Re:Reverse Engineering a Keyboard to Play Snake
by niklasni1 on Monday November 24, 2014 @10:31AM
(#8652781)
Personally, I think we need more open source day-to-day peripherals like this: keyboards, USB hubs, card readers, everything. It all needs to be replaced with open, inspectable, blob-less, user-upgradable alternatives.
Re:Reverse Engineering a Keyboard to Play Snake
by ericlathrop on Monday November 24, 2014 @11:47AM
(#8653198)
There's a growing open source keyboard community built around keyboards like the ErgoDox using the Teensy Microcontroller. Keyboards are surprisingly easy to build from scratch by hand.
But with all the concern over malicious USB devices, I'll take a dumb and simple PS/2 keyboard with a mask-programmed 8048 over anything "smarter". Otherwise, his idea of requiring a special key combination to enter firmware update mode is also good - something like "unplug, then hold down X while plugging in" easily stops any malware attempting to do a silent firmware update.