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Hardware

Any Alternative Uses For The MySmart Pad? 20

Posted by timothy from the movie-prop-is-too-obvious dept.
TellarHK muses: "Thinking back to the CueCat debacle, and on the topic of 'soon to be abandoned-ware,' has anyone considered mucking about with the MySmart mousepads? I picked up one of these on sale at Best Buy for $5, figuring someone might come out with a way to use the 'Smart' card reader as a tool for other applications. Sure, I know this'll get a lawyer's underwear in a bunch, but I don't recall signing any license stopping me. Maybe someone's come up with a quick and dirty program or routine for it, under either Linux or Windows?" These are also at CompUSA. Smart-card access to the basement? One more layer of security on your workstation? These look like fun, if someone has a driver.
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Any Alternative Uses For The MySmart Pad? More

Any Alternative Uses For The MySmart Pad?

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  • ...not much. It looks like the consensus is that you can't use the card reader as a generic reader. It could be used for simple security, though, but no code seems to exist for it.

    The mysmart.com web site seems to be down at the moment, so the company might have gone belly up. Check later...maybe they're using IIS and just need to reboot? :)

    Interesting note: There's some comment on the company considering Linux support. Likely? Nope.

  • I couldn't be bothered to wait for that flash demo (and that annoying fuck new-age music shit that is so common on the internet) to work, so I just looked at the pictures. Now, keep in mind that this is Slashdot, and I have just qualified myself as an expert on this product.

    Does the pad do anything except for have extra little buttons on it? If that is all it does, you should just have to map them to some sort of x-input.

    I know, I couldn't begin to do that either. But it looks fairly trivial. If it's that big a deal, find some developer and send him one.

  • On yahoo [yahoo.com] Bill's gettin over $8,000,000 advance.

    "I did all them DC bitches." wow, that's over $1M a sylable
  • Likely, even more of us own this reader than the mousepad reader. American Express gave them out for free with their blue cards. Has anyone hacked it yet? The device looks fairly simple and the smartcard follows the ISO standard for layout. These are the same cards(physically) as those used in DTV receivers and other smartcard apps. They even sell blank cards with embedded microcontrollers that can be programmed in assembly or C. The cards do serial input and output, and when power is applied the stored program springs to life and talks via the TX/RX contact on the card. The cards can even be locked so the code inside isn't extractable. Someone could easily write code to do some serious key based authentication. If the American Express readers could be hacked to read and write the cards this could be cheaply accessible to all of us. Not to mention it'd be a great way to get people into microcontoller coding and all the neat associated applications.
    • Cheaply accessible?

      Hardly. First, that implies that people have a credit line that'll get you AmEx. And again, this comes across as just another example of Slashdot elitism. ''We all need to be making huge amounts of money to afford anything neat.'' There are a lot of things out there that truly are affordable, to people even with a lower level of income than what people may be used to with the high-paying (and rapidly vanishing) silicon valley lifestyle. For five dollars, I think something like this that doesn't require a whole hell of a lot of effort to pick up yet has the potential to become an actually useful item to people of all income brackets.

      Posts like this, and articles saying that $2000 for a wearable computer is affordable really go a long way toward projecting the image that people that read here really don't have any interest in things that are actually truly affordable.

      I'd like to hope we'll start seeing articles about things that are actually reasonably purchased on less than a $50/hr. income, but I doubt it.

      • Dear me, you seem to have taken great offense at a non-existant problem...

        I just recently got Blue for Students - I'm a college student, and definitely not making > $50/hr. with my on-campus job :) I got the reader along with it, and have been toying with it.

        The Blue reader is supported by MUSCLE (smart card initiative for Linux.) I got a couple of BasicCards cheap - they're EEPROM programmable in Basic (yuck! oh well, it works.) It's neat... I don't have a real need for high security but one of these days I'll get it to work.

        Besides, I won't be able to afford a $2000 wearable, but it is certainly 'affordable' in the sense that previous wearables were much more expensive (or homebuilt.) I like to read about that kind of stuff, even though I know I can't afford it. It gives me hope that one day, I will be able to :)

        Oh, and besides, I don't think that the smart cards are 'useful to people of all income brackets'. In fact, AmEx has been quietly phasing out the applications which support their smart chip... It doesn't have a whole lot of use right now. The cards are more expensive than their dumb counterparts, the readers are cheap but not zero-cost, and it's still an effort to get it installed and running. (Easy, but not plug and go.) It's a gimmick thing, and will be until someone dreams up an application which is not feasable by any other method.

