Investigating counterfeit MicroSDs

bunniestudios.com

77 points·ColinWright··8 comments

Reminds me of the scene from Blade Runner where Deckard checks a snake scale.

I first ran into this issue when I bought my PSP. The counterfeits work just fine but most of the time don't have the advertised storage and also sometimes don't format correctly.

When some friends come back from China, they bought a bunch of kingston pen drives that were all the have. 8Gb was the largest one at the time... they got the 8Gb for like $5 each.

of course it could only store 256mb... playing later with it i noticed that the chip would max out on the number of sectors when asked. so i had a bunch of pen drives with 9.9TB partitions, which was the maximum i could partition with my kernels.

:s/all the have/all the rave back then/

Reposting a story form 02/2010? Why?

Counterfeiting is still a major problem in the electronics supply chain, and I thought it would be interesting, useful and enlightening to see a rather in-depth story of one incident.

And you mean "from", not "form".

Was there an original posting (you call this a 'repost')?

I enjoyed it a lot, actually. Not that I've had much dealings with counterfeit hardware but I can imagine that anybody that is into hardware hacking on a slightly larger scale has to worry about this.

It was posted at least once, about a year and a half ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1128711

Personally I don't mind reposts -- submitters usually have the best of intentions, and this story didn't get much play on HN the first time. But with older stories, a date in the title is a nice touch. I ended up reading this thinking it was an update on Bunnie's original post.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com