A Russian friend of mine has posted this absolutely amazing story.
He works at a hard-drive repair center in a Russian town right next to the Chinese border. A couple of days ago a customer has brought a broken 500Gb USB-drive that he had bought in a Chinese store across the river, for an insanely low price. But the drive was not working: if you, say, save a movie onto the drive, playing the saved movie back resulted in replaying just the last 5 minutes of the film.
The whole service center was rolling on the floor laughing. This was not the first time someone has brought a disk like that. And the previous drives were also bought in China... They opened up the drive right in front of the astonished customer. This is what they saw:
It's a 128-MB flash-drive. Working in a "looped" mode - when it runs out of space, it starts overwriting from the beginning. 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 "looped-overwriting" does not touch the other files present on the drive.
The device looks pretty convincing - lots of tech labels and stuff... The Chinese salesman even saved something to the drive to demonstrate that it "works" in the store.
118 comments:
The Trick is the controler. The controler thinks, that there are actually 5gigs available and puts data to the storage. The file table is stored in the controler. So the controler puts data to the storage as long as he thinks there is enough space. But in the storage the real data is just written as long as there is acutal space (Let's say 128MB) if there is more data than that it just gets lost.
So the trick is to put an controler for 5gb to the storage of 128mb
New (for me) twist on the fake USB pen drives. Last year there were reports of a lot of them in Ebay, working on the same principle (much smaller real capacity, files overwritten).
Thanks
Chinese can't be trusted with honesty in business - ever. The substance of this story has accompanied them for a thousand years of history in trading with other nations. They. Cannot. Be. Trusted.
Man, there's some real xenophobia going on in these comments...
2Adrian, yeah... I deleted the most offensive ones.
I know these devices. They are devices that they use for car crashes. When you crash your car, the last 5 min. of the crash will be stored on a storage device for playback.
The alarm bells should ring already when they plugged the device in. If the storage doesnt say its 500gb, you are sure you are getting scammed.
I have a "32GB" flash drive like this, 5MB/s write rates till you hit the phantom space, then it flies up to 20MB/s
Moral of the story: never buy any electronic piece of equipment in/from China.
Funniest thing I've read in a while. Seriously though, is there some ancient Chinese trick to this. Wait that doesn't sound right.
China is a big place, and just like most big places filled with many people, there are the honorable and the despicable. I've come across dirtbags of all stripes who'd pull something like this if they thought they could get away with it.
I say, kill all the dirtbags, whatever they look like.
I buy external drive that said 500 gb but it was only 465.76 GB... and now i read this and opened it up and even found no usb pen i can use... damn chinese, double tricked me..
If you look into your history books you see that we screwed china for hundreds of years. Stealing their secrets (silk), flooding them with drugs etc. They are striking back for just 30-50 years now....
Really funny, but can't be real.
When he writes
"But the drive was not working: if you, say, save a movie onto the drive, playing the saved movie back resulted in replaying just the last 5 minutes of the film."
Well, two things:
a) filesystem are full of metadata. Without them you can't even read file list directory;
b) if you save just last part of a movie file (avi in particular), you can't play it again. You loose header file and so on.
Ciao,
Gelma
Chinese invented the "infinite" HD and you just complain!! yes, infinite because you can write files on it and never runs out of space :D
By the way, you can't trust other brands neither, they sell you a HD measured in GB nad later you discover that they were referring to Gbits.
The people that don't realize shady business practices know no race, creed, or religion make the perfect customers.
>Moral of the story: never buy any electronic piece of equipment in/from China.
Stop using any computer and electronic device for life .
WOW and the two nuts used for place holders :D
this is indeed one of the most hilarious thing I've seen for a while! You have to give it to the Chiness innovation though, they are really making this push towards flash, solid state, no mechanics drive :P
I am chinese living in spain.
In shop we sell much like this. We return money if compains but normally they dont jaja!
One thing i agree, you get what you pay.
What u say is correct but I bought a sony camera in Malaysia for 95 euro. In Italy the prize was 200. The camera is still working after several "dives". So what is insane ?
I am importing chinese machinery into Spain, and chinese people are serious dealing. You can claim on poor quality, but you get what you paid, and if you tell them how to improve they will do.
