= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
ike comments on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas! - LessWrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (1240)
I started doing this a while ago.
There are a lot of fake memory cards going around on ebay. You can tell they are fake because they are going for a lot less (a third or less of the price, exact amount varies) than other places. They actually are just hacked to be less capacity than they claim. You can verify the exact capacity by using a program called h2testw.
I buy a few cards, wait for them to ship, dispute the transaction, and usually I get the money back without having to send back the item. (Once I had to send it back, but ebay paid for the shipping. Usually not, though.)
Viola, free memory cards. If you have paypal credit, it's even better, as you don't have to pay until later and you may cancel it before the payment is due. I'm ripping off scammers, so no ethical problems either.
You should not expect such cards to be reliable.
The reason this is possible is because of the way flash memory is manufactured now: the chips are produced with faults, then connected to a microprocessor that runs sophisticated proprietary algorithms to identify the faulty memory cells and reliably distribute stored files across the working memory cells, and also report to both the manufacturer and consumer the total capacity of those working cells. This way a single silicon wafer produced with imperfections can yield hundreds of sd cards ranging from megabytes to 128gb each.
The scammers you're talking about reprogram the microprocessors on these cards to identify themselves as having a larger capacity, but this isn't so simple as it being connected to a reliable 4GB flash memory chip and reporting itself as connected to a reliable 8GB flash memory chip, rather they're all uniformly connected to highly unreliable 32GB or greater memory chips and correcting the reliability problem in firmware, and there's no telling how the scammers messed with that besides the change in the reported capacity. I would expect any file saved on such a card to have pieces randomized or zeroed over time.
An 8G class 10 card can be purchased from frys.com for $3.00. You're not likely to get many cards larger than 8G by doing this and you may end up with a smaller card that is less useful. Unless your time and effort is nearly worthless to you, or unless you're so poor that you really would rather spend the time and effort to save such small amounts, this makes no sense. Furthermore, most people have no need for more than a few small SD cards anyway.
If it takes around 5 minutes per card (because you can order multiple cards at once), then making even 2 dollars a card is $24 an hour, for something that isn't very complicated and doesn't feel like work. I've also at times resold them myself (with the correct capacity, and as-is), and made money that way. Some people might also like to have a fake card for fun. (It's actually quite cool the way it's hacked.)
Besides, the title was Post ridiculous munchkin ideas.