That doesn’t really make sense. What incentive could a $6.99 dongle possibly have in allowing random hackers to access your stuff? The dongle maker certainly can’t access your stuff, not with a $6.99 connector.
Are they hoping the hackers will see that a person used this, and give them a percent of the profits?
No. It’s not rocket science to make a charging-only usb cable. That’s why it costs $6.99. There’s no secret to it either. These guys aren’t doing anything the $6.99 version doesn’t do. They’re just marketing it better, and jumping on the crowd-funding bandwagon.
No, dongle makers have no incentive to spy on you. Neither do USB charger makers, and yet here we are discussing hardware to protect your device from USB-borne nasties. If a random USB power port can infect your phone, no reason a charge cable couldn’t do the same. It doesn’t have to be a sneaky manufacturer, either; Cisco didn’t build routers to spy, but their routers still did it.
You’re right, of course - Xipiter’s condom doesn’t do anything the PortaPow adapters don’t, but having the option to visually and electronically verify nothing undesirable is going on just might justify that whopping $3 difference.
What? No. A “random USB power port” can’t infect your phone. Malicious code behind a USB power port can infect your phone.
At a public USB charging station, the station can (theoretically) have a processor inside it that sucks up phone information and stores it or emails it to somewhere else. That would be a non-trivial thing that someone deliberately put there.
Your 6-buck no-data charging dongle, however, has no way to do this. Really. And, likewise, they have no reason to enable a random hacker to do this.