Of course China is a big factory for the world, with many people wanting to buy things at amazings price, and there are people wishing to take your money as in any other country.
I did something simmilar when i was 16 i made that a 3 1/4 floppy disk looked like having 4 GBytes free space with several files of 1 Gbyte size
This is a hilarious piece of engineering! If the shop has dissassembled the controller code, please poast their results here.
credit for the cleverness.. but seriously thats harsh.
and can everyone keep in mind, its not just the Chinese. walk in a ghetto in California and you will get exactly the same. or the underbelly of London and there you have it. this just seems to be the first "reported" incident.
Juanjo Vega
"By the way, you can't trust other brands neither, they sell you a HD measured in GB nad later you discover that they were referring to Gbits."
You actually mean they measure the size in base 10 when bytes are measured in base 8. 1 byte = 8 bits, so you would've been backwards to begin with.
I knew someone who bought one ebay a while ago.. he bid up to 89.00 USD for it... My brother and I cracked it open and I just about fell to the floor... laughing what a hot mess.... I only buy electronics such as External Hard Drives from Newegg,ThinkGeek,BestBuy and a few other places... I've only had one go out.... Knock one wood... You have to be careful where you get anything like that.. I know of a few places around where I live trying to sell in shop refurbished items as new..... Just a hotmess....
Reading the anti-Chinese comments, one would think the Chinese are the only people smart enough to come up with such trickery.
If the story hadn't mentioned China at all, maybe the comments would just be about the hard drive, and not full of people lining up to bag the Chinese.
A former colleague of mine bought a fake iPod Nano as a joke in China 2 years ago. Looks like a Nano (unless you put a real Nano next to it), works like an MP3 (yes it plays music!), displays ~5GB (or was it 4? anyway several GBs) of space when plugged into a computer (yes, you can plug it in and read/write to it), but it can't find any files after the first ~512MB, lol.
I can assure you such stories are real.
Except without the beginning of the video, none of it would play. The beginning is the most important part.
TO Farouk, follow your logic, Bernie Madoff set up a Ponzi scheme that stole billions of dollars from people, so that we can conclude all Americans cannot be trusted.
I don't care about the trick, just say something about Chinese.
Being a Chinese, I would say that you are so lucky since you just bought some rubbish electronical devices. We have rubbish food full of chemical/poisonous material (all kinds of food, especially the milk affair), rubbish water and even rubbish air. There is only profit but not any moral in some guys' mind.
Who leads this? I am not sure. But you see that tricks and you also see iphone. They are both manufactured in China!
With good quality check and good management (gov.) or not, that might be the key point. But it's not possible for us to get better except one thing, which is not allowed to be talked about in China....
Bought a USB flash drive at a store in the Philippines. Fake 16 Transcend Drive (was really 1GB). Luckily the store honored the refund. Looked 100% real - except I should have checked the color band first.... Its not the Chinese. Its crap business practices WORLDWIDE. Buyer Beware.
...If our people could use more brain cell on some serious scientific research we could have owned the planet Earth now, with everyone on earth lived happily and peacefully together
But we dont :( sad face
lol, and a nation which has people who do business like this is one of the industrial powerhouses of the world.
i dont know if to laugh or quake with fear that they'll probably be running things within the next 50 years LMAO
Please, don't do business with the Chinese until they learn to play fair. You always get even less than you pay for. Sure, there are honest Chinese people, but the risk of getting scammed is just too high. Even with legitimate-seeming, long-standing business relations.
There is a market in Shanghai, some underground market, I forgot it's name, they sell all sorts of fake/imitation goods there - Nike, Louis Vuitton and everything in between. There was a store selling electronics, they had 500GB flash drives (not the hard drive size but the thumb drive size), we bought one just to test it out, same problem, you could write as much data as you want, but cannot read all of it, only the most recently written files can be read.
why not just look around when your in a different country and make sure its a good name brand store i dont know what a good one in china almost anything out of there can be fraudulent. plus if you bashin asian over something this simple bash your united states government for robbing our pockets for bullshit come on son!!!!!
