Slashdot Mirror
Look Ma, No-Hands Fasteners!
theodp writes "Inspired by a daughter who suffered a serious infection from an IV feeding apparatus, the Trib reports an Australian architect has developed high-tech bolts and latches, which can be operated remotely without being touched. The first commercial applications are intended for aircraft, allowing crews to quickly reshape interiors to maximize payload space. BTW, smart fasteners hit Slashdot's radar almost two years ago."
I can't wait until some enterprising hacker duplicates the signal to release the fasteners, and does it in mid-flight. Talk about chaos...
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Now, I think this is really nifty, but... its easily hacked. Why? Because anything transmitted over open air can be hi-jacked. They claim otherwise, but I find it hard to belive that a unit thats small and simple enough to replace standered fixing devices (like bolts) would be smart enough to handle and nearly unbreakable encryption scheme.
Oh well, time will tell.
snowulf.com
Call me paranoid, but they mention the fasteners being secured against access by unauthorized parties.
Why do I have a sneaking suspicion this will include the user, and/or third-party techs?
I can hear the coins rolling in now.
Isn't this a step up from explosive bolts? I wonder how long before an airplane falls apart in mid-air because of faulty wiring/programming a la Liberty Bell 7...
So THAT'S what a self sealing stem bolt is for...
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Remotely controlled bolts... that will certainly give a new meaning to "disassembler hacking".
There you are, staring at me again.
can't wait till this is p0wned !
Most people are less intelligent than bolts and latches:)
*ducks*
hilarious
Don't these require batteries which will eventually go dead, rendering them unable to be released remotely, and possibly difficult to remove at all? Also, if anyone believes these things are truly hack-proof, they must be pretty gullible.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Cost doesn't seem to be an issue here, especially if it'll save man-hours. Labor is usually the most expensive part of a business, especially when Unions are involved (like the airline industry) or when you take your car into the dealer.
So, if this mechanism means that bolts won't back out due to vibration, I'll take it. As long as it means I don't have to dick around with loctite threadlocker anymore. I mean, what genius decided to put the red loctite in a blue tube and the blue in a red tube?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
FTA:
Perrine, who left Microsoft Corp. to join Telezygology, said intelligent fasteners will cut the costs of designing, building and maintaining products that use them, and this is just the first step in a new direction.
When Balmer heard about this he threw a chair into a wall. Luckily the wall was constructed with intelligent-fasteners and with a push of a button, the wall was back to new.
From TFA:
"I wondered what's to prevent some nut using a garage door opener from pushing the right buttons to make your airplane fall apart," said Harrison. "But everything is locked down with codes, and the radio signals are scrambled, so this is fully secured against hackers."
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! That's rich!
We need the seats in our cars using these.... User slams breaks, bolts short circuit, seats let go of the floor, car hits tree.... In other news, company creates "retro bolts" as a backup to smart bolts.
Everyone knows the proper term for a remote control screw is teledildonics.
I think the part that'll strike most people here is this:
"I wondered what's to prevent some nut using a garage door opener from pushing the right buttons to make your airplane fall apart," said Harrison. "But everything is locked down with codes, and the radio signals are scrambled, so this is fully secured against hackers."
Uh... I don't think so. If past examples are anything to go by, almost certainly he's using some bush-league obfuscation of the signal that could be cracked fairly easily by someone with the applicable knowledge.
I mean, those electronic keys used by BMW, Mercedes and the other big carmakers aren't any too secure, but this guy somehow managed to get it right first time? Uh-huh.
that game where you try to unfasten girls bras without them noticing.. only instead of bras, its cars.
Its a cool idea, but i'm a bit sceptical about these 'codes'
it Would be cool if, say, in a car accident, firemen could spontaneously deconstruct a car involved, to get at the victim inside, but i doubt that screws have a lot to do with that. Its probably just going to make it easier for people to steal your radio
--AlexC
Just because I dont agree with climate change doesnt make me a troll
"I wondered what's to prevent some nut using a garage door opener from pushing the right buttons to make your airplane fall apart," said Harrison. "But everything is locked down with codes, and the radio signals are scrambled, so this is fully secured against hackers." (emphasis mine)
In other news, proof-of-concept "smart fastener" plane dissassembles itself midair. Cause yet to be determined.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't regist
Johnny 5 is alive!
While there are no doubt many interesting uses that this can be put to, the one that should chill slashdotters is the example of preventing "unauthorised" removal of vehicle airbags.
Because the DMCA makes hacking the encrypted communication to the fasteners a crime in its own right, only people who the vehicle manufacturer authorises can undo them. They presumably are their franchised dealer service centres and will not include the owner of the vehicle or their chosen unaffiliated repairer.
But why stop at the airbag? Why not bolt the hood down with the same things so that only the dealer can service the vehicle?
Heck, why not bolt the fuel filler cap shut with the same things. I imagine you could afford to give cars away if for their lifetime, they could only be refuelled at a Ford owned gas station.
If the devices become cheap enough, you might never be able to take the cover off anything you own again.
Just like DRM, the only people who this is going to inconvenience are the genuine customers.
