Posts Tagged

hardware

Printer Ink Is Expensive. Does It Have To Be?

Elizabeth Technology June 4, 2024

The type of printer is going to affect the cost of the ink. A thermal printer, like the kind used for receipts and some shipping labels, won’t cost you any money at all for ink, just a bit of a surcharge for the special paper that needs to be put into it instead. Laser printers are cheaper to run than inkjets because they only use toner, but often cost more upfront; other styles, like risograph printers, are highly specialized for a specific purpose, and not ideal for the kind of printing that most offices and homes need to do. Inkjets are cheap to buy, but pricier in the long run – it was a bit of a running joke that just buying a new printer with the cartridges already in it was the cheapest way to “refill” a printer. This is because many printer companies are selling the printer itself at a loss! You can begin to see the problem of ink pricing when you know that, but surely that can’t be the entire reason.

According to HP, their cost mainly comes from R&D – to formulate an ink that is heat resistant, finely vaporizable, accurate, and colorfast all at once is very difficult! Around 2010, they said it costed them roughly a billion dollars a year to do that. But, you may counter, the average low-end inkjet printer has only had four colors available for years, and while jamming and clogging are not as common, the ink research has surely hit the point of diminishing returns. You’re probably right, although no company in the world would tell you that they mark the refills up because you have no choice but to buy. This is where the “razor” model comes in – sell the handle cheap, mark up the blades, infinite money machine.

You may have heard of a recent court case regarding a third-party repair company, and the vendor that makes and maintains the McDonald’s ice cream machines – in court, it was revealed that the ongoing maintenance was considered a source of income for the company! Meaning that if the McDonald’s franchisee wants to sell ice cream, they better keep feeding coins into the piggy bank (this practice is considered predatory – read more here at Business Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/mcdonalds-kytch-lawsuit-broken-ice-cream-machines-2022-3?op=1 ). When a company sells a big machine to a consumer, they make one lump sum sale, and if they don’t sell the accessories or maintenance plans, then they won’t be making any more money off of that consumer until they need another big machine. But what if they sold the accessories? And even better, what if the consumer isn’t allowed to use substitutes?

They’ll be like a free money machine forever and ever, in the company’s imagination. A number of other companies try to sell people one big machine plus the juice that it runs on, with varying results – when Keurig tried to restrict consumers to Keurig-brand coffee pods, there was outrage over the plastic waste this would create and the limits it would put on coffee choice, and they backed down some. When Adobe Photoshop switched from one lump-sum payment for the program to a recurring subscription for forever, programs like GIMP and Photopia were shared around social media sites, so freelancers who didn’t have the funds could jump ship and be alright. When a printer company decided ‘no third party ink cartridges’ and started putting proprietary chips into the ink cartridges, most people were just forced to accept this because a printer is not nearly as easy to fool as a coffee machine, or to find an alternative for like the editing programs. To switch printers is, at the bare-bones side of the spectrum, 85$ on Amazon, but when you start looking at business-grade devices, you’d be looking at spending anywhere from 750$ to 1,350$. And then you still need to buy the ink for your new, hopefully better, machine.

An added complication to all of this is that businesses do not want to use some random assortment of programs or replacement parts for their investments! Third party ink cartridges might clog your machine or fail to print, and then what? HP/Brother/Etc. only cover their own cartridges failing under warranty. When Photopia doesn’t work quite right, you have to go to forums to troubleshoot; a business using Photoshop has the option of contacting Adobe for professional support on top of forums and other professional resources. A business wants to stick with reputable companies that have a professional reputation to maintain. Adobe is a well-trusted brand despite the nickel-and-diming, but GIMP? The name itself is a bit offputting – if you don’t already know the program, you might be concerned that someone wants to share a GIMP file with you.  

In short, the printer ink is expensive because the printer company demands that it is, and businesses are willing to accept the surcharge for the promise of quality, whether or not the printer holds up it’s end of the bargain. You can buy XL cartridges, you can buy refillable ones, or you can order from a printing company – but when it’s time to print, somewhere along the line, you need the ink. As such, you should pick carefully when you decide which printer to buy! Weigh the pros and cons carefully!

Sources:

https://www.howtogeek.com/174232/htg-explains-why-is-printer-ink-so-expensive

What is WiFi? How Does WiFi Work?

Elizabeth Technology May 28, 2024

Wi-Fi’s older than it may seem, as it spent quite some time at the fringe of new tech. The market was already flooded with dial up internet, and replacing it was going to take quite a bit of doing. When it first launched, it had an average speed of 2 mbps, which is actually pretty good, about four times faster than dial up, which had a max speed of 56 kbps. However, systems were so heavily dependent on that dial up system that it took many years for it to become the standard.

Wi-Fi is understood to mean Wireless Fidelity, but apparently nobody in the labs that studied or made it ever designated Wi-Fi as the official shortening of that term, it just sort of happened, and then licensing and officiating went from there.

Kind of Like Radio

AM and FM radio have been around for decades, now, and they work fairly similarly to Wi-Fi if Wi-Fi did both at the same time. AM radio changed the amplitude of the waves to transmit information across different bands, where FM changes the frequency of the band. However, AM and FM stick to kilohertz and megahertz frequencies, while Wi-Fi is in the significantly higher gigahertz frequencies.

Electromagnetic Radiation is a spectrum: at one end, there is infrared radiation which is extremely low-frequency, and at the other, gamma radiation, which is extremely high frequency. Visible light falls somewhere near the infrared side, where red is closer to the low end and violet is closer to the high end. Microwaves fall on the low side. A 2.4 GHz microwave has a gap between wave crests about the size of a baseball – the waves aren’t nearly as close together as they are in visible light. (Note – a microwave oven has the same frequency, it is much higher energy than Wi-Fi. Loud sounds can be the same pitch, or frequency, as quiet sounds, the same goes for microwaves). Microwaves, just like colors, are broken up into bands, and different frequencies can do different things. For this article, we’re focusing on information transmission.

What Can Stop WiFi?

Wi-Fi does get weaker when walls or other obstacles get in the way, although this is usually a good thing – there are only so many viable ‘bands’ for Wi-Fi to transmit over, just like radio, so crowded buildings would run out of available bands if they weren’t so easily stopped. While microwave ovens use metal, eventually those same microwaves would be stopped if they came into contact with walls or other solid materials. Eventually, distance also stops Wi-Fi. The waves lose energy as they travel and then carried information is lost.

Bluetooth devices can interact poorly with Wi-Fi as well – they work on similar principles, but Bluetooth is much weaker. If your headphones are undetectable to your phone, even when your device is on, it’s possible the Bluetooth is being drowned out by local Wi-Fi. Bluetooth typically has a range of about 30 feet, compared to Wi-Fi’s much larger 240 feet in ideal conditions.

