Ever been screwing around with a guitar, pumping out some jams for the heck of it, and realize that last couple of licks were genius? But then you have no idea what you did and they’re gone forever? Yeah, never happened to us because we don’t play guitar, but it’s a plausible scenario that makes the Gibson Memory Cable a really interesting product for any serious guitarists out there. It’s integrated directly into the cable, and records everything you play for up to 13 hours, directly to an SD card. Think of it as an audio dashcam. It’ll be available May 15th for an undisclosed sum.
A few days ago we found out that some, if not all SD cards actually contain computers. At the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Intel unveiled an offshoot of those flash devices. The Edison is a computer that looks like an SD card and can be read by SD card readers.
The Edison has an x86 dual-core 400Mhz Quark processor as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity. It also has LPDDR2 RAM and flash storage, though Intel has not yet revealed how much of either is in the tiny computer. It runs Linux by default but can be loaded with “multiple operating systems to run sophisticated high-level user applications.”
Intel made Edison as part of its bid to stay relevant in the emerging class of wearable devices, but the company also said that the Edison can be used in pretty much any project that needs a low-power and small computer, similar to Arduinos and the Raspberry Pi.
As you saw in MAKE’s video, Intel collaborated with Rest Devices to create prototype smart gadgets for parents, all of them powered by the Edison. The onesie monitors a baby’s “respiration, skin temperature, body position, and activity level”…
… and can supposedly trigger this baby bottle warmer to activate when the baby is awake and hungry…
…or help this coffee mug inform parents about their baby’s status using embedded LEDs.
Intel also promised that Edison “will be compatible with accessible developer tools used by the maker community”, although it did not yet provide a release date or price for the computer. With its size and capabilities I highly doubt that it will be as cheap as the Raspberry Pi, but I’m sure lots of tinkerers are still keen to get their hands on one.
Ever wonder why SD cards are dirt cheap? At the 2013 Chaos Computer Congress, a hacker going by the moniker Bunnie recently revealed part of the reason: “In reality, all flash memory is riddled with defects — without exception.” But that tidbit is nothing compared to the point of his presentation, in which he and fellow hacker Xobs revealed that SD cards and other flash storage formats contain programmable computers.
Bunnie also summarized his presentation in a relatively easy to understand post on his blog. The images I’m sharing here are from the slides (pdf) that he and Xobs used in their 30C3 talk. Here’s the full paragraph where Bunnie claims that flash memory is cheap because they’re unreliable: “Flash memory is really cheap. So cheap, in fact, that it’s too good to be true. In reality, all flash memory is riddled with defects — without exception. The illusion of a contiguous, reliable storage media is crafted through sophisticated error correction and bad block management functions…”
“…This is the result of a constant arms race between the engineers and mother nature; with every fabrication process shrink, memory becomes cheaper but more unreliable. Likewise, with every generation, the engineers come up with more sophisticated and complicated algorithms to compensate for mother nature’s propensity for entropy and randomness at the atomic scale.”
Simply put, Bunnie claims that flash storage is cheap (partly) because all chips made are used, regardless of their quality. But how do flash storage makers deal with faulty hardware? With software.
Apparently flash storage manufacturers use firmware to manage how data is stored as well as to obscure the chip’s shortcomings. For instance, Bunnie claims that some 16GB chips are so damaged upon manufacture that only 2GB worth of data can be stored on them. But instead of being thrashed, they’re turned into 2GB cards instead. In order to obscure things like that – as well as to handle the aforementioned increasingly complex data abstraction – SD cards are loaded with firmware.
And where does that firmware reside? In a microcontroller, i.e. a very tiny computer. The microcontroller is packed inside a memory card along with the actual chips that store the data. Bunnie and Xobs then proved that it’s possible to hack the microcontroller and make it run unofficial programs. Depending on how cynical you are, that finding is either good news or bad news.
For their talk, Bunnie and Xobs hacked into two SD card models from a relatively small company called AppoTech. I wish I could say more about their process, but you can read about it on Bunnie’s blog…
…or you can watch their entire presentation in the video below:
Long story short, Bunnie and Xobs found out that the microcontrollers in SD cards can be used to deploy a variety of programs – both good and bad – or at least tweak the card’s original firmware. For instance, while researching in China, Bunnie found SD cards in some electronics shops that had their firmware modified. The vendors “load a firmware that reports the capacity of a card is much larger than the actual available storage.” The fact that those cards were modified supports Bunnie and Xobs’ claim: that other people besides manufacturers can manipulate the firmware in SD cards.
The slide above outlines the other ways a memory card’s microcontroller can be abused. Malware can be inserted into memory cards to discreetly open files, make data impossible to erase (short of destroying the card itself) and even discreetly scan and replace data. On the other hand, Bunnie and Xobs note that this revelation opens up a new platform for tinkerers and developers. If a memory card is both a storage device and a computer, then it may be powerful enough to control another device on its own.
It’s worth noting that this particular investigation had an extremely small sample size. That being said, Bunnie believes that this vulnerability exists in “the whole family of “managed flash” devices, including microSD, SD, MMC as well as the eMMC and iNAND devices typically soldered onto the mainboards of smartphones and used to store the OS and other private user data. We also note that similar classes of vulnerabilities exist in related devices, such as USB flash drives and SSDs.”
