Hey what kind of clip (the blue thing in the picture) is that?

@Frank26080115: It’s a test clip for SOIC packages (that’s what you call that kind of surface mount package). Googling “SOIC Clip” got me this link: http://www.wassco.com/Products/Test-Clip–Narrow-SOIC–SMTC-8-Pin–3M__TMT-650-08.aspx but there are plenty of other manufacturers and variants (pin count, width) to choose from. I was contemplating getting a couple of those myself; I actually have that same USBee unit, and it’d be nice to be able to easily clip onto chips rather than probing the legs by hand.

Actually, Win+R and format c: won’t do anything since you can’t format a drive while it’s in use, or if it’s the partition that Windows runs on.

Nice try.

The hijack part is nice, but if none of the wireless interfaces of logitech are encrypted its even possible to recover passwords and other sorts of scary stuff….

@ Anon

Well thank you Mr. article patrol. It’s called an example.

@charper:
The system’s security is compromised. simply becouse an attacker could use the presenter dongle as a keyboard. so it’s possible to open a terminal and mount a network share. from there on the attacker is in.

The article mentions that an unencrypted mouse interface should not be concerning, but in reality you can do virtually anything with a mouse that you can do with a keyboard in Windows. I have had to use this fact several times in the past when my keyboard quit working or a program stopped responding to keyboard input for some reason but mouse input still worked. First of all, you can copy and paste individual characters from some other document to form any input (assuming the characters you need exist in a document somewhere, alternatively you could use the Character Map). This might take a while for lots of input but perhaps you could enter a “tinyurl” or something quick enough to cause trouble. You can cause plenty of problems with regular mouse actions as well (delete files and then empty the recycle bin; delete important system files; cause general mayhem). It’s naïve to think that it’s safe to let the public take over *any* input, to the computer you’re using publicly in front of hundreds or thousands of people… it’s just too tempting.

Sorry to offtopic, but that USBee looks pretty nice, anyone got any feedback?

@Ryan: I have the same USBee model as the one shown in the article. It’s a pretty solid little module; well built hardware, small size, and fairly well featured. My only real complaint is the fact that the software was Windows only. Looks like they’ve opened documentation for developing Mac and Linux tools, but they haven’t done them themselves (and they’re not currently available). I run it in an XP VM, which works well enough; I don’t really push it to the limits of it’s potential (I’m usually just using it to sniff I2C and UART communications, plus confirm that hardware PWM’s are acting like they’re supposed to), but it’s great for what I need it for. The software actually got updated relatively recently, which is nice — the older version, while it worked, was a little on the buggy side.

There are alternatives that have come out since I purchased mine; a few open source/hardware ones that honestly I’d probably prefer, that may work better or worse, and may be cheaper, but I haven’t worked with any of them so I can’t speak to their quality. If I were you, I would shop around, with the knowledge that the USBee is one good option (as long as you have a Windows dev environment.