12 ms·

Chinese Infinite Magical Hard-Drive

522 points by jitbit 16y ago

makeramen 16y ago
Anyone have experience writing or know the source of the software (firmware) that does this? If not just for the hax, it would make an epic April fools joke.
- Natsu 16y ago
  Between this and the story about France outlawing hashed passwords, I was starting to wonder if April Fools was hitting HN a week late. Sadly, it seems like they really are making dumb laws in France.
- Murkin 16y ago
  If you have a device running linux with a usb device controller, you can easily create such a fake. Linux has an implementation for a 'disk-on-key' (mass storage device). /usr/src/linux-*/kernel/drivers/usb/gadget/f_mass_storage.c The sample can use both memory and a file as storage. You can easily make it fake the size and rotate around, skipping the first.. 64K or so (forgot the exact number) to prevent your FAT16 from spoiling. Had my http://www.gumstix.com/ http://www.gumstix.com/ doing that for a while..not intentionally. (PS. I don't recommend that board !)
- JonnieCache 16y ago
  Here is a guide to doing this very thing: http://elasticsheep.com/2010/04/teensy2-usb-mass-storage-with-an-sd-card/ http://elasticsheep.com/2010/04/teensy2-usb-mass-storage-wit... Well, it doesn't tell you how to do the fakery. But it does give you a good starting place for rolling your own mass storage controller. It uses the awesome Teensy dev boards. http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/ http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/
- logic 16y ago
  Not quite the same thing as modifying an existing USB key, but there's a nice swath of Atmel USB chips supported by LUFA that could achieve similar effects: Home page: http://www.fourwalledcubicle.com/LUFA.php http://www.fourwalledcubicle.com/LUFA.php Hardware support: http://www.fourwalledcubicle.com/files/LUFA/Doc/101122/html/ http://www.fourwalledcubicle.com/files/LUFA/Doc/101122/html/ (LUFA is what powers the ATmega8U2 that replaced the FTDI chipset on the new Arduino Uno boards.) Stuff something like a Minimus USB or Teensy into a usb stick case, and you're all set to cause endless fun for your coworkers. ;-)
pmjordan 16y ago
A couple of years ago, some USB sticks with a similar "flaw" made it onto the European market. The capacity difference wasn't quite as drastic as this example, which almost makes matters worse: you have to fill it with e.g. 1GB of data and read it back before you notice anything. My friend said they're still trying to figure out how did the Chinese do that. Because the drive reports "correct" file sizes and disk-capacity. And the "overwriting" doe not touch the other files present on the drive. I suspect they treat the first N megabytes correctly to preserve file system data structures. For anything above that (the remaining "capacity"), they just let it loop by cutting off the top bits of the offset.
- beilabs 16y ago
  In 2005 a friend brought me a USB thumbdrive he had just bought for a few hundred RMB. It had apparently 10GB on it. He couldn't figure out why his files were not opening after saving them to the drive. The entire space on the drive was about 100MB but as with this article reported 10GB. As always, China is great at faking stuff....I loved the line from Kung fu panda, I've only seen paintings of that painting....
  - dcx 16y ago
    I bought one of these in Shanghai last year! Sadly I only realised it was acting strange when I got back from vacation (It had a perfect plastic casing, labels, little paper manual; we even tested it in store!). From my googling at the time, what they did was something like take a standard 128mb stick and flash it with some interesting firmware - there's even a utility out there which can help you figure out how big your flash drive _really_ is. For the price of the drive I thought it was a good business lesson. It implies the existence of an entire supply chain - crooked engineers/programmers, distributers, retailers, and maybe even government, manufacturers, building managers, etc. All to satisfy the market's "need" for the product to appear to work for longer than someone's visit lasts. An interesting/scary demonstration of total free-market capitalism.
    - roel_v 16y ago
elliottcarlson 16y ago
While I know these fake drives exist - wouldn't running the last 5 minutes of a video file utterly fail as it wouldn't have any of the header/codec/video envelope data since that's at the beginning? Have a feeling the story is more anecdotal than anything...
- JonnieCache 16y ago
  VLC will happily play files without any header/TOC or whatever. It has lots of heuristics in it to sniff that info from the stream when it can't find it. Try it with some broken files sometime. It really is amazing. It may not be capable of seeking properly, but it will have a damn good go at playing the file. Also - the frame index of an AVI file is at the end. It is only the headers which are at the start, and these are less important.
  - ajtaylor 16y ago
