#a simple no ty as a response works without making it a public affair

[iteh3xael]

Apparently we’ve reached an age where vagueposting is coming back en vogue hmmm

[stormkrigeren]

Whumptober Day 1!

Link to the Ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34210837/chapters/85120435

Title: Bound - Lois

Prompt: No. 1 ‘All Trussed Up And Still Nowhere To Go’ - “You have to let go”, barbed wire, bound

Word Count: 2475

Lois preferred rope over handcuffs, and duct tape over rope. Duct tape was best because it was surprisingly easy to break, but she was rarely lucky enough to be tied up with it. Lois could tell that today wasn’t her lucky day the moment the goon wrapped a length of plastic boating rope around her wrists and yanked it tight.

She loved her job. The title of ‘investigative reporter’ practically gave her a free pass to be as nosy as she liked (and Lois was admittedly quite nosy) while also revealing the truth on a variety of issues, affairs, and dealings. No one would blink twice if she walked into a warzone or gang territory or some crooked mogul’s office with a pen handy and far too many questions in her head, and no one was surprised when her life was threatened only for her to diffuse the situation a few minutes later. That was just how Lois worked, and she loved it.

The one and only issue with her job was the fact that if her life wasn’t being threatened, her freedom probably was. Sometimes it would just be a threat to get her so discredited that no one would ever publish her works again, removing her freedom of speech, but Lois was good at her job and no one ever found anything to discredit her on. So more often than not whatever fraudulent idiot she had revealed that day would instead tie her up and leave her in a warehouse somewhere until either the police or her boss showed up with a ransom because investigative reporters, especially ones named Lois Lane, were surprisingly valuable (the highest number she’d ever heard was close to a million, which of course didn’t pan out, but it was interesting to think about).

Today had started out pretty normally - Lois had woken up, gotten ready for the day, and taken the subway to work like she usually did. Upon arriving at the Daily Planet’s Head Offices in the Upper East Side of the city, she had clocked in and gotten to her desk with the intention of kicking off the work day with a little bit of research and note-taking in preparation for her interview with some S.T.A.R Labs higher-ups that afternoon. The company had received a contract from the Department of Defense to investigate and research the Kryptonian scout ship that had crashed in downtown Metropolis and was now in government custody. Any Kryptonian 'artifacts’ found in or around the ship were catalogued by S.T.A.R Labs before being transferred to various labs and other research companies around the nation for studying, the biggest transfers usually being made to the S.T.A.R facilities in Central City and Metropolis, and third-party contractors such as Kord Industries, LexCorp, and WayneTech. The distribution of findings for individual research was all well and good, but a whistleblower had recently come to Lois with some disturbing finds: some of the artifacts, especially alien weapons, were disappearing from large shipments without a trace.

When the time of the interview drew near, Lois checked in with Perry before catching a taxi to the S.T.A.R Labs headquarters downtown. Her appointment was with a few scientists from the company’s board of directors that worked with the Kryptonian scout ship the most, and luckily for them, all three of them had enough tact to not back out of the meeting when they realized that the reporter the Daily Planet had sent over was in fact a lady on the high road to a Pulitzer Prize. A board room was procured for their usage, and Lois, being well-familiar with the drill, started her recording app, pulled out her notes, and started doing what comprised the bulk of her job as an investigative journalist: asking questions.

How was work on the Kryptonian scout ship progressing? Had any significant discoveries or breakthroughs been made so far? What sort of artifacts were they dealing with, and how did they decide which ones to distribute for outside research? Were the scout ship’s contents primarily weapons, or other items? What was the company’s response to rumors about misplaced shipments?

The scientists happily answered her questions, occasionally going off on a tangent about some discovery or the supposed usage of some unknown object but otherwise provided Lois with some pretty good fuel for her next article up until she came to the final question. All three of the researchers shifted uncomfortably in their seats and exchanged the briefest of nervous glances before Dr. Rhems, the head consultant for their Kryptonian armaments division, launched into a spiel about how their cataloguing system was infallible and they had not seen any evidence that items were missing, the rumors had to be false or else they would have known. To solidify his claim, he even offered to show her their records and prove that whatever data people were basing their opinions off of had to be wrong. Lois immediately took him up on the offer.

Taking his fellow scientists’ leave, Dr. Rhems led her through the building before finally stopping outside a door that supposedly led to where the Labs kept their records pertaining to the Kryptonian artifact research program.