So the movie played back? That would be quite clever, meaning the firmware would have to intelligently detect a movie file being copied, store the file's header and metadata, then rewrite those back along with the last chunk of the file into a usable video format.
Presumably it would have to do this for other file types too. Any such system would be extremely complex for a firmware controller and the R&D to develop it alone would outstrip any savings made by selling these cheap drives.
I call shenanigans on this story. From a technical point-of-view it makes no sense.
You buy cheap you get cheap and this story is a prime example, stop looking for cheap hardware it will only lead to fail later in life.
Best of luck to all, peace out.
- Cybris
As any smart person would know, the angular momentum of that device would be wrong ...
It could be something called loop-mapping. For example, the first 100MB of HDD is directly mapped to the flash, and the rest 499.9GB is loop mapped to the last 28MB flash. In this way the file header may remain intact, and the last part of content accessible. I know some tools from flash drive controller manufacturers are able to do the trick.
I see there are some racism views. In the early 20th century, food industry in US wasn’t really reassuring. As exposed in The Jungle, rats along with meat went into sausages. Can we simply conclude that all Americans at the time were not trust worthy? America was developing fast, and lacks proper regulation, just like today’s China.
There are some serious problems in China, but they are not racial problems.
Yeah, fraud is totally just a chineese problem.
Oh wait. No. it's not. thats standard business in most of the world.
Most companys would do this if they could GET AWAY WITH IT LONG ENOUGH. And some of them do pull crap like this.
This is nothing new. Chinese sellers sell counterfeit SD cards and USB drives all the time. Stop buying "too good to be true" stuff. If it's less than half the price of other products of the same capacity, it's fake, guaranteed. A fool and their money is soon parted.
The creativity that the Chinese show in creating fake products is absolutely amazing. Ex artificial eggs, eggroll insides made out of wet cardboard, all of the kirf gadgets, etc. If only they put that effort and creativity into creating something good...
Yea. I purchased some USB drives from a chinese guy that was advertising on alibaba.com. Found out after I paid for them that they were phonies and wouldn't work correctly after a few uses. Couldn't get my $350 back and alibaba wouldn't help me. I'll never buy from China or alibaba again!
There seems to be a lot of people here assuming that all video formats have headers. Has no one heard of mpeg transport stream files?
Good, bad or indifferent, the chinese make most things now. Excellent things, shitty things and things in between. That someone has found a dishonest thing made in china is not news.
Hey, great price, where's the problem?
@Andrew
He listed China because it's really the most common place to find something like this. It's not that they're the only ones "smart" enough, or they're the only ones who would do such a thing. It's that they're already well known for selling electronics, so people are more likely to get scammed by a chinese salesman than something else, due to people usually trusting the chinese more. (You wouldn't even humour the thought of buying a Mexican harddrive, would you?)
All of these so-called "Xenophobic" remarks are only xenophobic because of their anger, the fact of the matter is they're not far from the truth.
I'll say, from experience and friends who are Chinese there's a few things you should all consider. Listen up you people harping about racism or spouting racism:
First, I bought one of those nice Loongson-based netbooks (awesome hardware if you have an application for it) and I've never had a problem. This shows that when they engineer something for a market, and make the genuine effort, they produce some excellent results.
Second, you have to realize the culture of their country contributes to the counterfeiting. Much like how Nigeria has become synonymous with (in a negative sense) 411-scamming because of their cultural influences, China is known (in the negative sense also) for their knock-offs.
Third, a lot of people who do these scams do so in order to bolster their dwindling income. This is particularly prominent in the poorer regions. Remember these people are not paid much, and if you were in a situation facing possible starvation or being a criminal it's pretty obvious what you would pick.
So stop hating on the people, remember that there are reasons this kind of stuff exists, and to deny that IS racist.
This in made in USA, just sold in China
Please stop being ignorant -- most movie formats don't need a header. The only one in popular use that I can think of that does is avi. mp4, mkv, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, possibly even qt etc. would have no problems playing as long as you get get a small contiguous section of the file intact.
I travel to China all the time. There are tons of stuff there good and bad. If you buy your equipment at the market for a cheap cheap price, what are you expecting to get?