    I can corroborate this. VLC is the one piece of software that will happily play back a movie as it's being downloaded. It's a fabulous example of tolerant software.
- wulczer 16y ago
  Depends on the codecs and the container format. With an Ogg/Vorbis/Theora you should be able to cut it in pieces an it will work. With, say, H.264/AAC in FLV you can't.
- DarkShikari 16y ago
  Depends... AVI: Index is at the end, so it might play fine in a tolerant enough player. MPEG-TS: Headerless. Will play fine in any player. MP4/MOV: Index is sometimes at the end; if so, it might play fine in a tolerant enough player. MKV: Has a header and index, usually at the start. Probably won't play. Ogg: Has a header, but is indexless; might play fine in a tolerant enough player. Probably not though, as both Vorbis and Theora (the only things Ogg supports that are ever used) both rely on custom Huffman tables in the headers.
  - 16y ago
afterburner 16y ago
Lots of fake 32GB microSDs are also on the eBay market, and function in a similar fashion. I've bought a fake hard drive, I know a few others who have bought hard drives or microSDs... someone musta written a how-to! They're getting tricky with pulling eBay/PayPal accounts and setting up Dutch auctions to throw wrenches in the system to slow it down before the money transfers are reversed/released.
dvfer 16y ago
I have seen a USB flash drive with only a USB connector on it... inside is empty, and yes, I'm Chinese. I don't know I should laugh or not.
millerc 16y ago
IIRC from my time playing with Norton Utilities back when it was a real hacker tool, you only need to format the disk as usual then hand-modify the disk size in the MSDOS (2nd, logical drive's) boot sector. The FAT will contain all the entries needed for keeping parts of the file in correct order, and Windows will happily report the drive size from that field. Assuming the flash drive's firmware/circuit doesn't report errors but rather uses the low bits to address the sectors (laziest way to build a flash controller), explains how "only the last part of the file" gets preserved (i.e. not overwritten). For the FAT to stay non-corrupt I would assume that Windows writes a full copy from its cache right after writing the file, that would not be an unreasonable assumption. All in all: extremely easy to reproduce, no special controller needed. Probably just a guy that realized how Windows behaves after changing a couple bytes on the disk, and another that said "hey, we can make money off that!"
- derobert 15y ago
  The FAT is many sectors long, I'm not sure why Windows would re-write the entire thing. Now, OTOH, you could just mark the areas the FAT uses, and all their aliases as in-use in the bitmap, that'd prevent them from being overwritten (but chkdisk would notice). You could additionally put a file on all those sectors, then chkdisk would pass, but you'd show a fairly large amount used (for your large file).
qjz 16y ago
I love the extra hardware glued inside to give it some weight. Nice attention to detail!
- jitbit 16y ago
  Yes. It's "CORE DUO" as you can see.
  - mahrain 16y ago
    Thunderbolt minus the "thunder" ;-)
    - jarek 16y ago
      Except these are nuts, not bolts...
      - zephjc 16y ago
        Well, "Thundernuts" just sounds like a flattering nickname.
      - jarek 16y ago
        At the risk of getting meta, watching this and the surrounding posts get upvoted and downvoted back and forth has been incredibly fascinating. Thanks to everyone who participated.
- patrickyeon 16y ago
  I wish more legitimate gadgets had that. I've taken to gluing some junk into new remotes, mice, etc. so that it doesn't feel like I'm using a toy.
  - cakeface 16y ago
    Logitech gaming mouses actually come with weights that let you do just this. Its theoretically for better game performance but I think it speaks to your point that sometimes weight gives a more satisfying tactile response. http://www.logitech.com/en-us/mice-pointers/mice/devices/5750 http://www.logitech.com/en-us/mice-pointers/mice/devices/575...
fdhjkyului 16y ago
welcome to: http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com The website wholesale for many kinds of fashion shoes, like the nike,jordan,prada,, also including the jeans,shirts,bags,hat and the decorations. All the products are free shipping, and the the price is competitive, and also can accept the paypal payment.,after the payment, can ship within short time. free shipping competitive price any size available accept the paypal jordan shoes $32 nike shox $32 Christan Audigier bikini $23 Ed Hardy Bikini $23 Smful short_t-shirt_woman $15 ed hardy short_tank_woman $16 Sandal $32 christian louboutin $80 Sunglass $15 COACH_Necklace $27 handbag $33 AF tank woman $17 puma slipper woman $30 http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com
aik 16y ago