Some of the other applications might be useful, but I'm not sure how different this is to remote car locks, TFA was short on detail.
Good luck hitting the right price point with that one, guys. Not only do you have to be cheaper per bolt than it takes the company to pay a monkey to screw one in, but you also have to be *safer* so the company has a defense against lawsuits when your bolt fails. F'in amateurs.
Beauty is just a light switch away.
Teams are locked into cages secured by these bolts. Each with a PDA and an RF scanner. First team out wins and losers PWN'd?
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One time keys, I would guess.
I wouldn't think that it would be too hard to key them with, say, 1,000 keys, 128 bits per key. That's 16,000 bytes, and 3.4 * 10^38 odds against you per guess. (I'll wager I don't need quite so many bits per key.)
The procedure is this: (1) Listen for my address to be spoken. (2) Listen for fasten/unfasten command. (3) Listen for password.
If you give it a good key, it follows the command, and throws away that key.
If you give it a bad key, it locks up for, say, an hour, ten minutes, whatever, ignoring all input.
When you unfasten for the last time, with that 1,000th key, it refuses to fasten again, until it's rekeyed. Or perhaps you just throw it away at that point; I don't know, depends on your manufacturing process.
I'd trust it.
How would you attack this? Possibilities: (1) Go after the master keyring. (2) Try to go through all possible keys. (3) Attack the fasteners physically.
Going through all possible keys would require that you hang out for a very long time: You'll probably get caught. You could use a device, but it could be picked up by a device listening for bogus queries, or abnormal use patterns, and alert local intelligence of abnormal activity.
Far more likely would be an attack on the keyring itself. This is a physical security problem. If you don't have physical security, the intelligent fasteners in your plane are the least of your concerns.
There's also the question of attacking the fasteners themselves. That is, you could get a wrench, or a hammer, or a grenade, and try to beat them out, by hand. But again, this is the same problem you have with unintelligent fasteners; there is no net loss in security here.
I'd trust this system. It can be successfully attacked. But the radio waves are not a weak point. I'd trust this.
Look ma, no hands! ...
Look ma, no feet!
Look ma, no teeth!
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
FTA:
I wondered what's to prevent some nut using a garage door opener from pushing the right buttons to make your airplane fall apart
I know they're intelligent fasteners, but the nuts are so smart that they can even use garage door openers? I don't even think Aibo can do that!
Is that like the official journal of doughnut bumping?
By equipping intelligent fasteners with sensors [...], inanimate objects will obtain the sort of self-awareness...
Terminator 3 was on dutch TV yesterday. There must be a link in there somewhere.
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Let's at least hope they dont evolve into these, then we're really "screwed"....
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
And then we can discover that by using human soul's we can make these "smart" bolts much more effective. Simultaneously, we can develop a space railway, and hire a very attractive robot to dupe little children into getting robot bodies for free, but really just put them into bolts. If anyone else knows this reference, hats off to you!
Well. This is great news. Intelligent fasteners. You know great if would be if the cockpit could be filled with airbag with all the seats getting loose including pilots seat. And with proper timing for such manouver could result lots of crushed meat. Think of it, all the airplane seats with people sitting in them falling freely until there is stop to free fall...
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
This sounds like nothing more than radio controlled solenoids, similar to what we see in remotely controlled apartment building entrance doors and in automobile power locks. A solenoid is just a coil that is electro-magnetized on demand to push or pull a metal bar through it's center. This bar usually moves something attached to it or touches a contact to close a high current circuit loop, like in a car starter motor. My guess is that the solenoid in a "smart fastener" would push open a latch or release some hooks.
So why all the talk about "smart materials", "intelligent bolts", and materials that "change shape on demand"? It sounds like a bunch of pie in the sky market speak to me, not unlike what is heard in articles written by corporate PR agencys. Such articles are often given to lazy, disinterested journalists as neat & easy pre-packaged stories.
This story has no substance - buzzwords are rampant and technical detail is non-existant. Yet the slashdot editors are proudly proclaiming they broke the story 2 years ago. Even worst, the story is being pitched as using exotic technology that allows self-threading bolts of some kind. The same false pitch was used last time as well. I bet this sort of "mistake" generates lots of $$$^H^H^H click thoughs though.
"It gives designers a free hand," he said. "With intelligent fasteners, they no longer have to worry about providing a tool path when they design a product."
:)
But we might need to design a new path to replace the batteries.
(well, I haven't read the spec., may be they doesn't require battery replacement or self-charging something....)
If your data center doesnt use Bolt 2.0 in its racks you are just gonna lose in online ecommerce.
BOLT 2.0 is future of internet hosting.
Call my company now to find out how not to get left behind.
... but *opperated* remotely? As in, installed remotely? Do these things hover or fly around to install themselves? Somehow I doubt _that_ very much :P
The sea changes color, but the sea does not change.
I can get that trapdoor installed on the other side of my desk.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
quick, patent that idea!
Of course his "solution" does nothing for the original problem of IV tube handling.
NASA has been doing this for years, or did he think that someone went along every unmanned satellite to undo the bolts holding it together. NASA tends to prefer the one-time use explosive bolt because it is extremely reliable, but sometimes they have things like docking module fasteners that can be remotely operated.