Turns out the memories of our computers are as unreliable as ours.
You don’t have to be a spy to find some use for this covert spy coin. They’re different from most other concealed storage containers because they really look and feel like the real thing. The reason for that is because they are made from actual currency. They’re hand-machined from existing coins to create the secret interior compartment. There’s only enough space inside to fit a micro SD card or anything else that’s as tiny as these memory cards.
Once the card is inside, just place the other side of the coin on top and press shut. It comes with a special opening tool that you’re supposed to use to open the coin. Without this tool, you won’t be able to open it.
Pretty neat, isn’t it? Just remember to keep it separate from your other coins for obvious reasons.
Samsung's ARM-running Chromebook is barely out of the starting gate, and it's already being tweaked to run without as much of an online dependency. By a Google employee, no less. Not content to rely solely on Chrome OS, Olof Johansson has loaded Ubuntu on the Chromebook by partitioning an SD card, mixing OS components and booting from USB. The technique unsurprisingly requires being more than a little comfortable with a Linux command line as well as playing fast and loose with the warranty. It also won't be cheap or quick -- commenters note that you'll ideally have a partitioning-friendly SD card, and running a desktop OS from a slower kind of flash storage creates an inherent bottleneck. Anyone who likes the Chromebook's $249 price, but isn't as enraptured with the cloud as most of the team in Mountain View, might still want to try Johansson's step-by-step process for themselves.
With the arrival of the iPhone 5 and its legacy-wreckingLightning port, this holiday season is likely to be the last that heavily features the now-obsolete dock connector. Two products caught in the wrong turn of history are Edifier's new pair of iOS device docks for home and on the go. If you need a "big" sound in a modest package, then the Esiena Bluetooth offers 3-inch full-range drivers and a class D digital amplifier -- and it's also packing Auxiliary, USB, SD card inputs and a digital FM radio. If you're more the adventuring type, then the portable Bric Bluetooth offers 2.75-inch full range drivers and the same class D amplifier in addition to a traveling pouch to keep the hardware safe on your travels. The Esiena will set you back $300 and the Bric a slender $100, with both arriving in the US and Canada from today.
Kingston's unveiled two new SDXC cards for anyone looking to upgrade the capacity (or performance speed) of their current removable storage of choice without denting the bank balance too much. The SDXC Class 10 cards arrive in 64GB and 128GB sizes, and Kingston reckons they'd go great with your new digital camera -- as long as it's compatible with the SDXC format, naturally. Both are available to buy now, direct from the storage manufacturer, alongside smaller capacities, with the 128GB card priced at $182 and the 64GB setting you back $80. The full press release is after the break.
The Windows Phone 8 SDK has escaped to the wild, and some sifting through the device emulator has dug up elements that Microsoft either skipped or only touched on lightly during the big unveiling in June. The most important addition may be the one customers see the least: backup. A WP7.hu search has the new OS replicating apps, settings and SMS messages in the cloud to prevent disaster, and that new SD card support will let WP8 owners shuffle photos from internal storage to the removable kind for safekeeping. There's also more work on Internet Explorer than we saw before, with MobileTechWorld noticing that DataSense provides an option for Opera-like remote compression to save that precious cellular bandwidth.
Media fans might have the most to gain. If we go by The Verge, both the Music/Video and Xbox hubs are getting fresh coats of paint -- both to integrate new ventures like Xbox Music as well as to jive more closely with the SmartGlass visual theme. Shutterbugs will like the long-awaited options to crop and rotate their work, pick multiple photos, and unify third-party camera apps under a Lenses concept. There's even more clever features in store, such as a Maps update that finds nearby WiFi hotspots, so head on over to the sources to get a full sense of where Microsoft will be going.
Microsoft is on stage at the Windows Phone Developer Summit offering us a bite of what's to come in Windows Phone 8, and one of the tastiest morsels may just be the noticeably more diverse hardware it will support. The new platform won't just support dual-core processors -- it will support as many as 64 cores, should such massively parallel chips come to exist in the platform's lifetime. Also gone is that long-criticized 800 x 480 display resolution ceiling: if phone builders like, they can either opt for the increasingly common 1280 x 720 or a rarer 1280 x 768. A few subtler feature parities are coming with the upgrade, such as NFC for tags and payments as well as a long, long requested support for SD cards beyond the crude initial expansion. All told, Microsoft just brought Windows Phone right up to hardware parity with its biggest rivals, and possibly a bit beyond.
To check out the latest updates from Microsoft's Windows Phone event, visit our liveblog!
ADATA's trio of new Premier Pro microSD cards have escaped from the company's headquarters. Aimed at professionals and demanding consumers, the 16GB and 32GB editions come with a 45MB/s read and 40MB/s write speeds and support the latest SD 3.0 standard. The company isn't mentioning how well the 8GB card runs, so we'll just presume it's a little less speedy than either of its larger brothers. We've reached out to the company to find out when we can expect to see these hitting shelves (and how much they'll cost) and we will update if they tell us.