Here's my sad Chinese sd card experience. The state of things there depresses me: When I was in Beijing I went to a regular store to buy an SD card for my camera. I asked them to let me try the cards in my camera before purchasing, so I did that. As I put a card in, all looked well, however when I proceeded to format the card, the issues arose. Regardless of the size of the card, 2, 4, or 8gb, the card would then instead read as 128mb. I mentioned this fact to them and they said sorry and let me try a new card. About 4 cards later the owner was nearly in tears and I was very frustrated. At that point the owner went to the back stockroom and gave me yet another card. This time it formatted fine and I purchased that one. It was such a sad experience. I felt very embarrassed and sorry for this owner. I don't know if the owner knew that they were scamming people, or if they were just being scammed themselves.
- GrandMasterBirt 16y ago
  +1 to the try-before-you-buy mentality. Will keep this in mind.
- benguild 16y ago
  That's really sad. Yet, it's probably mostly because all of the other stores are doing it and he/she can't compete without also selling the fake products. With no consumer protection or standards, this is what happens.
  - bioh42_2 16y ago
    With no consumer protection or standards, this is what happens. Not always, some times a wild market eventually results in some of the strictest standards which also happen to be self enforced. I say sometimes but some economists believe, in the long term, this will always happen. I think reality is a bit more complicated, and in the very long term we're all dead. So for the duration of any one human life time, amazing self enforced standards sometimes arise form chaos. Those send to be far superior to anything government can do. But government is often quicker to come up with enforced standards.
    - 16y ago
ginkgo 16y ago
How could a program work that can detect such scam-drives? As long as we don't care about crashing the formatting, at least. It could work by writing a specific pattern in the first few bytes of the device and then reading/writing in 2^n steps to check if the pattern cycles. I think I have some counterfeit thumb-drives lying around. Maybe I will try writing something like that..
- WiseWeasel 16y ago
  Since the compromised flash controller allocates the actual sectors to use, it seems like it would be difficult to make a reliable test without generating a large file and then checking it for integrity, which would take a while to run.
- jerf 16y ago
  Select a random number known only to you(r program). Seed your generator with it. Start randomly selecting sectors to write to (directly as a block device), writing a psuedorandom sequence based on your first number and the block identifier. Store a set of what sectors you've written to. (You can bundle them into arbitrarily-large contiguous chunks if this gets too large.) As you write, periodically randomly select a sector you already wrote to and verify that when read it returns the same psuedorandom sequence. I don't just read them back in order to prevent the "save the first few chunks" attack. This will slow down detection a bit, but if I'm working my intuition math correctly it doesn't actually slow it down very much, at the gain of making it impossible for a hostile firmware to know which sectors you're going to ask for. Using this approach, you can write arbitrarily large of data to a drive with very minimal storage requirements on your end (well within even modern-day embedded RAM availability), while still being able to demand any sector back at any moment and verifying it is correct. Theoretically your psuedorandom number generator ought to by cryptographically secure, and given that you're probably IO bound here and they aren't hard to come by, there's probably no reason to use anything less. I'm pretty sure the only effective defense against that is to actually store all the data. If you issue a predictable read pattern, you open an attack. If linearly-sampling your previously written blocks turns out to be undesirable you could tweak the sampling distribution, but I bet you wouldn't get much improvement. Also, come to think of it, if the drive is honest this could be done non-destructively (assuming the undo process is allowed to run to completion) by reading the sector and XOR'ing it, so you could then undo it by a second XOR operation. Further cleverness could even make this reasonably safe to half-complete the undo, then finish later, if you work at it.
dfranke 16y ago
Something about this story doesn't seem to add up. An SSD's firmware presents the raw flash to the OS as a block device. The filesystem is at a higher level of abstraction, above that block device. If the device is handling data that doesn't fit by wrapping back around to the beginning of the file, how is it figuring out where that file begins when all it sees is a bunch AHCI requests?
- Dylan16807 16y ago
  It wraps it around to the beginning of the data area past a reserved MFT zone. It doesn't do it per-file unless it's both very clever and dependent on a certain file system.
  - dfranke 16y ago
    Thanks, that makes more sense.
jcromartie 16y ago
