional?
It’d be an awful security risk if they did.
Wasn't that an actual plot device used over and over in Mr Robot?
Also in real life, although more with "lost" USB sticks, than handing them out as part of a resume (although the effect would be the same).
If people encounter an unlabelled USB stick, they'll often try and plug it into to discern whose it was. So if you put some malware on it, you can infect a network that you might not normally be aware of.
Since their brand is on it, yeah. I would expect that if the company wants my business, they wouldn't put their name on shit quality products. Especially if it can lead to their would-be customers losing data. It kind of baffles me that they think this is a good way to impress me.
Just happened to me the other day at THE worst possible moment. I bought a new mainboard which needed a BIOS update to work with my new CPU.
Me of course being a cheapskate I bought the cheapest one with no Bios flashback. So I put the files on a cheap USB, start the upate and compleatly bricked the mainboard.
After that I plugged the USB back into my PC and the fking USB corrupted the files.
Luckily I managed to save the BIOS but absolutley lost it in that moment.
Value your time and sanity over pure monetary value. It seems like something Lemmy users seem to do the complete opposite of at all times.
Saving $1 on a flash drive could have cost $100 on a motherboard. Saving $20 could have cost you $100 buying another one.
Learned this lesson the hard way, once bought a cheap replacement laptop charger for one that had broken.
It didn't work and instead borked the backlight of my screen.
I then discovered that on this model, the backlight couldn't be separately replaced, had to buy and fit a whole new screen and then also buy another replacement charger.
Never cheap out on things that hold data, or power supplies.
At best, you'll get extremely lucky and nothing untoward will happen.. giving you false confidence to try again.
At worst, catastrophic loss of data, hardware, or more.
The flashdrive in case was a random merchandise gift thing. It worked previously and was just the first one in the drawer.
But yeah in the future I will defintly get something better.
Also I did learn how to directly read and write Chips on the mainboard so the time spent wasn't totally wasted.
Oof. Honestly I do the same thing and I think your experience just convinced me not to. I keep a couple of those junk vendor USB's just for things like BIOS updates since the capacity is usually small. I hadn't considered one failing right in the middle of an update.
My guess is that the factories manufacturing the storage chips are making money on the side by selling off chips tuat failed quality control to companies that make these cheap USB drives or the factory is meaking the cheap USB drives themselves from the QC failed chips on the side and is selling them
It's also why you see a lot of rip off products from China because the factories line to make money on the side
They don't exactly fail the quality checks, they get binned into a lower grade. It's a common practice in many industries when reworking isn't possible or financially viable.
It isn't necessarily a bad thing either. Consumers can save some money when they don't need top performance, the company gets some revenue, and the products don't go into a landfill right away.
So it's not good enough for the main product and gets put into a different pile? That sure sounds like a failed QC check to me. I agree with you though about the excess.
it fails the top tier qc check, but passes a low tier qc check. That's how different price points/tiers for CPUs exist.
And then there's those who fail the low tier check and "some friend" gets them for scrap en masse.
That sounds like two different ways of saying the same thing.
It failed to be the best, but it was good enough to be used for something else.
Depends on the nature of the failure. This is super common in CPUs for example. The absolutely perfect ones go in the top quality bin, those are your i9 and Ryzen 9 CPUs. Ones that are functionally fine, but a bit unstable at the higher clock speeds end up in the next lower quality bin, so something like an i7 or a Ryzen 7. Then you have ones that maybe have a failed core or two, those ones have the failed cores fused off and go in the next lower bin with lower core counts. Etc.
In the case of a flash memory chip as long as it isn't corrupting data at a certain speed I'd expect it to be binned down to a lower quality bin. Assuming whoever buys that chip runs it at the clock speed the binning says to run it at it should be fine. Where you'd run into problems is if whoever buys it ignores what they were told and runs it at the full speed, in which case you're going to end up with corrupted data.
Likewise other things that could lead to a usable but lower quality chip is if certain areas of memory were bad. As long as you disable those failed memory regions and sell it as a lower capacity chip that's also fine. Once again though if the buyer re-enables the failed memory regions then that's a problem.
