Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the do-it-yourself-toll-gate dept.
MC68040 writes "The guy at this site managed to build something together that's actually quite neat in the way he built it, all hand-crafted system that uses a linux box to unlock his door. Maybe not the coolest of solutions, but actually a pretty good idea as for security in my humble opinion."
23 years ago...
by
Pig+Hogger
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
23 years ago, I was involved in a project to make a portable computer for data-entry, to replace optically-readed mark-sense sheets.
The final solution was to have no keyboard at all, but rather a computer whose motherboard was embedded in a 3-ring binder, with sheets.
On the sheets, were some barcodes, arranged in roughly the same layout the mark-sense cards were.
(For the geeks, the machine was MC6809-based, and had 56K CMOS RAM. The LCD display was always powered, but the computer shut down after it finished decoding a barcode and processing the "keystroke".)
Re:your house as a semi-permeable membrane
by
MORTAR_COMBAT!
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Indeed a cool idea. I would add that the holder of a 'key' should definitely keep it in a sleeve, though, lest high-res photography would allow for a duplicate key to be easily created.
The 'sending a JPG' to the baby-sitter starts out as a very neat idea, but what happens when baby-sitter has a popular e-mail virus which sends her e-mail to 100 people in her address book? Instant house party? Naturally they would only have the same access time slice as the baby-sitter, but they could just wait until after he/she is alone in the house and walk on in.
but without the major hassles (specialized equipment to punch holes or re-stripe a card)
It also means any Joe with a printer can make themselves a valid access card. I thought for quite a while about putting a similar setup at my house, but I decided instead to go with an extremely similar method, except instead of bar-codes I use hand prints. A lot of the advantages (time slices for the maid and sitters) without being able to be so easily produced (until advanced cloning techniques allow people to commonly grow copies of my hand).
And w.r.t. the people who keep asking about 'power outages' for (1) ever heard of generators of batteries and (2) naturally a physical key still works in the lock, duh!
-- MORTAR COMBAT!
Re:Honestly, really
by
sbaker
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I agree.
Slashdot really, truly, utterly needs to have a local cache of the pages it references. It's getting to where Slashdotting is as bad as a denial of service attack - and that's a terrible thing to inflict on *anyone*.
Probably 50% of web sites referenced from main news items are down within an hour of Slashdot mentioning them - and they stay down until a couple of days have passed. That sucks.
They could easily implement some kind of opt-in thing where you put a META tag in your web page telling Slashdot that you grant them explicit permission to mirror the site for (say) a week after mentioning it - so Slashdot would have no legal/copyright come-backs. At the end of the week the Slashdot mirror could revert to become a redirect to the real site so you don't have problems with people bookmarking the Slashdot cache instead of the real site.
The whole process could be automated.
People who do cool things like this door lock would surely be aware that they could get Slashdotted and prepare for the event in advance by inserting the tag - and private individuals are the people who are most likely to have their server die.
Companies that want to profit from their slashdotting by advertising from their page or taking orders off of it could just leave off the META tag and handle the traffic as now.
An opt-in cache mechanism is a win-win-win solution. Slashdot wins because more people will use the service if it doesn't continually refer to dead sites. Readers will win because less sites will be dead-on-arrival - and web site operators will win (if they want to) by not having their site die from Slashdotting.
Slashdot Mirror
The final solution was to have no keyboard at all, but rather a computer whose motherboard was embedded in a 3-ring binder, with sheets.
On the sheets, were some barcodes, arranged in roughly the same layout the mark-sense cards were.
(For the geeks, the machine was MC6809-based, and had 56K CMOS RAM. The LCD display was always powered, but the computer shut down after it finished decoding a barcode and processing the "keystroke".)
Indeed a cool idea. I would add that the holder of a 'key' should definitely keep it in a sleeve, though, lest high-res photography would allow for a duplicate key to be easily created.
The 'sending a JPG' to the baby-sitter starts out as a very neat idea, but what happens when baby-sitter has a popular e-mail virus which sends her e-mail to 100 people in her address book? Instant house party? Naturally they would only have the same access time slice as the baby-sitter, but they could just wait until after he/she is alone in the house and walk on in.
but without the major hassles (specialized equipment to punch holes or re-stripe a card)
It also means any Joe with a printer can make themselves a valid access card. I thought for quite a while about putting a similar setup at my house, but I decided instead to go with an extremely similar method, except instead of bar-codes I use hand prints. A lot of the advantages (time slices for the maid and sitters) without being able to be so easily produced (until advanced cloning techniques allow people to commonly grow copies of my hand).
And w.r.t. the people who keep asking about 'power outages' for (1) ever heard of generators of batteries and (2) naturally a physical key still works in the lock, duh!
MORTAR COMBAT!
I agree.
Slashdot really, truly, utterly needs to have a local cache of the
pages it references. It's getting to where Slashdotting is as bad as a
denial of service attack - and that's a terrible thing to inflict
on *anyone*.
Probably 50% of web sites referenced from main news items are down within
an hour of Slashdot mentioning them - and they stay down until a couple
of days have passed. That sucks.
They could easily implement some kind of opt-in thing where you put a META tag
in your web page telling Slashdot that you grant them explicit permission
to mirror the site for (say) a week after mentioning it - so Slashdot would
have no legal/copyright come-backs. At the end of the week the Slashdot
mirror could revert to become a redirect to the real site so you don't have
problems with people bookmarking the Slashdot cache instead of the real
site.
The whole process could be automated.
People who do cool things like this door lock would surely be aware that
they could get Slashdotted and prepare for the event in advance by
inserting the tag - and private individuals are the people who are
most likely to have their server die.
Companies that want to profit from their slashdotting by advertising from
their page or taking orders off of it could just leave off the META tag
and handle the traffic as now.
An opt-in cache mechanism is a win-win-win solution. Slashdot wins because
more people will use the service if it doesn't continually refer to dead
sites. Readers will win because less sites will be dead-on-arrival - and
web site operators will win (if they want to) by not having their site
die from Slashdotting.
www.sjbaker.org