A divide exists in the thinking of hackers, and non hackers. Non hackers look at the world in a very specific way; you see a phone, and regard it as an item designed to be a phone. Hackers see it as an object that can be broken down into its parts -- batteries, microchips, processors, different pieces. They can then create different devices from those pieces, things that a non hacker wouldn't think of. Pablos Holman of the Intellectual Ventures Lab places himself on both sides of this divide.
"This is a hotel room," began Holman at Wired 2012, showing a slide of a drab looking room, "kind of like the one i'm staying in -- totally boring place, normal bed, normal TV.
Except for a hacker, that's not like a normal tv -- it's a node on a network. I can send codes via the transceiver, so I can watch movies for free. Not only can i do this in my room, I can do it in yours too. I can even choose what you're watching, so I get to decide if you're watching Diseny or porn tonight."
Holman gave other examples of how hacker think: a hacker bot that found people using a Wi-Fi network and presented them with a screen containing all their password; a map of people's movements based on data gathered from traceable Bluetooth information; the story of Samy, a hacker who was trying to find "chicks" on MySpace: "He wrote a bit of code that would automatically add you as his friend when you viewed his page. It would also copy his code to your page, so then if anyone looked at your page it would add Samy. Within 24 hours he had over one million friends." Samy subsequently served three years on probation without the use of a computer.
It's this ingenuity, this ability to approach objects and problems with a different mode of thinking, that makes hackers so valuable to Holman and the Intellectual Ventures Lab. From keys, to credit cards, to thumb drives -- each of these devices presents hackers with a way of accessing different aspects of your life in a way that most wouldn't usually consider: using the "bump key" technique to open locks; buying a card reader to access RFID information from people's credit cards; changing the frequency of car key devices to open not just your car, but all of the related model of car.
Holman is currently applying the ingenuity of hackers in the Intellectual Ventures Lab to help solve a serious problem that doesn't relate to security or plastic: the spread of malaria by mosquitos. In the same way that a hacker might attack every point of an online security system, Holman gets hackers to apply their skills to the spread of malaria -- attacking every "point" at which it gets a chance to spread, interrupting the cycle.
The lab is able to run what's know as a "Monte Carlo simulation", computing hundreds of different simulations as to how malaria might spread throughout different regions of Africa, taking into account variable like temperature and seasons -- looking for a way that might allow them to interrupt the cycle.
"The other idea we had was what if we could shoot down a mosquito with lasers, because that sounded like fun. We can track them, monitor the frequency of their wing beats -- and then shoot them down. That's what it looks like when you shoot a mosquito with a laser," said Holman, showing a slow motion video of an ill-fated bug, "vaporising their wings. The idea is that we'd have lasers on fence posts around a building or farm land and take out any passing unwanted bugs. We built the first one with parts from consumer devices."
Intellectual Ventures Labs was able to come up with this idea by placing hackers alongside people they wouldn't usually get to work with. The group has got exciting ideas on the horizon, as Holman explained: "I've been thinking about the way that people eat. The way that people eat in the US is wildly inefficient; there's lots of packaging and lots of waste. We don't have any data about what you ate yesterday or on any other day of your life. Personally, I think that'll happen soon. Imagine a 3D food printer with three buttons: 'what I ate yesterday', 'what my friend ate' and 'I'm feeling lucky. Imagine it printing you a meal that's customised for you, injecting your pharmaceuticals and correlating to your diet to create something that's good for you. It could introduce an optimisation that's missing from the system."
Holman hopes that we might see such a 3D food printer appear in the next few years.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