Go to the store and pay the real price. If you are a dumb-a**, you get fooled anywhere int the world.
You can get very good items in China but not much cheaper than America. BTW I lived in Europe, Americas and traveled all around. Fake stuff is everywhere because dumb people buy them, and they make a market for them.
great price? I really want to know how much he paid. You cannot get a steak with cabbage pride, even in China.
/dev/null implemented in hardware - nice!
Bit bucket 7.0. :D
the BOFH would be proud of this guy
Hey, you gotta hand it to the guys that made that. They've got nuts!
The upbeat is that it is ULTRA quiet, no clicking or scratching sounds from spinning drives, and no need for an external power supply.
It's surprising to see how so much vitriol is being spewed at the Chinese here for allowing the guy to sell the device, and yet so few comments are calling out the moron who actually bought this "500gb" hard drive for so cheap. I mean come on, this is hilarious. Think about it - the guy actually demonstrated the drive for him in the store. When's the last time someone at your local best buy pulled a hard drive out of the box to show that it was real? Not only that, but since all that's in there is a little USB thumb drive, the thing can't have made any of the typical operating noise you'd get from a hard drive. If I don't hear a hard drive spin up when it's plugged in, I generally assume something's wong. And while they may have made progress in making them quiet, they're still a long way from silent. Or you could just touch it and feel for the vibration of the motor. There are a million ways this thing fails to pass for real, and that's even if we do ignore the fact that it was priced absurdly low!
Look, every where you go there are people selling shady counterfeit goods for absurdly low prices. Yeah, it's sleazy and disreputable, but the only reason they're able to thrive is because people keep falling for it.
You want to combat scammers? How about you remember that if a deal looks too good to be true, it probably is. Besides, he said he paid an insanely low price for it. Odds are he wasn't ripped off all that badly. And for those claiming that the guy could have lost some important data, well, that's still his fault for trusting important data to a piece of hardware he bought off the black market.
Seriously people, just support reputable vendors. That's all we need to do.
Oh, and for people claiming the story if false bceause a movie file can't play without a header, that actually depends on the type of compression used. Many modern formats actually use keyframes which contain all the relevant information usually found in the header dispersed liberally throughout the file. And uncompressed files (though ridiculously huge) can actually play with no header at all, as they're nothing more than bitmaps strung together. Yeah, some media players will refuse to play the file without finding a valid header, but the really good ones (read:VLC) can manage without.
I actually have a friend from China who lived their for 15 years and i showed him this... well he laughed his ass off and told me that he's seen this done in numerous places in China and that people might get mad and call the seller an ass hole but i mean, you're the one that just got scammed so really.... you're an idiot haha.
The product is NOT defective - it's a modern implementation of National's Write Only Memory chip. See this link at http://www.national.com/rap/Story/WOMorigin.html
First, the thing about playing the file with the header missing: It is perfectly possible that the device wouldn't cycle to the beginning of the file, but instead to some point a bit into the file, allowing for the header to be included. Most movie players probably would happily play the file if the header was intact even if there was a jump in the frames.
It's interesting to ponder how the author went about implementing this. A USB disk is a block device so it isn't aware of the concept of files - all it receives are requests for reading individual sectors. There are several ways to approach the problem. I have three suggestions of which I think the last is the one that is most probably employed by this device.
1) One possibility is that the USB device 'cheated' and installed a custom device driver when plugged in. Such a device driver could intercept file system calls (sitting a file system filter if on Windows) and could pull off the feat. One problem is that a unique device driver would be required for each platform, at least if the platform is to display the behavior described when writing the file.
1) A more full solution would instead involve the device interpreting the file system structures written by the operating system. It would tell the operating system it was a 500Gig device and the o/s would put a 500G file system on it. However, the device would interpret the file system structures so that it could understand which files were stored where and hence being able to detect the writing of big files and - when it wanted to cycle back upon the beginning of the file - start redirecting write requests to the trailing sectors, so that they would be written to where the beginning of the file is.
Such a solution is definitely possible and doesn't require a device driver. But it is file system dependent and probably quite complex to implement. For FAT32 it is probably doable, for NTFS it is probably impractical. Given the large (claimed) size of the device the user would likely format with NTFS. For this reason, I think this is unlikely to be the method employed.
