I appreciate the link. I wanted to see what you saw, so I opened the ZIP file and it expands to 27 files. I believe the relevant file is USB_PD_R3.2_V1.2_2026_05_20.pdf, page 42, which states:

3.2.5.2. SPR Programmable Power Supply (PPS) Programmable Power Supply (PPS) is Optional. When included, the voltages and currents a PPS Shall support are as defined in Table 3.4.

If it’s optional in rev. 3.2, I assume it’s optional in rev 3.0. I’m a bit astonished because PPS is probably the most signficant feature of rev.3. The industry is not competent enough to even tell consumers which rev a device conforms to. But if it did, typical Wikipedia-informed consumers who see PD “rev.3” advertised would naturally expect PPS. As you are correct that PPS is indeed optional, many consumers will get burnt by the misunderstanding.

A potentially interesting follow-up question would be whether the laptop’s mainboard PDO tells you the laptop supports PPS even though its power brick doesn’t.

What’s PDO?

The problem seems to be that a laptop could be designed to /need/ PPS, e.g. if the voltage it needs is well below 20v. While most PSUs do not advertise USB-PD 3(+) compliance, much less PPS.

Counter question: where does it say on there that it’s PD3.0?

Nowhere. I found no mention of PD anything which inspires some of my questions.

Perhaps it follows since stuff from the PD3 specs and that’s why that tester said it, but this is guesswork.

That’s indeed the sort of answer I was looking for. The testing device detects PD3. This somewhat suggests that electronically the PSU (falsely) identifies itself as PD 3.0-compliant.

Perhaps I’m misunderstanding you but the gist of your text is “why is this item not saying what a random guy said it should say??”

I want to understand the contradiction. The testing device declares that the PSU is PD3. But the test results led the blogger to claim it’s not PPS. So where is the lying occuring? I expect the PD protocols to establish a handshake whereby each side of the handshake discloses the PD revision it adheres to. Otherwise the protocol is quite shitty.

If we assume a non-shitty protocol, than the Dell PSU is falsely announcing itself as PD3 and the tester is just a messenger.

Edit: remember that companies need to pay fees when they advertise with the standard - they can just follow its spec without advertising it at all, I can see that happening for laptop producers specially as they don’t sell their power units as generic products (i.e. with a focus to market them).

That’s interesting. I suppose the fees finance a certification effort. And I suppose that’s fair enough. But if a device claims to be PD3 not on the label but makes this claim in the electronic protocol, the claim is still a claim nonetheless. People and machines rely on claims made by protocols. And I suppose it’s all legally dicey. Dell could not be easily prosecuted for false advertising if they wrote nothing on the box or label that a buyer would see. But the hardware is still lying about its capability and I would think that would (or should) have consequences.

Oh, so to be clear, an asus laptop that expects a USB PD supply can still detect whether or not it’s an OEM charger? And when it’s non-asus, it distrusts the capability and only draws 65w even if the PSU can do 100w?

IIUC, that’s a bit fucked up. I’ve read claims that either USB PD or the proprietary 3-pin predecessors are supposed to be smart enough so appliances can go easy on PSUs that are not up to the full load, but I was expecting USB PD to not have vendor favoritism problems like that. I appreciate the tip. Seems like another gotcha that can even burn above average consumers who know to a reasonable extent what they are doing.

(update) found this

Myth #2: “Original Chargers Are Always Best” Truth: Not anymore.

Many manufacturers use cheap chargers to cut costs. A quality USB PD charger often beats what’s in the box.

So I have to wonder if an asus laptop would actually nanny a non-asus PSU that is better than the asus oem psu.

I’m not grasping what you’re saying. What is it that asus is doing on their USB PD laptops and tablets?

Look it up on youtube

I don’t do youtube, which has descended into a shitshow of Google blocking both Tor and also killing off invideous instances. But I have seen some hacker pages with pics of this hacking. In any case, it’s a mess. It used to be that only dumb consumers got burnt (as they would mismatch voltages). But now smart consumers can get burnt too because even when the levels are good the nannying protectionism cock-blocks.

I’m getting the sense from your comments that you think that USB-PD will deliver a higher voltage than requested. This is not accurate. A device can request any of the voltages specified by PD, and the power supply will supply that voltage if it is capable of doing so. If not, it will provide 5V. It’s very possible to get a sippy that won’t power your device,

See the experiment I linked in the post that you replied to. If 19.5v is requested, 20v is supplied. If 12v is requested, 9v is supplied (not 5v). But also since 9v is optional, some PSUs would push 5v. So the voltage you get depends on what the PSU makers feel like sending.

but a working, PD-compliant power supply will not damage a working, PD-compliant device.