How Does Protecting WiFi work?

Wi-Fi transmits over those microwave frequencies to bring information to the computer and send it back out.

How do you protect information if it’s just being broadcast like that? Well, a couple of things. While it is very similar, it’s not exactly like radio, where the information from the station is broadcast across the city, and all you have to do is tune it. The computer has to find the network first, and as previously stated, both physical objects and distances can keep Wi-Fi from reaching a compatible device. Distance is a solid defense. If a hacker is in the same building, however, how do you protect the network then? Assuming their device is within accessible distance of the network, can it intercept information sent over that network?

The second part is encryption: it doesn’t matter if the data’s intercepted if the interceptor can’t un-scramble it. Transmitting unencrypted data over unprotected Wi-Fi can get you into trouble – see all the warnings about using public Wi-Fi to do banking – but encrypting it stops most issues before they start. Hence, the rise of VPNs. However, encryption alone won’t stop intruders, so the third part is network security.

The next logical step for a hacker is to get into the protected network and then seek out the info they want, skipping the encryption step entirely. The network itself has to be protected as well! Network protection can be passwords, or firewalls, or anything that prevents closed data ports from being opened. An open port in data security just means something that will allow packets of data to go in or out. A website has open ports so you can access the information on it, for example. If a poorly configured application on a computer has an open port, it’s looking for information, and that can be used to get into the network, bypassing the encryption.

2.4 GHz vs 5 GHz

Some modems allow two frequencies of Wi-Fi, a faster channel, and a further channel. The 5GHz channel is what you’ll want to use for your video streaming. The frequency is higher, and that means information is transported to your device faster. The 2.4 GHz frequency is probably what the printer in the other room is best on. It’s better at penetrating solid objects than 5 GHz, and it has a larger range, but it’s also weaker. 2.4 GHz is also more prone to interference, because many things use that frequency. Microwaves, for example. If you’ve had issues with your Wi-Fi while the microwave is on, get that microwave checked! The odds are good it’s shielding is faulty.

Modem Vs. Router

What’s the difference? A router routes traffic from your network to the internet. It’s sometimes referred to as a WLAN (or a wireless local area network) device. Most houses have a router because of the number of network-enabled devices in a modern home. Printers are rarely connected by cable to a computer anymore, for example.

A modem, on the other hand, is designed to connect devices directly to the internet. Modems are hard-wired into cabled data lines, like telephone lines, so they’re less popular than they used to be. Routers have taken their spot in-home, as dial-up internet is basically non-existent.

Routers and Wi-Fi are here to stay, at least until the next big things comes out!

Sources:

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/small-business/resource-center/networking/how-does-a-router-work.html#~how-routers-route-data

https://medium.com/@syakirharis25/modem-vs-gateway-vs-router-and-its-security-considerations-d853de8b4b31

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-does-wi-fi-work/

https://science.nasa.gov/ems/06_microwaves

https://www.centurylink.com/home/help/internet/wireless/which-frequency-should-you-use.html

GPU Prices Are Finally Coming Down From An All-Time High

Elizabeth Technology May 23, 2024

But why did they jump so high to begin with?

Assumed Superiority

Pre-built PCs are of the devil. At least, that’s what PC-Build forum elites will have you believe. If you didn’t pick out each part individually to make the most mathematically perfect device you possibly could, what are you even doing with your PC? Playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure? Pleb.

PC gaming rig subcultures can range from cool to sucky depending on who’s running the forum you’re visiting. Some are great, and they genuinely want to help kids just starting out with their devices. They keep baseline equipment reasonable and establish product tiers so no one part is bottlenecking others too hard. Others will insist users have the top-of-the-line hardware for their rig, even if it’s nearly too expensive for them. It must always go faster, there is no slow down. There is no stop. Only. Faster.

If you’re going to upgrade your device, there’s no point in taking a pit stop to save up for the next GPU. In fact, if you’re having a hard time affording it, maybe you should sell the GPU you’re currently using before you have a replacement lined up, just so you have a more accurate picture of your budget. (this is bad advice, don’t do this).

PC forums like the latter only build more hype for a hard-to-find item, and folks who follow them closely might feel like a GPU is worth double or triple what the manufacturer is actually charging for it – an unhealthy mentality with any high-price item market.

Enter: NVIDIA parts, specifically GPUs.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080. A fabled card destined to descend from the heavens and sell out immediately, then disappear for months. The initial sales price for the units in the newly released set went from a low of $499 to a high of $1,499 over the three performance options. The RTX 3080 was the middle-of-the-road unit, and it came with “serious 4K gaming performance, with access to the latest ray-tracing and deep learning supersampling (DLSS) tech from Nvidia” (Tom’s Guide).

Unfortunately, due to Covid-19 and an assortment of other factors, the company couldn’t restock for months, and they began selling out of their weaker units too. When a shipment finally came in, it was gone in seconds – people had bots poised and ready to make the purchase as soon as it was an option.

Market Exploitation

The manufacturers know that their primary market doesn’t screw around when it comes to very expensive, very powerful machine components. Quality is everything. Streamers, professional gamers, people hosting tournaments, and even people who just like to go really fast all camp out to get the newest, fastest parts as they become available. This isn’t the first chip that Nvidia released and then immediately ran out of, so they knew demand was going to be pretty high.

However, this was the first time it took months to get production levels up to demand. Not only was there a pandemic slowing down overseas shipping, Bitcoin mining became profitable again. For those of you who don’t know, the process boils down to “solve algorithm – verify transaction – get rewarded”. Bitcoin transactions are heavily encrypted, and the money itself is virtual. Verification is essential to making sure the same Bitcoin hasn’t been used somewhere else first.

Anyway, cryptocurrency mining is very GPU-intensive. The reward goes to the person who verifies the transaction first, and multiple people can compete for each transaction. The only way to ensure you’re ahead of the guy with the supercomputer is to keep your device as fast as possible, and the GPU is a common bottleneck for Bitcoin miners. If you’re really making money off mining, then paying double the price for a scarce item that will keep you ahead seems like a good deal, and you’ll stay in line for a GPU selling on eBay while gamers leave and re-evaluate.

Arms Race

The pandemic keeping people inside, the pandemic preventing overseas shipping, the pandemic shifting the market and launching Bitcoin into another peak, the pandemic… everything wrong with the GPU market could theoretically be tied to the pandemic. All of it together creates a shortage of GPUs at every level, but new GPUs ran out first.

