middleca

This feels like a very bizarre propaganda / pro-military opinion piece. Google isn't a defense contractor, its employees aren't any more or less patriotic if they don't want to build software that goes in killbots.

Particle.io is hiring! We're a fast growing, close knit team building awesome things. Tons of opportunity to work on open source projects, learn new technologies, work with hardware and software, etc. Check us out!

https://www.particle.io/jobs

We have tons of remote positions, as well as positions in San Francisco, and Minneapolis.

Google and all the other mega-tech corps do a similar tech phone screen where they're reading off an answer sheet. (powers of 2, sort these functions, linux kernel calls, etc).

Sounds like you dodged a bullet, this sort of thing speaks volumes to how the company is run internally and how you'd be treated there.

Came here to say +1 to this, definitely employ a bastion host and make sure that's the only way to SSH to your servers. This can be a little tricky to do correctly if you don't have someone on your team, but it's a valuable way to reduce your surface area to monitor.

Installing fail2ban is also a very basic / smart way to discourage brute force SSH attacks on your boxes. Also you could try piping your SSH logs into something like papertrail / slack, so you have clear visibility into who's logging into your servers, etc.

cool project, thanks for sharing!

It'd be interesting to see a wind speed sensor, temp sensor, or light sensor or something on the AC unit so you could know when it's on!

Schneier's estimate assumes rented hardware time, but purchased hardware and multiple attempts would drive down the cost dramatically over time. This estimate also doesn't include optimizations by leveraging previous cycles or spends, or the impact of storing something like a rainbow table.

Given a government budget and time-scale, and ignoring sunk costs, I would think a collision attack could already be in a negligible cost range for any well funded sophisticated attacker that has setup shop.

edit: also that opinion post is 2 years old

Very easy to publish an event stream from your code, and to pipe those wherever :) http://docs.spark.io/firmware/#spark-publish

You can actually do this with a usb cable, or flash your own firmware over the air, you'd only need a jtag programmer if you wanted to replace the open-source bootloader :)

It's nuts, I think I hear about a new Spark company, product, or service every few days. Where's the company name version of this? http://jezebel.com/imagine-typing-it-a-couple-hundred-times-...

Ahh, cool, that makes sense :)

For a second I thought you guys might be related to this connected furby project I saw recently:

http://vimeo.com/106770438

https://community.spark.io/t/internet-chat-furby-with-spark-...

Cool hack! How are you driving the furby?

+1 for CoAP - We use it!

oh hey! :)

We have a really awesome community that can help too! - https://community.spark.io/

Hi bravo22,

  I'm from Spark, and I can try to answer! :) 

With more than 20,000 units in the field, the Spark community is the largest consumer of the CC3000 module, so you get the benefits of driver testing and patches, and great community support. Large businesses could certainly use the open source modules and run with them, but if you're a large business you generally want to pay for support and licensing. Next for us is building a suite of fleet management tools and controls that larger companies want that also benefit hobbyists.

If you're a business or a maker, using the Spark Cloud saves you from having to worry about building your own protocol, dealing with socket programming, spinning up servers, as well as worrying about encryption on microcontrollers, or wearing a pager. Having the source code available means you can keep your private things private by not going over the internet, as well as building things we haven't thought of yet.

Thanks!

David

A lot of us are staying in the Twin Cities, and we're hiring! (https://www.spark.io/jobs), we're looking for great engineers, and we support remote work as well. :)

Hi All, (full disclosure, I work at Spark)

We tried hard to make sure the components on the Spark Core dev kit are really easy to source and buy in low quantities, so you can build the board yourself if you really want. Large companies often already have their own supply chain, so this makes things much easier for them, but you can also buy in bulk and get great discounts if you're a startup or building in lower volumes. :)

Thanks, David

Thank you for asking, much appreciated. :)

We'll probably do a small beta as we get the local cloud ready for release to make sure things are easy to use and work as expected. Since it'll be open source, I'm hoping the beta group can help find bugs and even send in pull requests if there are pieces they want added. The beta signup thread is here at the moment: https://community.spark.io/t/where-is-the-source-code-for-th...

Thanks, David

(full disclaimer: I work at Spark, and am personally responsible for the local cloud)

We will definitely be releasing this, we consider it a promise we made to our Kickstarter backers.

and... it's back to [email protected], that was interesting

see zedpm's comment earlier:

Yep, the Common Questions section of their website[1] says that they'll be releasing an open source version of their Cloud. Awesome. [1] https://www.spark.io/