Stephen Fry and DVD Jon Back USB Sniffer Project 126
An anonymous reader writes "bushing and pytey of the iPhone DevTeam and Team Twiizers have created a Kickstarter project to fund the build of an open-source/open-hardware high-speed USB protocol analyzer. The board features a high-speed USB 2.0 sniffer that will help with the reverse engineering of proprietary USB hardware. The project has gained the backing of two high-profile individuals: Jon Lech Johansen (DVD Jon), and actor and comedian Stephen Fry."
Stephen Fry's previous good stuff: gnu bday (Score:5, Interesting)
Stephen Fry also did a video for the GNU project's 25th birthday:
http://www.gnu.org/fry/ [gnu.org] "Freedom Fry"
Re: (Score:2)
Right, because no matter how much good he does for a movement, if he ever fails to support it in even the smallest thing, we should burn him at the stake. /sarcasm
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Sometimes there are second considerations.
Smartphones in the US were painfully abysmal before the iPhone. Every phone I owned before the iPhone deserved to be immediately flushed down a toilet. And I owned most of them. The stuff was GOD AWFUL. I remember using a friend's Nokia which was essentially a flip-out camera with a phone embedded into it, and it took 1/3rd of an hour of searching and 7 menu clicks to take a photo.
The iPhone advanced phone interfaces and technology tremendously. Tremendously.
Re: (Score:2)
I remember using a friend's Nokia which was essentially a flip-out camera with a phone embedded into it, and it took 1/3rd of an hour of searching and 7 menu clicks to take a photo.
What were you using the emacs interface?
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not a huge fan of RIM. It never seemed to get more usable than a baseline Treo. Which, don't get me wrong, wasn't a bad phone. But RIM made some befuddling option layout choices. And worse than that, they really only had about 5 functions, but they had about 30 or 40 input icons.
Blackberrys were not as bad as Nokias, by any stretch of the imagination. They had bloat problems, and were in love with proprietary technologies that were only useful to about 0.1% of their user base. Ultimately, I never
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Stephen Fry's previous good stuff: gnu bday (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, apart from the freedom to choose a locked down device if you want one.
Unless, of course, you're advocating forcing people to use devices that give them freedom?
Re: (Score:2)
Let's say for example that my employer wants to install surveillance cameras to see how well we're working. I'd say "no way" and start working for another company. But when that company starts doing the same thing, and then the next, then soon I might run out of jobs to apply for. This way a pressure is created to accept measures you're uncomfortable with even though it's still
Re: (Score:2)
surveillance cameras
Replace with that with "pre-employment drug testing" and your example would be a case of something that has already happened. When the stock boy at Target must pass a drug test to get a job (a job so mind-numbing that you practically need to smoke a dube to unwind after work), all semblance of freedom has gone out the window.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Stephen Fry's previous good stuff: gnu bday (Score:4, Funny)
The capitalist pig probably also drives a non-opensource car.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
> Stephen fry also uses the iphone and loves it
Yup. He loses a some RMS points for that. It's still cool that he made a birthday video for GNU.
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re: (Score:2)
Well since RMS is a egotastical tit that would rather force all things GNU down your throat, instead of giving you the freedom to decide, I don't see a problem with losing points.
Re: (Score:2)
egotistical*
Re: (Score:2)
egotistical*
Actually, I think "egotastical" is interesting, as in "ego fantastic".
Re: (Score:2)
My iPhone (haha) auto-corrected to egotastical.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
nobody is perfect :-) :-)
personally I do not like the iPhone for all kinds or reasons, but although my teen son accepted one as a gift from his granfather I did not decide to disown him
and "you" probably drive a car with proprietary "car"matics, "eeeviill"...
Let's than Stephen Fry for what support he gives, and try to explain issues to anybody who'd listen when possible..
Re: (Score:1)
Go watch Stephen Fry: Secret life of the Manic Depressive, if you care to know more.
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair he was pretty keen on Android and Windows Mobile 7. He had a windows mobile 7 phone before they got released to the general public.
I would be surprised if he actually pays for all of the devices he tweets about.
Re:Stephen Fry's previous good stuff: gnu bday (Score:5, Insightful)
But then, considering freedom good, and considering high quality hardware and software good are not mutually exclusive. Nor are acknowledging that sometimes you have to sacrifice one for the other.