“You have to understand, Miss Lane, that S.T.A.R Labs is not the only facility performing research on Kryptonian weaponry,” he explained as he fished a key card out of his pocket, nearly dropped it, and finally managed to tap it against the scanner beside the door, “It’s quite possible that one of the other contractors involved in the program may simply not be cataloguing their artifacts correctly-”

“They are,” Lois snapped back as she followed him through the doorway, “The issue is within your own company. The records available to the public show that half of the missing items disappear while still in your system. I know this seems a little far-fetched, Dr. Rhems, but it's looking like there are some shady dealings going on within your facility to steal Kryptonian weapons, and possibly other items, without your knowledge.”

“That’s impossible! This is one of the most secure facilities in the state, and every one of our employees has undergone rigorous background examinations. Surely this must be some sort of journalistic ploy to discredit S.T.A.R Labs, Miss Lane-”

“With all due respect, Dr. Rhems, please stop trying to dissuade me before I’ve seen your evidence against the so-called ‘rumors’. I’ll make my decision on what to tell the public once you can prove to me that the accusations aren’t true.”

Dr. Rhems paused at that, stopped in front of a laboratory workstation and glanced quickly between Lois and the racks of Kryptonian armaments on the far side of the room - apparently this lab was where they were stored for cataloging and documentation.

“Well,” the doctor said finally, “if you’re so sure you cannot be persuaded...”

The scientist tapped a button on the workstation’s keyboard and Lois distinctly heard the door behind her lock shut with a hydraulic hiss and low shunking sound. Before she even had time to turn around, Dr. Rhems was pulling what looked too much like a genuine Kryptonian sidearm for comfort out of his labcoat and levelling it at her head. There was no doubt in her mind that it was real, and Lois should know - she had used one.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Miss Lane,” Dr. Rhems confessed, “But I am going to have to ask you to comply while Caleb ties you up - don’t want you getting away before we’ve come to an agreement, you see.”

At his behest, mostly because she was unable to do otherwise with a Kryptonian sidearm pointed at her, Lois took a seat in the chair the scientist pointed to and waited in silence to see what he would do next. Dr. Rhems typed another command into the workstation console and the door unlocked to slide open just enough for a nervous-looking intern to slip inside before the door locked shut again. The young man had apparently been given orders to follow them and wait outside the lab until his boss let him in, and after a brief, curious glance in the reporter’s direction, he immediately got to the task assigned by fetching a length of plastic rope - the kind typically used for camping due to its lightweight nature - from a desk drawer and using it to tie Lois’ hands behind her back. Under Dr. Rhems supervision, he tied the knots as tight as he could before proceeding to tie her ankles to the chair legs, and though Lois hated to admit it, she was thoroughly stuck where she was.

“You can’t keep me here for long,” Lois reminded Dr. Rhems, holding back a wince when the uncomfortable cordage bit into her ankles and resisting the urge to give Caleb a solid kick to the nose went he bent down to adjust the rope, “My editor will wonder where I am if I don’t check in soon, not to mention the fact that I’m legally under the protection of both the US government and the Kryptonian remnant. I just have to scream ‘Superman’ and someone will be here within ten seconds.”

If she stated that last sentence a little louder than necessary, Dr. Rhems didn’t notice and simply cocked the blaster (improperly, Lois noted) as Caleb finished tying her up, “You won’t scream. You wouldn’t dare.”

“Maybe I will,” Lois answered, resisting the urge to smirk. Dr. Rhems apparently had enough confidence to do so himself, and shook his head self-assuredly.

“As you said earlier, Miss Lane, you should wait to hear my side of the story before forming an opinion,” he stated calmly, “Let’s start with a simple fact: alien artifacts created in and designed to be used in an environment different from Earth are a little difficult, and expensive, to maintain. Sure, the technology works here, but until we can fully understand it, we have to ensure that it does not deteriorate or lose function when not used properly. I would read you a few excerpts from my paper on the apparent bio-technological advancements in Kryptonian technology that make their mechanism borderline-organic, so simultaneously holding some level of innate intelligence or purpose but also being susceptible to deterioration if not maintained, but we don’t have time for that now.

“Without going into too much detail, S.T.A.R Labs is not getting the funding it needs from the Department of Defense. No significant advances or research is able to be done without money, Miss Lane, and we don’t have a lot of it,” Dr. Rhems continued, “The solution? Getting rid of artifacts we do not have the facilities to maintain while also making a little bit of cash - in short we’ve been selling Kryptonian technology to foreign buyers.”

