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.

Comments

Re: Who would plug into a random USB port?

[Obfuscant]

As for data? The chargers don't use those pins

How do you KNOW that the USB socket you're about to plug your device into doesn't use those pins? You control the device, someone you don't know controls the thing you plug it in to.

After all, there are people who manage to install stuff into ATMs that can read and transmit card data, so putting something in one of these kiosks is not beyond the pale. And the kiosk provider could even justify forcing your device to enumerate by saying they're only going to keep track of what devices are plugged in.

And yes, some chargers do use the data pins as a way of identifying known devices to which they should provide power and at what maximum current. Thus you have Motorola chargers that won't charge a Sanyo phone, LG phones that won't charge from generic chargers, etc. (Names used for example only.) I spent a lot of time trying to get one of my phones (now obsolete) to charge from a standard USB charger and I found there are at least three different data-line signalling systems that were in use. "How many ohms to which other pins" was the common way.