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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.
...and I'm not just worried about the data security aspect. Can you trust the electrical specs?
You're not at all paranoid, at least not in a bad way, for thinking that. I was just thinking that, so long as the device you want to charge just needs the 5 volt supply and not the data pair active, a good accessory to have would be a USB cable that has the data pair disconnected. That way if you do plug in somewhere in public, there's no chance of your device being compromised by malware. Now of course that won't protect you against someone sabotaging the port so it outright damages someone's device; has anyone heard of someone intentionally sabotaging USB ports so anything you plug into them gets damaged?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Somebody is going to make a bundle selling USB voltage regulators. As for data? The chargers don't use those pins
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
A more appropriate headline would be "NYC Begins Mesh Surveillance Network Rollout."
Yes, but as long as the masses confuse "free" with "no direct monetary costs", it will be seen as manna from heaven.
Their own privacy policy states that they require registration to use the service, and then they collect information including (but not limited to) mac address, IP address, browser type and version, operating system, device type, device ids, full URLs and IP addresses and timestamps of everything you connect to.
And they serve you targeted advertising, and reserve the right to share data with advertisers to "better' serve you targeted ads.
it would likely be illegal to call this free in either meaning of the word outside the land of the free.
Doubtful for one reason: all the kids are clamoring for ways to charge their phones. The demographic that is full of vandals have an interest in keeping these kiosks in perfect working order so they can check twitter, facebook, and play their games.
Pay phones were pretty impressive engineering overall when you think about how much abuse they were subject to.
The locks used on them, especially the coin box versions, were probably one of the most impressive parts of them. They might rank as one of the most secure mass-produced locking mechanisms ever made. I think the coin box had 1.5 million key variations and were extremely pick resistant.
This link outlines the lock system used and mentions the almost legendary status of them. I seem to remember the urban legend mentioned in the article about one guy who figured out a system for picking the coin box lock. The article doesn't go in to details, but I vaguely remember there was supposedly one guy (maybe an insider who had access to the internals or keying system or something) who got away with it for a while.
Back in the 1970s or even earlier, there would have been a huge motivation for a successful and simple method of opening pay phone coin boxes. Pay phones were everywhere and if you could gain easy access to opening the coin box you could have probably made a living just going from phone to phone emptying the coin boxes.
http://www.crypto.com/photos/m...