It's entirely possible to like both apple products, and open things.
Re: (Score:2)
Alternatively, you value freedom, but don't value it as much as you value actually being able to do things. The world is not a black and white place.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Freedom *is* the ability to do things. A phone that I can compile a kernel module for lets me do a lot more things than one where I may purchase pre-approved entertainment centric apps.
1700s: "Give me freedom or give me death!"
2000s: "Give me freedom or... oooh, is that an iPhone?"
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Stephen Fry is an old man enjoying popularity with the young crowd by latching himself on to things he doesn't really understand.
The minute he is criticised or meets some opposition to his actions he will storm off in a pathetic strop.
You know this for fact? irrespective of what people might think of Fry's personality, he is very far from dim. It would not surprise me that he has a pretty decent handle on what he is prepared to discuss. IANAG (geriatric), even so I think that some of the biggest and most revered names in FOSS and such like are well and truly in Fry's age group. That said, he does strop.
Also his father (Score:3, Interesting)
Mind you, there's not much else to do in Norfolk.
Computer literacy runs in the family.
Re: (Score:2)
Fry owes a lot to his father, who ran a company that made electronic controls from a factory in the grounds of their house in Norfolk. Fry's father was still writing code, the last I heard.
Mind you, there's not much else to do in Norfolk.
Even less now that the prime turkey bother-er has has gone to that great factory farm in the firey depths, to be "attended to" by turkey-demons.
(Bernard Matthews died yesterday. "Bootiful!")
Computer literacy runs in the family.
Instead of noses? (he says, typing whil;e wearing finger-mitts and a wooly hat)
Re: (Score:2)
Mind you, there's not much else to do in Norfolk.
I'll vouch for this.
Re:Stephen Fry's previous good stuff: gnu bday (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
You're right. I find it strange that people who don't want to be stereotyped (such as "he's just a geek") stereotype other people so readily ("he's just a comedian"). News at 11: People sometimes have more than one interest!
Asia Carrera, in addition to being a porn star, was at one time ranked number one in Unreal Tournament in the world. Crack all the jokes you like, but when was the last time you made millions and were ranked number one at a video game when it was at the top of its popularity?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"He's a high-profile, highly intelligent celebrity...
Seconded. If you're familiar with the American TV show "House" then your familiar with another brilliant British actor and Fry friend and Blackadder alum Hugh Laurie, who has nothing but high praise for Fry. Fry I thought was also brilliant in the flawed "V for Vendetta" film adaptation of the great graphic novel. He a charming and intelligent actor and if he stands behind something I can buy into it.
Re: (Score:2)
Fry and Laurie co-starred in a sketch comedy show called A Bit of Fry and Laurie, which I thought was brilliant. Particularly in the later seasons they did some wickedly weird gags, somewhere on the Monty Python scale of surrealism combined with brainy wit. I don't know if it's available on DVD in the United States, but you know, it's out there...
Re: (Score:2)
it is available. i own the box set.
Re: (Score:2)
Wait, you're still talking about Jeeves and Wooster, rite?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The anti-intellectual brigade certainly think so. Speeches such as this one [youtube.com] have produced some powerfull enemies, wittness the recent media beat up over his "mysoginistic remarks".
Re: (Score:2)
wittness the recent media beat up over his "mysoginistic remarks".
I didn't notice that (but then, I treat most of the "Celeb Nooz" parts of the gutter press with the contempt it deserves ; I wouldn't wipe the shit out of my crack with them, not out of respect for their finer feelings but because their rags use cheap paper that your fingers go through) ; but unless Fry's public sex life has changed drastically (see parenthetic comment above), then as a celibate he can be blunt about women's unpleasantly drippy, bleedy bits without facing charges of hypocrisy due to nonethe
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
With pathetic dogs like you nipping at his heels.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep. when all those ignorant young people discover that Fry is actually intelligent, educated and talented, they'll drop him like a hot potato and go back to pirating videos of anaemic pop songs performed by anorexic, Auto-tuned[tm] teen fashion models.
If you want to know the truth, look at the calendar. People who were born more than ten years apart have nothing to say to each other. Koko Taylor or Billie Holiday have nothing to offer that fashion model pop star, because they belong to an era before iTu
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Stephen Fry's previous good stuff: gnu bday (Score:5, Interesting)
he IS deffo a mac fanboi however, saying he doesn't understand just shows your complete ignorance of the man.