What if (this sort of) Chinese electronics designers spent their (obviously impressive) technical skills on not ripping people off?
- GrandMasterBirt 16y ago
  I don't think that's a viable strategy for people who rip people off. Also I'm sure this was a day's worth of work for one dude, and super cheap production. You can't build real hardware on those terms.
folkster 16y ago
At Least you get a WORKING hard drive check this http://www.walyou.com/img/fake-usb-flash-drive.jpg http://www.walyou.com/img/fake-usb-flash-drive.jpg
- pavel_lishin 16y ago
  I'd rather have one that fails obviously in the very beginning, than one that fails silently and subtly.
- Splines 16y ago
  Evolutionary pressure. Tourists now know about the fake USB drive problem, and test-drive hardware in the store. This sort of fakery is much harder to detect, and unless there are easy tools to detect wrongly-sized USB drives, these are going to be the dominant type of forgeries. Knowing nothing about how USB drive hardware/firmware works, I'm guessing we'll see mainstream Windows software for detecting real drive sizes soon (if not already), and then it'll be a back-and-forth between the two sides. Ultimately (I hope), the costs of the forgeries and the time needed to verify drive size is going to even out, and you can be assured that even though you're buying a knock-off, it'll very likely have a certain amount of space on it and a certain minimum life span.
- jat850 16y ago
  I don't know where that came from, but that's not a flash drive and never was. It looks to me more like a D-Link USB wireless adapter. I have a nearly identical one to that, except for a different hardware revision. That one looks like a B1, whereas mine was a revision A. There's also a MAC address printed on that label.
ck2 16y ago
This is an old trick. Ebay is flooded with 16gb and 32gb flash sticks, SD, microSD chips that are only a few gb in reality. Complaints and warnings in the feedback forum go back for years. They seem to format correctly but you have to copy that much in content to prove it's real. Stick to newegg, etc. for that kind of purchase.
alizaki 16y ago
When I was still in college a few years ago, I fell for this on a trip to Guangzhou. I believe those were supposedly 8GB flash drives with 32MB of real memory, selling for less than 5 bucks each. Being the immaculate hustler I am, I bought a sackful of those to haul back home to sell, only to learn that if it's too good to be true...
joejohnson 16y ago
The best part about the article was the really racist comments at the bottom. People don't like Chinese business practices, I guess.
mberning 16y ago
I love the inclusion of the two end nuts. How do you know if something is expensive and built well? It feels heavy/and or dense. You definitely get that feeling when you pick up something like an iPad or a good digital SLR.
- scotty79 16y ago
  After using Samsung Galaxy S for few months and recently playing with my friends iPhone I was under impression that I'm holding a brick. I also played with iPad 2 at the store recently and concluded that I really don't have strong enough writsts to own it.
VladRussian 16y ago
>he had bought in a Chinese store across the river, for an insanely low price. and who would say after that that there is no venture investors in Russia? The guy took the risk and it just didn't pan out. :)
hammock 16y ago
This just made my day. Thank you.
killerdark 16y ago
"He works at a hard-drive repair center". Ah? A hard-drive repair center yes? What do they do there? Take the drives apart, polish the platters and bolt them back together? Must be a Russian thing no?
- ars 16y ago
  The actual hard drive is inside the enclosure (assuming it was real). It's totally normal to open the enclosure to look at the drive inside. Sometimes the enclosure (SATA to USB converter) fails, while the drive is fine.
  - killerdark 16y ago
    That is correct. However, to the best of my knowledge this activity does not take place in a "hard-drive repair center". In fact, there's no such thing as a "hard-drive repair center", with the exception perhaps of an RMA department of a hard drive manufacturing company. That gave me the impression that the story was either made up or badly translated.
hardy263 16y ago
Not as extreme, but when I bought my 1.5 terabyte hard drive, I thought that I would be seeing 1.5TB when viewing its properties. I saw 1.36TB instead. So where did the other 0.14TB go? I thought I got scammed. Then I looked at the number of bytes on the hard drive, and it listed as exactly 1,500,299,264,000 bytes, and I realized that computers and manufacturers use different metrics.
aashpak1 16y ago
so whats the most efficient way to detect such 'infinite' storage drives programmatically ?! :)
yason 16y ago
It's just like spam: it's not the one who asks but he who pays... It's not about the Chinese magically managing to screw everyone: it's about enough people buying these fakes and not coming back with an angry look on their face and a pickaxe in their hands. That's what keeps this scheme profitable.

