Chumby and Reverse Engineering
I had quite an adventure getting out to USC from West LA while out of town Tuesday night. I thought it might have been possible to take a bus or subway to get around the area; boy was I wrong as could be. It really made me realize the abundance and scope of accessible public transit in the Bay Area and just how much I took that for granted.
I ended up taking a cab both ways which cost me plenty, but the talk was *totally* worth it.
Andrew “bunnie” Huang talked about reverse engineering and the tech and ethics behind it. The rest of the talk was about his new company that’s he’s starting called “Chumby“. They’re brewing up a cool little beanbag-sized … thing. It’s like an alarm clock on some heavy steroids. It uses these nifty little flash widgets to grab and display all kinds of media and content from the Internet. And the best part about the whole thing is designed to be open in every way; from the fabric patterns for the bag to the hardware schematics for the boards and the code running them. There’s only a couple places that will have to be secret: a co-processor that’ll do some crypto functions to securely exchange some authentication credentials and perhaps some portions of the schematic that may include some WLAN designs released under NDA from Marvell. It’s a very different business model that I’ll be interested to follow.
As far as hackability goes, it’s got tons of potential. I’d really like to build some nifty ubicomp projects around the house with some prototypes, so I’ll just have to ask politely 
I did find a cool potential exploit at LAX on my way back. I had some amazing travel luck and had a few hours before my flight to bum around the airport. I found some outlets to plug in, but there was no free wifi to be found. They did have some pay-per-use setups through Boingo Wireless and TMobile at a Starbucks kiosk, and well, I couldn’t justify dropping 25 bucks for an hour or so of wireless access.
Let’s just say that captive portal software doesn’t grab *everything*.
Hopefully there’ll be some code to follow shortly.
Flickr set from the talk.
Cory’s post at boingboing
MP3 from the talk