Hack and use broadband routers and wireless devices that are sent outwith free broadband packages.
Open TomTom – hack into these and use for a variety of other applications. TomTom have teamed up with Vodaphone to offer live traffic updates.
Hard disk drives can detect when they are dropped in order to protect the data. Someone has hacked and used this technology to track earthquakes.
iPhone users can break their devices out of the restrictive Apple environment to open them up to all sorts of other applications.
A remote control 4-way adapter that allows you to turn off a series of devices easily to save power being wasted on standby. Link this to a mic controller and you have home automation quickly and easily.
Later versions of LinkSys routers have less memory and are sometimes less hackable?
A Minority Report-style interface was made using Wii controllers linked to infa-red LEDs and a projector.
Produce a 3D display using a pair of glasses and infa-red LEDs.
Cost barriers to entry are very low for this type of subversive use of technology. Use crowd sourcing for design and development to further keep costs down.
However is it difficult to then take the product to market via manufacturers. Are they not interested?
Many consumer cameras use the same chip (e.g. a 12mp sensor) but the software brings it down to, say, 6mp. Allows them to easily offer a range of models and prices.
Some companies are really open to their products being hacked, while others are keen to keep them closed. Is there a trend to opening up your product – used as a marketing selling point?
Chumby (?) allows you to change the physical state of the product and also the software.
Software to track when you have taken a tin of beans off your shelf and then order you a replacement. Privacy issues around this?
Power tracking products used in homes – how can we aggregate all this crowd-sourced data? Can hack the chip collecting the data. Electricity companies are looking at this in order to map usage and predict demand.
Introduce live pricing for electricity prices in homes? eg consumer sees that boiling kettle at half time in the football will cost so much, but if they wait when there is less demand for power it will be cheaper.
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My notes from the same session:
Session being run by Saul Cozens. Claims not to be an expert in this field so this is an open conversation.
Subverting consumer technology is taking a consumer device and re-working it to do something that the manufacturers never intended it to do.
Examples:
Xbox media centre edition subverted the original Xbox to play media on a television rather than games. Xbox cost £120 at the time so it was much cheaper than buying a traditional PC for this purpose.
The Fonera. This is a wifi router that allows sharing of your home internet connection with other owners. A vulnerability in the firmware allowed new firmware to be loaded – OpenWRT. This is Free software router firmware that runs on a variety of different hardware platforms. Sky broadband used Netgear 834GT routers and they were quite liberal with the distribution thereof (would rather replace the hardware than diagnose problems with a customer’s current router, apparently). The routers were locked down to Sky’s network but could be hacked onto any network with OpenWRT.
The SLUG: embedded linux device intended to be a NAS with a USB and network port. These too can be re-flashed. Saul currently has Debian running on his! This is a very low power device and handles all his home server needs.
OpenTom: a Free software replacement firmware for TomTom GPS devices. In addition, TomTom have got together with vodafone to trawl the positional info of mobile phones on their network and mine this data for likely traffic congestion (lots of slow moving phones in an area == congestion).
HDDs with accelerometers: these were designed to park the disk heads if they detected that the disk was in free-fall. Someone realised that the accelerometer could be accessed programmatically. Earthquakes can now be detected and tracked more quickly by aggregating data from thousands of HDD accelerometers across southern california than by expensive sizemology equipment.
iPhone: jailbraking this allows many different types of software to be loaded.
Remote control power sockets. Unscrewing one of these to see what it’s made of reveals it contains a consumer RF tranceiver on 433 MHz channel. Devices to encode for this RF protocol are commercially available. Arduino microcontroller board can be linked to the RF module to create a cheap home automation system.
Wii remote: lots of very impressive projects subvert this device. Someone has combined the remote with bluetooth and IR receivers to create a system that is capable of tracking their hand movements. Integrating this with a computer user interface results in something akin to the system featured in the film “Minority Report” Interactive whiteboards have been made for less than $40 using the Wiimote. Wii remotes have also been used as 3D drawing styli, which can be integrated with a CAD package to provide a 3D drawing environment.
Samsung manufacture RFID chips and reduced the cost by factor of 100. Becomes feasible to slap one on everything! Interesting privacy aspect. Journalists scanning RFID tags in clothing worn by celebs – not size 8, size 12!! What happens when RFID tags are swapped between artefacts?!
Subverting consumer hardware changes the cost barrier to entry as there is no need to develop hardware yourself. Subverting off-the-shelf technology gives access to people without the resources of a large corporation. Difficult to commercialise subversions: subverting branded hardware is not popular with its manufacturers. Sometimes they embrace the communities (cf Linksys / Cisco and the WRT54g router – eventually and after GPL lawsuits). More often they try to clamp down (e.g. Microsoft Xbox 360, iPhone jailbreaking, DRM)
Manufacturers don’t have to support 3rd party hacks and they’re making enough money already so don’t need to. Need to bypass the business comunity and do it without their permission! It would be good to tap into and encourage product hacker communities.
Same chip in different products but nerfed in the cheaper ones. E.g. Texas Instruments scientific calculators: used to be identical hardware but different legengs screen-printed on the keys. If you knew the correct key presses for the “more expensive” functions you could get a cheap calculator to perform the same calculation. Replacement firmware for some Canon cameras allows export in RAW format – a “premium feature” in other cameras.
Is there a market benefit to product openness? Is openness a product feature? -> Chumby: a toy with open source software and hardware. Can download the CAD files for this and hack its physical form as well as its software.
Saul: crowdsourcing of data: power monitoring devices: how do we gather all that info? Like last.fm for power – I have my power usage down further than you! My house now runs on under 50W! etc etc. Power usage mapping. NYT plotted what was being said where across the nation when the superbowl was on. This kind of result only emerges when tech becomes ubiquitous. Anyone with a power meter <5 yrs old has RJ45 connector underneath – can hack this to get data out of it. Is there anything generating ubiqutious data at the moment that we can subvert?!
Electricity generation: lots of work mapping supply to demand. Generators are looking at using smart meters from the point of view of controlling demand. Need to switch this around so that consumers are using smart energy tracking to monitor their usage and switch supplier based on cost / eco-friendliness etc. At the moment we’re locekd into power suppliers for long terms but if we could switch instantly, programmatically, it would change the market and tech could be used to take advantage of that.
New uses for old technology – electronic cobblers – bring old tech into shop and have it repurposed into something new!
[...] first session was the talk on Subverting Hardware, by Saul Cozens which was a very interesting talk about the many devices people have subverted and made work in [...]
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