Rated insecurity: Faux Cat 6 cable sold on Amazon
Many of you are on Wi-Fi, but this is salient to you. Amazon’s enormous sales site is marketing Cat 5 and Cat 6 Ethernet cable with aluminum conductors, as well as “plenum-rated” cable that bears no UL markings and is likely fraudulent. This comes after a run of apparently bogus Apple chargers and cables. Why do you care? Several reasons: Some of the Ethernet cable sold uses either copper-coated or copper-mixed aluminum. Numerous specs call for the conductors to be solid copper. Why? Copper meets conductivity specs and won’t heat up under load. Organizations using Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) to power remote Wi-Fi access points (quite common these days) risk having the cable catch fire due to overheating, or just melt and short—especially on long cable runs. Plenum-rated cables are self-extinguishing. This means if you put a nail through one (we hope accidentally), then a jacket surrounding the cable prevents setting something in the surrounding area on fire. If you add the two factors together, cable that heats up and jackets that don’t extinguish a possible flame, then the sprinklers turn on. We hope. Whilst perusing the listings, I came across numerous enticing examples. Why enticing? Because their cost Continue reading