167
Kids are short circuiting their school issued Chromebooks for TikTok clout Ars Technica
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
167 points (96.6% liked)
Not The Onion
16217 readers
1640 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You can short-circuit basically anything with exposed contacts and a paper clip. This isn't specific to Chromebooks.
Pretty much any device with a USB port can be catastrophically short-circuited, because most USB ports are capable of supplying some amount of power. You can even buy "USB Killers", which look like a thumb drive but will fry the internals of whatever they get plugged into.
IIRC USB killers work because they're sustained high voltage. USB ports can often deal with a static discharge or over current, but a sustained 200 volts will let the magic smoke out.
I guess I just assumed there was some way to protect against it but I don't know anything about electronics.
They do make special shielding for USB and other ports, but most manufacturers don't use them because generally people aren't going to stick foreign objects into their computer for internet points.
Often times, those "public chargers" you sometimes see in airports and such have that shielding installed on the ports (though you should never use public USB ports to charge your devices, for a dozen other reasons).
USB condom works for public chargers. It's called a "usb data blocker" and goes for under $10
Don’t you need to manually approve data transmission through USB?
In an ideal situation, yes. Not all devices even do this and when they do, there is the whole concept of hacking.