For example, Emma thompson's laptop went tits up and she thought the script for the movie she had written was all but lost. she called stephen and asked his help....
he managed to recover the script and everything else on the macbook that emma thought she had lost.
so check the Production section of sense and sensinility wiki page for this little snippet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_and_Sensibility_(film) [wikipedia.org]
personally i am not a mac fan either however stephen fry does like their stuff and it was the writer Dougles Adams that got him into apple products
he has also been dealing with mental health issues and WINNING.. he's not the type to run off in a strop....
perhaps you should not comment on subjects that YOU can't understand or people you blatantly know nothing about eh?
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Ah like the "old men" that invented computing as we know it? Um, Like JCR Licklider?
You know, the guy who was 45 in 1960 [wikipedia.org], when he wrote about needing billions of bits [mit.edu] in computers? IN 1960!??
Yes, yes, I know, history is not important around here, especially when it doesn't involve rockets or space. Hell, even then no one cares.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Given the amount of scientific discovery at the time it seems a bit odd to not think there was a huge need in the future.
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
I think it's easy to say that in an era of essentially free computing hardware. Dig deeper and you'll see that it *was* obvious to many people that computers were useful, it's just that they were too large, expensive and cantankerous at first.
BTW, I'm glad you see that computers started because of "to get through a set of data more quickly than one could manually do it.", and *not* the insane viewpoint that we only have computers because of the space race of the 1960s. We could do the space race *because* w
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I think his illness is referred to as "bipolar disease" which is related to manic depression but not the same.
Re: (Score:2)
I believe he doesn't get enough of the manic side of things, only the depressive. That's gotta suck even more.
Spike Milligan also suffered from it, as do many comedians.
Remember he's a convicted criminal too, kids.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember he's a convicted criminal too, kids.
Yes, credit card fraud when he was 17 (three months' sentence), thirty-five years ago. Then he went to Cambridge, joined the Footlights, and began a brilliant career. (This was all covered in the BBC's celebration of Fry and Hugh Laurie's work just last Wednesday.)
From Wikipedia: "In December 2006 he was ranked sixth for the BBC's Top Living Icon Award, was featured on The Culture Show, and was voted most intelligent man on television by readers of Radio Times. [...] BBC Four dedicated two nights of progr
Re: (Score:2)
Fry was enjoying popularity with the young crowd before you were born.
Re: (Score:2)
Daily Mash: People Who Know How To Fucking Park On Brink Of Extinction [thedailymash.co.uk]
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Like I care when an Anonymous Coward dismisses a comedians endorsement of a software/hardware project...
Re:so? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, because (Score:2)
Re:Yes, because (Score:5, Informative)
Should we ignore anything Brian May has to say on the subject of Astrophysics because he's "just a musician"
He's Brian Cox, OBE.
Or he's Brian May-of Queen, with a PHD in astrophysics from Imperial College... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_May [wikipedia.org]
huh? (Score:1, Informative)
Brian May (he of Queen Fame) is known for being knowledgable on Astrophysics (and wearing clogs), whereas Brian Cox is less well know for his big hair and guitar solos.
I suggest you go an wiki Brian May.
Re: (Score:2)
The Brian Cox he means is the ex-bandmember of D:Ream, who has a PhD in particle physics, not astrophysics. He currently works on an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.
While his musical efforts are not as iconic as those of Dr May, his scientific contributions, both in terms of the science itself, and his promotion of the public understanding of science, are arguably more significant.
Re: (Score:2)
Slashdotted Fry? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Douglas Adams would've approved ... (Score:2)
I sure hope Stephen Fry can write up a funny thing to stir up support, even among those of us who don't care enough.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
"Write" is a strong word. How about "published posthumously as part of a larger collection of writings?"
Re: (Score:1)
"Write" is a strong word. How about "published posthumously as part of a larger collection of writings?"
Are you saying that Adams published his own work posthumously? Neat trick. He did, of course, write it, and it was first published as a column for MacWorld magazine. The posthumous collection of works came after ... *cue eerie music*
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
"Write" is a strong word. How about "published posthumously as part of a larger collection of writings?"
Are you saying that Adams published his own work posthumously? Neat trick.
Of course he did. He's only spent the last decade dead for tax reasons.
