This has involved combining a few features to make a 0.01 release that can go out on the perk Mesh Extenders, as well as some WR703N-based mesh extenders we are preparing for a monastery (more on that in a later post).

I wanted the firmware to support updating of the servald binary and config file, as well as preventing login as root in normal operation, and operating a captive portal so that people connecting to a mesh extender get some idea of what is going on. It also needs to support the different hardware types we are using.

This is all finally coming together as the following image shows.   The captive portal automatically pops up on my Mac if I associate with a mesh extender by Wi-Fi.

I’ll talk more about the firmware structure later, and document it on the wiki.  Anyone wanting to take an early look can checkout the source code and look in the somewhat erroneously named mr3020 directory.

But for now, I am happy that we have the main functions of the mesh extender firmware functioning.

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I hadn’t caught up with them for a few months, but today was student expo for the department, and so I went down to see what they had created.

It was very pleasing to see a nice that they had indeed managed to make a 6m high tower that can be assembled in less than 10 minutes, and consists entirely of common hardware and a few 3D printable parts, as you can see below:

And again with one of the students who designed it for scale:

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The full report can be downloaded here:

http://www.ifrc.org/PageFiles/134658/WDR%202013%20complete.pdf

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 With the lid on it looks like this:

The next step from here is to adapt it for the MR3040 router which has a small rechargeable battery, and means that we can have a single-piece Mesh Extender with at least a few hours of battery life before adding an external battery.

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First, here is the unit after we put all the parts in, in fashionable Flourescent Yellow, almost verging on the appropriate International Standard Yellow-Green:

We did, however, hit a little snag: The USB memory sticks we are using here, while very small, are slightly larger than the ones that Musti was measuring against.  Similarly, the USB connector itself had a taller flange than anticipated.  The end result was the case is about 2.5mm too narrow, and about 1mm to low around the USB connector:

Musti has done a great job making it all slot together, and feel really firm and stable in terms of the positions of the components.

Now to build an updated servald binary including all our recent changes and bug fixes…

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The following images are supplied by Musti, as we are yet to print some of these out ourselves in the lab.  You can be sure we will be doing this as soon as possible next week.

Having our own case is one of those little things that makes a big difference to the end usability, and also feasibility of manufacturing these units in small quantities.  No odd parts poking out. No lids that won’t close properly. All little things that make a big difference.

Musti has made the case so that the PCB and radio just slide in, and with a little extra PCB all the connections can be made without having to solder anything — a very nice time-saving trick.

We will be putting the CAD files up on http://developer.servalproject.org/wiki as soon as we get the chance.

Next we are looking at doing the same for the MR3040, which is much the same as the MR3020, but has an internal rechargeable battery — that would give us a one-piece complete Mesh Extender, which is very appealing. Also, the MR3040 is much easier to open to get the PCB out in the first place compared with the MR3020 whose lid is cemented and clipped shut, and generally Un-Fun to open by the dozen.

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Image in the public domain

It is entirely possible that a hundred people have thought of this before, and if so, my apologies.

Much ado is made of biometrics from time to time,  most recently on the latest iPhone.

Most of the attention focuses on how wonderful it is to be able to use your thumb, eye-ball or some other body part to identify yourself.

Many companies are formed based on the assumption that biometrics are secure, and are generally speaking A Good Idea.

However, as we have been reminded by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) in Germany breaking the biometric authentication on the iPhone in less than two days using common household ingredients and just a photo of the fingerprint.

The CCC sum up many of the major problems with biometrics in their post:

“We hope that this finally puts to rest the illusions people have about fingerprint biometrics. It is plain stupid to use something that you can´t change and that you leave everywhere every day as a security token”, said Frank Rieger, spokesperson of the CCC. “The public should no longer be fooled by the biometrics industry with false security claims. Biometrics is fundamentally a technology designed for oppression and control, not for securing everyday device access.” Fingerprint biometrics in passports has been introduced in many countries despite the fact that by this global roll-out no security gain can be shown.

There are a few salient points in the above that are so important that they require repeating, as well as some important consequences. Please excuse the all caps, but these are really important points that need to be made again and again, because industry, government and individuals continue to be badly deluded as to the value and sensibility of biometrics as an authentication or access control.

1. You leave your fingerprint EVERYWHERE.  Despite the fact that we tell people to keep their passwords secret, the biometrics movement encourages people to use a password that is IMPOSSIBLE to keep secret.

2. Because you leave your fingerprint “password” everywhere, you don’t know when someone has captured and compromised your password.  So you continue to acting like your fingerprint is secure, and so does your phone, your passport and everything else that depends on it.

3. If you do discover that someone is doing something naughty with your supposedly secret fingerprint password, YOU CANT CHANGE YOUR FINGERPRINTS.

