Archive for the ‘Coffee’ Category

Your loser update: week 11, 2021 (with bonus firings).

Monday, November 22nd, 2021

Sorry. I’m running a little behind, as I was tied up much of yesterday with various things, including going to see “Dune”.

(Random thought: it is refreshing to know that, thousands of years in the future, even on desert planets, there will be coffee.)

Anyway, NFL teams that still have a chance of going without a win this season:

Detroit.

The Lions play the semi-hapless (3-7) Bears on Thanksgiving Day. I’m thinking this is a toss-up, though ESPN seems to favor the Bears.

In firings news: Dan Mullen out at Florida. 34-15 in four seasons and they were in the national championship game last year, but (as Easterbrook often says) “what have you done for me lately?” (Answer: gone 5-6 this year and 2-6 in conference.)

Chip Lindsey out at Troy. 15-19 in three seasons, and 5-6 this one. Sensing a trend?

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 358

Wednesday, March 24th, 2021

Let’s take a coffee break.

“The £299 Aldi Espresso Machine – How Bad Could It Be?”

Oddly enough, I don’t shop at Aldi either, and for the same reason: the nearest one to us is about 30 miles away.

Bonus #1: Since we’ve talked about an espresso machine, how about we talk about a can opener? A very specialized can opener, that is: this one opens powder cans for the 16″ guns on the Battleship New Jersey.

Bonus #2, and a little shout-out to the Saturday Night Movie Group. From the “Old Car Memories” channel, Jim Rockford’s Firebird.

The Internet of Stupid Things.

Saturday, September 26th, 2020

We have a coffee maker that allows you to make coffee the old fashioned way by pressing a few buttons or via a mobile phone or tablet using an app. The maker operates with Wi-Fi and when unboxed you have to connect it to your network through a companion app on your mobile phone. When turned on for the first time, the coffee maker works in a local mode and it creates its own Wi-Fi network that the hopeful coffee drinker first connects to in order to set up the device.

The protocol that this device speaks has already been documented on the internet by several other researchers. As expected, it’s a simple binary protocol with hardly any encryption, authorization or authentication. Communication with machines takes place on TCP port 2081.

“hardly any encryption, authorization or authentication”. I bet you can guess what happens next. Yes! Hilarity ensues!

We used the unused memory space at the very end of the firmware to create the malicious code. By using the ARM assembler we created ransomware that when triggered renders the coffee maker unusable and asks for ransom, while at the same time turning on the hotbed, water dispensing heating element, permanently and spinning up the grinder, forever, displaying the ransom message and beeping. We thought this would be enough to freak any user out and make it a very stressful experience. The only thing the user can do at that point is unplug the coffee maker from the power socket.

The write-up is much, much longer and more detailed: I’m just trying to hit the high points here.

Bonus:

Even if we were to contact the vendor, we would likely get no response. According to their website, this generation of coffee maker is no longer supported. So users should not expect a fix.

(Hattip: Hacker News on the Twitter.)

TMQ Watch: January 20, 2015.

Wednesday, January 21st, 2015

We’re grumpy. Apparently, this is a day ending in “Y”. Let’s just jump right into this week’s TMQ

(more…)

Random notes: October 3, 2014.

Friday, October 3rd, 2014

Good coffee is important.

I’m a big fan of both Jimmy Stewart and Carol Burnett, so this makes me very happy. (I have family in the area around Indiana, Pennsylvania, but I’ve never had the chance to visit the Jimmy Stewart Museum. Perhaps I will remedy this on a future visit.)

Five rules for viewing art, damn it, art! There’s much here that I agree with; seek silence, take your time, do some research. On the other hand, I don’t see anything wrong with purchasing postcards or posters at the gift shop. I do think the rubber van Gogh ear is a bit over the top.

Some practical advice: If you feel better about yourself when you leave a museum, you’re probably doing it all wrong.

This bothers me as well, but I’m not sure I can articulate why. I need to think on it some more.