“You mean stealing and profiting off of property of the US government, not to mention that the UN is currently trying to rule both artifacts and the scout ship itself as property of the Kryptonian remnant,” Lois corrected him. Damn, she was pretty sure she was losing feeling in her hands considering how tightly the intern had bound her, but if she could just slip one hand out of the rope…

“Everyone knows the UN won’t succeed in the ruling - that technology is far too valuable to belong to a couple of do-gooder extraterrestrials,” Dr. Rhems answered, “And before you ask what I’m going to do with you or why I’ve decided to tell you all this, the answers are simple: I’m going to ransom you and get a bit of extra ‘funding’ out of it, and once your ransom has been paid and you are released, you are going to write me an article about the corruption going on in our own Department of Defense that has led to the gross underfunding of essential research facilities such as S.T.A.R Labs.”

“And just who do you think is going to pay my ransom?” Lois asked. Her plan was to keep him talking, keep his focus off her and the fact that after rubbing the skin raw and nearly spraining her wrist, she had just about managed to get her right hand out of Caleb’s tightly-but-poorly-tied attempt at binding her up. Poor kid - he hadn’t done too bad of a job considering that typing would be a pain-in-the-ass tomorrow, but it wasn’t enough to keep Lois off her game. Dr. Rhems was still going off about who he was going to call for the money for her release when she got both hands free, and right on time the thick laboratory door crumpled beneath a hand strong enough to bend steel as Superman himself stepped into the room. Lois wasted no time when the two S.T.A.R Lab scientists were distracted by his arrival, and she lunged at Dr. Rhems to knock the blaster out of his distracted grip, cock it for firing (properly, she noted), and point it at the bastard’s head.

“Well, Dr. Rhems,” she couldn’t help but announce with a smirk, “It looks like I was right about those missing shipments.”

V*V*V*V*V*V*V

It was Perry who picked her up from the S.T.A.R Labs facility after Lois was done giving her account to the police - part of her wished it had been Superman who flew her back to the Daily Planet offices, but he was still busy talking with an officer about the two scientists who had been holding Miss Lane hostage - and after a short drive back to the familiar newspaper building, it was Clark who first noticed the blisters covering her wrists and insisted on getting the first aid kit to treat them. Still, Lois ended up looking after the injuries herself, mostly because Clark, despite his kindness, strength, and adorable handsomeness, was a bit on the squeamish side and still had work to do. It wasn’t the worst she had ever dealt with - her wrists only required some antibacterial cream and bandages, whereas her left ankle had nearly been sprained when she lunged at Dr. Rhems with her feet still tied to the chair and required a bit more care in the form of an ice pack. Despite her injuries, Lois was having a pretty damn fine day - her typing skills weren’t as affected as she had imagined, her phone had still been recording throughout the whole hostage situation, and she had enough evidence pieced together to make the leading story of the evening edition. A sprained ankle and wrists that were raw as fuck after trying to wriggle her way out of plastic boating rope of all things were a small price to pay for the front page.

[shirlleycoyle]

Why the World May Never Truly Be Rid of Dongles

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

As you may guess from the stuff I write about, I have a lot of computers, of various shapes, sizes, and functions.

Some of them I only mess with occasionally; some are frequent companions; some (like my Pinebook Pro) are destined to be frequent targets of tinkering for me. But the one thing that they have in common is that they encourage me to plug in a rat’s nest of cabling to plug into the various gadgets I own. The monitor I got late last year I purchased specifically because I needed a USB hub to go with my high-resolution screen. 

But despite all these efforts to simplify my cabling life, dongles rule everything around me. And around you, too. It comes with the territory. 

Ultimately, the problem the dongle solves may never truly go away.

“We don’t know much, for sure, about the word that has been a source of so much frustration and controversy and, regardless, ubiquity. But that hasn’t stopped people from guessing.”

— Megan Garber, in a 2013 essay in The Atlantic discussing the origin of the word “dongle,” which she noted was fairly unclear. A 1984 article from The Guardian, in reference to Clive Sinclair’s ill-fated Sinclair QL computer makes a reference to dongles as “an ancient piece of computer jargon,” despite the fact that it’s one of the earliest references I can find in a mainstream newspaper. It suddenly showed up in newspapers around 1984, as did one of the earliest patent filings regarding dongles, in the United Kingdom. In technology publications, the first references I see date to October 1981, in issues of New Scientist and Byte, both in reference to antipiracy technology. 