522 points by jitbit 16y ago

Anyone have experience writing or know the source of the software (firmware) that does this? If not just for the hax, it would make an epic April fools joke.

Natsu 16y ago
Between this and the story about France outlawing hashed passwords, I was starting to wonder if April Fools was hitting HN a week late. Sadly, it seems like they really are making dumb laws in France.
Murkin 16y ago
If you have a device running linux with a usb device controller, you can easily create such a fake. Linux has an implementation for a 'disk-on-key' (mass storage device). /usr/src/linux-*/kernel/drivers/usb/gadget/f_mass_storage.c The sample can use both memory and a file as storage. You can easily make it fake the size and rotate around, skipping the first.. 64K or so (forgot the exact number) to prevent your FAT16 from spoiling. Had my http://www.gumstix.com/ http://www.gumstix.com/ doing that for a while..not intentionally. (PS. I don't recommend that board !)
JonnieCache 16y ago
Here is a guide to doing this very thing: http://elasticsheep.com/2010/04/teensy2-usb-mass-storage-with-an-sd-card/ http://elasticsheep.com/2010/04/teensy2-usb-mass-storage-wit... Well, it doesn't tell you how to do the fakery. But it does give you a good starting place for rolling your own mass storage controller. It uses the awesome Teensy dev boards. http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/ http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/
logic 16y ago
Not quite the same thing as modifying an existing USB key, but there's a nice swath of Atmel USB chips supported by LUFA that could achieve similar effects: Home page: http://www.fourwalledcubicle.com/LUFA.php http://www.fourwalledcubicle.com/LUFA.php Hardware support: http://www.fourwalledcubicle.com/files/LUFA/Doc/101122/html/ http://www.fourwalledcubicle.com/files/LUFA/Doc/101122/html/ (LUFA is what powers the ATmega8U2 that replaced the FTDI chipset on the new Arduino Uno boards.) Stuff something like a Minimus USB or Teensy into a usb stick case, and you're all set to cause endless fun for your coworkers. ;-)

pmjordan 16y ago

A couple of years ago, some USB sticks with a similar "flaw" made it onto the European market. The capacity difference wasn't quite as drastic as this example, which almost makes matters worse: you have to fill it with e.g. 1GB of data and read it back before you notice anything. My friend said they're still trying to figure out how did the Chinese do that. Because the drive reports "correct" file sizes and disk-capacity. And the "overwriting" doe not touch the other files present on the drive. I suspect they treat the first N megabytes correctly to preserve file system data structures. For anything above that (the remaining "capacity"), they just let it loop by cutting off the top bits of the offset.

beilabs 16y ago
In 2005 a friend brought me a USB thumbdrive he had just bought for a few hundred RMB. It had apparently 10GB on it. He couldn't figure out why his files were not opening after saving them to the drive. The entire space on the drive was about 100MB but as with this article reported 10GB. As always, China is great at faking stuff....I loved the line from Kung fu panda, I've only seen paintings of that painting....
- dcx 16y ago
  I bought one of these in Shanghai last year! Sadly I only realised it was acting strange when I got back from vacation (It had a perfect plastic casing, labels, little paper manual; we even tested it in store!). From my googling at the time, what they did was something like take a standard 128mb stick and flash it with some interesting firmware - there's even a utility out there which can help you figure out how big your flash drive _really_ is. For the price of the drive I thought it was a good business lesson. It implies the existence of an entire supply chain - crooked engineers/programmers, distributers, retailers, and maybe even government, manufacturers, building managers, etc. All to satisfy the market's "need" for the product to appear to work for longer than someone's visit lasts. An interesting/scary demonstration of total free-market capitalism.
  - roel_v 16y ago

elliottcarlson 16y ago

While I know these fake drives exist - wouldn't running the last 5 minutes of a video file utterly fail as it wouldn't have any of the header/codec/video envelope data since that's at the beginning? Have a feeling the story is more anecdotal than anything...

