this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2024
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Meme "the number of people who think this is an abomination" over a photo of a USB-A to USB-A cable, "but think this is perfectly acceptable" over a photo of a USB-C to USB-C cable, "makes me sick."

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago (1 children)

yeah because they are designed quite differently. usb c has a way of detecting a host to host connection situation and will do the right thing – which is just powering off the ports, unless one of the hosts has the usb otg capability to turn itself into a peripheral.

with usb a connectors thats just not possible and the situation is not defined in the standard. you might get an overload in one of the power supplies, you might get any number of weird effects on the hosts but you will never get any useful result from this.

see also: https://superuser.com/questions/1140136/how-does-usb-c-affect-usbs-distinction-between-host-and-peripheral

[–] takeda 2 points 2 months ago

AFAIK every non USB cable before worked on this way that it connected a peripheral to a host.

It was USB-C where they innovated to change this and now everyone expects old USB to work the same way.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

I remember when the difference between ethernet "crossover" and "patch" cables was of critical importance. I am glad we never had to deal with that additional layer of confusion with USB.

[–] pelya 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This type of cable is called a fuse tester.

[–] SatansMaggotyCumFart 3 points 2 months ago

I have these for my Christmas lights.

[–] hperrin 4 points 2 months ago

USB-A male to USB-A male is not in any USB standard (not entirely true, but compliant cables are very rare and don’t connect voltage), and if you plug it into a device it’s not meant for, the behavior is entirely unspecified. It will probably do nothing. But it might fry your USB controller that is not expecting to receive voltage.

USB-C to USB-C is in the spec, and if you plug in two host devices, they won’t hurt each other. You can actually charge a host device over USB-C, unlike USB-A.

That’s why it isn’t ok. It’s not the same thing, it’s not in the standard, and it can even be dangerous (to the device).

[–] ThePantser 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The top cable actually was useful for some software like PC Mover where you could back up one machine to a new one with USB instead of having to have a wired network and deal with windows horrible file sharing settings. But I think those had a bit of smarts in the middle being used as some kind of middle man processing.

[–] Khanzarate 3 points 2 months ago

Yeah it was secretly just two cables, and some kind of microprocessor or something that faked it was a hard drive on either end, I think.

[–] Anticorp 1 points 2 months ago

Show some intestinal fortitude.