An example of a parallel-port dongle. Image: Raimond Spekking/Wikimedia Commons

The dongle’s original legacy as an antipiracy tool

Last year, when the latest iteration of the Mac Pro came out, one thing that may have confused observers looking at this machine, which they will likely never use, is the unusual placement of a USB-A port on the machine’s motherboard.

To those that only lightly follow technology, the existence of this port likely made no sense. But it reflects a decades-long legacy of tying security to actual hardware that, for some programs at least, persists to this day.

A 1984 New Scientist piece explained the dynamic that led to the growing popularity of dongles throughout the period, but noted that despite their goal of security, they ultimately were seen as easy to break by technical users:

The dongle is a small plastic box which plugs into one of the ports at the back of a computer. A program protected by a dongle contains a routine that asks a computer to check whether the dongle is present and sometimes to read a code from it. If it has not been plugged in the program will not run. Most dongles do not prevent programs from being copied, but they stop the copies from being used, since each copy needs a matching dongle to work.

Unfortunately, there is nothing to prevent the owner of a dongle-protected program from displaying the program code on his computer screen and removing the dongle check from it. One expert says this task takes about two hours.

The dongle system has been refined by some companies. Instead of supplying a program in plain computer code, some or all of the instructions are scrambled. The key to this simple encryption is held by the dongle which passes it to the computer’s operating system (the program which coordinates the computer’s operations). Once unscrambled, the program is loaded into the computer’s memory and runs in the normal way; but it is not difficult to remove the built-in checks. 

For games, these approaches were eventually replaced by copy-protection schemes inside manuals or by different distribution approaches, like shareware. But dongles for more high-end or specialized software products, along with employee security, never really went away. In fact, they got more sophisticated, adding their own processing capabilities that interacted with the software being used.

Of course, people aren’t aware where they actually came from in the first place, as The Atlantic_’s Garber implied. This has led to fun stories, the most colorful of which was invented by the tech company Rainbow Technologies, which, in a 1992 advertisement than ran in _Byte, invented a character named Don Gall who they claimed the device was named after.

“He wasn’t famous. He didn’t drive a fancy car, but dressed in his favorite Comdex T-shirt and faded blue jeans, he set out to change the course of the software story,” the fable started.

While obviously totally made up, it nonetheless became something of an urban legend.

These devices generally hooked up to serial or parallel ports throughout the 1990s, with adapters that allowed users to continue to plug in devices such printers. In terms of video games, cheat tools like the Game Genie could be thought of as dongles.

But in the late 1990s, these devices were able to shrink thanks to USB. These dongles, while less prominent than they once were, have largely stayed in common use in a handful of industries, specifically those that sell computer-aided design or manufacturing software, and those that offer software for digital audio workstations. ACID and Autodesk, two manufacturers that specialize in are probably two of the best-known companies that rely on hardware security dongles in the modern day. These are the kinds of devices for which the Mac Pro has an internal USB-A port.

More common, however, are devices intended specifically for two-factor authentication, such as the YubiKey, which serve a similar security function, but for the user or the organization for which they serve, rather than to prevent piracy. These tools work in similar ways to the dongles of yore, perhaps with additional security mechanisms.

Speaking of USB, the switch of formats, which was ultimately a good thing for technology, helped create a pretty big market for dongles big and small, many of which connect to all variety of objects, from printers to TV sets. (Apple, the company that moved to USB early, is responsible for many of our dongles.)

The USB thumb drive is a great example of a dongle, and perhaps the most prominent example of flash disks around.

Similarly, video standards have a way of adding dongles to our lives. Ever converted HDMI to DVI to VGA to composite to RF? (No, just me?) Then you’ve lived the dongle life.

It’s a fact of life, and one that has only become more of a fact of life thanks to the rise of USB-C creating natural incompatibilities for dongles.

Five of the weirdest dongle connectors I’m aware of

USB-C to MagSafe. As is well-documented, I have issues with the design of the Mac’s default power brick, which I think has serious deficiencies because, prior to its conversion to USB-C, its primary cable is both thin and non-removable. For years, Apple made this port proprietary and failed to allow for alternative devices to be made, but after moving to USB-C, Apple took its eye off the MagSafe ball. I bought this adapter off of eBay, delivered straight from China, and use it with the adapter that comes with my HP Spectre x360, which supports USB-C by default.

