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Lilliput 7" touchscreens are only $279 at www.mp3car.com. Prefect for and undercabinet mounting. Combine that with a mini-itx board and you have a great kiosk or mp3 car player.

Other links of interest:

Linux Touch Screen HOWTO
EPIA HOWTO
Gentoo EPIA HOWTO
Nehemiah Hardware Entropy Generator
VIA PadLock support for Linux

I am a big fan of implicit filesystem feedback. This can support all kinds of services from file sharing to most recently accessed search requests. Even fine tuning access controls in an RSBAC security policy.

The big concern is keeping this data protected and private. You dont want to share all of your metadata with everyone, so security of these systems should be something to look at carefully.

As hinted at in this interview, the future of wireless networking revolves around many variations on a few core themes: diversity, versatility, and scalability.

Diversity is accomplished through MIMO and other technologies like beam steering to provide a robust communication channel between wireless devices.

Versatility comes with open source firmware / drivers and software defined radios. There is no way manufacturers can foretell all of the desirable uses and functionality consumers want in their products. The most useful systems will be those that are versatile and can adapt to new protocols, encodings, etc.

Scalability can be achieved through robust ad-hoc routing protocols and decentralized security methods to produce a system that scales easily as participating nodes join and part the network without complicated provisioning or a reliance on centralized and limited backhaul or access point functionality.

There is still a lot of interesting work to be done in these areas, but the real fun starts in the applications that will utilize these new ad-hoc networking infrastructures.

Guessing a port and IP is fairly easy. Guessing the sequence number is not. This is why making sure that TCP initial sequence numbers are random is important.

This is old news.

For the insanely paranoid use a hardware entropy generator (TRNG) for choosing ISN's.

There are all sorts of attacks against network protocols when poor random number sources are used. This is but one example...

>> I have 'ln -s /dev/random /dev/rand' and I have a hardware random number entropy generator.

SoupaSlow writes:
>Where is that? On the shelf next to your Universal Turing Machine and Flux Capacitor?

Use google before showing your ignorance. Here is one of 22,400 results for hardware random number entropy generators.

To get a feel for the conference you can listen to the CodeCon 03 audio recordings or review the CodeCon 02 write-ups for day one, day two, and day three.

As a developer who has gone to the previous conferences I can say without hesitation that they are well worth the time and cost.

are a 802.11b card, a 1W amplifier, and a nice 16dBi vagi antenna:
http://peertech.org/coder/vagi-amp-laptop.jpg

It would seem that if you have a clear line of sight to multiple APs, then you could combine them and have more bandwidth than a single AP-channel connection would provide.

This is called "concurrent multiple association" or simple multiple assocation / AP hopping, and it's something i've been working on off and on for a little while. I talk about it in a bit more detail on the Janus Wireless pages, but I have yet to get anything stable ready for prime time use.

The current problem with multiple association is that you need a very low latency interface to the network radio's at a packet injection / monitor mode level.

I've been able to get this to work in a very crude and inefficient manner with cisco/prism cards used for monitor mode recv of packets, and prism2 based cards for packet injection to implement the multiple association and data packet injection.

There is some hope that the newer cards, specifically the atheros 802.11a/g cards with a reversed binary HAL driver could provide the requisite low level functions to do this efficiently.

But then you are faced with another problem: aggregating the UDP datagrams from multiple sources into a single address space similiar to the way mobile-IP has a dedicated "public" host which acts as your intermediary as your IP changes without breaking existing TCP connections.

I've played with this a bit as well on a dedicated host that has a few IP's, and it works like a NAT that collates UDP datagrams from a wide variety of sources and converts them into the desired TCP/UDP/etc communication from that public endpoint.

In short: for multiple association you need a number of new driver and radio interfaces for:

1) very low latency packet injection and monitor style recv.

2) specialized mobile-IP like drivers on the client that present a virtual interface (ethX) to then host while using injected datagrams over the various multiply-associated wifi links for transport.

