254
Duh i take my phone out to the protest
(sh.itjust.works)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
254 points (99.6% liked)
Cybersecurity - Memes
3245 readers
1 users here now
Only the hottest memes in Cybersecurity
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Would this be difficult to actually put together? Asking as a mostly casual user of technology and of course for purely academic purposes.
Depends if the phone is supposed to still work.
If you just take an empty shell it shouldn't be hard at all to put an USB killer inside.
If you want to keep a functional phone, that's very difficult. You'd likely have to reduce the size of the battery by half to free some space and then design a custom USB killer to fit into that space. And then you need some kind of switch to switch between regular USB usage and USB killer mode. Or you just hard-wire it to USB killer only and charge your phone exclusively with wireless charging.
USB-C has a lot of pins, some custom built cable could use nonstandard pins for power and data and the standard data ones for the 20kV line.
Or just run the 20kV line on the data pins and leave power standard. That way you can use a power-only cable to charge the phone.
The pins are quite close to each other, wouldn't 20kV just jump between them?
True, didn't think of that.
I guess a much lower voltage of let's say 200 volts would kill a device just as effectively and probably wouldn't arc itself.
Another option would be a smart device that first senses some current and only then dumps the 20kV.
You have piqued my curiosity. I was imagining a non-functioning device with the sole purpose of hampering USB/devices. Like if I were to, conduct research, I would probably just have the insides filled with sand or something to give it heft or the illusion of being a real phone.
FYI the word is “piqued.”
Good looking out! Corrected.