A new GPU on the market creates a cascade of used GPUs that trickle down. The used computer parts economy is actually pretty interesting, as depending on what part of the cycle you step into, the used part may cost more than the launch price of the new one. Memes to this effect flooded the market once users who’d sold parts in hopes of getting the 3080 realized everything was either out of stock or pretty scarce. Everything worth having, at least.

It’s not all bad: many of the folks waiting for the newest series learned to appreciate their old cards! A GPU in the PC is worth two in the void.

This is the downside to the more intense PC-building communities. There’s pressure to not stop and wait, and pressure to not settle for a less powerful (but still adequate) device if perfection is available for double or triple its actual price. (Please note here – I’m not talking about people who had a card break right before launch and decided to wait for it.)

This mentality creates poor-quality markets with a lot of demand and nearly no supply. The perfect environment for scalping.

Scalping

As mentioned before, the used-part life cycle is really interesting. People look to upgrade when something new comes out, so they upgrade to something new and sell off their old GPU. That GPU becoming available on the market allows another person to let go of their old GPU and purchase a faster model than what they currently have. GPUs are durable, so barring a major part failure, they’ll last a while in this cycle. The gist of all of this movement is that 1st tier items become 2nd and 3rd tier when the next generation comes out, and everything moves down a peg in the wishlists.

Scalpers see this and disrupt it. The goal is to eat up available supply to drive up demand, and then resell those devices they hoarded – er, stocked up on – at the new, higher price. Now only 4th and below tier items are available at the original price! High-end GPUs are beginning to cost the same as used cars, so trying to get in on it should be a risky investment, but high-priced electronics have their own rules. If everyone waited for prices to lower, everyone but the scalper comes out better for it.

This does not happen. It didn’t happen with the Wii. This didn’t happen with the Playstation 5. It won’t spontaneously happen with GPU scalpers, not only because it wouldn’t happen anyway, but also because this is a particularly terrible year for supply. If you’re not getting it from a scalper or reseller, you may not be getting it at all! Previous years, it was possible to look at scalper’s markup as a fee for early access, while other folks waited for a restock. This year…

Blown Manufacturing

The first pandemic year was ugly for many reasons.

The lack of supply for the electronic is inevitably what drives scalpers to buy as much of the final product as they can, and we see this time and time again with other products. Why can’t the manufacturer do something about it?

The most common suggestion is buy limits, but buy limits are tricky. Multi-person households may not want to share a PS5, even though they’re ordering to the same address. This doesn’t include portable electronics like the Switch, where children may genuinely just want their own Switch, like they did for the DS series, even though they’d share a PS5. GPUs are much the same! Streamers who can’t afford to have downtime may be looking to buy a backup, and are they wrong for that? If more than one streamer is living at an address (this is surprisingly common) there’s going to be a suspicious number of cards going to one location.

They may not even want to curb the scalping, because even scalping is profitable.

Don’t forget about profits. Buy limits cut down profit if the manufacturer doesn’t do as well as it’s hoping. Some theorize that Nintendo doesn’t make enough of it’s products on purpose so it always sells out and always has demand. Widgets and electronics are expensive to make, and initial release may be the only time they can charge full price without being undercut by market forces, sales, and secondhand devices coming on the market. Besides, it’s easier to make more of a successful item than it is to get rid of unsuccessful items and still make profit.

There’s also the option of increasing supply, which would make scalpers irrelevant. See again PS5 and Wii – more did come out after the initial release burst. However, this isn’t an option right now either. Overseas trade is just now getting back to normal. The Nvidia chip was out out. This gave the scalpers inordinate power.

Long story short, this is a complicated, multifaceted issue. The best thing you can do is wait if you can afford to. If the chip’s working fine, and you’re not already experiencing bottleneck, wait it out. Patience is bad for scalpers but good for you!

Sources:

https://www.tomsguide.com/opinion/how-the-great-graphics-card-shortage-had-me-panic-buy-an-nvidia-rtx-3090

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55755820

https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/12/22227040/nvidia-amd-gpu-shortage-rtx-3080-3070-3060-ti-3090-rx-6800-xt

https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/17/21441391/nvidia-rtx-3080-sold-out-online-instore-stock-shortages-graphics-card-gpu

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/terrible-time-to-buy-gpu-late-2020

Being Too Smooth To Use

Elizabeth Technology May 16, 2024

Breaking rank with other companies to make things smoother can certainly set your product apart, but is there a point where something becomes too sleek to use?  

Tesla Handles

Most models of the Tesla car have handles that physically retract into the doors when not in use. Inside the car, the handles operate by a button press, not by a pull. You are not mechanically opening the car door, you are instructing the car door to open, and that’s an important difference. Both sets of handles require that the car has power. Otherwise, they won’t function. Famously, one man struggled to get out of his car after it caught fire because the handles inside don’t operate like the handles of any other car, and a special ‘release latch’ that’s hidden behind the doorgrab is necessary to open the car when it doesn’t have power. He couldn’t find that latch because it’s hidden (for added sleekness), and as a result, he had to crawl through the window. Of course, Twitter commenters pointed out the latch, but if you can’t visually identify the thing that’s going to open your flaming car in a few seconds, is it really a ‘good’ design? Sure, that’s great if the car dies and the button doesn’t work and you have time to figure it out – it doesn’t work so well in an emergency. Similarly, the doors of the new Cybertruck will stop working if the electronics stop, requiring the user inside to manually disassemble part of the door and pull on a specific wire to get out in case of emergency, which lead to the death of billionaire Angela Chao : https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/10/business/angela-chao-death/index.html

The handles are also more prone to freezing over in cold climates, which is very annoying. Plenty of car doors freeze shut, and this is far from a Tesla-only problem, but it turns an already annoying problem into an even more annoying one because the handle has to be freed from its pocket in the door before you can even begin to try opening it.

 Apple and It’s Missing Jack

Apple removed the aux jack from its devices. Did it need to? Maybe – the jack takes up quite a bit of space inside the phone thanks to it’s placement, and removing it would enable Apple to put some more cool stuff inside the phone. But then the phones got bigger, and the storage chips got smaller even as they held more digital storage space. Does this mean Apple will put the jack back in, seeing as it no longer needs to conserve space as much as it did when it was trying to make phones that broke technological walls? The phones are flipping huge now, there is space for the jack.

Haha, no!

Removing the aux jack also made it so that any non-Bluetooth headphones the consumers had wouldn’t work without an adaptor. An adaptor that Apple just so happens to sell. An adaptor that has the same problems that all of the cords made by Apple do. This means that a number of accessories are now effectively Bluetooth-only, which is annoying at best and kind of malicious at worst. When carriers pushed the new phone, users had to upgrade everything if they wanted to go to the next model. Apple happens to sell a lot of those accessories, and while Apple may be pricey, the name does still carry weight – it means a defective product could be returned to a physical store or exchanged immediately without waiting for Amazon to retrieve it.

