Today my EPROM Eraser showed up which I've bought
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But I'm convinced, it will for sure not meet the VDE safety standards or the CE standards (EMI).
After or before you've enhanced it?
Seriously, the major problem with self-certification along the CE marking model is that it lacks "nuke'm from orbit, land, plow the land and spread salt over the fields" termination clauses in the legislation. It is largely painless and cheap to get caught peddling broken stuff, so people take their chances, especially if they're only one step in the value chain. There is always someone else to blame.
The old SEMKO / DEMKO / VDE / UL / CSA model was hampering innovation and was a market blocker; we do not want that again. What we need is a way for manufacturers and vendors to feel the pain.
Oh, I know... it was so horrible to have to have your product full of angry pixies inspected by an independent certification body made of people who actually know their asses from a hole in the ground. You know, BEFORE importing them by containerload and the fire jumps out and burns people up.
mnem
"Acceptable risks" = pricetag on human lives.
I get your point, but there's a horrible tendency for these organizations to turn into "rent seeking" operations. The big boys don't particularly care, they can absorb all the fees (and second people to all the standards committees and inspection organization's boards), and the £20,000 in fees for the simplest product to reach the market nicely keeps them from being competed with by all those pesky little independent operations without getting into any trouble over anticompetitive practices. Ask the Germans about the TUV, and frankly the TUV is one of the better at still performing its original intended purpose. They start out as a good idea with good intentions but quickly become a barrier to market entry for any but the biggest organizations.
Back in the day, I was a member of the UK naming committee, which did a pretty good job of managing UK domain registrations (in particular, ensuring that registrations actually fitted the nominal category they were for and weren't abusive) for no fees at all. Now go and look at the horrendous mess that (the nominally non-profit, hah!) Nominet has made of everything - minting money hand over fist in the process. It's not quite the same thing as TUV/whatever, but it does fit in the same niche in regulatory/civil society and failed in exactly the way those fail.