NOTE: Faculty, if you are interviewed and quoted by news media, or if your work has been cited, and you have an online link to the article or video, please let us know. Contact us at news@csusb.edu.
FBI says public phone chargers may put your data at risk: What to know
The Washington Post
April 11, 2023
Tony Coulson, executive director of the Cybersecurity Center at California State University at San Bernardino, was interviewed for an article about “juice jacking,” when hackers use public phone charging stations to gain access to a person’s cell phone. He said people should start thinking about phones like we think about credit cards. “You don’t just go anywhere and start plopping your debit card in,” he said.
He likens juice jacking to credit card skimming. Similar to magnetic strips on credit cards, which make them vulnerable to security threats, USB technology is old, Coulson said, and “doesn’t have a lot of safety built into it.” You can see that just by looking at a USB plug: There are four connectors inside; two are for power, and two are for data. “There’s no fail-safe in between, and once you’re plugged in - if data talks, then data talks,” he says.
If you’re in a hurry and in need of a USB port, check to see whether it has four or two connectors inside - many are manufactured with four, but if it has two, it is just for charging. “But that’s not a 100 percent rule,” Coulson cautions.
When it comes to his own device, “I only charge my phone with my own plug-in charger,” he says. “I’ve been doing that for years.”
CSUSB Egyptologists travel to places no archaeologist has been before
Redlands-Loma Linda Patch
April 10, 2023
The Wadi el-Hudi Expedition just returned to San Bernardino after their latest archaeological season in Egypt, where they excavated two ancient houses and an ancient Egyptian mining settlement that archaeologists had not yet explored, as well as discovering six new archaeological sites at Wadi el-Hudi. Now they are looking forward to sharing with the Cal State San Bernardino campus community their new discoveries, places visited for the first time, and technological innovation in archaeology.
The Wadi el-Hudi Expedition is directed by Kate Liszka, associate professor of history and the Benson and Pamela Harer Fellow in Egyptology at Cal State San Bernardino. Co-directors of the project are also affiliated with CSUSB: Meredith Brand was CSUSB’s W. Benson Harer Egyptology Scholar in Residence for spring 2022 and Bryan Kraemer is CSUSB’s Egyptologist with the Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art.
Warehouse forum is Wednesday at CSUSB
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/The Sun/The Press-Enterprise/Redlands Daily Facts
April 10, 2023
In a business news column: “Faculty and students at Cal State San Bernardino will host a hybrid event Wednesday, April 12 on wide-ranging issues related to warehouse work in the Inland Empire and specifically around CSUSB.
“CSUSB professors Mike Kohout (geography) and Jeremy Murray (history) are the event hosts. They said the forum ‘will help draw connections between the intellectual life of campus and the interests and concerns of warehouse workers and others impacted by these major businesses in our community.’”
Knuckle-walking in Sahelanthropus? Locomotor inferences from the ulnae of fossil hominins and other hominoids
Journal of Human Evolution
Jason P. Jung, a lecturer in the CSUSB Department of Biology, was one of the authors of a new paper in the Journal of Human Evolution, in which he and researchers from Chaffey College and New York University found the distinctive forelimb morphology of the African knuckle-walking apes in the forelimb of the roughly 7-million-year-old Sahelanthropus tchadensis. Only chimpanzees and gorillas exhibit robust and forward-curving ulna shafts, which are thought to serve as an adaptation to knuckle-walking. This bone in all other primates is straight or curves backward and contrasts with humans and other fossil hominins (bipeds).
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