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I feel the easiest path around this is to use wireless charging instead of plugging into a multi-use port. As we have seen operationalized USB attacks, I don’t
by ghayes 3y ago
I feel the easiest path around this is to use wireless charging instead of plugging into a multi-use port. As we have seen operationalized USB attacks, I don’t quite buy the premise of the article.
- sschueller 3y agoWireless charging is so wasteful. We all want to save the planet we should not be wireless charging until we get a much higher efficiency setup. Fast charging also produces a lot of waste heat. Out phones should know our patterns and for example slow charge overnight. Similar to what Apple started doing with the MacBook where it won't charge to 100% if if knows it will be attached to power.
- mbrndtgn 3y agoSlow charging etc. is nice for laptops, but for phones I wouldn't even bother. If you use your phone for navigation in summer, it's very likely your phone's battery will degrade rapidly anyway due to the heat.
- ReptileMan 3y ago> We all want to save the planet we should not be wireless charging until we get a much higher efficiency setup. I doubt that those couple of watts per phone will make a dent even if we multiply them by a billion. Wireless charging is 70% efficient in theory, but lets move to 50. So a 17 watthours battery (biggest currently in phones) would waste 17 watthours per charge - equivalent of my any of those - my induction hob, my oven, my electric water heater or my oven working for 30 seconds. Or my gaming PC for that matter. so 7 billion people, fully charging their phone each day, the phone battery being the biggest one on the market - each year they will waste around 0.17 percent of world electricity production. But since wired charging is also not 100% efficient - if we give it 90% efficiency - this means that we are saving in that case 0.12 percent of world electricity. I doubt that it will save the planet. The only think it will help is make some people feel righteous with symbolic gestures.
- ztrww 3y ago> 0.12 percent of world electricity That seems a lot? I’d have guessed it’s a magnitude or two less
- ReptileMan 3y agoIt probably is order of magnitude less in reality since I was looking at worst case - chargers are actually 70-sh percent efficient not 50 which almost halves it. Also far from everyone on the planet has a mobile phone, let alone high end flagship. What I mean is that there are much easier fruits to pick without sacrificing even tiny bit quality of life.
- thefurdrake 3y agoThe estimate was given assuming every person on the planet fully charged their phone every day. The number's going to be higher than reality.
- cassianoleal 3y ago> Fast charging also produces a lot of waste heat. Legit question about this, I couldn't find any references. Does fast charging produce more waste heat than regular charging per mAh charged? I couldn't find information on this. It's quite obvious that fast charging makes your device hotter, but this could be just because the heat has less time to dissipate.
- nicd 3y agoIt's less power efficient than a cable, so trivially it's going to generate more waste heat (sure, there might be small amounts of power released as RF, but typically, innefficies in electronics result in heat).
- cassianoleal 3y agoThat was not the question though. The question was the difference between fast and non-fast charging. To get a good comparison we need to do wired fast vs wired non-fast, then wireless fast vs wireless non-fast.
- ztrww 3y ago> Wireless charging is so wasteful Just how wasteful is it? 70-80% vs 9X% considering how little power phones use on average is insignificant… You’d save what? 1-2 kWh per year at the very most? Totally irrelevant..
- jodrellblank 3y agoI googled and the first result said a pixel 4 charging from 0 to 100% takes 14 Watt hours by cable and 21 Watt hours by wireless. That’s saving maybe 60 cents of electricity in a year of charging if you run the battery right down every 2 days. Nothing compared to the spending and pollution of gas to go a distance one could comfortably walk or bike - most vehicle journeys in the US.
- dingaling 3y agoScale matters though: there are about 15 billion mobile phones in use, which means an theoretical excess power usage of 90 terrawatt-hours; about a week's worth of output for a nuclear power station.
- jodrellblank 3y agoI doubt there are 15 billion mobile phones in enough use that they are fully discharged and charged every two days. That's two for every person on the planet including including the 2Bn who are under 14 and including the billion who have no access to electricity. In electricity terms, a power shower can be 5-10KW so what you're talking about - the phone charge waste - is the equivalent of running one at 4KW for 7 seconds longer. Who is campaigning to get people to shave 30 seconds off their shower time? Compare with the amount of money, energy waste, heat waste, pollution, of driving every journey less than 3 miles which could plausibly be biked or walked or bussed or trammed - between North America and Europe closing in on a billion people, estimate 20% of them driving 3 miles every 3 days and we're in the region of 200,000,000 miles of unnecessary driving every day and tens of millions of litres of gas/diesel burned
- jacobp100 3y agoI believe wireless charging still has communication between the pad and the device, so you still have an attack vector
- porkbeer 3y agoIs this true? I have never seen it.
- paxys 3y agoThe easiest path is to hit "no" if your phone asks whether you want to trust the device it is connected to. Problem solved.
- flangola7 3y agoWhat about keyboards
- thefurdrake 3y agoYeah, hackers have never bypassed a "no" prompt before.
- paxys 3y agoIf hackers can do anything then why even use a phone?
- thefurdrake 3y agoBecause they perform functions people find vital to their daily lives? What is the point of this question?
- Wowfunhappy 3y agoI'd argue keeping your phone charged is pretty vital too.
- thefurdrake 3y agoYeah, who said it wasn't?