This is how chip fabrication works. It's how chip fabrication has always worked. Chip yields are never perfect. The lithography processes aren't 100% accurate, the substrates aren't 100% pure, and some portion of chips come out of the oven with flaws. Always. That's just how it is.
That doesn't mean those chips don't work, it just means they won't work to their maximum design specifications. So to use a very simplified example, a 32 gig flash chip with a flaw found in it somewhere can be burned so the flawed portion will never be used, and then binned as a 16 gig chip. A processor core that's not stable at its maximum rated speed can be burned so it'll be a perfectly serviceable lower speed version. Etc. The process is already done, the material is already used, and that chip can still be serviceable. So why throw it away?
That's the white hat version.
The black hat version is, some shady manufacturer could take the chips that are too flawed to be used reliably for any purpose, and use them anyway. Where that distinction is drawn is pretty important.
Steve Gibson recently created a small utility to test USB drives to see if they work and actually give you the store space they claim.
What, you expect the flash drives they hand out for free at trade shows to be decent quality?
They are intended to be used to distribute advertising materials, not be rewritten multiple times.
E-waste, I say no to these same as I say no to straws, or plastic forks for takeout.
A business card with a link to the content would be a lot less wasteful.
Yep, and everyone understands a QR code these days
I remember some kid at a job fair in college handing out his resume on flash drives. I remember one of the booths saying “yeah, that’s not getting read.”
It'd be an awful security risk if they did. You can't trust that the USB stick contains the resume to begin with.
A smart kid would have written a Stuxnet type malware that finds its way to any payroll system and adds him silently to it.
A smarter kid would then have it auto email their cyber dept with their resume and point out the vulnerability, and have their malware autoremove himself from the system before getting paid so he doesn't go to jail for it. And even then, it's illegal and a risky move just to try to get a job.
Taking the joke a little too seriously, huh?
Smarter, or delusional?
Wasn't that an actual plot device used over and over in Mr Robot?
Also in real life, although more with "lost" USB sticks, than handing them out as part of a resume (although the effect would be the same).
If people encounter an unlabelled USB stick, they'll often try and plug it into to discern whose it was. So if you put some malware on it, you can infect a network that you might not normally be aware of.
Since their brand is on it, yeah. I would expect that if the company wants my business, they wouldn't put their name on shit quality products. Especially if it can lead to their would-be customers losing data. It kind of baffles me that they think this is a good way to impress me.
Just happened to me the other day at THE worst possible moment. I bought a new mainboard which needed a BIOS update to work with my new CPU.
Me of course being a cheapskate I bought the cheapest one with no Bios flashback. So I put the files on a cheap USB, start the upate and compleatly bricked the mainboard.
After that I plugged the USB back into my PC and the fking USB corrupted the files.
Luckily I managed to save the BIOS but absolutley lost it in that moment.
Value your time and sanity over pure monetary value. It seems like something Lemmy users seem to do the complete opposite of at all times.
Saving $1 on a flash drive could have cost $100 on a motherboard. Saving $20 could have cost you $100 buying another one.
Learned this lesson the hard way, once bought a cheap replacement laptop charger for one that had broken.
It didn't work and instead borked the backlight of my screen. I then discovered that on this model, the backlight couldn't be separately replaced, had to buy and fit a whole new screen and then also buy another replacement charger.
Never cheap out on things that hold data, or power supplies.
At best, you'll get extremely lucky and nothing untoward will happen.. giving you false confidence to try again.
At worst, catastrophic loss of data, hardware, or more.
The flashdrive in case was a random merchandise gift thing. It worked previously and was just the first one in the drawer.
But yeah in the future I will defintly get something better.
Also I did learn how to directly read and write Chips on the mainboard so the time spent wasn't totally wasted.
Oof. Honestly I do the same thing and I think your experience just convinced me not to. I keep a couple of those junk vendor USB's just for things like BIOS updates since the capacity is usually small. I hadn't considered one failing right in the middle of an update.
That's fucking rough! Crappily produced electronics are a plague.