3) A much simpler and probably more likely solution is the following: When the device detects a series of sequential writes that goes beyond the actual capacity of the drive, it simply starts redirecting those writes to the sectors written in the beginning (or, near the beginning) of the current sequential write series. This solution would not be specific to a given o/s or file system, but is dependent on the o/s handling copying large files through sequential writes - or almost sequential, depending on how much logic is put into the detection routine of the device (for instance it could be tolerant to intermittent writes to the file system structures as long as it saw continued sequentiality etc.). The hacker could have analyzed the writing patterns of common operating and file systems to come up with a simple algorithm that would work most all the time.
However, the solution might run into trouble in case of fragmented drives, but given that the purpose is just to convince a potential customer and that such a demonstration would likely take place on a freshly formatted drive, this shortcoming is probably irrelevant.
well...if somebody is offering a diamond for $1 ...simply can't be real...
Is like a politician speech...while they are in the rallies, they are always saying that they will improve the health care and the education system and lowering taxes for everybody...until they are elected...then...looks like a brain format is done and they do exactly the opposite... How do you know that the weather is cold watching a lawyer? Is the only moment in their careers when they have their hands in their own pockets!
I was in Shanghai a few years ago and went into one of their major electronics stores (which functionally are hundreds of small dealers renting display areas).
I encountered some 16 gig USB thumb drives at a remarkable low price (by American standards). Overcoming some language problems, the dealer demonstrated that the file parameters were fully appropriate to a 16 gig drive. I bought several.
At home later, I discovered that, while I could write to the drive, I could never retrieve full files.
At the time I assumed that someone was selling factory rejects.
Now I understand. Thanks you for solving the mystery.
Now, please, cut out the xenophobia. Crooks come in all shapes and colors.
This is why I never use ANY electronic devices. I live in a cave and watch 30 rock (30 rocks in a pile) all day.
I'm guessing the two big nuts are for weight?
This is genuinely one of the funniest things I've ever seen. Clever Chinaman.
Welcome to Free Market capitalism.
Actually, with MPEG video, the header is repeated every 15-20 frames or so, and self-synchronizing (prefixed with an easy-to-find bit pattern), so it's definitely possible to watch the video if you have only the end of the file.
There is at least one non-racist generalization that could be made: too many people have lied to me, so I learned that people can't be trusted.
I'd have to agree, dirt bags are everywhere, not just China, and all the major brand electronics made in China for major brands sold through out the world are subject to the brand name company's QC; they simply can't afford something like this staining there name. As for the guy who thinks he got scammed because his 500GB external drive only show 465GB available after formatting it . . . seriously! I can't believe he opened the drive looking for a thumb drive, clearly he's never added a hard drive to his system before.
Looks like more than a few teabaggers sharing their racist inclinations here. Most have never ventured further in the world than the neighborhood 7-11.
You know how this product got sold, right? "Pssst, I have some hot 500GB drives I can sell you one for 50RMB." Easiest marks in the world are ones who are willing to participate in an illegal transaction for perceived profit.
And I'm an American who's been to China a number of times. They are some of the hardest working people I've seen. They have a rep as being copiers, but not designers. That will start changing now that they are the world's #1 manufacturer. Hard to design stuff when you can't build it. And, if people want to sing the blues about copying, you should have thought about that when you transferred your technology to a country to exploit cheaper wages.
China has no corner on the con market - they are everywhere in the world, making their living parting the money from the fools.
What's this,.. no one has ever heard of nicely priced Rolex watches for sale in Mexico?? And then there's the ultimate scammers... the American banking system that not only screwed their own people but as many other countries as they could.
Sheesh what a dumb thread of posts.
Seems to me like too much effort was put into this little device. All that time could have been spent on actually selling the real thing for less if you count the time put into it in reverse engineering it in the first place. Either way, I think it is quite amusing to see such deception. Well played LOL
Well not everything from them is fake. I bought a Sandisk MicroSD 16 GB 6x ages ago when they cost a lot of money.. ordered it from Hong Kong via Ebay and it has been working great for ages now inside my Nokia.