The phone is sleeker. It has less ports. It’s closer to being truly waterproof than it ever has been before. It looks cooler than ever. But the minimalist principles in the design of the phone are directly costing consumers both real money and ease of use. Apple knows this – Apple likes it that way. Eventually, there may come a time when Apple removes the C-USB port and expects you to use cordless charging, with its proprietary charging pad.

Windows 10

Windows wants you to use Bing. Windows wants to add functionality to your taskbar. Windows has combined the built-in taskbar search feature with the open web in an effort to do both of these things. Unfortunately, it turns out this configuration combines the worst of both. Have you ever had a relative who doesn’t use computers much? For a long time, you could rest assured that a search on the Windows taskbar wouldn’t somehow end with that relative downloading a browser extension they didn’t need or clicking on an ad they mistook for a file on their computer.

When Windows made it possible to search for both ‘on-web’ and ‘on-computer’ pages in the same search bar, they also created a massive headache and added additional clicks to the search. Trying to search for a file named something like ‘car report’ could bring up search results for sites like Carfax. Suddenly, you’re not in your files digging around for a report that was already made, you’re on the web. That’s annoying, but you can just go back and try again. If you’re really desperate, you can open up the file picker and search there. It doesn’t work for everything on the computer (it doesn’t want you to be able to find and delete functions like Sys32 or Task Manager, so it won’t show you their file locations, and file picker isn’t equipped to open it for you like the taskbar search is even if you do find them) but it’s better than the mess you just got into with the search bar.

But wait – go back to that relative from before. For that relative, this was a linear path that makes sense, and the website must have what they were looking for because it popped up in their search. Every iteration of Windows before this one has worked by only showing the relevant files on the device, so they don’t know that they aren’t meant to be on the Carfax website. If they don’t stop to call in help, they may end up filling out a form on that site they didn’t need to, or giving up information they might not have wanted to. Imagine how much that could suck if it wasn’t the car report – taxes, Social Security, health insurance, any number of things that might be saved on a computer, could simply be confused with an ad on their accidental Bing search.

It should say something about how poorly this worked out that there are dozens of pages on forums and blogs detailing how to disable it so this exact thing won’t happen – or happen again. Windows 11 at least gives you the opportunity to turn it off, and you have to go out of your way to get to web results in regular taskbar search once it is. A search function where everything can show up in the same place is not always better.

What is Air Gapping?

Elizabeth Technology May 9, 2024

You might have heard it in the Matrix, or in a heist movie: what does “air gapping” mean?

Normal Devices, IoT devices, etc.

 In today’s age, many devices have internet capabilities. Your washer, dryer, your coffee machine, your fish tank equipment, things like glucose monitors and portable speakers, are all now capable of internet connection. Is it efficient? Sure, if you want those features – they wouldn’t still be made with WiFi enabled if they didn’t provide some use to the end consumer that was greater than the annoyance of getting it all set up. Is it safe?

No! Generally speaking, IoT devices are poorly defended and often don’t even come with passwords to prevent unauthorized parties accessing their internal computers. This can then act as a gateway to other parts of the network – your home computer, with it’s tax documents, or your business computer that shares a network with the coffee machine, to see valuable internal documents. One unlucky casino had their devices infected with ransomware after a fishtank thermometer allowed an unsavory agent to connect to it (learn more here on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/leemathews/2017/07/27/criminals-hacked-a-fish-tank-to-steal-data-from-a-casino/?sh=4be5c0832b96 ).

It’s unfortunate, but many networks are not as totally protected as they need to be, even without an IoT device providing an easy door in. Even crucial networks can be manipulated. The only way to truly secure a computer from outside threats is to not allow it any access to the outside at all.

Locked Away in a Tower

An airgapped computer may still be part of a network with other computers on it, but every part of an airgapped network is kept in physical isolation from the outside world, or any computers that are allowed to touch the internet at large.

It has no network interfaces: other devices cannot see the air gapped ones wirelessly. It will not receive updates, it will not be exposed to the online threats that a lack of updates can present. If data must be transferred to an airgapped system, it must be done via a physical data device like a thumbdrive, or disk. You may see an issue there – a malicious party could gain access and deliver a virus or malicious program on a device to infect the air gapped computer, so physical access must be tightly controlled as well. Famously, a nuclear reactor in Iran was infected with a virus known as Stuxnet via a thumbdrive, which caused a significant setback to operations in the plant by damaging centrifuges.

System requiring less protection can use things like data diodes to filter their incoming information – an unclassified computer can talk to a classified one, but only if the data is determined to be safe coming in, and only if the data leaving the classified system is carefully monitored to prevent exactly the situation such devices are used for in the first place.

Vulnerabilities

As mentioned above, the easiest way to get into an air gapped network is to somehow get close to the system physically with a portable data device like a thumbdrive. But a number of other methods to steal or transmit data exist too! A couple of researchers found success by transmitting acoustic signals, or using a cellphone to broadcast at certain frequencies – the computer was contacted and internal equipment was manipulated into behaving like an antenna, transmitting data back to the phone. Furthermore, if someone does get into the system, viruses are often able to spread much faster than they would be on other networks, because air gapped systems are not updated as frequently thanks to their lack of internet connection. Security holes not present in other systems might still be found in air gapped ones!

Your IoT Devices Are Opening Doors For Hackers

Elizabeth Technology April 4, 2024

Internet of Things items are convenient, otherwise they wouldn’t be selling. At least not next to regular, non-wifi-enabled items. They don’t even have to be connected to the internet, and they should stay that way!

An Internet of Things item, or an IoT item, is a device that has a WiFi- or network-enabled computer in it to make the consumer’s use of it easier. This includes things like WiFi-enabled/networked washing and drying machines, ovens, fridges, mini-fridges, coffee makers, lamps, embedded lights, etc. anything can be an IoT item, if it’s got WiFi capability.

Network Entry Point

Internet of Things items, when connected to WiFi, represent a weak link in the chain. They’re poorly protected, they’re designed to favor user friendliness over all else, and they’re usually always on. You likely don’t unplug your fridge or washing machine when you go to bed – that device’s computer may sleep, but it’s not off. You probably don’t disconnect the internet when you go to bed, either. Some devices take advantage of this, and only schedule updates for late at night so you don’t notice any service interruptions. Unfortunately, their strengths are their weaknesses, and an always-open port is a dream for hackers.

Outdated Password Policies

Internet of Things items are rarely password protected, and if they are, many users don’t bother actually changing the password from the factory default. This makes them excellent places to start probing for weaknesses in the network!

