Ways to make phone charging less risky
MANILA, Philippines — Public charging stations are smart and accessible, yet they are highly dangerous.
Charging stations are usually attached to a third party. Once you plug in your phone on that USB port, your data starts to transfer. All the valuable information, including the pages you browse, your purchasing patterns, pins and passwords are exposed to cybercriminals.
We've all been there. A draining battery with no powerbank in our bag plus an urgent call we need to make. So if we cannot charge our smartphones in public kiosk, what can we do?
Russia-based software security group Kapersky Lab recently introduced the Pure Charger, a compact, thumb-drive-size USB device that can activate or deactivate data lines. By default only the power lines are active, and no data is transferred. If a USB port requests a connection to transfer data, the device alerts the user, who can opt in to or out of the data exchange with a single tap.
In addition, it has a voltage stabilizer for surge protection. In cases of voltage spike, the charger is expected to protect the smartphone’s hardware, even the charger itself has to die.
The charger also features a smartphone app to track the charging process and get some insights like duration of charging, location, percentage of the battery filled up. Among other things, it helps track the smartphone’s battery health.
The Pure Charger are just among other future-forward batteries and chargers sets are rolling out to the consumer market. Among these are a lithium-air breathing battery which uses oxygen as oxidizer—it's lighter, cheaper and longer lasting.
Another notable possibility are gold nanowire batteries discovered by the University of California Irvine in a search for solutions to make batteries last "hundreds of thousands of times" longer. — Alixandra Caole Vila
