Announcing the LUNA Crowd Supply Campaign!

Today marks the day that our campaign to fund LUNA launches on Crowd Supply! Over the next six weeks (from July 15th to August 26th) anyone will be able to pre-purchase a LUNA and support our goal of bringing this low-cost multi-tool for building, analyzing, and hacking USB devices to market. If you want to learn more about LUNA, we have a detailed writeup of the device on our Crowd Supply campaign page that we hope you will read!

July update: community developers portal

This month’s big news isn’t a piece of hardware or software but rather an upcoming platform aimed at community developers called the PINE64 DevZone. But fret not, I also have a number of hardware news to report - including a new LoRa device called PineDio Stack - as well as an overview of the software progress on our flagship devices.   

Why I recommend CGI instead of web frameworks

Includes amusing stories about teaching and learning.

Talking about GreatFET with Limor "Ladyada" Fried at Adafruit, 2019

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/t0uIoJ9gK4Y

In this interview, Michael Ossmann visits Adafruit in New York and chats with Limor “Ladyada” Fried about GreatFET and HackRF. The two talk about what GreatFET neighbours are, how to design GreatFET neighbours, and Mike demonstrates how to use a wiggler to separate neighbours from a GreatFET. This is followed up with a short discussion on HackRF and Portapack and how they work together.

June update: new hardware and more on the way

I’d like to start by giving you all a quick heads-up: next month I am away on vacation (first one since early 2020), which means that next month’s update will either be very short or split into multiple posts. If I write up a longer post then I may not publish it on the 15th but at some other point in time. I haven’t yet made up my mind how I’ll do this, so just keep an eye out. 

Безопасность встраиваемых систем Linux

Весь наш мир построен на противоположностях. Если вы создаете свое устройство и продаете его, то всегда найдется тот, кто захочет его взломать. Цели у злоумышленника буду самыми разными, от попыток сделать клон устройства (привет Китаю) до шантажа конечных потребителей, что весьма ухудшит вашу репутацию с точки зрения изготовления надежных устройств. И чем популярнее система на основе которой построено устройство, тем интереснее она злоумышленнику. В последнее время активно развивается сегмент одноплатных компьютеров, таких как Raspberry Pi, и множества других. Linux системы по распространенности использования во встраиваемых систем, вышли на первые места. Большая функциональность устройств, например наличие разных беспроводных интерфейсов коммуникаций, в...

We are KDE patrons

KDE is a project near and dear to our hearts. The original Pinebook, which forged the path for our current hardware lineup, was the first PINE64 device to ship with KDE Plasma Desktop. This was in early 2017. Fast forward to today, both the PinePhone and Pinebook Pro - our current flagship devices - ship with their respective Plasma user interfaces atop of the Manjaro operating system. As many of you surely also remember, earlier this year a dedicated KDE community edition of the PinePhone was sold with the intention to boost development of the Plasma Mobile user interface on...

Превращаем одноплатник Cubietruck в Wi-Fi Hotspot с Captive portal, VPN-шлюзом и Ad block

Для построения Wi-Fi сети обычно используют готовые маршрутизаторы, функциональность которых всегда ограничен прошивкой. А если необходимо добавить блокировщик рекламы, VPN шлюз и красивый Captive portal, покупать новую железку? Стоимость устройства с такими возможностями будет уже весьма высока. Можно взять Linux с Hostapd и сделать точку доступа с Wi-Fi, но в отличие от готовых маршрутизаторов не будет наглядного Web-интерфейса. И для решения этой задачи был создан проект RaspAP, который на базе устройств с ОС Debian создает Wi-Fi Hotspot с Captive portal, VPN-шлюзом, Ad block. Для RaspAP в отличие от OpenWrt не требуется непосредственная поддержка устройства, достаточно поддержки последней версии Debian. RaspAP...

OsmoDevCall: "SS7 and SIGTRAN in 2G/3G networks"

I've presented a talk SS7 and SIGTRAN in 2G/3G networks as part of the OsmoDevCall talk series on Osmocom and related technology.

You can find the video recording at https://media.ccc.de/v/osmodevcall-20210514-laforge-ss7-sigtran

FemtoStar: taking aim for the stars

Networking and communication is something that has been on our minds as of late. As many of you are surely aware, we have started developing our own solution to private and secure peer-to-peer and group text messaging based on the PineDio gateway system, available next month. While we have high hopes for this system, we are also aware of its limitations. Voice communication and higher-than LoRa® data speeds is something we all rely on in our daily lives, and nothing will change this. If there was only a way to network via a secure and open source friendly manner -...