Assuming someone’s hacking into a place to ding it with ransomware, there are a number of worthy targets: corporate offices, nuclear facilities, hospitals, etc. are all staffed by people, and people like their coffee. A well-meaning coworker bringing in an internet-enabled coffee machine for his coworkers is suddenly the source of a critical network vulnerability, an open port in an otherwise well-defended network!

If the coffee machine, or vending machine, or the lights are IoT items, they need to be air-gapped and separated from the main network. They don’t need to be on the same network supplying critical data within the center. The devices are simply unable to protect themselves in the same way a PC or phone is! There’s no way to download a suitable antivirus onto a coffeemaker. If something gets past a firewall, and that password is still the default or nonexistent, there’s no second layer of protection for IoT devices.

Malware

For example, hacking into a fridge is not nearly as hard as hacking into an old PC. Even great antivirus can struggle with traffic coming from inside the network. Even worse, IoT devices are often missed in security checkups anyway. When McAfee or Norton or Kaspersky recommends you scan your computer, are they offering to scan your lightbulbs as well?

Once they’re in, the entire network is vulnerable. Ransomware events with no obvious cause, malware that’s suddenly deleted all the files on a server, stolen data and stolen WiFi – all of it’s possible with IoT devices. There’s more to gain than just bots for the botnet, which is why hackers keep going after these IoT items.

IoT devices are also much easier to overwhelm to gain access, even with firewalls and effective load balancing. DoSing an IoT item can be as simple as scanning it. No, really. A team in the UK found that they could shut down turbines in a wind farm by scanning them. The computers inside weren’t equipped to handle both a network scan and their other computing duties at the same time. Many user devices are in the same spot or worse!

Security

Besides turbines, items like cameras and door locks probably shouldn’t be connected to the internet just yet. A terrifying string of hacks let strangers view doorbell and baby monitoring cameras, for example. The cameras themselves were difficult to defend even though the network was protected by a router. This is terrible for obvious reasons and class action suits were filed soon after. It even happened accidentally; Nest users would occasionally end up viewing other people’s cameras unintentionally, a bug in the system that was only fixed after complaints were made.

A consistent pattern is forming here: security patches are only issued after vulnerabilities are discovered by the consumer! Any other type of programming wouldn’t get away with this without some public outcry. You shouldn’t have to become a victim of a security flaw as large as “someone else is viewing the inside of my house” to get it fixed.

And then there’s things that physically interact with the security features of a house, like electronic locks. There’s nothing wrong in theory with a password lock. However, electronics are not inherently more secure than physical locks, and adding in WiFi only gives lockpickers another ‘in’. Hacking the lock could lead to being locked out of your own home, or worse. Besides, a regular lock will never unlock itself because its battery died, or because you sat down on the fob while getting on your bike or into your car. If you do want a password lock, it’s better to get one that’s not network enabled.

We aren’t quite at the point where hacked self-driving cars are a legitimate issue, although the danger is growing on the horizon. Cars are also poorly protected, computer wise.

BotNets

The fridge doesn’t need a quadcore processor and 8 GB of RAM to tell you that it’s at the wrong temperature, or that the door’s been left open and you should check the milk. The voice-controlled lightbulbs only need enough power to cycle through colors. IoT items are weak. But not too weak to be used for things like Botnets, even if your main PC wards off botnet software.

Botnets are networks of illegitimately linked computers used to do things like DDoSing, brute-forcing passwords, and all other kinds of shenanigans that a single computer can’t do alone. By combining the computing ability of literally thousands of devices, a hacker can turn a fridge into part of a supercomputer. No one ant can sustain an attack on another colony, but an entire swarm of ants can!

This is another reason tech experts are worried about IoT items becoming widely used. Their basic vulnerabilities give skilled hackers the ability to ding well-protected sites and fish for passwords even if the network they’re targeting doesn’t have any IoT items on them. It’s a network of weaponizable computers just waiting to be exploited. Remember, password protect your devices, and leave them disconnected if you can!

Source:

https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2019/06/how-to-hack-an-iot-device/

https://danielelizalde.com/iot-security-hacks-worst-case-scenario/

https://cisomag.eccouncil.org/10-iot-security-incidents-that-make-you-feel-less-secure/

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16630199/1/orange-v-ring-llc/

Remember the Apple Wheels?

Elizabeth Technology March 12, 2024

Ah, Complaining.

Apple Wheels

The Apple Mac Pro cost several thousand dollars, and it looked like a cheese grater. The little Apple-branded wheels to make it move cost about 700$, or approximately the price of the iPhone 8 at launch. Oh, but don’t worry – you can buy the feet for a mere 300$, if you just have to have Apple Brand. How did we get here? How did we, as a society, get to 700$ computer wheels?

Brand = Trustworthy

Branding by itself is an interesting mark of human psychology. It’s a shortcut to trusting something! The brand of an item itself purely imaginary – the brand, by itself, does not produce value for the final product except for the value the consumer gives it in their mind. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. Look at IKEA: all those items come from different factories, so customers shouldn’t just blindly trust whatever they buy, right? But because IKEA has put their name behind it, consumers still buy the cheap shelves with the understanding that IKEA has endorsed them. If these shelves were somewhere else, and un-branded, consumers wouldn’t trust them as much. They’d sell less. You see copycat items on Amazon all the time, but mostly people buy brand-names they recognize. Branding, in this way, is extremely valuable even though it’s intangible.

And it’s good for the customer, too! It allows them to make a more informed decision. Emotionally, people become loyal to brands that have served them well. Fortunately for the brand, they’ll stay loyal unless something seriously impacts their mental image of that brand.

All of this sounds totally logical and reasonable, right? It’s the way people have done business since cash was invented. It made sense for people to trust the smithy, who branded their creations, over someone who wouldn’t put their name to what they made.

Strange things start happening when people like the brand more than the products, and we’ll get there.

Even though consumers may know the store-brand comes from the same plant that the name-brand does, they may still pick name-brand. This is part of that trust – it is scary to try new things, and keeping one constant, the brand, the same, makes buying big electronics or new foods less scary. When consumers stop showing a brand loyalty, or they start complaining, the brand could do things like throw in warranties, coupons, or spare parts for free and retain that good will. Store brand doesn’t stand a chance even if it’s literally identical.

Brand = Money

Branding can save a company even if they’re like modern day Pyrex, which has a different heat tolerance depending which factory you get it from. People post infographics online so consumers can identify the ‘good’ pieces, because they love Pyrex so much. A change to the glass manufacturing process means that the brand is no longer a reliable indicator of quality, but people still want to like Pyrex. Otherwise they wouldn’t go through all this effort to find the right Pyrex factory, they’d buy somewhere else. This is where brand starts to become more important than what it’s selling: the nostalgia of a good brand present in one’s formative years carries it along past it’s loss of quality.