My guess is that the factories manufacturing the storage chips are making money on the side by selling off chips tuat failed quality control to companies that make these cheap USB drives or the factory is meaking the cheap USB drives themselves from the QC failed chips on the side and is selling them
It's also why you see a lot of rip off products from China because the factories line to make money on the side
https://qz.com/771727/chinas-factories-in-shenzhen-can-copy-products-at-breakneck-speed-and-its-time-for-the-rest-of-the-world-to-get-over-it
https://9to5mac.com/2019/12/18/iphones-made-from-rejected-parts/
They don't exactly fail the quality checks, they get binned into a lower grade. It's a common practice in many industries when reworking isn't possible or financially viable.
It isn't necessarily a bad thing either. Consumers can save some money when they don't need top performance, the company gets some revenue, and the products don't go into a landfill right away.
So it's not good enough for the main product and gets put into a different pile? That sure sounds like a failed QC check to me. I agree with you though about the excess.
it fails the top tier qc check, but passes a low tier qc check. That's how different price points/tiers for CPUs exist.
And then there's those who fail the low tier check and "some friend" gets them for scrap en masse.
That sounds like two different ways of saying the same thing.
It failed to be the best, but it was good enough to be used for something else.
Depends on the nature of the failure. This is super common in CPUs for example. The absolutely perfect ones go in the top quality bin, those are your i9 and Ryzen 9 CPUs. Ones that are functionally fine, but a bit unstable at the higher clock speeds end up in the next lower quality bin, so something like an i7 or a Ryzen 7. Then you have ones that maybe have a failed core or two, those ones have the failed cores fused off and go in the next lower bin with lower core counts. Etc.
In the case of a flash memory chip as long as it isn't corrupting data at a certain speed I'd expect it to be binned down to a lower quality bin. Assuming whoever buys that chip runs it at the clock speed the binning says to run it at it should be fine. Where you'd run into problems is if whoever buys it ignores what they were told and runs it at the full speed, in which case you're going to end up with corrupted data.
Likewise other things that could lead to a usable but lower quality chip is if certain areas of memory were bad. As long as you disable those failed memory regions and sell it as a lower capacity chip that's also fine. Once again though if the buyer re-enables the failed memory regions then that's a problem.
This is how chip fabrication works. It's how chip fabrication has always worked. Chip yields are never perfect. The lithography processes aren't 100% accurate, the substrates aren't 100% pure, and some portion of chips come out of the oven with flaws. Always. That's just how it is.
That doesn't mean those chips don't work, it just means they won't work to their maximum design specifications. So to use a very simplified example, a 32 gig flash chip with a flaw found in it somewhere can be burned so the flawed portion will never be used, and then binned as a 16 gig chip. A processor core that's not stable at its maximum rated speed can be burned so it'll be a perfectly serviceable lower speed version. Etc. The process is already done, the material is already used, and that chip can still be serviceable. So why throw it away?
That's the white hat version.
The black hat version is, some shady manufacturer could take the chips that are too flawed to be used reliably for any purpose, and use them anyway. Where that distinction is drawn is pretty important.
Steve Gibson recently created a small utility to test USB drives to see if they work and actually give you the store space they claim.
https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm
Anything similar for Linux?
I'd like to know as well, hopefully, I'll get a notification for leaving this comment 😝
Yes, there is one called F3 (Fight Flash Fraud).
There's F3. I've never used it but it looks decent. https://www.linuxbabe.com/command-line/f3-usb-capacity-fake-usb-test-linux
Man, I haven't visited GRC in forever! Glad to see they're still killing it...
I actually bought an USB stick that repeatedly fails to boot any Linux Distro. Have to test that one.
Do other OSes work on it?
Nothing afaik. Kinoite, NixOS and some more
Would Android work on it? It's related to Linux.
Android is not made for Desktops in a ton of ways. Most projects are at most on Android 11 so they are not usable.
OSes, my dude. There is absolutely no pluralization that uses an apostrophe, so keep that in mind.
Osii?
I can't help but think "Osii chan" when I see this
Who cares?
Incorrect.
Apostrophes are used to denote plurals for lowercase letters. Like if I said "Missippi has three p's in it."
*Mind.