JonnieCache 16y ago
VLC will happily play files without any header/TOC or whatever. It has lots of heuristics in it to sniff that info from the stream when it can't find it. Try it with some broken files sometime. It really is amazing. It may not be capable of seeking properly, but it will have a damn good go at playing the file. Also - the frame index of an AVI file is at the end. It is only the headers which are at the start, and these are less important.
- ajtaylor 16y ago
  I can corroborate this. VLC is the one piece of software that will happily play back a movie as it's being downloaded. It's a fabulous example of tolerant software.
wulczer 16y ago
Depends on the codecs and the container format. With an Ogg/Vorbis/Theora you should be able to cut it in pieces an it will work. With, say, H.264/AAC in FLV you can't.
DarkShikari 16y ago
Depends... AVI: Index is at the end, so it might play fine in a tolerant enough player. MPEG-TS: Headerless. Will play fine in any player. MP4/MOV: Index is sometimes at the end; if so, it might play fine in a tolerant enough player. MKV: Has a header and index, usually at the start. Probably won't play. Ogg: Has a header, but is indexless; might play fine in a tolerant enough player. Probably not though, as both Vorbis and Theora (the only things Ogg supports that are ever used) both rely on custom Huffman tables in the headers.
- 16y ago

afterburner 16y ago

Lots of fake 32GB microSDs are also on the eBay market, and function in a similar fashion. I've bought a fake hard drive, I know a few others who have bought hard drives or microSDs... someone musta written a how-to! They're getting tricky with pulling eBay/PayPal accounts and setting up Dutch auctions to throw wrenches in the system to slow it down before the money transfers are reversed/released.

dvfer 16y ago

I have seen a USB flash drive with only a USB connector on it... inside is empty, and yes, I'm Chinese. I don't know I should laugh or not.

millerc 16y ago

IIRC from my time playing with Norton Utilities back when it was a real hacker tool, you only need to format the disk as usual then hand-modify the disk size in the MSDOS (2nd, logical drive's) boot sector. The FAT will contain all the entries needed for keeping parts of the file in correct order, and Windows will happily report the drive size from that field. Assuming the flash drive's firmware/circuit doesn't report errors but rather uses the low bits to address the sectors (laziest way to build a flash controller), explains how "only the last part of the file" gets preserved (i.e. not overwritten). For the FAT to stay non-corrupt I would assume that Windows writes a full copy from its cache right after writing the file, that would not be an unreasonable assumption. All in all: extremely easy to reproduce, no special controller needed. Probably just a guy that realized how Windows behaves after changing a couple bytes on the disk, and another that said "hey, we can make money off that!"

derobert 15y ago
The FAT is many sectors long, I'm not sure why Windows would re-write the entire thing. Now, OTOH, you could just mark the areas the FAT uses, and all their aliases as in-use in the bitmap, that'd prevent them from being overwritten (but chkdisk would notice). You could additionally put a file on all those sectors, then chkdisk would pass, but you'd show a fairly large amount used (for your large file).

qjz 16y ago

I love the extra hardware glued inside to give it some weight. Nice attention to detail!

jitbit 16y ago
Yes. It's "CORE DUO" as you can see.
- mahrain 16y ago
  Thunderbolt minus the "thunder" ;-)
  - jarek 16y ago
    Except these are nuts, not bolts...
    - zephjc 16y ago
      Well, "Thundernuts" just sounds like a flattering nickname.
    - jarek 16y ago
      At the risk of getting meta, watching this and the surrounding posts get upvoted and downvoted back and forth has been incredibly fascinating. Thanks to everyone who participated.
patrickyeon 16y ago
I wish more legitimate gadgets had that. I've taken to gluing some junk into new remotes, mice, etc. so that it doesn't feel like I'm using a toy.
- cakeface 16y ago
  Logitech gaming mouses actually come with weights that let you do just this. Its theoretically for better game performance but I think it speaks to your point that sometimes weight gives a more satisfying tactile response. http://www.logitech.com/en-us/mice-pointers/mice/devices/5750 http://www.logitech.com/en-us/mice-pointers/mice/devices/575...