3) a dedicated public host with an IP it can allocate to you that accepts all of these incoming UDP packets from various source addresses (all the AP's you are using) and combines them into standard IP traffic from that public IP (ala mobile-IP as well).

None of this is extremely difficult (with the newer cards) but it is a lot of code, and a lot of work, and requires some dedicated host resources.

Now, for the cool part. When you do have all of these pieces in place, it allows you to:

- Simply add cards to your system for more bandwidth. The multiple association throughput is limited only by the number of AP's you can talk to, and the number of cards you have to monitor and inject packets with. It scales nicely barring interference problems.

- Maintain extremely high throughput as you move anywhere within range to open AP's! You could aggregate the upload capacity of 30 AP's to get a 10Mbps link to the net and maintain this constant fat uplink as you drive around the city.

- Enjoy extremely reliable / robust communications. Since you are no longer dependant on a single AP, you dont have to worry about connection dropping, clients messing with your signal, etc. Your aggregate connection is spread over a number of AP's which means problems with individual AP's make only a very small impact on overall connectivity.

This is really the way things are headed, and its only a matter of time before they become useable and widespread.

The 802.11b MAC layer is fairly sensitive to timing latency. (I go into more detail on this article on timing in long 802.11 links)

Did they use the old ad-hoc demo peer to peer mode, which has no ACK's and performs much better over longer links?

Cisco cards are also well known for their quality; perhaps the cisco MAC can adapt to high latency long shots while also working well in infrastructure mode.

Does anyone have more details on exactly how tenuous this link was, and how they pulled it (card settings, cables, antennas?)

As a side note, myself and some others have been wondering how we might go about discerning the exact timing characteristics of different 802.11 MAC implementations using non-exotic hardware (like regular cards in monitor mode).

When you need to measure microseconds (or fractions of them) it gets tricky...

I've been working on a linux distro for a few months now that is using this combination of technologies. It definitely appears to be a configuration of growing use and interest.

I added the cryptographic iButton to the list as the only piece missing from the live CD / USB fob picture is secure authentication so that when you are accessing your files remotely from any location, you need not fear about Man-in-the-Middle attacks or insecure password / authentication allowing attackers access to your data.

I talk about some of the features I want in this thread of wanted features / technologies

The future trends are moving quickly towards seamless access to data via mobile devices and wireless communications. A trusted operating system on a mini-CDR with a USB key fob storing dynamic data and strong authentication via cryptographic hardware is all you need to access files, music, movies, anything back at home or work with complete security (or, as much security as you can provide given a good OS configuration)

And the best part: it fits in your pocket. You can take it anywhere. You can "phone home" via wireless and reach everything there as if it was local.

With AES encryption of sensitive data on the USB fob you can prevent any kind of unauthorized copying that would reveal private data, and compression added to the mix lets you store a lot more than 256M or so of data as well.

The latest USB devices are capable of throughput in excess of 6 MegaBytes / second, which is more than adequate for most tasks.

Userspace / overlay filesystems with selective encryption, networked access, and secure decentralized distribution are going to make this kind of setup extremely sweet.

I can't wait for it...

with the centaur C5P processor core. Draws about 8W for the chip @ 1Ghz. Lets assume 12W total for network boot.

[ see image here: peertech.org/hardware/viarng/image/nano-itx-c5p.jp g ]

With 5,200 Watts for Green Destiny, you could use 433 boards these boards for the same power consumption.

The on chip AES is clocked at 12.5Gbps, Entropy at 10Mbps (whitened). Thus you would have

422Ghz of C5 processor power
5.412TB/s of AES (yes, terabytes)
4.22Gbps of true random number generation.

Yeah, these are really rough estimates, but that is a long of bang for your kilowatt buck no matter how you slice it.

With a cutting edge P4 approaching 100W the efficiency of these less powerful but fully capable systems will become increasingly attractive.

I would not be surprised to find bleeding edge processors relegated to gamers and workstations as most computing tasks start migrating towards small, silent, low power systems that simply *work* without eating up desk space, filling a room with fan noise and driving the electricity bill higher with continuous 100's of W draw.