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    pushcx avatar pushcx 4 years ago | link | on: Internet of Things: How Spark core helped us make a Wi-Fi keylock with e-paper keypad for our office

    “for ~35 USD in parts”… plus a device with a 749 EUR price tag that this business is selling.

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      jux avatar jux 4 years ago | link

      Spark Core is 35USD. The rest is optional. E-paper device costs 239EUR (not 749EUR), but you could use your iPad, Android tablet, etc…

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        pushcx avatar pushcx 4 years ago | link

        The kit that doesn’t require a connection to Visionect’s servers, which I think you would be important for a door lock, is 749 EUR.

        Are you an employee of or in any other way affiliated with Visionect?

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      mordae avatar mordae 4 years ago | link | on: Internet of Things: How Spark core helped us make a Wi-Fi keylock with e-paper keypad for our office

      I know it’s a demo, but if this reflects the level of (in-)security IoT will bring upon us, we are deep in trouble.

      The device have been programmed in a way that just screams “rootkit included”. The keypad is not only tampering-unsafe, it connects to the doors “directly” with no security hub, which means that anyone who can own the keypad owns the door. (Unless I’ve gotten it wrong and it’s just a screen, not a full-blown tablet.)

      And the referenced Lockitron is a horror story in waiting as well.

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        jux avatar jux 4 years ago | link

        Relying on a lock to keep intruders away is very stupid, regardless of the type of the lock (deadbolts can be pwned, classic keypads can be pwned, fingerprint scanners can be pwned).

        That being said, the device itself has no real operating system, has zero buttons, cannot be hooked up to any external input devices and even if it was it wouldn’t do anything. Its a dumb terminal, a window to a “browser tab” (the simplest analogy) running on a secure server. You can take it away, disassemble it, reverse engineer it, nothing will help, nothing is stored on the device.

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        goalieca avatar goalieca 4 years ago | link | on: The Swift Programming Language

        What the world needs right now is an open source / cross platform language. Hopefully apple delivers.

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          SeanTAllen avatar SeanTAllen 4 years ago | link

          What incentive does Apple have to deliver a cross platform open source language?

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            journeysquid avatar journeysquid 4 years ago | link

            Do we have a shortage of those?

            I imagine this will be much like Objective-C. Technically you can use it elsewhere (eventually), but practically no one will.

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              jux avatar jux 4 years ago | link

              And Apple is an avid proponent of both, so you can count on Apple to deliver. /sarcasm off

              Swift is closed source and Apple only. Perhaps we’ll see projects like Mono (for MS C#) that will change this.

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                Axman6 avatar Axman6 4 years ago | link

                … at the moment. There are plenty of signs pointing to them making it open source in the future. Apple don’t have a horrible history with open source; LLVM and Clang being the two major open source language projects they heavily contribute to or created and released. The damn thing is less than 24 hours “old” and people are already bitching that it’s not FOSS. Jesus, just hold your horses.

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                  mempko avatar mempko 4 years ago | link

                  KHTML guys would like a word with you….

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                    Axman6 avatar Axman6 4 years ago | link

                    I don’t understand your point. Open source doesn not mean you have to give code back to the original author/project, it means the source is accessable, and that’s exactly what WebKit is. It was much easier for them to make their own fork and control the direction of the code they wanted without having to try and maintain compatibility with KHTML and its differing goals. What exactly is the evil deed Apple committed when it created one of the most widely used open source projects in the world? Most users of the web these days see it through a webkit rendered page, and any one of them can download, build, use and contribute to the project if they want to.