fdhjkyului 16y ago

welcome to: http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com The website wholesale for many kinds of fashion shoes, like the nike,jordan,prada,, also including the jeans,shirts,bags,hat and the decorations. All the products are free shipping, and the the price is competitive, and also can accept the paypal payment.,after the payment, can ship within short time. free shipping competitive price any size available accept the paypal jordan shoes $32 nike shox $32 Christan Audigier bikini $23 Ed Hardy Bikini $23 Smful short_t-shirt_woman $15 ed hardy short_tank_woman $16 Sandal $32 christian louboutin $80 Sunglass $15 COACH_Necklace $27 handbag $33 AF tank woman $17 puma slipper woman $30 http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com

aik 16y ago

Here's my sad Chinese sd card experience. The state of things there depresses me: When I was in Beijing I went to a regular store to buy an SD card for my camera. I asked them to let me try the cards in my camera before purchasing, so I did that. As I put a card in, all looked well, however when I proceeded to format the card, the issues arose. Regardless of the size of the card, 2, 4, or 8gb, the card would then instead read as 128mb. I mentioned this fact to them and they said sorry and let me try a new card. About 4 cards later the owner was nearly in tears and I was very frustrated. At that point the owner went to the back stockroom and gave me yet another card. This time it formatted fine and I purchased that one. It was such a sad experience. I felt very embarrassed and sorry for this owner. I don't know if the owner knew that they were scamming people, or if they were just being scammed themselves.

GrandMasterBirt 16y ago
+1 to the try-before-you-buy mentality. Will keep this in mind.
benguild 16y ago
That's really sad. Yet, it's probably mostly because all of the other stores are doing it and he/she can't compete without also selling the fake products. With no consumer protection or standards, this is what happens.
- bioh42_2 16y ago
  With no consumer protection or standards, this is what happens. Not always, some times a wild market eventually results in some of the strictest standards which also happen to be self enforced. I say sometimes but some economists believe, in the long term, this will always happen. I think reality is a bit more complicated, and in the very long term we're all dead. So for the duration of any one human life time, amazing self enforced standards sometimes arise form chaos. Those send to be far superior to anything government can do. But government is often quicker to come up with enforced standards.
  - 16y ago

ginkgo 16y ago

How could a program work that can detect such scam-drives? As long as we don't care about crashing the formatting, at least. It could work by writing a specific pattern in the first few bytes of the device and then reading/writing in 2^n steps to check if the pattern cycles. I think I have some counterfeit thumb-drives lying around. Maybe I will try writing something like that..

WiseWeasel 16y ago
Since the compromised flash controller allocates the actual sectors to use, it seems like it would be difficult to make a reliable test without generating a large file and then checking it for integrity, which would take a while to run.
jerf 16y ago
Select a random number known only to you(r program). Seed your generator with it. Start randomly selecting sectors to write to (directly as a block device), writing a psuedorandom sequence based on your first number and the block identifier. Store a set of what sectors you've written to. (You can bundle them into arbitrarily-large contiguous chunks if this gets too large.) As you write, periodically randomly select a sector you already wrote to and verify that when read it returns the same psuedorandom sequence. I don't just read them back in order to prevent the "save the first few chunks" attack. This will slow down detection a bit, but if I'm working my intuition math correctly it doesn't actually slow it down very much, at the gain of making it impossible for a hostile firmware to know which sectors you're going to ask for. Using this approach, you can write arbitrarily large of data to a drive with very minimal storage requirements on your end (well within even modern-day embedded RAM availability), while still being able to demand any sector back at any moment and verifying it is correct. Theoretically your psuedorandom number generator ought to by cryptographically secure, and given that you're probably IO bound here and they aren't hard to come by, there's probably no reason to use anything less. I'm pretty sure the only effective defense against that is to actually store all the data. If you issue a predictable read pattern, you open an attack. If linearly-sampling your previously written blocks turns out to be undesirable you could tweak the sampling distribution, but I bet you wouldn't get much improvement. Also, come to think of it, if the drive is honest this could be done non-destructively (assuming the undo process is allowed to run to completion) by reading the sector and XOR'ing it, so you could then undo it by a second XOR operation. Further cleverness could even make this reasonably safe to half-complete the undo, then finish later, if you work at it.

dfranke 16y ago

Something about this story doesn't seem to add up. An SSD's firmware presents the raw flash to the OS as a block device. The filesystem is at a higher level of abstraction, above that block device. If the device is handling data that doesn't fit by wrapping back around to the beginning of the file, how is it figuring out where that file begins when all it sees is a bunch AHCI requests?

Dylan16807 16y ago
It wraps it around to the beginning of the data area past a reserved MFT zone. It doesn't do it per-file unless it's both very clever and dependent on a certain file system.
- dfranke 16y ago
  Thanks, that makes more sense.

jcromartie 16y ago

What if (this sort of) Chinese electronics designers spent their (obviously impressive) technical skills on not ripping people off?

