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OLPC's XO As a Wireless Hacking Tool
twistedmoney99 writes "InformIT.com has a whimsical yet intriguing look at the OLPC in an article series titled "One Leet Pwning Child — Give one, Get Owned". Part one details how to upgrade the core system with some extras, but part two is where the fun begins as the author converts the OLPC into a lean green hacking machine to enable wireless sniffing, setup the OLPC for vulnerability assessments, and stage the device for a little autopwning with Metasploit."
Might just be virgin messing with me but the site isn't loading well, so here's the 1 page version
and the google cache
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Great. Now we'll have to worry about those leet African hackers doing phishing.. Oh wait.
Does it come with Zealous Autoconfig?
Wasn't it the whole point behind these things---to make kids more technical/geeky. It would've been a complete waste if everyone just used it for email and word processing.
Now if only actual kids in 3rd world countries did cool things with these laptops---like coding/hacking/whatever.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
The wireless sniffing section seams a bit weak, if they can Dsniff working, would aircrack-ng not also work?
On an active network, with a bit of patience, aircrack & wireshark can get you all the information you need without leaving a trace, (granted if its a WPA network with a good key its a lot of patience).
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
I'm sure someone will happily correct me if I an wrong here. However, seems to me that just about any wireless enabled linux box + same toolkits = wireless hacking tool. Nothing to see here folks, just move along please ;)
Teach a man to phish and he'll never be hungry again!
Computers can be used for hacking.
Obviously this must be stopped now! Think of the children.
Once they gain this forbidden knowledge, they'll threaten the social order in the god forsaken dirt hole where they live.
1. Distribute computers.
2. Children become L337 H4X0RZ
3. ???
4. Cthulhu
So a slightly modded (which is part of the original charter right?) OLPC can own the fleet of upcoming XP based OLPC's?!
Am I the only one who finds that more than a little amusing?
Sheldon
First off, parent should (IMHO) be modded as troll, because it has nothing to do with the subject, and looks intended to start a flame war. But just to debunk the argument:
I'd say the OLPC project has succeeded in a technical respect. It produced a computer that's rugged, cheap, power-efficient and flexible. And for the combination of properties, better than what existed before. What's more, if it didn't break open the market of cheap, ultra-mobile machines like the Asus EeePC, then at least accelerated that. Causing millions of people to use smaller, more eco-friendly computing devices than before.
From the education side, success needs more time to show, if it will happen. But progress is blocked here by political or market forces rather than technological options.
So even if the OLPC project hasn't (yet) succeeded in helping poor kids to connect to the rest of the world, and improve their education, it has done 2 things: a) realize part of that dream, and b) bring that goal closer.
-- Oh and btw. it's Nicholas Negroponte
Give a kid a fish, he eats for one day.
Teach a kid to fish, he eats for a lifetime.
Give a kid a laptop, and he empties your bank account.
Teach a kid to program, and your job is outsourced to him.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I saw this article and ran to get my XO. Keep in mind I'm not a Linux user, so I type those command line instructions very slowly. After 15 minutes, I'm actively scanning my home network using Zenmap. If this goes well, I'll have to bring it along with me to a local, unidentified coffee shop! I personally think the most telling aspect of this excercise is that it has helped open the door of linux a little bit.
So even if the OLPC project hasn't (yet) succeeded in helping poor kids to connect to the rest of the world, and improve their education, it has done 2 things: a) realize part of that dream, and b) bring that goal closer.
A dream can be a dangerous thing. The dream of nuclear energy can all too easily be perverted to the quest for nuclear weapons.
The dream of the OLPC was powerful, but it has been perverted into a Microsoft market development system.
I will never understand why even bother with the OLPC...
Why not just use an Eee PC, it's a solid computer, and with the price you end up getting significantly more. Coming from someone who owns an Eee and has used an XO several times; I can tell you that the XO is inferior in so many ways. Not just with little things either, anyone who has tried using that screen in non-ideal conditions knows what I mean.
I have an XO, I love it - but Sugar sucks and the file management 'Journal' is idiotic and clumsy. I've found that the only way to get any productivity out of the thing when not simply surfing the web or checking email in the basic browser is to go to the terminal. Writing, saving, and sending a simple text document via the Sugar GUI and apps takes takes forever; I knew nothing of linux when I got it, but now do all my writing and email in the terminal with Midnight Commander, then use Lynx to email it out - I can do any text/email stuff 100x faster that way. I'm looking forward to the rumored 'ubuntu lite' I've heard whispers of - getting an XO prompted me to switch over the home box to Ubuntu, and having a portable system that runs the same would be great.
If no one has your back, time to move your back.
I'd been thinking similar thoughts about my OLPC, but with very different terminology. I'd been wondering whether, with appropriate software installed, it would make a good "net admin" tool.
;-)
Specific example: One of my other toys is a Mac Powerbook, which talks to the Airport that's attached to our local LAN (with a linux firewall/router). Yesterday was a very nice day, and I did as I've often done on other nice days: I carried the Mac out to the patio and tried to work from there. Without much success.
While I've done this a lot over the past few years, this time the wifi went into its "fluctuating access" mode. The wifi signal strength, according to the Mac's little wifi icon, changed on a time scale of seconds from near full strength to various intermediate valued, to no access at all. I grabbed my OLPC, carried it out to the patio, and it reported a constant near-max signal level from the Airport. But I can hardly do any work on the OLPC, because of the crippled Sugar GUI. The two laptops have nearly the same pixel count on their screens, but the Mac lets me have 3 or 4 non-overlapping Terminal windows open at the same time, while the OLPC only allows one.
Anyway, since the OLPC seemed to have no problems with the wifi, I'm wondering if I could use it somehow to diagnose the problem. The few times I've asked about such things on a Mac forum, the responses could be summarized as variants of the "It Just Works" mantra. I shouldn't worry my little head about things like this that are beyond my ken; I should just accept what's given to me. No clues about how I might diagnose such problems. Either that, or I should just pay for new hardware, which might not have the same problems.
Now, I'm quite aware that to the media, the very fact that I'd consider installing software to analyze local wifi transmissions immediately puts me into the "hacker" category. I try not to tell them that I've been known (and paid) to write such software. ("What sort of shady corporations would pay a hacker like you to do their dirty work?" Dirty as in diagnose and fix problems.
But it does occur to me that people here might be a bit more sympathetic. And it seems to me that if the poor kids in remote places can learn to use their OLPCs to "hack" the network around them, they could be a real service to their communities. The commercial folks aren't supplying their communities with service, and probably never will. Here in the US, the comm companies can't be bothered to supply decent service to remote areas, and never will unless those evil government regulators force them to.
So maybe we need an open project to take tools like the OLPC, the EeePC, and others like them, and turn them into good "hacking" platforms. That way, people in poor and rural areas can support their own comm system.
To me, this article just tells me how the media will spin it, to make such self-help efforts look criminal and subversive. But I can't even find decent diagnostic help for a wifi problem here in a Boston suburb from the makers of the equipment. Maybe it's time we get serious about finding ways to fix such problems ourselves.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I'm confused... we give them a computer and assume they shouldn't be able to do everything that a computer should, including hacking. Do people seriously see this as a bad thing? If anything, this is good, we gave them a computer that acts like a normal computer, so what about the hacking...
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.