USB "Condom" Allows You To Practice Safe Charging

MojoKid writes "Yep, a USB condom. That term is mostly a dose of marketing brilliance, which is to say that grabs your attention while also serving as an apt description of the product. A little company called int3.cc has developed a product—a USB condom—that blocks the data pins in your USB device while leaving the power pins free. Thus, any time you need to plug a device such as a smartphones into a USB port to charge it—let's say at a public charging kiosk or a coworker's computer--you don't have to worry about compromising any data or contracting some nasty malware. It's one of those simple solutions that seems so obvious once someone came up with it."

Re:Not Completely Safe

[smash]

If someone has physical access to your phone unsupervised, ALL BETS ARE OFF.

What the unholy crap????

[Anonymous Coward]

An entire PCB filled with parts? This looks like an example of someone too smart for their own good. I just bought a dedicated USB charger wall-wart on eBay for 2$ and an octopus adapter cable so anyone who comes to my place can charge anything at all.

This over-engineered nonsense in the article is ridiculous.

Half-plugging has the same effect

[enoz]

In the standard A and B plugs the data pins are recessed compared to the power pins. Grab any standard cable and you can slide it in until the power makes contact, giving you charging without any data connection.

I've been doing this for years to charge a MP3 device without it being mounted by the host computer.

Re:Fast charge detection

[tjohns]

These boards have quite a bit of logic on them. If they were just cutting the data pins, that would all be unnecessary.

The product page is light on details, but I'd be surprised if that logic wasn't there precisely to negotiate charge rate.

Re:Condom. You keep using that word...

[jamesh]

A little company called int3.cc has developed a product—a USB condom—that blocks the data pins in your USB device while leaving the power pins free.

If you consider something that blocks the middle of the male end but leaves the sides open to be a "condom," you might want to see a doctor. Soon.

If you consider that it allows for insertion without allowing the flow of information, the comparison might be more correct than you think.

Re:*yawn* these have around for years?

[aXis100]

"Negotiate" is a loose term - really it's just some fixed resistances across the data pins that set USB charging mode. This can be built into the plug without any extra copper in the cable.

That said for the portable device on the other end to recognise charging mode it also needs to see some fixed resistance, which would need to be build into the far end plug too.

Re:*yawn* these have around for years?

[viperidaenz]

and if you don't connect the data pins, the port, if it obeys the USB standards strictly, may shut down if more than 100ma is drawn without negotiation.

Re:So, if I manufacture chargers....

[smash]

Well... if you're going to remove a device specifically designed for device security because some unknown third party device/person tells you to - your security problems aren't of a technical nature. As they say, there's no technical fix for stupid. Not saying it won't happen, but there's not a lot a security accessory vendor can do to protect against that.

No one noticed the x86 opcode?

[dido]

Their domain int3.cc is an allusion to the one-byte software interrupt instruction [wikipedia.org] on 16-bit x86 systems. Opcode 0xCC disassembles to int 3, and it's most frequently used by debuggers, which patch a single byte of code with it to make a breakpoint.