hacking
Alexa, open the pod bay doors; or how I learned to stop worrying and hack the wiretap in my home.
Confession: I have an Amazon Echo. I really like Amazon Echo. I use Amazon Echo almost every day.
Everything about the Amazon Echo is great, except for the primary feature of the Amazon Echo: it is always listening. When I received the Echo nearly five years ago, as a gift, Amazon was not quite the Surveillance Capitalism behemoth that it is now. They packaged their new smart speaker with lots of information about privacy and what Echo can and can’t and won’t do.
Of course, none of that turned out to be true. In just the last year, Echos have been turned into permanent recording devices, listened to a couple’s conversations and then inexplicably sent those conversations to the husband’s employer, and sent 1,700 voice recordings to a totally random stranger. Amazon hasn’t exactly done much to help the image of Echos as Bradburian household horrors, unveiling an Echo Dot for Kids, filling patents for true always-on recording, releasing recordings to outside contractors, and, perhaps most egregious of all, embedding Alexa into a Big Mouth Billy Bass.
It’s reached the point where no one should feel comfortable having an always-on speaker in their home, but damn if these little things aren’t just so convenient. On top of being useful for quick searches, playing Baby Shark on repeat 40 times, checking the weather, and dozens of other little things, the original Echo was a really good speaker. It seems a waste to throw the whole thing away just because one feature is unacceptable.
Read MoreHagfish, chill Puffins, swamp monsters, the mining boat floats, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: April 2, 2018
Foghorn (A Call to Action!)
- Want to help stem the tide of misinformation online and off? Do you have it all figured out and just need resources to implement your world-saving solution? The Rita Allen Foundation is looking for Solutions to Curb the Spread of Misinformation.
Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)
- Hagfish. Tough. Lovable. Slimy. But not too slimy. Hagfish Take Weeks to Recover from Sliming Someone.
- Kevin D’Angelo integrated the OpenCTD with a new protocol for detecting salinity using the gold pins of a microUSB controller and I am blown away! Outstanding work.
- This is a puffin wearing sunglasses for science.
The Levee (A featured project that emerged from Oceandotcomm)
- Installed as a beacon of hope for a hurricane-racked island, the statue had to be moved multiple times due to the eroding coast: Our Lady of the Sea by Russel Arnott.
- Russell also created these outstanding posters to warn us away from Louisiana’s famed and fearsome swamp ghosts:
Beware the Feu Follet, by Russell Arnott
Skate saunas, clone armies, deep news from deep-sea mining, an ocean of plastic, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: February 12, 2018.
Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)
- Attack of the clones! A Pet Crayfish Can Clone Itself, and It’s Spreading Around the World!
Ranja Andriantsoa/The Atlantic
- One of the take-home points in the talk I gave last Friday is that we barely know anything about the services hydrothermal vents provide to the rest of the ocean ecosystems. Deep-sea hydrothermal vents are nurseries for skates.
ROV framegrab of Pacific white skate egg sacs near a black smoker in the Galapagos. Photo Courtesy Ocean Exploration Trust
Hacking tractors, foraging in the surf, mini-boats, Mardi Gras beads, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: February 5, 2018.
Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)
- This little video is a master class in natural history: Foraging on a beach in Wales.
Farting oysters, bombing sea lions, and a new trash island? It must be the Monday Morning Salvage! November 20, 2017
Fog Horn (A Call to Action)
- It’s Native American History Month. Southern Fried Science recognizes that our servers are housed on the occupied land of the Timpanogos people while the majority of our writers live on unceded Powhatan territory. This November, Try Something New: Decolonize Your Mind.
Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)
- Boaters stumble on massive Caribbean “gyre” of plastic garbage. “Gyre is in quotes because I’m almost certain that this is debris from the 2017 Atlantic Hurricane season, rather than an accumulation of decades of plastic is a circulating ocean current. It’s still shocking to see.
- The ARA San Juan, one or Argentina’s two diesel-electric submarines, is missing. Search and rescue is mobilizing and there’s hints that the sailors tried to send out a signal Saturday.
- Without a Treaty to Share the Arctic, Greedy Countries Will Destroy It. Cosign.
Make for the Planet with Conservation X Labs and the Earth Optimism Summit!
Invasive species, overfishing, ocean plastics, wildlife tracking, and measuring ecosystem services, are some of the most daunting challenges in conservation.While these challenges require a combination of social, commercial, and regulatory cooperation to address, they can also be tackled through technological innovation, which can bypass some of the largest hurdles to implementing practical, timely solutions.
On April 21, 2017, 18 teams of conservationists, technologists, makers, and hardware hackers will gather in Washington DC and tackle five conservation challenges selected by a panel of experts at the Make for the Planet, part of the Smithsonian’s Earth Optimism Summit. Over three days, teams will work to develop prototypes, strategic frameworks, and model systems that address specific issues within the broader challenge prompt of terrestrial species invasion, overfishing, ocean plastics, wildlife tracking, and ecosystem services. Read More
Dear John: Farming and technology in the near future.
I wrote this story a couple of years ago and have been trying to find a home for it ever since. As the issue of proprietary software’s relationship to agricultural technology is back in the news, I figure it’s time to stop shopping this short science fiction story around and put it in front of a real audience. For some real-world background reading, see:
- Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors With Ukrainian Firmware.
- Hacking the Tractor: what the future of farming means for open science.
- New High-Tech Farm Equipment Is a Nightmare for Farmers.
- We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Very Idea of Ownership.
DEAR JOHN.
It started with the tractor. Or, rather, it stopped with the tractor. John Willis climbed down from the cabin of his dead machine and removed the cowling. Everything looked fine. The diesel engine shined, its green accents still brilliant.
After years trading his skill with a wrench and a soldering iron for access to his neighbors’ equipment, he finally owned a tractor of his own. The latest model, too. Not ostentatious, but with just enough comforts to make up for the last ten years. The tractor was new, bought debt-free through the Farm Act and a decade of careful planning and backbreaking labor. Expensive, but built to last.
Except it didn’t last. For the third time in an hour, the engine seized, the wheels locked, the console went dead. Willis sighed. He had acres to till and he wasn’t in the mood to spend a day stripping the engine, hunting for some tiny defect. He could send it to the service yard, but he couldn’t afford to wait for an authorized repair. The quote alone would set him back a week.
He couldn’t afford another late planting. Not this year.
He started the tractor. It roared back to life, the engine purred but the console beeped and flashed with panic, a thousand different alarms. The manual, a massive, multi-gigabyte document, was sitting on his work computer, back in the barn. For whatever reason, he couldn’t get it to download to his field tablet. He put the tractor in gear and continued down the field.
Fifteen minutes later, the tractor was dead again.
Well, he thought to himself, at least there’s a rhythm to it. He limped down the rows in quarter-hour bursts.