You just have to be careful and not fall for obviously fakes... venders with no feedback or poor feedback.. prices that are oddly low, etc.
I got ripped off like this once. Was my own fault. I bought a Sony brand Memory Stick Pro Duo from eBay. It looked OK, seemed OK, and worked OK... until I started writing too much data... then it just seemed not to hold any more data... which was 1/8th the actually reported size.
So, I created some tests (generating a bunch of small files, then reading them, until it told me there were problems). It was clear that it really held 1/8th of what it reported in size.
Further research led to it being a counterfeit. eBay didn't help either... they just referred me to PayPal. PayPal didn't help either. They said I'd have to take it to some place to *certify* it as counterfeit and would need to fax these documents in within 10 days. No place (locally) could officially certify this. I called Sony. They said I could mail it in for inspection. They mailed it back certifying it to be counterfeit. It was already too late for PayPal. The 10 days had passed. They closed the claim. Besides, the seller had already abandoned that PayPal and eBay account and moved on.
The moral of the story. Don't buy memory cards or other forms of storage from eBay.
What's worse is... a year later, I bought a Sandisk brand memory stick from Circuit City. I ordered online using the option to pick up in store. When I went to the store to pick it up, they apologized and said that could not find the Sandisk one, but could give me the Sony one for the same price. This was technically a good deal because the Sony one costs more. I obliged. Took it home and started using it. I didn't think to test it. Later down the road, I started experiencing a similar experience with this one. I tested it with the software I wrote previously. Once again, counterfeit. From Circuit City. At this point, Circuit City had gone bankrupt and closed its stores. I was stuck.
NOW the moral of the story is. Don't buy electronics. Ever. It will probably just be a counterfeit.
I bet at least half of you that are beaking off about how terrible the Chinese are are playing with your iPhone right now, made almost completely with parts made IN CHINA.
Hypocrite racists. I guess I don't expect you to be smart.
Well i bought a 64GB USB drive from ebay and surprise !!! it is 64GB.
I am still trying to find the technology behind a movie file (avi) playing with no header...
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I've been here some time ago and it took many hours to work out what was going wrong. Initially I purchased a 4G stick from eBay from a seller named global_eshop8, it wasn't cheaper than any of the others and he assured me it's his supplier who is at fault.
The stick was bought to run Ubuntu on a family members computer as an alternative to it's heavily virus infected Windows XP.
After making the boot stick I couldn't work out why there were issues getting the device to boot or checksum at the end. I even went back to some very basic stuff before I eventually doubted the soundness of the hardware.
Using a little loop of dd's of around 1MB I eventually noticed their md5sums were not consistent. I thought it was just a faulty memory device, but after reading this article I no understand that someone attempted to rip me off. Going back over my screen log from the time it looks as if it was around 512MB into the device. Someone could quite easily have been putting valuable data onto this.
What next, should consumers begin to suspect RAM too?
I agree you cannot trust anything Made in China. Just check the recalls on this site
http://latestrecalls.blogspot.com/
The drywall case Made in China is the most shocking. I truly believe it was on purpose to hurt the economy of the United States.
Half my extended family is chinese, because my wife is chinese, so I guess this is a bit biased, but here goes...
China can be an interesting place to travel in. But, you need to beware of "bargains", especially in electronics. Legitimate electronic and computer goods in China often cost as much or a little more than they do in North America. If something is a lot cheaper than you would expect, especially in the many barter "markets", it is probably not genuine.
This is not really a uniquely Chinese issue. I used to live in the New York City area and, in the mid 90's, there were people on the corners in some parts of lower Manhattan that were selling cheap/fake electronics as well.
Caveat Emptor - Let the buyer beware! If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. It's too damn bad that there are so many people that will use any scam they can think of to separate people from their hard-earned money... It's bad enough that the "Gimme-ment" wants to TAX us to death, then the scammers take a crack at us. But I guess that's just another lesson we need to learn to survive in this world of thieves.
Adding two huge bolt-nuts to give it the correct weight was when it became art.
Being Chinese or not has nothing to do with it. It's no different than our own caveat emptor - 'let the buyer beware.' It's sheer capitalism which is what everyone seems to love, and it's par for the course. If you dance with the devil don't cry when he steps on your feet, and don't be jealous when the Chinese beat us at our own game.
