Interesting. IS it wrong that my first thought was that they look benign and unobtrusive enough that they could be easily socially engineered into somewhere to start scanning for vulnerabilities... ?
When flashed with the appropriate firmware of course.
Not sure it's 100% applicable, but certainly my proposal would indeed by illegal black-hattery, unless done by a legit pen-tester.
I'd never do such a thing, but I might now be more aware that the little plastic block attached to the socket over there could easily be a cheap, full linux system running some sort of metasploit/neopwn variant...
We are now beyond assuming that you can "see" the tiny computer over there. You can pretty assume that for example that any electrical device could have one of these concealed in it. That includes electric cords and light bulbs.
Additionally these can be hidden in non-electrical objects with small batteries and run for weeks.
This is exactly why I dismantle and inspect all 'unimaginably cheap' pieces of tech before using them for their intended purpose. That, and curiosity. There are many clever cost-cutting hacks to be learned that way.
I remember the talk about it at the time. I still have my sheevaplug at home, I pre-ordered one of the first dev kits and used to be active on one of the plug forums. I don't use it for anything much any more but I did a power-supply replacement a couple of years ago when it blew.
That pwn-plug has had some serious mods done to it, with bluetooth, 4G and 802.11 wireless built in!
(--edit-- I see now that those are provided by adaptors, not built in to the box, that does reduce its stealthiness somewhat)
These new ones are much smaller than that by the looks of things though, seemingly on the scale of socket adaptors, rather than (to an up to date eye) quite a big power brick.
It's currently £5 inc. delivery on Amazon.co.uk. This puts it into Raspberry Pi Zero and NodeMCU/ESP8266 territory.
Add to the fact that internally it's not very different to the venerable TP-Link WR-703N and it's possibly a great OpenWRT device to tinker with.
I've used Gearbest in the past. They're ok to order from generally, but their unsubscribe mailing list email link doesn't work and I had trouble ordering from them initially due to delivery address issues at my end.
Except the pi zero has a 1ghz quad core processor and 512mb ram. This has 64mb and a terrible 400mhz single core processor (i think). So not really that comparable.
Also not forgetting that without modifying the chip it gives the Chinese company that makes it complete access to any files that go near it if it gets internet access.
Both this and the still to be delivered "Black-Swift" are minimal single board computers using the AR9331. It should be similar to the Black-Swift's power specs,
"Power consumption: 120 mA typical (400 MHz CPU frequency, Wi-Fi enabled), 60 mA in energy-saving mode (200 MHz, Wi-Fi disabled), 300 mA max"
This is at 5v so ~1.5w max. If you wanted to use even moderate power USB2 peripherals instead of the SD card reader you'd have to inject external 5v power.
If you don't need sdcard reader, but want RJ45 for wired Ethernet and USB host port connectors out-of-the-box (as opposed to soldering to test-points on Zsun), ~ $7 will get you this:
Just a heads up, the device you mention uses an RT5350-based SOC. There's nothing wrong with it, but support can sometimes be a little flaky.
However, the built-in wifi chipset doesn't do channel hopping properly while the AR9331 does, meaning that for people doing 802.11 security stuff this is not the chipset for you.
If on the other hand you're not doing 802.11 or anything funky with the hardware, it's a nice little box. I have one using a CDC ether USB gadget to inject rickrolls into web pages.
No, I'm using a HooToo TripMate Mini (HT-TM03) which uses the same SoC and seems to work fine out of the box, but I had to build my own OpenWRT image based on a hodgepodge of current trunk and Wingspinner's HT-TM02 work.
EDIT: Actually there are quite a few boxes out there that do have CDC support built in. The ASUS WL-330NUL uses a stripped down ASUSWRT and has CDC support built-in. You can get the firmware source and build your own version if you like. It's not as friendly as OpenWRT (which is saying something) but is workable if you persevere.
Given that it can apparently act as a USB card reader if plugged into a bog standard PC, i suspect no more than your typical USB device. So something like 0.5A at 5V.
Yeah, a few days ago we noticed that our wiki pages fell off Google and Bing search results. No idea why, and Google Webmaster Tools aren't helpful, either. :(
This is OpenWRT, not the same thing as DD-WRT. It's basically a full embedded Linux distro with extra emphasis on networking and complete with its own package manager, so the answer is yes you can do quite a lot with it.
It's possible to do more general purpose stuff with DD-WRT as well, but it's not quite as flexible . IIRC you can install your own packages there too, but it is set up to be more streamlined as a SOHO router.
http://www.anites.com/2015/01/hacking-kankun-smart-wifi-plug...