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Archives for: February 2010

Learning Wireless Power: Part 1 - Security

02/10/10 | by zveriu | Categories: Hardware, Hack

Prolog

Wireless Power is not something new. It’s an old idea, an old dream, an old demo. However, it now revived with new forces in form of new technology products.

Mainly, there are two camps trying to use magnetic induction to charge things:

one offering a charging pad
other trying for over-the-air power

However, the post is not about going over this technology itself - if you want to explore, check the links provided at the end.

To the point

The point of this post is to discuss the security perspective of wireless power transfer, especially for over-the-air type. Several couple of years proved consistently that wireless technologies (WiFi, RFID, remote controls, GSM, etc.) are very prone to security vulnerabilities (sadly, most often by design, rather by implementation).

The types of attack one can envision are:

wireless power theft
Read more! »

TV-B-Gone experiments - Part 1

02/04/10 | by zveriu | Categories: Fun, Hardware, Software, Hack, Hack

TV-B-Gone experiments - Part 1

Prolog

For those who don’t know, TV-B-Gone is a device that makes TVs… well, to be gone… (As in Boris-The-Bullet-Dodger). It was invented by Mitch - Altman, and is sold as a ready (but limited in flexibility) unit, as well as a soldering/programming kit from Limor aka LadyAda.

I bought my TV-B-Gone kit version 1.1 from LadyAda some time back, but only recently with help from VadimBo, we got it soldered and (re)programmed.

Just to give you an idea what can be done (but not actually advised though ) - check “Confessions: The Meanest Thing Gizmodo Did at CES”

To the point

The downsides of the version 1.1 are:

there are mainly NA codes only supported in firmware 1.1 and 1.1b
there are only around 40+ codes supported in firmware 1.1 and 1.1b

So, I backported from tvbgone firmware 1.2 (Caitsith corrected WORLDcodes.c #ifdef version) into firmware 1.1b the following:

removed NAcodes, which are UNcompressed version of limited codes table
added WORLDcodes, which are compressed/optimized version of extended codes table
modified main() to use compressed codes table routines
modified Makefile to use EU/NA/both tables