RobotSkirts

Hackers working on the Barnes & Noble Nook have gotten a huge gimmee. nookDevs member poutine took the back off of his and discovered that the device’s filesystem is stored on a 2GB microSD card instead of onboard flash. Mounting the card revealed three ext3 partitions. You can find a listing of the files here. It’s mostly a stock Cupcake build with a few additions like ./system/app/instorewifi-release.apk. The debug interface, adb, is included so its a matter of adding it to the startup script to begin talking to the device over USB.

When the nook was announced, I was interested because it’s an Android device but worried that it would be too locked down to be fun. This is an amazing discovery and being able to modify the filesystem directly will surely make hack development much easier. The back is just screwed on so it isn’t that difficult to remove and since it’s under an external cover I can imagine people keyholing it to get easy access to the card. Veteran Android hackers like JesusFreke have already jumped in to help out. You can find them actively working in #nookdevs on Freenode.

US wireless carriers have started selling femtocells to their customers. A femtocell is a device that essentially acts as a mini cellphone tower. It connects to the user’s broadband connection and their cellphone connects wirelessly just like it would to a regular tower. The call is trunked over the broadband connection and the customer gets a much better signal than they normally would. If the caller leaves range of the femtocell, it will be handed off seamlessly to a normal tower.

I was reading about AT&T’s MicroCell, which they’re testing in a couple markets, and saw this interesting note:

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When an application sends an update to Twitter it can specify the ‘source’. The screenshot above shows an update where I used ‘foursquare’ as the source even though it wasn’t sent by Foursquare. No, I don’t think this is a security issue; it can be funny though. (more…)

UPDATE: @SanMo is now using Chris Finke’s implementation in Python.

@SanMo is a Twitter based service I launched in late January. It’s designed specifically for Twitter users in the Santa Monica area. Anyone can send a message starting with @SanMo and the bot will retweet it. The idea is that locals who want to participate will follow @SanMo and then respond to the inquiries. (more…)

I finally got around to looking at the Python tutorial today. I didn’t make it past page one because I was shocked to discover that Python is named after Monty Python instead of… you know… THE SNAKE. I figured this fact would be more obvious had O’Reilly chosen a more appropriate beast for their cover, so I decided to throw this cover together for them. Apparently Perl books have similar issues.

Nathan Ball let us try out his neat rope ascender while we where in Boston. I wrote a short post for Hack-A-Day and you can find more pictures on Flickr.

CCCamp is essentially over. I’m currently at Fabienne’s in Berlin and wanted to get something up quick while I’m on a decent internet connection. You can check out my pictures from camp on Flickr. Pictured above is one of the camps ubiquitous Datenklo. It’s the ethernet wire closet found at the ends of camp’s fiber optic runs built inside of a water closet.

The next couple weeks are both busy and exciting for me. I’ve got more stickers (black too!) on order and new tshirts on the way. Aug 1-2 is Black Hat, a computer security convention, followed by Defcon 3-5 then on the 6th I fly into Dusseldorf, Germany for CCCamp August 8-12th. After the camp I’ll be touring a few hacker spaces with a group: Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna, Karlsruhe, Cologne, Bonn, and Darmstadt. I return on August 20th (another direct flight). Then I think I’ll sleep for a week to make it a solid month (I’ll probably need to by then).

I’m really looking forward to this next month and it’s going to start off with lots of great people coming to town this week.

I was at ToorCon Seattle last weekend. It’s an invite only event and the badge was wrapped like a Wonka bar. Inside was a golden ticket that provides entry to next year’s invite event. I went through my badge collection from the last couple years and uploaded all of the hacker ones. There’s a bottle opener, laser cut puzzle, and a integrated circuit amongst others.

I really dislike April Fool’s day. Especially people whose April Fools joke includes the phrase “this is not a joke” which they later retract. That type of person doesn’t understand how humor works.

My April 1st post from last year.