GrandMasterBirt 16y ago
I don't think that's a viable strategy for people who rip people off. Also I'm sure this was a day's worth of work for one dude, and super cheap production. You can't build real hardware on those terms.

folkster 16y ago

At Least you get a WORKING hard drive check this http://www.walyou.com/img/fake-usb-flash-drive.jpg http://www.walyou.com/img/fake-usb-flash-drive.jpg

pavel_lishin 16y ago
I'd rather have one that fails obviously in the very beginning, than one that fails silently and subtly.
Splines 16y ago
Evolutionary pressure. Tourists now know about the fake USB drive problem, and test-drive hardware in the store. This sort of fakery is much harder to detect, and unless there are easy tools to detect wrongly-sized USB drives, these are going to be the dominant type of forgeries. Knowing nothing about how USB drive hardware/firmware works, I'm guessing we'll see mainstream Windows software for detecting real drive sizes soon (if not already), and then it'll be a back-and-forth between the two sides. Ultimately (I hope), the costs of the forgeries and the time needed to verify drive size is going to even out, and you can be assured that even though you're buying a knock-off, it'll very likely have a certain amount of space on it and a certain minimum life span.
jat850 16y ago
I don't know where that came from, but that's not a flash drive and never was. It looks to me more like a D-Link USB wireless adapter. I have a nearly identical one to that, except for a different hardware revision. That one looks like a B1, whereas mine was a revision A. There's also a MAC address printed on that label.

ck2 16y ago

This is an old trick. Ebay is flooded with 16gb and 32gb flash sticks, SD, microSD chips that are only a few gb in reality. Complaints and warnings in the feedback forum go back for years. They seem to format correctly but you have to copy that much in content to prove it's real. Stick to newegg, etc. for that kind of purchase.

alizaki 16y ago

When I was still in college a few years ago, I fell for this on a trip to Guangzhou. I believe those were supposedly 8GB flash drives with 32MB of real memory, selling for less than 5 bucks each. Being the immaculate hustler I am, I bought a sackful of those to haul back home to sell, only to learn that if it's too good to be true...

joejohnson 16y ago

The best part about the article was the really racist comments at the bottom. People don't like Chinese business practices, I guess.

mberning 16y ago

I love the inclusion of the two end nuts. How do you know if something is expensive and built well? It feels heavy/and or dense. You definitely get that feeling when you pick up something like an iPad or a good digital SLR.

scotty79 16y ago
After using Samsung Galaxy S for few months and recently playing with my friends iPhone I was under impression that I'm holding a brick. I also played with iPad 2 at the store recently and concluded that I really don't have strong enough writsts to own it.

VladRussian 16y ago

>he had bought in a Chinese store across the river, for an insanely low price. and who would say after that that there is no venture investors in Russia? The guy took the risk and it just didn't pan out. :)

hammock 16y ago

This just made my day. Thank you.

killerdark 16y ago

"He works at a hard-drive repair center". Ah? A hard-drive repair center yes? What do they do there? Take the drives apart, polish the platters and bolt them back together? Must be a Russian thing no?

ars 16y ago
The actual hard drive is inside the enclosure (assuming it was real). It's totally normal to open the enclosure to look at the drive inside. Sometimes the enclosure (SATA to USB converter) fails, while the drive is fine.
- killerdark 16y ago
  That is correct. However, to the best of my knowledge this activity does not take place in a "hard-drive repair center". In fact, there's no such thing as a "hard-drive repair center", with the exception perhaps of an RMA department of a hard drive manufacturing company. That gave me the impression that the story was either made up or badly translated.

hardy263 16y ago

Not as extreme, but when I bought my 1.5 terabyte hard drive, I thought that I would be seeing 1.5TB when viewing its properties. I saw 1.36TB instead. So where did the other 0.14TB go? I thought I got scammed. Then I looked at the number of bytes on the hard drive, and it listed as exactly 1,500,299,264,000 bytes, and I realized that computers and manufacturers use different metrics.

aashpak1 16y ago

so whats the most efficient way to detect such 'infinite' storage drives programmatically ?! :)

yason 16y ago

It's just like spam: it's not the one who asks but he who pays... It's not about the Chinese magically managing to screw everyone: it's about enough people buying these fakes and not coming back with an angry look on their face and a pickaxe in their hands. That's what keeps this scheme profitable.