People will pay a premium for a brand they trust, and companies know this. We see this everywhere, from cars to computers. Sears might have survived a couple years off of goodwill and nostalgia alone.

Branding, therefore, can become a phylactery in the hands of a new controlling board. As soon as a company starts to rely on goodwill to sell items that they know other companies would have ditched, they become like Apple. Unlike Apple, many of them don’t sell high-ticket items as a luxury.

For Apple, the brand is demand. Where Steve Jobs might have demanded innovation out of every item they released, the controlling board doesn’t. They know that the brand reputation he built will sell items because people love Apple, people already have Apple, and they know people want to look like they have money! And by smearing Android products as ‘cheap’, Apple became a shortcut for ‘expensive’. Apple wheels are a natural result of a market that’s so hyperfocused on branding that it doesn’t care about functionality. A combination of goodwill and a little psychology gives us these overpriced items that are only overpriced for the sake of it.

The irony of all of this is that people will eventually buy the item as a ‘flex’, unironically, and then the product exists in a quantum state of sincerity. How does Apple live where others die?

Wheely Worth It

Apple sells sincere items alongside their ‘meme’ items. While Apple sells things like wheels and pens for hundreds of dollars, the past generations of phones are still about the right price for what the user gets. Factoring in things like R + D, factory overhead, and the materials to go into it, a comparable phone (including camera and storage space) made by a third party would be cheaper, but not by much. They’re only at a small premium to other comparable brands for the same computing power, which makes sense with Apple’s well-known tech support. They haven’t gone full ‘Sears’ yet: there’s still some value in the idea of their brand, and they still release ‘worthy’ items alongside the garbage ones. Why risk it with wheels that cost as much as an iPhone, a genuinely expensive item?

Simple: it’s for advertising, and it’s fairly cheap as far as campaigns go. Either ‘hype beasts’ (people known for buying branded clothing just because it’s expensive) buy it to flex on others, or regular people discuss how out-of-line Apple is. Either way, Apple’s name is out there. Apple might not actually expect to make money with these wheels, but the items are so cheap to make that a single purchase could finance the production of 50 more sets. Not to forget hype beasts!

This new trend of “flexing” expensive-but-nearly-worthless items has led to the creation of the Supreme Brick, the Apple wheels, and all sorts of other tomfoolery that relies on branding. Now, some brands use branding as a shortcut to ‘luxury’ instead of ‘trust’. Luxury clothing items have already been doing this for years, so while the material is thin, the manufacturing process cost cents on the dime, and shipping it en masse cost maybe a couple dollars, the final item is an 800$ shirt. Not because it’s made of especially good materials, or hardy – because it has a logo on it.

The only reason knockoffs are not worth as much is because the original brand has convinced people that their product is ‘better’ because it cost more, not that it cost more because it was better. And people believe it! Anyone self-conscious enough to get fake Airpods or a third-party Gucci shirt are still pursuing that image of luxury, which is fantastic for the brand. The same goes for Apple Wheels, and Airpods, and Supreme clothing… if the consumer values it, then they’re worth it. The Apple Wheels are worth 699$ to the people who want it, and that’s good enough to keep making them.  They’re buying Apple Brand, after all.

Apple Wheel. It’s wheely about the advertising.

Sources:

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MX572ZM/A/apple-mac-pro-wheels-kit

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MXNM2ZM/A/apple-mac-pro-feet-kit

https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2020/02/26/shout-or-whisper-dissecting-quiet-and-loud-luxury

Memory Terms

Elizabeth Technology March 7, 2024

The first Bit of Data

A bit is a single character in binary, and actually comes from shortening “Binary Digit”. A bit is the simplest possible data that the machine can read, and is either a 1, or a 0. A yes, or a no. True or false. The bit has been around for longer than computers, originating in punch cards in the 1700s for analog machines to “read”.

Processing

If you’ve recently upgraded to Windows 10, you may recall having to check if your computer is 32 bit or 64 bit. The numbers determine how much memory the computer’s processor can access by its architecture – is it equipped to read up to 32 consecutive bits of data as an address, or 64? A 32 bit computer has fewer possible memory addresses from its CPU register– not much more than 4 GB’s worth, or 2^32’s address’s worth – while a 64 bit computer can store to up to two TB, or 2^64 addresses. This doesn’t mean 32 bit computers can only store 4 GB of data, it just means it can store 4 GB worth of names. The files themselves can be nearly any size as long as there’s storage available for them.

Then, a Byte

A byte is usually eight bits in compliance with international standard – but it didn’t always have to be. Instead, it used to be as long as needed to show a character on screen, usually somewhere between two and ten bits, with exceptions down to one and up to forty-eight bits for certain characters. Eight-bit bytes became the standard by their convenience for the new generation of microprocessors in the 70s: within 8 bits in binary, there are 255 possible organizations of ones and zeroes. 16 bits would give too many possibilities and could slow the computer down, while 4 bits would mean combining phrases of bits anyway to get more than 32 or so characters.

Alphabet

8 sounds like the perfect combination of length and possible complexity, at least with the benefit of hindsight. The government had struggled with incompatible systems across branches due to byte size before 8-bit came along. ASCII was the compromise, at seven bits per byte, and when commercial microprocessors came along in the 1970s, they were forced to compromise again with ASCII Extended, so that commercial and government systems could communicate.

However, not all ASCII extended versions contained the same additions, so Unicode was then formed later to try and bridge all the gaps between versions. Unicode, a character reading program that includes the ASCII set of characters within it, uses eight-bit bytes, and it’s one of the most common character encoding libraries out there. You’ll run into ASCII a lot, too – if you’ve ever opened an article and seen little boxes where characters should be, that’s because it was viewed with ASCII but written with a bigger library. ASCII doesn’t know what goes there, so it puts a blank!

Kilobyte

1000 bytes of storage forms a Kilobyte, or a Kb. This is the smallest unit of measure that the average computer user is likely to see written as a unit on their device – not much can be done with less than 1000 bytes. The smallest document I can currently find on my device is an Excel file with two sheets and no equations put into it. That takes up 9 KB. A downloadable “pen” for an art program on my device takes up 2 KB.

Computers before Windows had about 640 KB to work with, not including memory dedicated to essential operations.

The original Donkey Kong machines had approximately 20 kilobytes of content for the entire game.

