Comment by sllabres

From the article: "The consequences for a consumer buying a shady USB cable likely aren’t too bad".

I can't second that, but more to the software/driver side.

Without my knowledge, I once had a counterfeit cable that costed several days of my life. At that time, the FTDI drivers recognized (and as I read did some other things [1]) that a counterfeit cable was connected, but instead of simply disabling the function, they impeded it. In my case: After pressing the first few keys on terminal connection, the transmission from the device to the PC worked, but not the reverse direction. A long search for the error came to an end after I replaced the USB/RS232 with a new one. This was with windows, with Linux even the counterfeit worked.

[1] https://www.elektroda.com/qa,ftdi-ft232-scandal-driver-brick...