Over at Datamation, Bruce Byfield opines, "What Linux users don't know about manufacturing open hardware can lead them to disappointment." Interesting stuff.

Both the manufacturing and distribution of digital products is controlled by a relatively small number of companies, whose time can sometimes be booked months in advance. Profit margins can be tight, so like movie studios that buy the rights to an ancient sit-com, the manufacturers usually hope to clone the success of the latest hot product. As Aaron Seigo told me when talking about his efforts to develop the Vivaldi tablet, the manufacturers would much rather prefer someone else take the risk of doing anything new. Not only that, but they would prefer to deal with someone with an existing sales record who is likely to bring repeat business. Besides, the average newcomer is looking at a product run of a few thousand units. A chip manufacturer would much rather deal with Apple or Samsung, whose order is more likely in the hundreds of thousands.

Off hand, it sounds a bit like the same problem independent authors have with big publishing houses: no one wants to buy or publish anything other than a guaranteed best-seller by a proven author, making it hard for the independent guys to get noticed. The article has some interesting insights into what Aaron Seigo and the Vivaldi (Linux-based open tablet) experienced before they abandoned hope for the project.

The worm and/or vulnerability they're now calling "Shellshock" has soured sysadmins on the Bash shell for the moment, and brought attention to a new point of entry for web-based server penetration attacks. Fortunately some researchers at Harvard have been thinking about problems like this and have come up with a solution.
It's a new scripting language called "Shill" and it's intended to limit the resources and privileges scripts have when running.

The language, called Shill, was designed to limit shell-based scripts so they can't access resources beyond what is specifically needed for the task at hand. "You want to give the script exactly the permissions it needs to get its job done," said Scott Moore, a computer science doctoral student at Harvard who is one of the contributors to the Shill research project, led by Stephen Chong, an associate professor of computer science.

The team is working on a version of Shill for the FreeBSD Unix operating system and is mulling the idea of porting it to Linux. The team will also present the technology next week at the USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation conference, in Broomfield, Colorado. Shill follows the principle of least privilege, which stipulates that software shouldn't posses more authority than what it needs to complete its job, Moore said.

Sounds like this might be useful for more reasons than simple exploit prevention, too!

Grml Linux is a bit of a unique distro whose vision and focus have shifted over the past ten years. It represents the personalities of its developers, who prefer the zshell, focus on sysadmin tasks (deployment, disk cloning, backup, forensics, and rescuing borked systems). Lastly, one of the developers is visually handicapped. Thus: grml focuses on scripting, tools managed from the command prompt, and has chosen zsh as the basis for its innovations. Its Distrowatch page is here.

These days grml is a live CD or USB-stick based on Debian. You're not supposed to install it. It requires little more than 256MB of memory, and though it's intended to be mostly a command line environment, they've packaged Fluxbox and you can get there via startx. That's useful if you want to launch a browser to read up on a issue, but most of your day you'll be sitting at the command prompt in a zsh. Have a look at their zsh introduction page or their reference card then to get a sense of the shortcuts, command aliases, and scripts that help you administer your systems, or the dpkg package list showing installed packages.

I find the package list to be limited, and to my knowledge, there are no tools available that you can't find on other distros. But I find grml's advantage to be that they love and have put a lot of energy into the zshell, and if you're interested in the zsh this is a good place to see it showcased. It's also an easy distro to carry around on a USB stick if you're a command prompt warrior and want to quickly boot up to a useable command prompt from where you can do other things. For example, you simply run the grml-network script from the command prompt to discover, configure, and connect to a wireless network. And of course it's based on Debian's excellent hardware recognition and configuration system. This is a niche distro that won't appeal to everybody, but odds are better than average you'll soon find yourself at the ZSH Reference page looking into additional resources for using the amazing zshell (For starters, try the 429 and dense page ZSH Manual and this 14 page zshell reference card from the guys at bash2zsh. Have fun.

What's new in robotics? Depends where you are. Scientists at Harvard are putting their time and energy into the newish field of soft-robotics, a field that uses elastomer - a type of polymer similar to rubber - to perform behaviors such as grasping a human hand or crawling across the ground. Eventually, researchers say that soft robots may be instrumental in things such as physical therapy, minimally invasive surgery, and search-and-rescue operations. By using soft robotics, engineers have created projects like a pneumatic glove for rehabilitating hand movement, a cardiac simulator that mimics the precise movements of a human heart, and a device for thumb rehabilitation.

In Japan, meanwhile, scientists are putting a happier spin on swarm robots - small robots that can communicate and interact to achieve common goals - by rolling out cheerleader robots that use swarm technology to animate and entertain.

The Murata Cheerleading robots ... look like dolls, have glowing eyes and balance on steel balls. Unveiled Thursday in Tokyo by components maker Murata Manufacturing, each bot looks like a cartoonish girl sporting a red skirt and short black hair. A series of rollers under the skirt keep the robot balanced on a ball or rotate it in a particular direction to move around. Under the afro, meanwhile, nestles an infrared sensor and ultrasonic microphones that help the robot detect objects nearby. Three gyro sensors control motion from front to back, side to side and in rotation. A wireless network is used to control a group of 10 cheerleader robots. They can perform precisely synchronized dance routines, moving into formations such as a heart while spinning on their balls.

It's all very kawaii, and of course intended to generate attention among Japanese audiences and visitors to trade shows. "We designed the cheerleader robots to cheer people up and make them smile," said Murata spokesman Koichi Yoshikawa. "Their features can be summed up as '3S': stability, synchronization and sensing and communication."

Now, what could we do if we combined those two technologies?