Megabyte

A megabyte is 1 million bytes, or 1,000 kilobytes. Computers had made some progress post-relays, moving to hard disks for internal memory. IBM’s first computer containing a megabyte (or two) of storage, the System 355, was huge. It was also one of the first models to use disk drives, which read faster than tapes. In 1970, if users didn’t want a fridge, they could invest in the now desk-sized 3 million bytes on IBM’s model 165 computers, an improvement over GE’s 2.3 million bytes the year before – and the year before that, Univac had unveiled a new machine with separate cores tied together to give users between 14 and 58 megabytes of capacity in Byte Magazine, at the cost of space. IBM’s System 360 could reach up to 233 megabytes with auxiliary storage, but its size was…prohibitive, reminiscent of that first System 355.

Tapes and drums were competitive with the disk format for a while, but ultimately disk and solid state improved faster and won out (right now it’s looking more and more like SSDs, those solid state drives, will outcompete disks in the future too). During the 80s, the technology improved so much that hard disks became standard (IBM released a home computer with 10 MBs of storage in 1983) and floppy disks acted as media transport.

DOOM comes out in the 1990s and takes up 2.39 MB for it’s downloadable file, with smaller, DLC-like packs of fan-created mods coming out along the way.

Gigabyte

A Gigabyte is 1 billion bytes, or 1,000 megabytes. In 1980, IBM releases another fridge – but it stores up to a gigabyte of information! According to Miriam-Webster Dictionary, you can pronounce Gigabyte as “Jig-ga-bite”, which just… feels wrong. In 1974, IBM releases a 20 foot long beast of a storage system that stores up to 236 GB of data on magnetic tape.

In 2000, the first USB sticks (memory sticks, jump drives, etc…) are released to the public with 8 megabyte capacities, and they’re so convenient that floppy disk ports begin disappearing from computer designs in favor of USB ports. USB sticks then improve exponentially, and soon have capacities of one, two, and four Gigabytes while floppies struggle to keep up.

Besides being smaller and harder to break, those USB sticks also store more. Where the first USB sticks held 8 MB, the standard size floppy disk at the time could only hold 1.44 MB of memory. Knowing how small DOOM is, it would take two floppy disks to download all of DOOM, but a USB only took one. By 2009, USB sticks with capacities of 256 GB were available on the market. That’s 178 floppy drives.

Terabyte

A terabyte is 1 trillion bytes, or 1,000 gigabytes. The first commercial drive with a capacity of one terabyte was first sold in 2007 by Hitachi, a Japanese construction and electronics company. The movie Interstellar, released in 2015, featured a depiction of a black hole known as Gargantua – and became famous when it closely resembled a picture of an actual black hole taken by NASA. A ring of light surrounds the black hole in two directions, one due to friction-heated material Gargantua has accumulated, one due to the lensing of light around it. The gravity is so intense that light itself is pulled into orbit around Gargantua’s hypothetical horizon and kept there. It took 800 terabytes to fully render the movie and make Gargantua somewhat accurate in terms of light-lensing.

Petabyte

A petabyte is 1 quadrillion bytes, or 1,000 terabytes. This is typically cluster storage, and while it’s available for purchase, it’s very expensive for the average consumer. For comparison, while rendering Interstellar took 800 terabytes, storing it at standard quality takes 1/200th of a terabyte. You could store approximately 2000 DVD quality copies of Interstellar on a petabyte. It took a little less than 5 petabytes to take a picture of the real black hole, M87.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit

https://kb.iu.edu/d/ahfr

http://www.differencebetween.net/technology/software-technology/difference-between-unicode-and-ascii/

https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainframe_PP3155B.html

https://www.pcworld.com/article/127105/article.html

https://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-black-hole/

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gigabyte

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/news/black-hole-image-makes-history

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2019/4/19/how-scientists-captured-the-first-image-of-a-black-hole/

What is an RFID Chip?

Elizabeth Technology February 27, 2024

Definitions

RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification, and it’s usually used in the context of a chip! There are active and passive types: an active RFID chip has a tiny battery with it, while a passive one is powered by the energy of the reader’s signals alone. Active chips can be read from much greater distances, but the battery makes them heavier and more expensive. Meanwhile passive chips have to be blasted with the RFID signal to be read.

How do they work?

RFID chips are great because they’re small, and they don’t take line-of-sight to read like many other cataloguing techs do.

There are three major parts to an RFID chip: the microchip, an antenna for receiving and broadcasting signals, and substrate to hold it together. RFIDs work with radio waves, a form of electromagnetic radiation. They actually got their start during the end of WWII, where a Soviet engineer created a passive listening device activated by radio waves, which would then store a small amount of information about the transmission. It wasn’t really the same as what we use in security tags and inventory systems today, but it was a tiny passive chip with information stored on it passively, and that’s close enough! 1973 saw a real attempt at the kind we have today, and ever since, they’ve been shrinking in size.

RFID chips can also come with read-only or read/write memory, depending on the style of that chip. Essentially, it has a very small amount of memory on it, just enough to store things like batch number, serial number, or address, in the case of pet tags. They’re not very complex: in the case of an active tag, the reader simply dings the RFID chip, which then responds on a compatible wavelength with the relevant information via that antenna.

Some chips broadcast constantly, while others broadcast on a regular interval, and some wait for the RFID reader to ding them before they send their data. In a passive chip, the RFID reader has to ding the chip so hard that it absorbs enough EM radiation to respond – energy hits the antenna, travels to the chip, and powers it enough to activate the antenna for signalling, which then causes the chip’s signal to travel back up the antenna and transmit to the reader. Neat!

Utility

An RFID chip’s low profile and small size makes them great for inventory management. Since the chip doesn’t need line-of-sight like barcode scanners do, production doesn’t have to worry about maintaining a certain orientation towards cameras for their items, they can just pass them over an RFID scanner and they’re good to go. Radio waves can pass through solid objects!

The RFID chips are also good at tracking inventory while in the store: you’ll notice many big box stores have an exit with detectors alongside the doors, which prevents unscanned or active chips from getting out the door. It also sometimes triggers on nametags and items the cashier had to scan in the cart, but most of the time it works as intended.

RFID chips are great for livestock and pet chipping – they’re small, and not only are they less painful than a tattoo, the data is also unlikely to migrate or blur like ink could in a pet’s ear. The initial wound is also smaller, which makes infection less likely. That doesn’t mean they’re perfect, but they carry a lot more information for less relative risk to the animal.

On the human side, RFID chips are frequently used in employee identification badges – the theory is that it’s harder to copy and easier to read than a barcode scanner for restricted areas. Some people go so far as to get them implanted, but the ethics of that are… iffy, to say the least, even if they want the implant. The long-term effects in humans just aren’t that well-known, and while pets are a good indicator that nothing should go wrong, pets also don’t have to worry about getting their phone hacked because their pet tag carried a virus along.

RFID chips are now popular in credit cards! The chip in the card is (in theory) safer than the regular magnetic stripe, and it’s supposed to be much harder to copy. Of course, early versions still had their issues, but now they’re difficult to signal from a distance.