Here is another example of what can happen when you buy a USB harddrive in China:
http://www.offthehill.org/articles/2011/03/23/beware-chinese-electronics-part-1/
Give the Chinese enough money and they will deliver a G-Technology level HD, but someone has to pay components, designers, developers , etc.
Where can i get one??
Yeah....
Hey people: everything comes for a price. If they sell a 1000$ computer in the US/Europe, but you can find it on the black market with less than 500$ this means that there's a problem! The same with components...
Quality management and sustainable business costs time,money,effort,sacrifice (in the sense that you can't have Michal Jackson's money without working as hard )...
It seems that westerners got lazy and greedy and all of them want to be business men but think like accountants :)) well good luck with that...
I've bought a Chinese flash drive a long time ago. The capacity showed on the disk is 8GB, but actually it's capacity just 16MB. If I copy file larger than 16MB (up to 8GB, ok!), that file will be corrupted. Amazing!
Awesome. ;D
I think, the first parts of the memory are not in loop-mode, so the NTFS-Filesystem works and thinks there are files. (Size, Date,... are part of the Filetable)
It makes me laugh, LOL. I'm just wondering, if it only stores the last bits of the file, how could you play the movie? ? You've lost the header of the file and CMIIW it's almost impossible to read a file without the header, located on the first bits of the file.
An Ancient Chinese Secret, ROFL.
@YouFan:
The header of a video file is at the end of the file stream, because a lot of information are only known at the end of the encoding process. ;-)
I have done a great deal of business in computer parts from the local Chinese community. I found that they bargained hard but stuck to any deal even if it hurt them. But if you were silly enough to buy something that was not kosher ...well that was your problem. I have never been scammed like this by a Chinese. But I have bought bargains that were not. Ebay is ok because you can usually get a refund or cancel the deal if it is not as described.
"Man, there's some real xenophobia going on in these comments... "
I see no problem with this. The last thing America needs is some politically correct people telling us that we cant make observations about the Chinese because their feelings will be hurt. Save these comments for your next PETA meeting.
I would gladly put my name to this post but cannot connect to Yahoo!
The problem here is that buying cheap stuff like this in mass is just encouraging that market. The "you get what you pay for" is true and if you dont like what you got for that price, pay a little more and you might like what you bought. And more important is to buy more products "made in (your country name)".. buy local products to save on transport fees, make local workers have job and keep it, encouraging your entourage to be prosper and therefore making you surrounding healthier and more nice to live in. Most of the time, trying to save money will result in cutting in quality and service and therefore cutting in usefullness of what you paid for and sometimes will cost you more to replace continuously the cheap object, leading to more wastes and pollution.
Be smart!
I had a virus exactly like this, I wish I could remember its name because it did the above and most likely had similar code to the above harddrive.
The essence of sabzh: 128 MB flash drive, infa written on it in a circle. How this is done, it is not clear. But when writing a large file, all of it "climbs" on it, and when reading the file, visible only in the last 128 MB of information, although the file size otobrazhetsya correctly, as the original.
These are the cakes.
Moral think all clear
thank you googletranslate for clearing that up.
once I saw an expose' on counterfeit car parts. There was a Chinese made knock off of a Motorcraft oil filter..(called "Motorcare")...when they cut the oil filter open, all that was inside was a tack welded Chinese asparagus can with holes punched in the sides!!!
Reading thru the Chinese bashing, this is all I gotta say. You CANNOT help but use Chinese products. They are making everything and I mean everything these days. But thats not all. They are making different quality products for different customers depending on the customer's requirement. For example, if I was to go to a Chinese manufacturer and ask them to make me a bunch of really really outstanding quality external hard drive, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have any problems with my request. But on the other hand, if I went and asked them to make me these crappy products for a fraction of the cost, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't refuse my request either. My point being, they have the resources and the facilities to make whatever the customer asks them to make, its the dodgy customers that get these products manufactured (and they could be from any part of the world - not necessarily Chinese) that are to be blamed
About movie playing. In some videoformats meta-/headingdata is stored at end. AFAIK This applies also to MP3. So theoretically it would be possible.
