The revolutionary family of wifi products combining Arduino with Linux is here
The first Arduino Yún is the combination of a classic Arduino Leonardo (based on the Atmega32U4 processor) with a Wifi system-on-a-chip running Linino (a MIPS GNU/Linux based on OpenWRT).
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Historically, interfacing Arduino with complex web services has been quite a challenge due to the limited memory available. Web services tend to use verbose text based formats like XML that require quite a lot or ram to parse. On the Arduino Yún we have created the Bridge library which delegates all network connections and processing of HTTP transactions to the Linux machine.
Okay, I’m calling it. Arduino has officially jumped the shark. Not only is the MIPS SoC powering the WiFi card probably more powerful than the shitty ATmega processor, but to make it work it actively has to offload tasks to it.
This is precisely the point when you’re better off just using a different platform.
Hacker serving 5-year sentence invents ATM add-on to prevent theft
Boanta’s arrest in 2009 spurred him to develop the anti-theft device to make amends. “When I got caught I became happy. This liberation opened the way to working for the good side,” Boanta told Reuters. “Crime was like a drug for me. After I was caught, I was happy I escaped from this adrenaline addiction. So that the other part, in which I started to develop security solutions, started to emerge.”
Yup.
At Google Conference, Cameras Even in the Bathroom
Exhibit A:
Often, Google Glass owners looked strange. Many were using their cellphones while wearing the glasses — defeating a declared purpose of the new gadget, to free you from having to look at your phone. Another man continually looked at his watch to check the time, even through the glasses display a clock right above your eye.
Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider; these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society. They are a boon to Hiro because they embody the worst stereotype of the CIC stringer. They draw all the attention. The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time.
Finished Project: The Community Network
The Community Network Tool is both a set of websites built to serve as community hubs, as well as a stand-alone website installation bundle.
It’s also the project upon which I worked for my Master’s practicum, so there’s that.
- Download Practicum Discussion paper
- Download files, documentation, and my final presentation
- Video of the practicum presentations (I had to re-do mine because they didn’t actually record mine the first time.)
Mike Ambinder at Valve on biofeedback in game design
An excerpt from his session at last week’s NeuroGaming Conference and Expo. Not a whole lot of new information here as he has previously discussed all of this, but it’s still cool to hear him talk about it. VentureBeat also has an associated article.
I honestly had no idea that this conference even existed, but suddenly I am quite curious if they will be making videos of the sessions available.
White Men Wearing Google Glass
“In its favour, if Google Glass didn’t exist, all these Silicon Valley guys would be having affairs or buying unsuitable motorbikes”
This may be the most hilarious thing I have seen all day.
Really says something…
Stop Drawing Dead Fish
Bret Victor doing his thing.
As a sidenote, the setup he is using for his presentation is quite interesting. He is using two iPads that are wirelessly networked, one of which is hooked up to the projector and the other which is providing controls for his presentation. There is no standard method of providing that faculty, though, so it’s something that he explicitly built into his demo app.
Blue For The Pineapple ....
The WiFi Pineapple, was a device coined by the Hak5 (www.hak5.org) Team back in 2008. Originally it was a hacked Fon/Fonera AccessPoint (AP) with Karma patches applied to hostapd. Back then Digninja (Robin wood) called it Jasager (http://www.digininja.org/jasager/), it was called this because the AP software answered “Yes” to all WiFi Beacon Frames; if a WiFi client was looking for the SSID BTOpenzone the Pineapple(or Jasager) would reply “That’s Me!”, if a second WiFi client was looking for an SSID of Starbucks, again the Pineapple would reply “Thats Me!www.hak5.org) Team back in 2008. Originally it was a hacked Fon/Fonera AccessPoint (AP) with Karma patches applied to hostapd. Back then Digninja (Robin wood) called it Jasager (http://www.digininja.org/jasager/), it was called this because the AP software answered “Yes” to all WiFi Beacon Frames; if a WiFi client was looking for the SSID BTOpenzone the Pineapple(or Jasager) would reply “That’s Me!”, if a second WiFi client was looking for an SSID of Starbucks, again the Pineapple would reply “Thats Me!” – Thus tricking unsuspecting users/devices into associating with its private network. From this stage you could attack WiFi clients, and perfrom Man-in-The-Middle(MiTM) attacks on their interenet traffic!.
Speaking of attacks against WiFi…
Google Glass review (Explorer Edition)
In fact, very little is adjustable in Glass. You can modify the wake angle (how far back you must tilt your head for the display to pop on) and enable or disable head detection, which automatically turns off the headset if you remove it. That’s about it. You can’t adjust volume levels or display brightness, can’t disable WiFi or Bluetooth (both appear to be always on), can’t re-arrange the application cards in the interface or set their priority, can’t modify the default screen timeout length and you can’t enable a silent or do not disturb mode — though it could be argued that simply taking Glass off serves the same purpose.
After reading the article, I am thinking that this style of device is simply not going to take off. It has entirely too many compromises due to form factor, and far too many quirks and limitations.
The above jumped out at me, though. For a device that is designed explicitly to upload and stream personal data, open WiFi and Bluetooth offer a massive surface for exploits. Especially WiFi, where there exist any number of exploits against devices that attempt to automatically connect to a network. I’m actually rather shocked that Google shipped a device like this, even if it is an early preview release.
Security is something that products are designed for, not tacked on afterwards. I am not even going to start on the potential implications of a product design team at a major company leaving out something so easy and basic from the get go.
The PC is booming—just not the PC we know - The Tech Report
I still spend a lot of time in front of an old-school desktop PC. I wouldn’t dream of giving it up. The thing is, though, my PC is big, heavy, difficult to operate, and required for serious work—Photoshop, Excel, web design, text editing, you name it. There’s nothing terribly personal or cozy about it. If you think about it, today’s tablets and phones fulfill the PC’s original mission—making personal computing available to the masses—far more elegantly than this thousand-dollar workstation.
Because that’s really what this is: a workstation. And that’s really what most of today’s traditional PCs are. They’re workstations with multiple processor cores, Windows NT-based operating systems, and copious amounts of storage and memory.
There’s nothing wrong with that. Workstations will always be needed, because there will always be work to do. But we shouldn’t pretend that the PC is somehow dying because people aren’t buying workstations they no longer need. The PC isn’t dying, because today’s real PCs are in our pockets. We’re buying more of them than ever, and they’re doing more for us than i486 Compaqs ever did.
Cyril over at Tech Report accurately sums up the PC industry today.
