rePost::Sleuthing uncovers the mystery of Kingston MicroSD cards' crappy QA Boing Boing

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Sleuthing uncovers the mystery of Kingston MicroSD cards’ crappy QA

By Cory Doctorow at 2:46 AM February 16, 2010

via Sleuthing uncovers the mystery of Kingston MicroSD cards’ crappy QA Boing Boing.

When Bunnie Huang was in South China overseeing production on his versatile ChumbyOne device, he discovered a major quality issue with Kingston’s MicroSD cards. At first, he assumed that he’d gotten a counterfeit batch, but further investigation proved them to be legit. Kingston wasn’t willing to give Bunnie any details on its QA process, so Bunnie did some amazing engineer-sleuthing on Kingston and its competitors’ MicroSD, and wrote up the results in a damning report that is one of the most fascinating accounts of everyday engineering I can remember reading. Bunnie Huang wrote the book on reverse engineering, literally, so he isn’t afraid to start dissolving memory cards’ encapsulant with acetone, or start comparing /sys entries to get comparative reads on the the electronic card ID data records. Posts like this make me want to be like Bunnie when I grow up.

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