Yet they will fail because compliance is subject to interpretation and the ambiguities are disputed. Try plugging a USB-C bicycle light into a Lenovo USB-C PSU. Even though they both handle 5v, it fails. The Lenovo device makers believe all voltages, even 5v, must be negotiated. The bicycle light makers believe a 5v “default” /means/ they should get 5v without negotiation. The Lenovo PSU makers believe “default” means 5v will be the result of a failed negotiation (but not absence of negotiation).

And other device makers believe USB PD requires supplying the closest voltage when negotiation fails, not 5v. Those people probably also believe 5v should be sent in the absence of negotiation.

Obviously, if you get a barrel jack adapter that requests 20V and then plug it into a 5V device, you’re going to let the magic smoke out, but that’s because barrel jacks don’t do negotiation. The power supply correctly supplies 20V as requested, and then you plug that 20V into the wrong thing.

You’re mixing up the different adapters. You can have a USB→barrel and you can have a barrel→USB. The interesting case is what I described, when the appliance and PSU are compatible in terms of voltage but still fail because of the protocol. Also consider that a 20v barrel PSU could feed a dumb usb-c adapter which then fries a 5v device. In principle, the adapter /could/ do a negotiation and refuse to supply 20v to a 5v device, or even just cut-off anything above 5v, but the shitshow that we have is a marketplace with dumb adapters. And in both situations (usb→barrel and barrel→usb), it’s not foolproof. Countless consumers cannot handle the voltage matching task so if the plugs fit, they will try it.

Oh I didn’t think of that. It’s native French speakers who use “mail” for “email” (when speaking english).

Interesting to see his take on “e-mail” vs “email”. I bet he changes his tune on “email” vs “mail” – where gen-z has decided that it’s okay to save keystrokes by dropping the “e” because no one uses snail mail anymore. Indeed I am always disguested when someone says “send a mail”. I have to ask for clarification and they always confirm that mean email.

USB PD is also a shit show. You might want to read this:

https://goughlui.com/2025/12/01/tested-usb-c-barrel-connector-adapters-5-5mm-od-2-1-2-5mm-id/

Which shows those USB PD negotiations can get dicey. It chooses voltages thought to be close enough to what’s requested.

I’ve run into a nasty problem where a USB-C appliance needed 9v. Says in the manual something like “only use Kenwood power supplies on this device”. I thought, fuck that, USB PD is a standard for a reason. I’m not going to blow money on a proprietary OEM Kenwood USB-C PSU. Then found that many power supplies actually skip 9v. The USB PD standard makes some voltage steps optional, and some mandatory. IIRC, 9v was one of the required ones, yet it was easy to find USB-C power supplies that skipped 9v but offered 12v (or 15v, I forget). And yet 12v or 15v was one of the voltage steps that’s optional. And IIRC, the Kenwood OEM PSU /only/ did 9v, which is also not USB PD compliant, so the Kenwood PSU could not be used on other things.

So the USB PD strangely and arbitrarily makes some voltage steps optional, and manufacturers ignore the standard anyway.

I have an adapter that goes from barrel to USB-C. Recipe for disaster. Even if a 9v PSU uses that adapter and a USB-C appliance wants 9v, it will fry shit because any non-5v appliance expects to negotiate the voltage. I don’t recall how it leads to frying (I think b/c it tries to start at the 5v default before negotiating for 9v but instead it just gets hit with 9v), but the fact that there are USB-C-barrel adapters that just hardwire without the needed logic is scary.

So in the context of copious dumb users plugging in anything that fits the socket, the data PIN may¹ have prevented a lot of damage while at the same time enabled HP to rack in lots of money on replacement OEM proprietary PSUs. Indeed I have seen on many occasians clueless plebs at the street market selling 2nd-hand appliances and quickly trying barrels from a pile of tangled PSUs until one fits, then trying to include that with the device they are selling without looking at voltage or anything. It’s common and I’m sure lots of gear gets fried because the general population is just not smart enough.

I know how to match voltage, polarity, and current demands. And I got stung by the nannying to protect me from myself. Spent a lot of time disassembling a laptop, trying different RAM sticks, removing wifi cards and other components as I was baffled about what this fucking blicking LED means when it is not blinking in any way to convey an error code. Removed the CR2032 battery to reset the CMOS. Wondered if my slower than spec DDR3 RAM was causing this, so I went to the trouble of tracking down a RAM stick the precisely matched the specs. Still just got a steady non-stop blink, which the manual falsely states means it’s in sleep mode. So I was ready to conclude that the laptop was trapped in sleep mode and irreparably hosed. Perhaps I would have tossed a working laptop.

