Swarm Robotics

May 13, 2008 by 4 Comments


Uber-geek [James McLurkin] was in Austin recently demoing his robot swarm. He’s on tour with EDA Tech Forum. [McLurkin] has multiple degrees from the MIT AI lab and worked at iRobot for a couple of years. Lately, he has been working on distributed robot computing: robot swarms.

[McLurkin] was an entertaining speaker and had an interesting view of robotics. He is optimistic that robot parts will become more modular, so it will be easier to build them, and more importantly, faster to design them.

Some quotes:

  • “There’s more sensors in a cockroach’s butt than any robot”
  • “12 engineer years to design, 45 minutes to build”
  • “If it can break your ankle, it’s a real [rc] car.”

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Cold Boot Encryption Attack Video

May 13, 2008 by 18 Comments

We haven’t made a regular habit of watching BoingBoing TV, but lately they’ve been covering topics we’ve been interested in… not the dolphin pr0n. In yesterday’s episode they talked to Jacob Appelbaum and members of the EFF about the cold boot encryption attack. The attack involves dumping the contents of memory to a storage device by power cycling the system. Cooling the memory chip with compressed air helps preserve the integrity of the data. The attacker can then search the data to find encryption keys protecting the contents of the hard drive. A fool proof solution to mitigate this attack hasn’t been developed yet. You can read more about cold boot attacks at the Center for Information Technology Policy. The BoingBoing TV episode, bizarre editing and all, can be downloaded directly here.

Charter Screwing With DNS

May 12, 2008 by 35 Comments


Charter Communications seems to be pulling some sort of crap with their DNS servers. While working on a new project our friend Billy Hoffman, discovered that Charter was reporting absolutely every domain as resolving. They do offer a solution by providing an opt-out cookie, which isn’t useful at all if you’re not using a web browser… and I’m guessing most of Charter’s subscribers aren’t looking for a bastardized version of the net. We’ve seen recently that messing with DNS like this can actually open up new security holes.

XBMC For Your Mac

May 12, 2008 by 7 Comments


XBMC (formerly Xbox Media Center) has always been a popular choice for retiring an original Xbox. Maybe people install it for lack of something better to do or maybe it’s the pride in having better media support than the 360. The XBMC team has found another device that has a pretty weak television experience, the Mac. Lifehacker took the latest XBMC for OSX beta build for a run now that it supports remote controls. It seems like a much more functional than Apple’s built in Front Row. There are a few things that don’t quite work yet, which you can find in the FAQ. We’re definitely going to try this on our old Mac mini… once we upgrade it to Leopard, which is an unfortunate caveat that might prevent people from running XBMC on legacy hardware. There is no Apple TV support planned because of limited horsepower and the hacking hurdles that might be required. If you’re interested in repurposing your old Xbox with XBMC, check out Lifehacker’s install guide.

Smart Car Sensing With RF

May 12, 2008 by 8 Comments


In order to tell his home automation system that he’s home, [Jim] mounted a RF transmitter in each of his cars. When the car is on, the transmitter is powered up. The house picks up the transmitter signal when the car arrives or departs. With that information, he was able to set up some stateful rules that can be activated when people arrive or depart. Some people prefer to use APRS and read vehicle location from the transmitted GPS coordinates, but this is a bit cheaper and doesn’t transmit your position to the entire world all the time. The useful range is about 100 feet, so this can work even if you have to park in the street.

Human Sync Optical Tachometer

May 11, 2008 by 1 Comment


[Jared] sent in this optical tachometer by [Mike Freeman]. The write-up and code requires a free registration, but if you’ve got a use for it, it’s probably worth the hassle. The zip archive includes a nice writeup in PDF format, and the code needed for the pic controller. The tach was built specifically for model helicopters. The user looks through the viewfinder and adjusts the pot on the side until the spinning helicopter blade visually stops turning.