4. Because of all of the above your fingerprint is of more value to naughty people who want to defraud you than it is to you.  

5. All of this is bad, because it creates economic incentives for bad people to STEAL YOUR FINGERPRINT, or worse STEAL YOUR RETINA.

6. In case you think that practically perfect fingerprint cloning on real fingers is impossible consider the following: It is well known that bricklayers often abrade their fingerprints completely, showing that making a “blank finger” is trivial.  All that remains is to engrave the blank finger with the target’s finger print, e.g., using laser micro-surgery techniques.  I’m not saying that this would be trivial, but it is hopefully apparent that there are major problems facing fingerprint based identification, even if it advances to actually requiring a live person attached to the finger print.

We also know that normal passwords are both annoying and also have their own security problems. (Although at least you can give your password to someone and retain binocular vision and the ability to hold cutlery, and then get a new password to replace the old one.)

So, what should we do?

We should try to do something that will not make the biometrics lobby too upset, so that they don’t push back with more lies and patently false claims about the security or sensibility of biometrics.

One way of doing this could be coming up with a scheme that can leverage the accurate object and surface imaging technologies that these companies have created, and allow them to rapidly transition focus from the largely counterproductive biometrics field.  In other words, lets leave them room to still make money and be prosperous.

Enter the idea of thingometrics instead of biometrics.

Basically, lets stop scanning body parts, and instead scan simple objects.

Simple objects can be easily chosen that:

1. are hard to clone from a photograph (unlike finger prints),
2. don’t leave the means to reproduce them on surfaces everywhere. That is are more rivalous than not, instead of the practically nonrivalous nature of fingerprints.
3. can be given to a forceful attacker without having to hand over any body parts
4. can be easily replaced if ever compromised

Things like sea shells, small pebbles, a crumpled mass of stiff wire, or any other morphically stable robust object would be good candidates.  Attach them to your physical key ring for convenience. You could even use one of your existing physical keys for extra convenience (which always comes at a cost to security).

Need to change your password? Just go outside and find a new rock, or better yet take a monthly work-mandated trip to the beach to find your new password.

It would be quite possible to make a 3D printer to produce a pseudo-random object with a keyring attachment point if you want an more environmentally sensitive source of things to metric.

If you want to be super-paranoid you could reduce the residual risk of someone comprehensively imaging your password object from a distance by making the interior of it the password part.  Again, 3D printers would be your friend here, or if you have a handy supply of geodes would make for a password with street cred among your geologist friends.  If used with dedicated imaging sensors the complex interior need never be visible from the outside at all.

Oh yes, and with thingometrics you can easily implement some helpful security protocols.  For example, you can register anti-passwords, in the form of other objects that when presented cancel the authority of an other thingometric password, analogous to revocation certificates in PKI systems.

You might carry one anti-password with you, and one or more in a safe remote place so that if you lose (or are robbed) of your thingometric passwords anti-passwords you can easily cancel the stolen password (or instruct someone remotely to do so on your behalf).

You can also physically destroy a thingometric password if you are worried about it being captured, and because well chosen thingometric passwords are closer to being rivalous, you can have better confidence that no one else has obtained the password if you still hold the original.

3D printers and the like represent risks, but nothing is perfect, and the risks are much lower than with fingerprint biometrics which as previously noted leave sufficient imprint everywhere for people using relatively easy technologies like those developed by the CCC.

Thingometrics has the extra advantage that it could be implemented using the camera on a smart-phone, without needing to have an extra sensor.  At most, you might want a second camera for stereoscopic vision.   So not only is thingometrics safer for you, and more secure for your data, it can also be cheaper to implement.

It also means that it would be much easier to support in free and open software and operating systems, because there are no more funny closed drivers and firmware than normal.

So let’s think about what would be needed to implement thingometrics in practice.

1. Some good image mapping algorithms, that can capture the shape and texture of an object in front of a camera to develop a detailed enough 3D image.

2. Some good image matching algorithms that can detect (or reject) an object being held in front of the camera.

And, er, that’s about it really*.

I suspect that suitable technologies exist in part or in full in the academic literature and elsewhere, and that creating a functional system could be implemented fairly readily* by a skilled and dedicated team.

If you go for a dedicated sensor and the inside-out key idea described above, then this becomes much, much, simpler to do. It could probably be implemented in a semester by a good student (any volunteers? I’m happy to supervise. You don’t have to be in Australia, either.)

So, here is the challenge: Let’s get a bunch of us together to implement thingometrics, and give the world a better alternative to biometrics.  I’ve registered the domain names.  Now we just need the team.

Paul “I want to keep my thumbs” Gardner-Stephen.

* Which isn’t to say that there wouldn’t still be quite a bit of work. Everything is relative, after all.

