Welcome home to this five bedroom four and a half bath colonial home on six and a quarter acres in the serene Thurmont area! This home features a large kitchen with granite counter tops, a massive pantry, gas cooking, a main level primary suite, on the upper level another primary suite, and three additional bedrooms, hardwoods on the main level, a full basement ready for your finishing touches, and a three car garage. This home has plenty of room to spread out and enjoy the outdoors with a plethora of established fruit trees on the property and a chicken coop. This home has it all! Schedule your private tour today, before it’s too late!
It’s a simple question: when is it okay to use a public charging port to power your cellphone or laptop?
The answer is also simple, but more scarily frustrating: never!
Imagine: you’re sitting at the airport, waiting for your departure…and your phone’s about to die. But wait…there’s an empty USB port at a charging station nearby! Well, that might seem like a gift from heaven, but those public ports can actually give you a lot more than a charge for your nearly dead phone.
The FBI is now warning everyone to “avoid using free charging stations”, as hackers have “figured out ways to use public USB ports to introduce malware & monitoring software onto devices.” And the FBI isn’t the only agency warning about what’s called “juice jacking.” The Federal Communications Commission’s website also has a warning about juice jacking, explaining what is & how to avoid it. According to the FCC, “Malware installed through a corrupted USB port can lock a device or export personal data & passwords directly to the perpetrator. Then, criminals can use that information to access online accounts or sell it to other bad actors.” And when you really think about just how much personal information we all store on our phones nowadays, that type of invisible theft could do some real damage.
So, what’s the owner of a dying phone or laptop to do? Well, the #1 way to ensure juice jacking doesn’t happen to you is: never use a public USB charging station. Always be sure you have a wall adapter for your USB cable, so you can plug your charger directly into an available power outlet. Also, you could invest in a portable charger to keep with you for those unexpected instances when your battery’s drained but there’s no power outlet available to plug into. You could also pick up a “charging-only” USB cable, which doesn’t include built-in data transfer wires. And never plug your phone into a USB cable someone else has left at a charging station. Sure, it could be harmless…but do you really want to risk it?
Got a Mundane Mystery you’d like solved? Send me an email: [email protected].
If anyone’s ever tried to give you a false answer to an earnest question, they may have followed up their response with “I’m just joshing ya!” But who is this Josh fellow, and why do folks invoke his name when trying to pull the wool over our eyes?
The phrase “just joshing you” arose out of the late 1800’s & all began with a man by the name of Josh Tatum, a deaf mute, yet very enterprising, American man from the Midwest. In 1883 the US Mint came out with a new nickel, deemed the Liberty Head Nickel. On one side it had a large roman numeral V stamped on it. What it didn’t have stamped on it were the words “cents” or “nickel”. Well, Josh Tatum noticed that, along with the fact that it was nearly the same size as the US $5 gold piece, which, at the time, was common currency. So, with the help of a friend who was familiar in gold electroplating, Josh turned the Liberty Head Nickel coins, which were worth 5 cents, into replicas of the $5 coin. Josh went on to use his counterfeited $5 coins at stores & shops around his part of the country. Though, he was very careful not to purchase anything that cost more than a nickel. Usually the clerk would accept the coin, and in most instances would give Josh back $4.95 in change, which Josh would happily would take. By the time law enforcement eventually caught on & caught up to him, Josh had visited hundreds of towns & had amassed a small fortune. Authorities tried to prosecute him, but he ended up being found not guilty on the most serious charges, primarily because he’d only purchased items that totaled 5 cents. But also because, since he was unable to hear or speak as a deaf mute American, he’d never misrepresented the coins presented as $5.00 gold pieces.
But the government learned its lesson and, later that same year, the US mint added the word “cents” to the Liberty Head Nickle in order to bring that type of fraud to a halt. In the aftermath of Josh’s caper, anytime someone would get caught in a harmless lie the famous saying became commonplace: “Ah, I’m just Joshing you”!
If you’ve got a Mundane Mystery you’d like solved, I promise I won’t be joshing you with its answer. Send it to me in an email: [email protected].
