This researcher must have a good publicist. shodan.io, project sonar (https://opendata.rapid7.com/about/), https://www.binaryedge.io/, https://twitter.com/ErrataRob, and many more scan the entire internet all the time. https://twitter.com/Viss does talks about finding wacky stuff on the internet regularly.

Remember when businesses used to talk about competitive advantage? I.e. the thing a competitor couldn't easily replicate? I'm not shedding a tear for a startup that doesn't have one. And again, boo hoo about getting acquired. This is how it works. Take a look at military tech. small companies exist, but basically once you become valuable, you are acquired by one of the 5 big defense contractors because R&D is expensive compared to just buying the winners.

I'm actually looking forward to wireless charging. The reason is that one of the primary reasons a piece of portable electronics becomes useless to me is the charging connector gets worn out. It a simpl fact that plugging it in and out multiple times a day and stressing it in odd directions is going to cause it to simply not work over time.

I'd love a situation where I just sat my devices on a pad for them to charge and even to sync data at faster-than-wireless speeds. That way I only had to plug them in in limited situations, (such as travel).

Also, it would be nice from a device standpoint. Right now I have an octopus of micro-usb chargers on my chest of drawers. I have half a dozen devices that need charging through the week. I'd love to just leave the ones I don't use on the mat and have them charged and ready to go when I took them.

My wife had an n900. she dropped it and cracked the digitizer. (Not the glass, not the screen, the digitizer.) She has a pin set since it's synced to an exchange server. we assumed there must be SOME way to get the photos off of it. Nope. With a pin set, you can't connect it to a computer. And without a digitizer, you can't do squat. Now, all the pictures she's taken on the system since it was last backed up are stuck on it forever.

I feel bad for her. Not only does my Samsung Epic 4G have a SD card w/ all my photos, google+ automatically uploads them to picasa and syncme automatically downloads them to my home fileserver.

This is the first step towards the world described in Ghost int he Shell. At some point a need for security appliances on brain-machine interfaces will be needed and created. Then the brain-machine interface and the security appliance will move to an embedded solution within bodies. At that point, hacking will be a lot more dangerious as one of the impacts of attacking, defending, and counter-attacking will be loss of confidentiality, integrity, and availablility of people's own brains.

Comcast frustrates the hell out of me though. I know they've got a team working this, but if you try and contact customer support it's like talking to a wall. Questions like, "Is IPv6 available in my area?", "When will IPv6 be available in my area?", "Can I get a static IPv6 assignment?", "Can I be put on a list or something to get IPv6 enabled on my connection?" and "Do you know what IPv6 is?" are met with hours on hold while the tech asks the next level tech who also doesn't know. I appreciate that Comcast has a team working through deploying IPv6 but I'm frustrated they seem to have no interest in supporting the people who actually want to use it! (I'm running business cable so this isn't even the home support guys.)

There's a fundamental error in how steve's doing this. It assumes either the attacker knows the key space you're using or searches all smaller key spaces first. Instead, an attacker is more likely to use a word list with a set of permutations. that may mean that Password1! breaks even though it has a nice key space. On the other hand, passssword may not break because it's simply too computation intensive to check adding the entire key space into the middle of the dictionary in every location. You'd have to search every number, letter (upper/lower), and character inbetween every other letter in the word and then do it again with combinations of two characters for every word in your dictionary. (BTW, I can't take credit for this insight. It was presented at defcon a few years ago. As a sidenote, at the presentation, I believe someone indicated some password crackers will try characters inbetween the sylables. To generalize this, you can use a pattern to create your password with a very small keyspace and unless the pattern and keyspace is known to your attacker (either because you leaked it or you chose a common pattern) your password can be safe.

If a system has a password maximum length, it probably means it's neither hashing nor salting your password since the main reason to minimize length would be to fit it into a database field. Food for thought.

I can think of another use:
Temporary in-room networking where security or bandwidth conjestion are a concern. I could envision a server room issue where you needed to understand what was happening at multiple points in your network that aren't normally tapped. You use something like a vampire tap and a raspberry pi to get copy off the data, analyze, and send back to something like splunk. However, rather than running temporary wires all over, instead send them by laser to the central monitor. Then when you're done, you can easily back out your taps.

The answer's in the article (actually in the Slashdot summary). Take itunes, turn it into a platform for 'apps'. The iphone is a physical platform. itunes is a software platform. There can be music, pictures, video, etc, etc, etc apps. The itunes platform can manage the sync'ing of different apps with other platforms and the cloud.

It's a model everyone understands. It's strait forward. It's consistent with their other products. Plus it provides a new market. Apple could have an app store for apps that run on it's itunes windows platform.

Buy 2 servers, preferably used storage array servers. Start a raid 5 or 6 array on one. (This server is the storage server.) This is your main storage drive. Store ALL data on it. It's helpful to have it support multiple access methods (SMB, NFS, iSCSI, etc). You could go full OS like Debian or something like OpenNas or OpenFiler (BSD based).

On the second box, add as much storage as is accesable on the first. This is the backup server. Run a cron job to regularly r-sync the data off the Storage server over to the backup server.

In this configuration, you have some redundancy in the RAID and a true backup in the second server. You also have the ability (hopefully) to drop in drives as you need so you can expand as you go. And if the hardware it's self breaks, you can simply replace it and keep going.

So I looked and I see two, x-servers: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.theqvd.android.x# and https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=au.com.darkside.XServer#. Am I missing something? Is there a major difference?

It seems like PXE booting something that then boots a tailored ISO would work pretty well.

I have multiple projects planned already. The first is to use it as a very cheap, simple router. I have a zyxel wireless AP, but it won't accept USB tethered cell phones as WAN connections. So I'm going to use the cell phones as usb modems to the rasberry pi and use the pi as an ethernet gateway to the zyxel.
The next project is to use the rasberry pi + old monitors as thin clients to my servers. That way I can monitor them from my desk without going through a full computer. (Other option is to buy cheap android tablets to do it.)