Whether it is a good design to protect from incorrect PSUs (despite that the obscure barrel connector is probably only 19.5v systems anyway), most certainly it’s a crappy design to not inform users. To fail to assign an error code. Sure, it vaguely says in the manual something like “use only approved HP power adapters” – something /smart/ consumers do not take seriously because they know how to match PSUs to appliance and know that shit is always a branding hussle. The data pin should not be a secret that is concealed from both the user guide and the maintenance and service guide (which HP says is not for end users… yet they still withhold the info from service people).

Perhaps good design as far as the PSU goes. But shitty to not document the situation and to not implement an error code.

¹ I stress /may have/ prevented damage because I have seen a lot of street market goods and only seen this obscure barrel tip on HP and Dell laptops, both of which are 19.5v.

AT&T is the worst of the worst. And I boycott them for countless reasons like snooping on their own customers voluntarily without a warrant. It’s really a hard-right corp. In any case, never tried them so I didn’t know they blocked egress 25.

One trick that works if truth-in-advertising laws are in force: ask the sales people before subscribing if the block port 25. They always say “no, we block nothing” (in my experience). So you subscribe and sign the contract. Then when you see they actually block 25, you have a false advertising situation and also a contract violation (if either verbal contracts are enforcable or if you can get it in writing that nothing is blocked). So you complain. In my experience, they give a gratis upgrade to an enterprise level of service that generally has a static IP and no blocks – for the price of the residential plan you signed up for.

I can’t speak for @ShutUpWesley@piefed.zip, but I boycott both Google and Microsoft. This means 95+% of prospective people, corps, and gov agencies I would exchange email with are not getting email from me. They are also not getting an email address out of me.

I have been done with email for nearly a decade now, mostly. So, to answer your question, I use fax and snail mail. Not joking. I feel liberated and don’t give a shit about postage or inconvenience. There is still that exceptional 5% or so who I will exchange email with, which does not have GAFAM in the loop.

(edit) should add that I give friends and family an XMPP address (of my own, but often I also give them an XMPP acct for themselves). Google bounced from XMPP a decade or so ago and AFAIK Microsoft has no XMPP service. So it’s mostly snail mail and fax for govs and corps. XMPP for people.

Any friends or family who resist XMPP are mostly stuffed. They can either proxy through a mutual friend or call me if they are local.

Maybe the way to fight GMail’s outsized power is to stop using GMail.

Stopping your own gmail use is trivially easy. It just scratches the surface. In order to not lick Google’s boots, you also need to stop sending email to gmail users. That means doing an MX lookup before emailing to see if their vanity email address is on a Gmail host. And of course this also means not sharing an email address with gmail users.

I do that, in fact. I also boycott Microsoft. In the end, this means I am not using email much at all.

They claim its for spam prevention which is why most ISPs actually also block outgoing SMTP port 25.

European ISPs block egress port 25, not American ones, generally. Not sure about the rest of the world.

In Europe, one refuge is to send using the GSM networks, which tend not to block egress 25 for some reason.

Very happy to have learned about tildeverse.org. It gives a great refuge from a lot of the garbage. But I have to ask, if you are part of the tildeverse project why are you on lemmy.world, a centralised exclusive Cloudflare instance? I realise tildeverse does not have a lemmy node but there are many decent ones and LW is probably the most contrary to the tildeverse philosophies.

So IIUC, you’re saying it’s for a phone to configure the appliance? The reason being that the appliance’s UI is not convenient enough, I presume?

In the case at hand, the Karcher DAB radio has no iOS or AOS app. So AFAICT it would only be feasible if the radio also had a built-in web server and a captive portal. But I get no captive portal when connecting.

I suppose another theory is that if the radio has a cloud uplink, perhaps it would then push a captive portal to redirect to a centralised server which then remotely configures the device. I would not trust it enough to give it an uplink so I can’t test this theory.

Sorry for the late reply. But for the record I must say Tails does not do what I want because Tails gives clearnet access. The UI discourages it, but the possibility is there to open a browser on clearnet.

You may be right about Whonix… I have yet to tinker with it.

So the question is, does Russia really have a hard time getting spies in? Or is it more of a matter of saving money on the travel effort and letting a couple local kids be the fall guys? Because the recruitment itself has some risk. Netherlands probably needs some counter spies posing as kids looking to be recruited.