Flaws

RFID chips aren’t free from flaws.

Security can be a problem, especially for active chips, which can be read from hundreds of meters away. Most vendors have some sort of protocol in place, but for a hot minute, RFIDs in cards were a potential security nightmare. Remember all those anti-RFID chip wallets? That’s because readers were able to access the chip as though they were being used for a purchase. It just wasn’t very safe before protocols were established.

Secondarily, a bunch of folks went out of their way to prove that the more complex RFIDs could become transmission sites for computer viruses – one guy had one implanted in his hand, and if the virus could infect that hand, then the virus could get anywhere he could wirelessly. The perfect crime! Airgapped networks were no longer safe if RFIDs were on the table.

Incompatible readers can make inventory transfers more painful than they need to be, as well – the ISO sets standards for which channels get to be used for what purposes, but the companies have to comply with them first. They also have to have the right kind of reader – is it scanning for active or passive chips? The two have very different needs. An active reader might not be able to find a passive chip!

There’s also the sticky issue of privacy and destruction. How do you get rid of the tag on the product once it’s no longer needed for inventory? RFIDs can be destroyed by microwaves, but that doesn’t help if they’re attached to an electronic, which can also be destroyed by microwaves. They can be wrapped in foil a couple of times, and stop transmitting long distances – on some objects, that makes them unusable. It takes special equipment and some professional skill to actually scan a building for RFIDs, but it’s not totally impossible.

It just takes work, the kind of work a stalker or government agent might be willing to put in if they needed info on a person so badly that they’d want to see what items they had in their house. This is also more difficult than it sounds because most chips go by something vaguely specific, like a batch or serial number with no product name attached, but it’s not impossible. It would just take quite a lot of effort when stalking via binoculars is much easier.

It’s also still possible to clone RFIDs – passports with RFIDs in them could be an especially large problem for both the original holder and the government of that country. The obvious option, credit cards, are still cloneable too, although with modern banking it’s often not worth the investment for the scammers.

However. With tech improving every day, it may be possible to limit what chips respond to which scanners, which would make it much more difficult to invade privacy. Chips get smaller and smaller every day, so it’s entirely possible a password- or signal- protected RFID may some day come into power.

Sources:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224328848_Impacts_of_RF_radiation_on_the_human_body_in_a_passive_RFID_environment

https://www.atlasrfidstore.com/rfid-insider/active-rfid-vs-passive-rfid

https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/high-tech-gadgets/rfid.htm

How the EMV credit card chip works and why it matters

https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-coronavirus-vaccine/fact-check-magnet-test-does-not-prove-covid-19-jabs-contain-metal-or-a-microchip-idUSL2N2N41KA

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-vaccine-microchip-gates-ma/fact-check-rfid-microchips-will-not-be-injected-with-the-covid-19-vaccine-altered-video-features-bill-and-melinda-gates-and-jack-ma-idUSKBN28E286

Reasons to Recycle Your Phone

Elizabeth Technology February 22, 2024

1.Lithium batteries are not biodegradable.

In general, modern materials don’t really degrade much. When was the last time something you owned rusted away completely? And if it did – did it really? The spot below the cheap, neglected grill in my friend’s back yard has no grass growing on it. The rust is still there to interfere with that grass’s growth, even though it’s technically degraded. That grass may eventually come back if the rain ever washes enough of the contaminated dirt away, but until then, the ground is inhospitable. Now picture that with metal that’s not designed to spoil, and chemicals that are much harsher. Batteries are by far one of the most concerning items to trash. They tend to corrode and release acid if not disposed of properly, and the bigger the battery, the bigger the concern for acid to leach into whatever it’s laying on top of. You don’t want something you threw away to make a mini-superfund site, surely?

2. They also don’t behave well when the internals are exposed to air.

You cannot just dump a phone in the trash when you’re buying a new one. Besides the environmental effects (which can be anywhere from acid leaching to heavy metal poisoning, depending on battery type) there’s also a real danger of starting an unquenchable fire in a garbage truck. If it’s one of the fancy ones that can compact garbage as it picks it up, the battery being punctured can set off a fire inside the bin. If you’re unlucky, and others have thrown out paper trash or flammables, you’ve got a serious problem on your hands. Recycle the phone! If not the phone, then at least the battery!

3. The phone contains rare earth metals.

These are metals that are common in the Earth’s crust, but very difficult to actually mine out and purify economically. After a point, mining them might make phones too expensive for the average consumer – so it’s important to harvest what parts are harvestable! Besides that, the phone itself isn’t going to bio-degrade because it’s completely inorganic. Rather than let all those precious minerals and non-degrading materials go to waste, recycle!

4. The hard drive may not be wiped the way you hope it is.

It’s very possible to recover deleted documents off of a hard drive months after ‘wiping’. Wiping a traditional hard drive completely is difficult, and solid states only make it harder. The hard drive still has a phantom copy of the old doc until it’s written over with something else, or grazed with a magnet. Doing this thoroughly is difficult, which is why you should recycle through a reputable hardware recycler. This is especially important for things like email apps, which frequently don’t ask users to log in after the first time they’re used on the phone!

5. Having a secondary market is essential for the health of the industry.

If the number of workable phones is low, people are forced to buy the new model because it’s all they can find. This is why planned obsolescence is so insidious. They’re deliberately cutting down the market for their users so they can sell more new phones at a high price. If this was a perfectly efficient world where consumers had perfect information, this would lead to the company dying, because nobody wants to pay 700$ for something that breaks in three years. But it’s not – it’s a world where people drop an extra $200 on a phone for its camera. It’s a world where the phone carrier forces you to upgrade as part of their contract. It’s a world where branding is the fashion. It is not perfectly efficient, and as long as the manufacturers recognize this, they will make attempts to money-grub.

Keep those second-hand phones in the market and force manufacturers to keep making phones at least as well as their old products. This is still recycling! It’s keeping the phone from its final death in a landfill, and extending it’s life for as long as possible.

6. Broken Phones Still have Valuable Parts

If the phone’s so broken that it’s not possible to re-sell it, consider recycling it anyway – lithium batteries have many uses, and as mentioned before, those rare earth metals aren’t getting any less rare. Recycling the phone by sending it somewhere to get it broken down is also valid recycling. If you can squeeze just a little bit more use out of a device by dropping it off or passing it on – why wouldn’t you?

Besides, the facility will know how to handle that battery!

Sources:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/mobile-phones-elements-periodic-table-endangered-chemicals-st-andrews-a8739921.html

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/936268845/apple-agrees-to-pay-113-million-to-settle-batterygate-case-over-iphone-slowdowns

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