Headless CHIP WiFi

I am working on a modification to hostapd and I really have to run this on linux. The pi I was planning to use has seems to have finally given up the ghost after 4 years of use. Never fear, I failed over to using the chip , that came with my pocketchip flashed with the headless firmware.

The chip will use the microusb connection as a serial port by default, similar to the way the BBB uses the usb port to do ethernet. With a serial connection, I needed to figure out how to get the chip onto wifi.

There is a command line tool for interacting with network manager listed in the chip documentation . nmcli is a pretty great tool for network access. 

$ nmcli device wifi list
*  SSID             MODE   CHAN  RATE       SIGNAL  BARS  SECURITY    
*  HameNetwork      Infra  11    54 Mbit/s  100     ▂▄▆█  WPA2        
   NetGear-AWQ4D8   Infra  1     54 Mbit/s  69      ▂▄▆_  WPA1 WPA2   
   BTWifi-X         Infra  6     54 Mbit/s  30      ▂___  WPA2 802.1X 
   BTWifi-with-FON  Infra  6     54 Mbit/s  30      ▂___  --

Better yet, there is a nmtui interface that presents a nice ncurses way to configure the network.

Reading: Babylon's Ashes, Diamond Age

Evil Bit

It appears that people mistake this April 1st RFC for a genuine one, the author has a page of replies here .

Reading: Babylon's Ashes, Diamond Age

OONI Probe Mobile

Awesome news, OONI probe now has an android tool. OONI probe uses tor to map out censorship on the internet. If you want to make the internet a much better place I really suggest running this app.

Unrelated , I read an awesome write up on reverse engineering a book cover . It is a shame I don't read Polish, the author including something interesting in the cover is a real draw to the book for me.

Reading: Babylon's Ashes, Cryptonomicon

FOSDEM Booths

FOSDEM is split between devrooms and booths, there are booths for a load of different projects. The Olimex DIY Laptop was announced the week before, they were showing it off at a stand at FOSDEM.

The hardware is quite nice, the case feels a little cheap, but what can you expect for that price? The keyboard they have on it is horrible. It would be much better served with much fewer keys on the layout, something more like a chromebook would be good (I would settle for 40%, but the market is probably small).

I unplugged the assembled model they had on display and they got upset and it was quickly plugged back in. The hardware is still quite early, it looks like a really solid start.

I don't think I would pick up the first generation of hardware, if they continue with the project it will be really promising.

Reading: Babylon's Ashes, Cryptonomicon

Xen DNA TShirt

I got this TShirt at FOSDEM, I was told that it means something .

First here is all of the text from the tshirt, which should make the page more discoverable: 

Xen 
  Project
  @FOSDEM 2017

Forging the 
DNA of the Cloud

AGTCTACTCAGCCGTACTTCATCGACTTAGCGTTGTCTCAGC
GCTTGTCACGTCCTGCTCGTCAGCTAGCGTCTAAGCTACCTC
ACTAGCTGTGCTAGCTAGCGTCTAAGCTCAATCTGTGATTAC

These three strings are a bit unweildly to work with, lets break them down into groups of three. 

AGT CTA CTC AGC CGT ACT TCA TCG ACT TAG CGT TGT CTC AGC
GCT TGT CAC GTC CTG CTC GTC AGC TAG CGT CTA AGC TAC CTC
ACT AGC TGT GCT AGC TAG CGT CTA AGC TCA ATC TGT GAT TAC

Now to wikipedia to get a DNA Codon Table to refer to: 

Amino acid  Codons                          Compressed                      
Ala/A       GCT GCC GCA GCG                 GCN                     
Arg/R       CGT CGC CGA CGG AGA AGG         CGN MGR     
Asn/N       AAT AAC                         AAY     
Asp/D       GAT GAC                         GAY     
Cys/C       TGT TGC                         TGY     
Gln/Q       CAA CAG                         CAR     
Glu/E       GAA GAG                         GAR     
Gly/G       GGT GGC GGA GGG                 GGN     
His/H       CAT CAC                         CAY     
Ile/I       ATT ATC ATA                     ATH                         
START       ATG                                 

Amino acid  Codons                          Compressed                      
Leu/L       TTA TTG CTT CTC CTA CTG         YTR CTN
Lys/K       AAA AAG                         AAR
Met/M       ATG
Phe/F       TTT TTC                         TTY
Pro/P       CCT CCC CCA CCG                 CCN
Ser/S       TCT TCC TCA TCG AGT AGC         TCN AGY
Thr/T       ACT ACC ACA ACG                 ACN
Trp/W       TGG
Tyr/Y       TAT TAC                         TAY
Val/V       GTT GTC GTA GTG                 GTN
STOP        TAA TGA TAG                     TAR TRA

I poked at this for ages, I wondered if I had need to the take the codons in as they are written. A column at a time. But even looking at that, there was nothing obvious about the codon sequence.

After a while I started searching for subsequences from the string. This didn't help at all, but one page on google had a related search for ['dna message translator'][3]. Annoyingly I fed in this string: 

AGTCTACTCAGCCGTACTTCATCGACTTAGCGTTGTCTCAGCGCTTGTCACGTCCTGCTCGTCAGCTAGCGTCTAAGCTACCTCACTAGCTGTGCTAGCTAGCGTCTAAGCTCAATCTGTGATTAC

And got the result: 

XEN HACKATHON FORGING THE DNA OF THE CLOUD

Reading: Babylon's Ashes, Cryptonomicon

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