Cufflinks That Double as a Wi-Fi Hotspot

Yes, we all remember the endless parade of cufflinks that doubled as USB storage drives, if you missed it, it happened maybe four or five years ago.

But this is Y2K12, and there’s a new breed of high-tech cufflinks in town.

While one cufflink in the set of Polished Silver Oval Wifi and 2GB USB Cufflinks that Brookstone is selling indeed doubles as a USB storage drive

The other cufflink is an honest-to-goodness USB Wi-Fi hotspot. Why is this important?

Let’s say you’re at a wedding and the wireless router kicks the bucket. Just hook a laptop directly into the cable modem and then stick the Wi-Fi cufflink into one of the laptop’s USB ports.

In no time at all, you’ve got yourself a new wireless hotspot that all the guests can use to surf the web on their Wi-Fi-enabled devices.


This sounds like a boring wedding, but you just made it exponentially more interesting by being the guest with the Wi-Fi cufflinks, so there’s that.

The Wi-Fi cufflink requires software to be installed on the host computer, which you can download first or store on the other cufflink that doubles as a USB storage drive.


The cufflinks cost $250, but if you regularly purchase cufflinks, you probably have that kind of money in your cufflink budget.

Visualising WiFi Signals with Ligh

Have you ever wondered what the WiFi signal looks like around your office, school, or local café? In this video, Timo Arnall, Jørn Knutsen, and Einar Sneve Martinussen show you the invisible. And they pulled this off by building a WiFi measuring rod, measuring four meters in length, that can visualize WiFi signals around Oslo, Norway with the help of long exposure photography.

What’s fascinating to see is how the WiFi signals vary across the city. Away from residential buildings, the drop-off in WiFi strength is steep. On the other hand, the WiFi signal is dense around commercial and academic buildings. The amazing visualization gives us a glimpse into the complex relationships between WiFi networks and the physical environments underpinning them. For a deeper read about this project, see this blog post.

Hackers Firesheep & Latent Evil

In America there is a saying “guns don’t kill people.” Some people add “people with guns kill people.”

This does put a handy slogan on a view about moral responsibility. On the face of it, the sayings are accurate: while a gun can be used to kill a person, guns are not themselves moral agents.

As such, a gun or any weapon, bears no moral responsibility for any deaths that it might be used to bring about.

Today, we will be looking at applying this argument to the use of hacking program, in particular, one called Firesheep, not to be confused with the user-friendly browser Firefox or the emulator Sheepshaver.

Firesheep was written by Eric Butler and brings easy to use 'hacking' functionality to the Firefox web browser. The 'add-on' allows users to view information in internet cookies at sites such as Twitter, Facebook. Flickr, Tumblr and Yelp.

Fortunately, Firesheep is limited in what it can do. It can allow a user to get usernames and session number IDs but it cannot be used to get passwords. In effect, it allows users to view information e.g. a person’s Facebook or Amazon account, but does not let users do anything that would require a password.

It is also limited to hacking on the same network. However, this means that if you are reading this blog on a public wi-fi, then someone with Firesheep could be reading through your darkest Facebook secrets. It is very popular for the 'man-in-the-middle' interceptions used in cafes and public sites. So remember that the creepy fellow sitting two tables down, may also be reading your pages and Tweets too.

The creator, Eric Butler makes it very clear that he sees himself as a white hat: he is hacking to expose vulnerabilities so that they will be fixed. Interestingly, he does directly address the moral issue at hand: “The attack that Firesheep demonstrates is easy to do using tools that have been available for years. Criminals already knew this, and I reject the notion that something like Firesheep turns otherwise innocent people evil.” (Discuss!)

Firefox's response to the topic of Firesheep and hacking on their browser

On the face of it, Butler may be correct. Firesheep, like other tools, is not some sort of cursed weapon that can possess the mind of potential victims and compel them to do evil, unlike television and other media. Clearly, the same is true of other potential harmful pieces of technology, such as guns and junk food.

Therefore, Butler and the other folks who make such tools openly available, are not directly accountable for what people do with the tools. Using the same argument as arms dealers, saying, “I just provide the weapons, the customer does the actual killing.”

Clearly, Butler has no malign intent in creating and releasing Firesheep. Rather, he seems to be like Dr. Gatling, he is hoping (albeit naively) that his creation will do good, rather than generating further evil.

There is another, deeper concern. Namely that providing the tools that makes misdeeds easier makes a person accountable to a degree. While the person who invents or distributes such tools or weapons does not make people evil or make them do misdeeds, the person does make such misdeeds easier.

Check out what Network World are saying about the Firefox and Firesheep threat

Therefore, the person providing the tool does play an indirect causal role in the misdeeds, especially if the tool or weapon serves as a “but for” cause e.g. if someone would have been unable to track down the whereabouts of, and start stalking, their Ex girl friend, without using Firesheep. The assumption is that the Ex would not have been stalked but for intervention of Firesheep. Therefore, making misdeeds easier does appear to bring with it a degree of moral accountability.

Butler answers this sort of criticism by stating that other tools already exist to do just what Firesheep does. Firesheep is just a better known and easier to use tool. So, to use an analogy, Butler is not inventing the gun, he is merely making the gun easier to use.

“Firesheep doesn’t hack. People hack with Firesheep.” You decide!

Long Range WiFi Edges Nearer With FCC Decision

A new class of devices able to create WiFi-like connections that span miles rather than meters just jumped significantly closer to market. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has made a crucial decision on the rules that will regulate such devices, which will use the "white spaces" between TV channels that were freed up by the analogue switch off.

Although the FCC voted in November 2008 to open up these white spaces, the exact rules governing how they could be used were not decided. Companies of all sizes, ranging from Google to startups, with plans for gadgets and services using white spaces have been waiting since then. Some have spent money lobbying for rules favorable to rapid development of a whole new sector.

A key concern was whether the FCC would stick with a previous suggestion that white spaces devices must constantly listen out for broadcasts from TV stations and also wireless microphones to ensure they wouldn't cause interference. Today the commission decided that this isn't necessary. Instead, the rules will require devices to be capable of knowing their location and using an online database to find out which channels are active in their area.

"The ruling is in the right direction to help us quickly get white spaces devices onto the market, Ranveer Chandra of Microsoft Research who built the world's first white spaces network on the company's Redmond campus, told me.

"Making hardware able to get sensing right is very difficult, particularly for wireless microphones which all have different signals." False positives are a problem when listening for wireless mics, says Chandra, because their signals are so low powered.

Being able to use the software-centric database approach will allow much speedier development compared to the alternative, which would me coming up with new chip designs, he says.

Although Chandra and colleagues experimented with sensing too, the Microsoft network also demonstrates how a database could be used. They developed a cloud-based service to which a device can supply its location and receive back an accurate description of the whitespaces available, based on the position, power and height of nearby transmitters. They also built a website where you can check the white spaces in your area.

The FCC is yet to release the full technical details of the rules, which are expected late today. When these details are released, the real work will start, says Chandra. "Over the next couple of weeks we and others will need to look at that very closely," he says, to work out just what the rules allow for.