Someone stated in the early days of the war, a feeling that was reciprocated by the soldier in khaki and the sailor in blue, that a mechanical device would be the determining factor in ending the world conflict, favorably, of course, for the United States and her allies. 1
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In the United States, we are losing our fondness for cash. As in many other countries, cards and other types of electronic payments now dominate everyday commerce. To some, this is a loss. Cash represented a certain freedom from intermediation, a comforting simplicity that you just don't get from Visa. It's funny to…
One of the more common arguments you hear in contemporary computer security circles is about hardware trust and embedded controllers. Technologies like Intel ME, the ARM Secure Element, TPMs, etc, remind us that the architecture of the modern computer is complex and not entirely under our control. A typical modern…
Last time we perambulated on telephones, we discussed open-wire long-distance telephone carriers and touched on carriers intended for cables. Recall that, in the telephone industry, cable refers to an assembly of multiple copper twisted pairs (often hundreds) in a single jacket. There is a surprising amount of…
Recently, I covered some of the history of Ethernet's tenuous relationship with installed telephone cabling . That article focused on the earlier and more business-oriented products, but many of you probably know that there have been a number of efforts to install IP networking over installed telephone wiring in a…
I think I've mentioned occasionally that various devices, mostly cellular modems, just use the Hayes or AT command set. Recently I obtained a GPS tracking device (made by Queclink) that is, interestingly, fully configured via the Hayes command set. It's an example of a somewhat newer trend of converging the…
A few days ago, on a certain orange website, I came across an article about an improvised parallel printer capture device . This contains the line:
I haven't written for a bit, in part because I am currently on vacation in Mexico. Well, here's a short piece about some interesting behavior I've noticed here.