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New York Begins Public Gigabit Wi-Fi Rollout (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Workers in New York City have begun installing the city's first LinkNYC kiosks. The kiosks are free, public Wi-Fi access points, which are taking the spots formerly occupied by phone booths. 500 more of these hubs will be installed by mid-July, and the full network will eventually include over 7,500 of them. "Once completed, the hubs will also include USB device charging ports, touchscreen web browsing, and two 55-inch advertising displays." The displays are expected to bring the city $500 million in revenue over the next 12 years.
When the project was announced in 2014, officials said construction would start "next year." They sure cut it close.
You mean something like a USB Condom?
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Yeah, exactly, except someone who is handy could just get a short USB extension cable, strip back the outer jacket, expose the data pair (white and green twisted pair, I believe) and just cut them, then put heatshrink or electrical tape over where you modded the cable and you're done. Would cost you less than a dollar and take all of 10 minutes of your time.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
You can buy or make your own power-only cables. Doesn't address the aforementioned power spec issue, of course.
Yeah, exactly, except someone who is handy could just get a short USB extension cable, strip back the outer jacket, expose the data pair (white and green twisted pair, I believe) and just cut them, then put heatshrink or electrical tape over where you modded the cable and you're done. Would cost you less than a dollar and take all of 10 minutes of your time.
I've done pretty much exactly that before, although there was a couple additional steps involved.
This was way back when the iPhone 3g just came out, and I was annoyed that most (real) USB chargers would do nothing more than connect the GND and +5v pins, which by USB spec is how the charger states it only has 500ma available.
To inform a device there is more amperage available, the USB spec states you need to have voltage on the two data pins.
The iPhone 3g could suck down up to 1000ma if available, which involved having +2.0v on one data pin, and a bit more on the other data pin. (+2.75v going by the link I found below. Sorry, the memory isn't too good these days)
I had a USB extension cable laying around that had a normal USB connector on one end, and a small weighted plastic base on the other end with the jack. It was intended to sit on your desk and let you plug in flash drives and be all pretty and convenient I think.
But to me the plastic base was the perfect place to solder in the two resistors between +5v and the data pins and keep all the ugliness out of sight.
The cable was something like this, although not the exact same model:
http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-5ft-Desktop-Extension-Cable/dp/B001K9BFB8
Here is a lookup table of resistances/voltages needed on the two data pins to signal various amperages:
https://www.voltaicsystems.com/blog/choosing-usb-pin-voltages-for-iphones-and-ipads/
Doing the soldering free-hand instead of digging up some perfboard made it take about 15 minutes, so you are pretty spot on.
I already had the parts laying around so didn't cost me anything, but that USB cable on amazon above was just the first result I found so I'm sure isn't the cheapest available, but even that is only $7.
Since then the "USB Condoms" other people have been posting about have dropped in price to about the same as building one yourself, plus they look a lot slicker and professionally made, and quite short compared to my 3 foot monstrosity, so I just purchase them now.
Not only does such a device help protect your hardware from the unknowns out there, but in the case of Apple connecting an iOS device over USB would auto-launch iTunes, an annoyingly long and most of the time unwanted process just to get a bit of recharge. :P
There have been other devices in the past I remember doing similar, auto running some software when the computer detects it. Totally annoying when one is capable of running programs on their own when needed
Thankfully Android never went down that path, but even there a USB condom is useful as the devices usually show up as a flash drive with your camera pictures on it which could be copied from you unwantingly, and a few models I have seen expose this as read/write!
At work I have group policies set to deny read access to any "\\\\.\\autorun.inf" file (aka that file at the root of any drive path) as well as to log to a server the fact explorer.exe tried to read one along with the exe name it tries to run.
A co-workers Android phone got infected by Windows malware we discovered this way, as some infected PC copied an autorun.inf and a [random-letters].exe to his phone, to attempt to infect other Windows PCs it got connected to.
Obviously the phone itself wasn't infected, and as he mainly only plugged the thing in at home (Linux) and at work (Windows yes but with the above GPO), and so he never noticed it was playing infectious carrier to anything he plugged into.
TL;DR - Always be safe and wrap yur wire!