Stephen Fry and DVD Jon Back USB Sniffer Project

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

[ciaran_o_riordan]

Stephen Fry also did a video for the GNU project's 25th birthday:

http://www.gnu.org/fry/ [gnu.org] "Freedom Fry"

Re:so?

[adamofgreyskull]

He's not just a comedian though is he? Most actresses know less about foreign policy than Sarah Palin, whereas Stephen Fry knows a lot about open-ness, DRM and the importance of being able to play a DVD on the OS of your choice. Should we ignore anything Brian May has to say on the subject of Astrophysics because he's "just a musician"?

Re:Stephen Fry's previous good stuff: gnu bday

[Pax681]

actually Stephen Fry is extremely intelligent and computer literate.

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]

On an episode of the popular quiz show QI, Emma Thompson revealed that she lost the screenplay on her faulty computer. When a repairman could not retrieve the file, she took the computer in a taxi to friend Stephen Fry, who, along with flatmate Hugh Laurie, spent seven hours retrieving the missing file.

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:Stephen Fry's previous good stuff: gnu bday

[ciderbrew]

He drives a London black cab.

Re:Stephen Fry's previous good stuff: gnu bday

[squizzar]

If I remember correctly he's a manic depressive, so possibly the odd strop is not unreasonable. Also given the propensity for Slashdotters to be a bit odd, I don't think it's entirely fair to put him down for some behavioural quirks, many of which are less serious than those exhibited by stereotypical computer types.

Re:Stephen Fry's previous good stuff: gnu bday

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Also his father

[Kupfernigk]

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.

Computer literacy runs in the family.

Re:Stephen Fry's previous good stuff: gnu bday

[toriver]

I think his illness is referred to as "bipolar disease" which is related to manic depression but not the same.

Why hardware?

[bcmm]

Why does this need to be implemented in hardware?

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:Stephen Fry's previous good stuff: gnu bday

[Anonymous Coward]

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* we ALREADY had computers, not the other way around!

Re:Stephen Fry's previous good stuff: gnu bday

[chartreuse]

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 programming to Fry on 17 and 18 August 2007, in celebration of his 50th birthday. The first night, comprising programs featuring Fry, began with a sixty-minute documentary entitled Stephen Fry: 50 Not Out. The second night was composed of programs selected by Fry, as well as a 60-minute interview with Mark Lawson and a half-hour special, Stephen Fry: Guilty Pleasures. Stephen Fry Weekend proved such a ratings hit for BBC Four that it was repeated on BBC Two on 16 and 17 of that September."

So if anything you're implying an early conviction is a good career move. But I'm sure you've never done anything illegal in your famously-productive life. What kind of example does that set for the kids? Go out and get convicted today!