alt Hacker NewsIt's been quite a while since i did CE, UL and CSA testing and conformities, but CE even back then was pretty worthless. It's just a self declaration. Only when the proverbial fan has been tainted with figurative feces, they will maybe act upon it.
And back then there was also this weird "China Export" logo that resembled the CE logo specifications for about 95%. The average consumer could not know the difference.
It also gives me a chuckle when i see this weird 'QC passed' stickers on components. Completely worthless.
> It's just a self declaration.
Without registering every minute product variation with a testing certificate, how else would you handle this though? As much as I think regulators should be swinging the axe more than they do, from an engineering perspective it's impossible to actually do unless everything is locked down ISO 9001-style, especially for electronics and doubly so when software is in the mix.
Lying on a self-declaration should always be taken very seriously, but I feel like it often isn't. For example, if Amazon is found to have fake-CE marked good for sale after it's been reported to them, the penalties should make even their eyes water and have their responsible people shuffling nervously.
There's a limited amount you can do for Temu direct-shipped deathtraps (I suppose if you went to an tech-brained extreme, you could use the x-rays of packages at the border that they already do and have something like AI-based statistical recognition of known-bad products). But there's also not nothing you can do if you really cared. For example, you could imagine a registry of every single tested-bad product, photos of it, where it came from, known aliases, sightings in the wild and so on.
> And back then there was also this weird "China Export" logo
I am pretty sure that is a myth. It's just a sloppy, not-quite-to-spec logo. There is no China Export scheme. Maybe it was a sneaky deliberate way to avoid being hit with a "fake CE mark" charge but instead argue it's "no CE mark", but in either case it's not a legal product if the product needed a CE mark in the first place.
Not hammering down on that hard and fast is what allows that kind of thing. Recall the products you see with that and the retailers and importers would quickly get the message. Test products preemptively and publish the results. Allow it to fester and you get problems and people actually die.