2026-09-23 20:21 UTC
Replies (2)
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@jpaskaruk@growers.social 2026-09-24 14:52
@lcamtuf@infosec.exchange replying so I remember to come back and read the responses. I don't think my story will win, but the best I can think of was very early and bitch basic: I had a DSL connection at the time, which very frequently would hang up in a way that required the modem be power cycled. I had recently acquired a first-gen Raspberry Pi, so I went and bought a suitable relay, and wired it up under the Pi's control, so I could power cycle the modem from anywhere in the house. It worked great, for a few months, at which point we upgraded to a Cable connection that was much faster and stable. No great struggle, no deep insight, just using tech stuff to make life easier.
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@kaced@infosec.exchange 2026-09-28 04:56
@lcamtuf@infosec.exchange even though the giveaway is over, I’ll chime in. At a previous job, I was researching a $2000 commercial 5G base station. We were putting modified firmware on it and I had to do frequent builds. For some reason, it used an “eUSB” drive as its main storage, a flash chip on a tiny board with a USB controller. Taking it out to write to it was a pain, so I made a USB switch with some relays and a hacked up cable that could change the connection from a laptop to the device, controlled by a Raspberry Pi. It worked, was awesome, until after maybe 50 uses the device got stuck in the BIOS and could no longer recognize USB drives. Had my colleagues look at it, no one could figure out why, maybe my cable had a random short briefly? Started over with another device, trying to be extra careful with everything. Again, worked great, then the same thing happened. $4000 later, I just relied on unplugging the drive from then on with the remaining functional device. No one ever could figure out what it was doing to the thing. Also at that job I had an intern who was working on a fault protection relay for the power grid that was for some reason missing a power cable for itself. We checked the other device like it that we had, it just used 120V or 240V AC from the wall. He said the device with missing cable said it could use the same voltage range. I checked his connections but didn’t read the thing myself. Luckily he was the one under the desk plugging it in because if the small explosion had been larger I would have felt really bad putting him in harm’s way. I knew better to be more careful with wall power. Turns out the second device wanted 120V DC, not AC. Lots of wild stuff at that job.