As an aside, if you want to move something from here to there exactly once, the explosive bolt is the most reliable way to do it.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
So I'm sitting on the plane and some dude with a transmitter that easily gets past security presses a button and all of a sudden all of our seats unbolt?
Maybe I can use it to loosen the cork on this bottle of wine for manly men.
"I wondered what's to prevent some nut using a garage door opener from pushing the right buttons to make your airplane fall apart," said Harrison. "But everything is locked down with codes, and the radio signals are scrambled, so this is fully secured against hackers."
Well, my garage door opener also says it has secure codes:
For greater security, our screw drive openers include Security+® rolling code technology. Each time the remote is activated, Security+ automatically rolls the code over to any one of 100-billion new codes, never to be repeated.
Yet when I brought home my new car, It was able to derive this 'secure' code scheme after listening to only 3 button presses on the garage door opener. Now I can open and close the garage with the button built into the car.
And apart from the fact that over-the-air codes are probably unsafe, you have the far bigger problem of all these minimum-wage technicians that have access to the technology and transmitters. I'm fairly confident that you could either a) get a job in this facility yourself, to gain access to the technology, or b) pay off an existing employee/technician.
Just please god, tell me that there is some hard-disconnect that deactivates these latches entirely during flight. I really don't want to be flying along and suddenly tumble to the back of the plane with everyone else like a bunch of marbles in a jar.
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
Will I be violating DCMA If I take apart my car and replace this with a 'dumb' bolt? I'm not against these so much as the political BS that could pile up around them. How long until the government starts regulating that the black boxes that are becoming common in cars are bolted in with coded bolts, such that removing it is a violation?
The will wrap a Microsoft OS around it. That way, it will really be secure.
When I read the article, I was concerned not with the ease with which a third party could hack the radio signals, but with the problems this technology could cause for regular users who want to take apart their consumer products. If, as the article predicts, these RF fasteners make visible screws and bolts a thing of the past, to be replaced by internal, remote-controlled fasteners, the main result will not be opening up new avenues for design, but limiting users' ability to take apart their devices. In this dystopian future, only qualified service representatives might be authorized to use the coded signals to open up the case on a PC or a phone, for example. Or the fasteners could be rigged to electronically keep track of "tampering" or "unauthorized access." I would prefer to at least have the option to void the warranty without having to smash open the case with a rock!
I'm suprised nobody thought of this before....
Remote fasteners + IKEA = INSTANT FURNITURE!
When the only tool in your box is a blackberry, every problem looks like an intelligent fastener!
"It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." -Homer Simpson
Are here: http://www.textronfasteningsystems.com/pressroom/p r/intevia/photos.htm.
"I wondered what's to prevent some nut using a garage door opener from pushing the right buttons to make your airplane fall apart," said Harrison. "But everything is locked down with codes, and the radio signals are scrambled, so this is fully secured against hackers."
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I'd be seriously tempted to earn my millions...
1) Wait for full deplyoment.
2) Design a tiny transmitter, they seemed to be saying these things could be "Daisy Chained" so you would only need to be near one bolt--that means a good transmitter taped to a watch battery could be as small as a quarter. You worked at the company, so figureing out the codes should be a no-brainer, they are probably as easy to hack as RFID.
3) Place the transmitter somewhere under/in a chair (maybe slit the fabric somewhere or bubble-gum attach it underneath on a few dozen planes.
4) It mid-flight, five flights later one goes of and unlatches all the seats, then starts sending an invalid signal every 5 minutes so they cannot be re-latched for landing.
5) send a letter to the airlines saying there are more set to go off in the future, but you'd be glad to sell them the locations
6) profit.
Yeah, I guess that sucks--probably why I'm not a theif.
Sounded pretty cool, then saw the title of the page that the first link goes to... "Oh Snap!"... No digg.
You can buy them anywhere, here is an example
Man, you really need that seminar!
Oh great. Now when I tell someone to get screwed, they can do it by remote control.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
No, the real pain will come when you all tumble to the front of the airplane as it's augering into the ground like a lawn dart!
it Would be cool if, say, in a car accident, firemen could spontaneously deconstruct a car involved,
I need more coffee. At first I thought that said, "in a car accident, Fremen could spontaneously deconstruct a car..."
I can see it now:
POPUP: I'm sorry Dave, you shouldn't have opened my case.
My hunch is that this is just one of the few similar recent releases that might kick off another dot.bomb venture captical cycle.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Self sealing stembolts, no less! The future is now.
"this is fully secured against hackers."
Them's dangerous words to say on the internet.
Gives an exciting new meaning to the term, "hash collision". (-duck-)
Actually these things are pretty cool. But I don't want my airline seats to be attached with these things. I want them real solid so it takes guys hours to replace them. I don't want to worry about a lightning strike or embedded vulnerability disabling them or something!
I'm betting that we'll be seeing some real unpretty bug incidences of such units used where they can heat or chill by mistake (remote utility boxes, vending machines, etc.) and they just snap open all by themselves.
'Course, I might be up for "helping" those vending machine examples ;->
-Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.