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The worst part of the assembly is getting the lids of the MR3020 routers, which left me with a broken pocket knife and sore fingers for a couple of days.  Basically the lids are cemented to the main body of the case, and you have to break each point of cemented bond, without breaking the lid.  Some are much easier than others, depending, presumably, on the amount of cement used.  We had one lid cracked out of the ten units made.

Then it was soldering the radios and router PCBs together:

The cases are down with the engineering workshop services to get the holes drilled for the radio connectors, and some of the internal ribbing ground off so that the radio can sit flush with the inside of the case.

Otherwise, it has been teaching, and sorting out some of the local tax arrangements for the contributions from Australians in our crowd funding campaign.  If you put an Australian shipping address and requested a perk, then you will get a GST-inclusive tax invoice.  We won’t be out of pocket with GST, because we budgeted for it, and also the GST on all the hardware will more than make up for the GST we have to pay on Australian contributions.

Our focus is now on fixing a couple of late issues with the mesh extender firmware so that it works at least for meshms over UHF radio.  Optimising the throughput for larger files will happen overtime, and be delivered as over-the-mesh updates.

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But for me, the situation is more acute.

First, I live in Australia, so travelling almost anywhere involves substantial time-shifts. I still remember my surprise when going to a conference in China and realising that: (a) I wasn’t jet-lagged; and (b) everyone else was instead. Such is the effect of living in Australia.

Second, I have a young family at home, and also teach at a University.  This means that most of my trips have to be kept to the absolute minimum duration.  Take my two most recent trips:

Trip 1: Adelaide -> Washington DC -> Amsterdam -> Adelaide in 9 days, including a complete 24-hour time shift, and heading East all the way, which is reputed to be the worst direction for jet-lag (a subject I’ll comment on later).

Trip 2: Adelaide -> London -> Adelaide in 95 hours. That’s right, I wasn’t even gone for four whole days. But I had to be fully in the London timezone immediately for meetings two hours after landing, and then on the one whole day I was there because I was presenting a grand-final pitch at the Global Security Challenge.  I then had to be back in Adelaide time straight away on returning, because I was rostered on at church, and then had a meeting that afternoon.

If I had tried these trips three years ago, it would have been jet-lag city.  Fortunately since then I have learned progressively more about an excellent and (for me at least) easy way to beat jet-lag before it even happens.

This is the fasting method of which there are lots of descriptions online, including this one.  But I want to add to the record, first by confirming that for me it works, and second, outlining my simplified approach, and some comments about one of the causes of killer week-long jet-lag that has been revealed by the discovery of the ability of the hunger clock to override the circadian body clock.  But first the method:

The method

1. Before departing, set watch to destination timezone.
2. Don’t eat after 16h00 in destination time zone.
3. Try to sleep as much as you can on the plane so that you aren’t sleep deprived on arrival (which is distinct from jet-lag, but no more fun). Pack an eye-mask or use the one they supply on board.  If you can manage it, snooze all the way on a 24 hour flight, with the odd movie etc to keep you occupied if you like.  The sleep part isn’t important for the jet-lag, however, just your sleep deprivation, for reasons I will soon explain.
4. Do eat at 08h00 or similar sensible breakfast time in destination time zone.

When I say don’t eat, I mean don’t eat. Nothing. No fruit. No Juice. No oysters, roast turkey, custard pies or anything. Only water.

Why you can’t even eat a little bit during the fast

The reason it is really, really, important that you don’t eat during that 16 hour period is that your body needs to switch to “hungry mode”, and get the idea that during that time there is no food coming. If you eat anything, no matter how small, during the fasting period, it is basically game over, go to jail, do not collect $200. Try again tomorrow, it’s still better than having jet-lag for a week.

Why you need to eat breakfast at the right time

The reason it is really important to then eat a good breakfast at the right time, is that is the moment when your body clock shifts. Yup, your body clock shifts however many hours in the process of eating that breakfast.  Your hunger clock presses the reset button on your normal circadian body clock.

Now, there is a trick to this: Don’t eat breakfast at the time you want to wake up, because you will begin to wake two hours before the time you ate breakfast. I can’t remember where I read about this little fact, but once I realised it, suddenly a number of problems I had with the method previously made sense, and I was able to sort them out, largely by not giving in and eating at 05h30 or 06h00 instead of a couple of hours after I wanted to actually wake up.

Basically your body tries to be wide awake at breakfast time, whenever that is.  So if you have breakfast at 06h00 you will wake at 04h00, which was exactly the sort of problem I was having when I first tried this method.  Once I sorted that out, it worked beautifully for me.

How to have the worst jet-lag ever: eat in the middle of the night

How to wake up early every morning if you are “not a morning person”

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