Jawbone UP24 to USB. Despite the fact that most people associate exercise bands with the brand Fitbit, it was Jawbone that really set the stage for the category’s success with its UP series of fitness trackers, which actually pulled off the neat trick of looking cool without being showy (a credit to its designer, Yves Béhar). It helped to build a market segment … which Jawbone’s competitors quickly took for themselves. For this discussion, though, The interesting thing about this device is how it charged: You take off the cap and a 2.5mm headphone adapter appears. You plug that into a USB-A dongle with said jack, that isn’t useful for anything else.

DVI to ADC. While VGA is a far more memorable adapter for those looking to get a signal onto a video display, DVI has been a more consistent part of the video experience in recent years, appearing on video cards even today, while DisplayPort and HDMI are locked in a battle for supremacy. But ADC? This was a relatively brief attempt by Apple to try to minimize the number of cables needed to connect cables to its monitors. It was arguably ahead of its time—it took USB-C 15 years to make this capability common across the computer industry—but the problem was that the port was proprietary, and if you wanted to use a computer other than Apple’s G4 towers (say, a PowerBook), you needed to break apart those signals—which required a really big dongle. Apple’s official dongle, released in 2002, is both extremely expensive and as large as a standard laptop power brick, and while there is a smaller third-party alternative, it’s harder to find. At least one hardware-hacker has gone to the trouble of creating a reasonably sized version.

Crazyradio PA USB Dongle. This dongle, an open-source device, is essentially a USB radio that works on the same open 2.4-gigahertz as early versions of Wi-Fi. Why would you want this? Well, it’s effectively a wireless mouse dongle for everything else, except with a much larger antenna. Highly hackable, open-sourced, originally developed for a tiny drone, and with a massive range, it can be used for any manner of weird stuff, and is a popular choice for hardware hackers, though some have gone to the point of hacking those wireless mouse adapters for whatever they want.

The Shugru-covered wireless mouse connector. For those with wireless mice, Apple’s move to USB-C on laptops has made life a lot more frustrating because it requires the use of a dongle with your dongle. Rather than be stuck with that state of affairs, the YouTube channel DIY Perks pulled apart one of those mouse connectors, soldered it onto a USB-C breakout board, and covered the whole thing with Shugru, the moldable glue popularly used for DIY projects. A little hacky, but it totally worked.

There was once a massive dongle for sale that could Hackintosh your system

The very nature of dongles means that they come and go, and no dongle, perhaps, has come and gone as quietly as the EFiX USB dongle.

Unlike the security keys used to protect software from installation, EFiX literally does the opposite—it allows users to install software that its maker would prefer users didn’t.

A gadget modern enough that it was featured on websites such as Engadget, the EFiX (also known as EFI-X

, with both names referencing the UEFI firmware that is common today but Intel Macs were relatively early to) harkens back to a time when installing MacOS on a non-Apple PC wasn’t particularly easy. This object, produced by a firm named Art Studios Entertainment Media, was what the company called a “Boot Processing Unit,” which essentially took all the complicated parts of building a hackintosh (all the messy code and what have you) and hid those from the user.

“EFI-X

is not for everyone. It is not for who wants to save money, at all. It is for enthusiasts that put expandability and extreme performances before anything else in their computing needs. We heard those voices, and we answered,” the company that built this device stated on its website. 

The device, which plugs directly into a USB header on a motherboard rather than a single USB port, essentially handles all the messy parts of installing Mac OS X on a standard desktop PC. (The key word there is desktop; laptops tend not to have user-accessible USB headers.)

A 2008 Gizmodo review of the device noted that while you did have to open up your machine to plug it in, it was incredibly simple to use:

If you’ve got the hardware, the whole process is simple, so that even if you’ve never cracked your desktop before, you could still get this done with a quick search online for the requisite know-how. I plugged the EFiX dongle into a USB header on my motherboard-not, as you might have assumed, to a USB port on the outside. That’s really it for getting your hands dirty, though. I restarted my computer, selected EFiX as the boot device-it was listed under hard drives, actually-and was greeted with a drive selector. After selecting the Leopard disc, it started installing without a hitch.

But those who did get more technical were fairly skeptical about what they found. One Hackintosh blog doing an autopsy of the device in an effort to come up with a software-only solution said that despite the flashy looks and the use of an ARM processor on the module, it was not particularly novel.

“The whole thing, inclusive PCB, case, cable and packaging should cost less than 10 dollars, I guess,” the author wrote.