Seems some commenters here have no problem with lying about the product in the first place: "you get what you pay for," "people are stupid for buying it, they should know better", etc. Until you get a handle on that "blame the victim" mentality, Chinese products will *always* be viewed inferior. And no, I don't mean the American products built in China. Chinese labor is quite good. Chinese design, not so much.
"you get what you pay for", uhm...yeah. You are buying 500 Gig drive, but instead, you get 128MB drive. I don't think you "got what you paid for".
3 yrs. back I bought a kingston 32 GB pendrive .(from grey market.& @ very cheap price) it turn out to be 256 mb. The sad thing is tht it worked for few days & then after tht, my system was not able to recognise the device. I still have tht shitt with me. Sounds like the same trick.
Well I remember a serious episode with miniscribe disks in early 90's. They sent brick stones in the packages of fixed disks. I bougth one. This was not a chinese company but an american. Don't trust americans. Never order from an american company !
I agree with most of the comments here in regards to "Buyer Beware". If it looks too good to be true, it likely is. Do a little research on the seller first and you might not get burnt.
It isn't just the "Chinese" or any other country for that matter -- Every country has their good guys & bad. Every country also has their idiots who jump first> get burnt> then complain.
Wake up LOL!
Everyone, Chinese isn't bad, the factories only produce what they are told to and there are ppl that have plans for things like this. The moral of this story is: Buy everything at reliable sources, and check it, and know how you can get back at them if you got scammed.
I did some business with China and they simply cannot be trusted. I re-designed a generator they produce. BEFORE my order arrived I saw MY design in shops already - and I supposedly had a Sole Agency agreement. Their factories all deal through 'sales companies' and each Sales Company has a brand, so the factory may produce the same item with 100's of diferent brands on it, so they have no problem giving you 'sole rights'.
And dont let them make anything for you. Your design is copied automatically.
You can play random chunks of movies without header files with programs like VLC, which aren't exactly uncommon.
A lot of friends I know who I would hardly describe as 'techy' use it as their main media player
These are classic. I've seen cards that pretend to be much bigger than they are.
I'm sure it isn't related to the gigantic floppy that I saw back in school once. That just had a filesystem broken in an interesting way :)
Criticizing China as a country is not racist. There are some serious regulatory issues in China that the Chinese government has failed to address for many decades and there is no sign on the horizon that it will change. Any rational person would see that it is a national issue, not a racial issue, i.e. - it says nothing about Chinese as individuals.
As several posts pointed out, there are some regulatory issues in other countries as well, but IMO nowhere near the same degree as China. You can rightly point to Bernie Madoff as a regulatory failure, but when was the last time you heard a story about the U.S. mass producing toys made with toxic chemicals? You don't, because in the US it wouldn't pay and you would end up in prison.
This kind of Chinese USB flash disks have been sold in Iranian market for more than two years. I bought one of them two years ago, claiming to be a 200GB flash, but it was a 128MB flash disk. When I tried to format, it totally failed and I threw it away.
Totally agree! That's what happened when I bought a 32 GB pen-drive in Kathmandu. It wouldn't write after a certain time - and playback - forget it. I opened it and found out that there was just a 128 MB chip.
I used it as a keyring for some time, and then it got lost somewhere. Clever manufacturing!
One thing is for sure. China makes nearly all electronics, so boycotting will never be an option.
There would be any number of ways fake the formatting to make the drive appear larger than it is. And I can see this being used to fool a buyer just long enough to close a deal.
The part I don't get is with the "looping". What's the point? Whether your disk runs out of space or the file is not copied correctly you know the drive is bad. Is having the drive do this odd "looping" thing rather than just simply reporting a bogus capacity really going to make a difference?
Hmm, I remember what one dude said in a Grand Theft Auto forum when they berated a Chinese modder for stealing someone else's work and passing it on as his own - "You're not improving the image of the Chinese people one bit with this,"
The more they make dud products the more they'll be bashed and racially humiliated for what they're doing.
I hope this ends up in the Chinese Museum for Modern Technology. Because it's freaking awesome.
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