        -Karl
        ------------

  • We recently had to purchase some software that went along with a special printer here at work. The software came with a simple "smart card" reader and one of the memory cards pictured with the mouse pad you're talking about. In effect, the software simply uses the reader as a fancy dongle. That is, you have to have the reader plugged in and the card inserted to be able to use the software. This is one of the dumbest ideas I have heard of for this technology.

    I can't tell you any specifics on the reader that comes with the mouse pad, but the card doesn't look like it has a CPU, as someone mentioned above. It looks like it is a flash memory card only.
  • As far as I can see, the mysmart pad is ps/sc compliant. This means that it has drivers so an OS (especially windows) can treat it as a generic smart card reader. There is also a Linux project for this stuff (muscle) [linuxnet.com] so anyone can use it. There are several *nix projects on sourceforge too just search. This type of card is different in form-factor to DirectTV ones. The chip is placed in a different part of the card but I am pretty sure they are otherwise similar. Though I haven't used the mysmart pad myself, I do like the quick-link ideas though it depends on software running (like cuerat). And you can replace the sheets that allow OEMs to put their brand on it. It has been around at least a year so someone is buying them. For lotsa fun in smart card microcontroller programming (cheap too) see BasicCard [basiccard.com]. Cheap too.

  • A little late (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yeah I saw these things about 6 months ago at best buy and immediately thought of smart card authentication for computers. I posted it about it but I guess it wasn't interesting at the time. Good that the article finally made it up. The question is... Are these using intellegent smart cards or dumb ones. The smart ones have a mini cpu inside them. The dumb ones are basically flash memory. I've been meaning to find out if there is a way to recharge my "TelMex" phone card that I got while vacationing in Cancun.
    • The problem with the TelMex card is that they are even dumber. They aren't made with flash mem (expensive). They are made of fuses. 1 unit == 1 fuse. The phone blow a fuse each time a unit is consumed. If you are really into that, you could put an EEPROM on your card, and simulate the behavior...
  • According to this page, [mysmart.com] the pad appears to be mostly a regular mouse pad but with added buttons for quick access to email, web sites (no doubt advertisements - notice the 'valuable discounts' line) and such.

    On the other hand, this page [mysmart.com] mentions their 'smart card' which can be inserted into the pad. So yes, there is a reader. It stores settings for the pad, though. There's no guarantee, unfortunately, that there's a way to access the reader with the PC.

    Then again, a quick disassembly of their software might prove me wrong.

  • The smart card. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by TellarHK ( 159748 )
    Actually, I don't think the card itself stores information on the pad's features. It appears to me that the various inserts that the pad ships with, are each designed to tell the pad software which links to use. Not that the inserts are smart, but that the software is.

    Now, the real question is how smart the card itself is? Is it a simple serial number that lets the software do all the work, or can information be stored on it? If the former, that might be better for security applications, and if the latter, it might be better suited toward saving personalized data. As each card is non-numbered, on the outside, appearing to have no way to uniquely ID them, it makes the whole matter completely up in the air. I'd like this to get to the main page so we can see more input. :)

  • It's Sat evening at 11:00pm and there's 7 comments to this article and it is not on the front page?

    Something broken?
  • I picked up one of these at Best Buy also. I tore it apart the moment I got home; if anyone wants pics of the internals, send me an email and I'll get some high quality pics of all the components. Basically, the unit is two parts: One part is the 'mousepad' unit that has little press-button pads on it that line up under a paper insert labeled with websites (and branded shit). The paper insert has a notched corner that meets up with a few contacts to identify which branded pad is in the unit (ie, a CompUSA mysmart pad has a different notch than a BestBuy one so they link to different sites). The contacts connect to the smartcard circuit, which in turn connects to your USB hub. The smartcard itself seems to just be a simple flashmemory card (no real CPU or java on it or whatever) that stores your website passwords and favorites and branded stuff. It would be nice to be able to use this smartcard for some simple authentification; ie, pop in your smartcard to login, pull it out and your terminal is automatically locked. If anyone wants to hack at this, I can send you pics and specs of the unit, and you can get them for cheap at local stores. jason

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