If this all sounds fairly gray area, it’s worth noting that this device came to life around the time that the Florida company Psystar was getting some negative legal attention from Apple after announcing plans to sell a Mac clone system—a battle Psystar ultimately, famously, lost.

The USA seller of the EFiX dongle, EFiX USA, at one point announced plans to release a clone system of its own … but then quickly changed course, realizing it would probably put them in a world of legal hell.

EFiX and its manufacturers faded away eventually, and the Hackintosh community came up with other solutions for easily turning a computer into a Hackintosh—no proprietary dongle necessary.

The thing with ports is that there is never a shortage of choice in terms of what you can do with them. But when you try shopping for cables with a specific use case in mind, things get confusing, fast.

Last fall, I made a trip to Micro Center, in part because I heard it was the best computer store chain in the country and I was utterly curious about this Mecca to silicon and circuitry. Overall, the experience was fairly positive, but I felt strangely claustrophobic in one section of the store—the section around KVM switches, which are devices (glorified dongles, really) that allow users to swap between different computers.

So many cables. So much switch. Image: Priwo/Wikimedia Commons

These products, generally, require a lot of cables. An absolute ton, a level that will make you never want to see another cable again. And there are a lot of them, of different shapes, sizes, and use cases. Despite the fact that VGA is a dinosaur of a technology, the vast majority of KVM switches that handle video seem to rely on VGA in the year of Our Lord 2020.

The perfect KVM switch is often hard to find if you have a specific need—and they can get ungodly expensive if you’re not careful.

I can’t remember what I was looking for, but I remember vividly that I not only didn’t find it, but I suddenly had a strong desire to leave this store I went out of my way to visit. Again, I’m the guy that loves computers enough that I wrote an entire article about dongles, and I couldn’t take it. I psyched myself out.

The good news is that USB-C has the potential to simplify the use of KVM switches entirely, at least eventually, as they will only require one cable from each device that you’re switching from. The bad news is that USB-C has confused the spec significantly, in some frustrating ways.

By way of example: Recently, I set up a wall stand next to my desk (a floating shelf for DVD players, essentially) that I set up to allow me an easy place to put my laptops and use them without taking space on my desk. Conceivably, I could plug in my USB-C-based laptops using a single cable and get going. The problem is that USB-C adapters have short cables that are embedded into the device.

So, what do you do to resolve this? First, you find a USB-C hub that doesn’t have a cable built-in. Great; here’s the only one I could find that cost less than $50 that had good power-delivery capabilities. But now this cable has to pull double-duty. It needs to be long enough that it isn’t directly next to your computer, able to transmit high-speed data, but able to charge a laptop. This is harder than it sounds. My HP Spectre x360 relies on a 90-watt charger; most cables with the ability to transmit power and high-speed data top out at 60 watts. Want one that supports 100 watts, powerful enough to handle the latest MacBook Pro? In most cases, the speeds will max out at USB 2.0 levels, meaning you may be better off with Thunderbolt 3, which costs even more than USB-C does. I want USB-C for compatibility for multiple devices.

So it took quite a bit of digging to find the right hub and the right cable to make this setup possible. But now I can plug in a single cable to my laptop and start working. (OK, technically two, because the hub transmits HDMI at a slower speed than the port on the laptop itself. Can’t win everything.)

So why am I telling you about the complications of all this? Simply, I think it’s important to point out that we’re replacing dongles with ports that can theoretically take basically everything, but that have specifications so inconsistent and hard to follow that, once USB-C becomes the one port to rule them all, we may be replacing the physical hell of dongles with a sort of technical hell of inconsistent standards, where the value of a specific cable is defined by what it can do rather than what it looks like.

You can buy a working system for a lower price than you can this cable.

We’re already seeing this. Recently, Apple drew a lot of attention for selling a Thunderbolt 3 cable for $129. It was very much a weird-flex-but-OK situation, but part of the reason that it sells for so much is that it’s relatively long (2 meters, or 6.6 feet, or $1.63 per inch), but supports the full Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.1 specs. Most cables of that type only support certain elements of these specifications; Apple’s expensive cable supports the whole thing, making it an extremely valuable cable for someone who prides maximum compatibility, maximum speed, and maximum flexibility in a single span of braided black cable. This kind of consumer, apparently, exists.

All of this raises the question: Are dongles as bad as they look? Probably not. But they sure look weird.

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