Originally Posted By: DWallach
... a cable they have, internally, that's a USB-A-to-micro-B cable with an inline button. When you first plug it in, it's "charge only" but you can press the button to make it a data cable. This doesn't seem to be available anywhere online.

Needless to say, when you've got one connector for all things, you want some way of saying "I don't trust your charger but I want power from it." I wonder if these sorts of things will catch on.
I would expect that inline adapters would appear with just that sort of isolation.

I suspect the adapter would need a chip inside to negotiate the power available signaling with the power source and then provide the appropriate signaling to the device on the other side wishing to be charged. A firewall of sorts, but limited to passing power info between the two ends.

Even better would be integrating this 'firewall' into the USB facility in the device. Of course, the USB spec guys have been messing with this sort of thing for a while now and the result is still all over the floor.

This new world of untrustworthy external devices and potentially harmful external injection vectors is turning simple usability into a huge liability. Wired connections used to be the gold standard for 'good' connectivity. Now it is turned upside down...