(You set 'em up ; I'll knock 'em in!)
Re: (Score:1)
"Write" is a strong word. How about "published posthumously as part of a larger collection of writings?"
Are you saying that Adams published his own work posthumously? Neat trick.
Of course he did. He's only spent the last decade dead for tax reasons.
(You set 'em up ; I'll knock 'em in!)
+1 Nicely Played
Re: (Score:2)
That was a strong comment. How about published humorously in as “Dongly Things, A Pox on the Panoply of Plugs,” in US version of MacWorld magazine in September 1996 (p. 140) and republished in his post-humous book, The Salmon of Doubt.
How the hell is "write" a strong word? When and however it was published, he wrote it.
Re: (Score:2)
Stephen Fry and Douglas Adams were great friends and one of them was the second to own an Apple Mac in the UK ....
Both were/are very knowledgeable about most techie things, especially Apple related (they are biased towards all things Apple...)
Re: (Score:2)
...and you base this on what ?
Both Stephen and Douglas have used Apple Mac's since 1984.. and both have had stories told about them of their ability to fix low level problems with them
Yes they may never have never complied a program in their life and their knowledge may be limited to a set of machines, but if that means they are not techies then you seem to be moving the goalposts to exclude them deliberately ?
Anysort of breakout-board is always a welcome tool (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Nope. Not unless you come across a device that is USB-3 compatibleonly. As in, no backwards compatibility with USB 2.0 and 1.1. Then you would need a USB 3.0 analyzer.
That is very unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not necessarily. You'll get a functional device in that case yes, but whenever USB enters a new major revision they've had to tack on a new chip to the mix. And there's no guarantee that the new chip will be completely compatible in terms of protocol with the older ones. In fact I'd suggest that they aren't compatible otherwise they wouldn't need a separate chip for it.
So, wait. How do you get a functional device if the interface chip is incompatible? You lost me there. Either they communicate effectively, and the device is functional, or they don't (and it isn't).
Why hardware? (Score:4, Interesting)
I presume the main purpose of this is analyzing the communication between a USB device and its proprietary Windows driver. Wouldn't it be easier to modify virtualization software to do this? Qemu can already connect a real USB device to a virtual machine (see its "-usbdevice host:" option).
Re:Why hardware? (Score:5, Insightful)
Two main reasons: Embedded device peripherals, and USB device development. Sometimes you don't have access to the OS running on the host to set up a sniffer (game consoles, some smartphones, and similar). And sometimes you need to debug a USB device that you're developing, and software USB sniffers don't provide the kind of detail needed to do that effectively (some errors are only evident when you watch the stuff on the wire, not the high-level requests).
Also, software sniffers are imperfect. I've had issues with them. A physical hardware device is completely transparent and can work without either side noticing anything. Sure, you can make do with a software sniffer sometimes, but that doesn't mean there's no point to a hardware version.
And since this is open, it can be repurposed for other uses. For example, you could use only the device port, and turn it into a kind of usb device-to-device bridge that lets your computer impersonate a USB device. That is currently not possible except on embedded systems with USB device controllers, and those have limitations. You could also use it as a pretty good logic analyzer, given proper firmware.
Re: (Score:2)
Because then it's hardware and software independent.
Want to know how that proprietary controller communicates with that proprietary console? simple. A windows driver wont always exist.
Software only solution? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Let's say you're working on trying to reverse engineer the Xbox 360 controller protocol...
Yes, it has two modes. "Works on windows" and "works on xbox". Getting it to give up it's secrets to work on, "Works on Xbox" mode has been a pain in the ass.
I pledged! (Score:1)
Interesting (Score:2)
Amusing video but... (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Having worked with several commercial USB protocol analyzers over the years I have yet to see one was anything more than an FPGA connected to an off the shelf USB PHY chip. As much as I like cute dog videos these guys need to post proper requirements and design specifications if they seriously want funding from me.
Click through the links to the actual Kickstarter project description. We did some handwaving to keep it accessible for J. Random (Software) Hacker, but I think we gave enough details to answer your questions.
(tl;dr: yes, you're right, and that's more or less what we're doing. Haven't decided on which PHY to use, looking at some SMSC and NXP parts.)
Re: (Score:2)
Why'd you go with XMOS over, say, additional FPGA fabric?
Is it just me.. (Score:1)