WiFi Telescope


We Make Money Not Art recently visited the LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre in Gijón, Spain. The installation that left the strongest impression on [Regine] was the WiFi sightseeing telescope built by Clara Boj and Diego Diaz. Spain is in a situation similar to the USA: A few years ago many municipal WiFi projects launched only to be squashed because of theoretical unfair competition with local utilities. Now commercial projects like WeFi, Whisher, and FON encourage people to “share” their WiFi. Observatorio (Observatory) is designed to provide insight into the current state of local WiFi. It uses a highly directional Yagi antenna to collect wireless access data from the local area. The antenna has a 30deg aperture which is matched to a camera with an identical field of view. The observer sees the camera’s viewpoint with the WiFi data overlaid showing where accesspoints are and whether the AP is open. WMMNA also recommends you check out the WiFi Camera which photographs electromagnetic space.

Phlashing Denial Of Service Attack, The New Hype


Imagine how surprised we were to discover that by accidentally bricking our router we were executing a brand new attack: Phlashing Denial Of Service (PDOS). This week at EUSecWest, researcher [Rich Smith] will present the theoretical PDOS attack. Instead of taking over control of an embedded system, the attacker turns it into a nonfunctioning brick by flashing it with a broken firmware. Anyone who has flashed a device knows the danger of interrupting the procedure.

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FON Mp3 Streaming Router


I was looking for streaming solutions the other day. Little did I know that [John] would be sending in a hack for adding an mp3 decoder board to the La Fonera. The final device has both a web and command line interface which let you connect to any shoutcast/icecast streaming server. John has even gone so far as to provide the Openwrt image for the router with all of the software components you need.