![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Tin Foil Millinery
Jun. 17th, 2009 09:32 amFour clever household hacks under my belt so far, and I'm chewing on two more.
One of these involves a battery pack that's DOA... and the official replacement costs more than what I paid for the whole unit.
The case is surprisingly difficult to open. It's not just the security screws they used, they also glued the plastic lid down too... Unlike the laptop battery I destroyed, the plastic is heavy enough here to survive some abuse.
As I pry open the lid and pull out the odd-sized cells inside, a wave of memory pushed me back, more like a tidal bore... My very first psychotic break featured batteries as one of the many sub-plots.
There's even a little side-bit in Stephen King's The Dark Tower where one particular brand of battery is considered more trustworthy than the rest.
One thing that's changed between 1986 and now, is that I'm better able to invent stories without necesarrily believing them. So here's a story...
Say you're a moustache-twirling owner of the world, and you want to give your people lots of shiny trinkets, but you don't want them to do anything seriously bad to the system with these trinkets... You might imbue the power sources with an identity without letting on that one source of power is any different from any other.
I suppose this is only 'tin foil hat' material if I'm advancing some sort of remedy... "Here's how to protect yourself from those evil batteries". But it's not a perscription, it's merely a story.
House current is trivial as far as identity is concerned. The old X-10 system uses house wiring, and deliberately introduces modulated interference into the current as a way of sending signals. If I were a more competent engineer, I might could invent questions to ask of the house current, ways to look for signal within the noise. Imagine Tesla's work was never discredited, only buried, weaponized... Could you write an alternate history of consumer culture since Great War the second, where appliances can deliver useful information without being found out? I notice it's a lot easier to tell if my washing machine is turned off, than my television.
So if the house wiring can spy on you, portable electricity might present a kind of problem: disconnect from the grid, take the gadget away from the mothership, and it might be used for purposes unknown and uncontrollable.
I dunno, it's not silly enough to be fun, and I need a better sense of humor to make any of this crawl off the floor. All I know is that I've got four different cordless power-tools in the garage, and each tool uses a different-shaped battery that's not usable with any of the others. Each battery needs its own charger. And each charger plugs into that wall outlet, providing me with power that I don't always trust.
I suppose taking the larger view of it all, the shape of the battery is just one layer of onionskin security. The vast majority of people will accept that limitation, and work within its bounds. they're not the ones to worry about.
If I was going to get all Dr Horrible about it, I'd need at least two more layers of weirdness to make a convincing story. A paranoid granola James Bond would have to find and debug all of them in order to make a convincing case. But before he can get that far, the new gadgets have evolved, the old batteries don't work in the new gadgets, and 'net is maintained with a completely different mutated protein coat.
All those cell-phones in the waste stream.... what might they have told us if we'd known what to look for?
One of these involves a battery pack that's DOA... and the official replacement costs more than what I paid for the whole unit.
The case is surprisingly difficult to open. It's not just the security screws they used, they also glued the plastic lid down too... Unlike the laptop battery I destroyed, the plastic is heavy enough here to survive some abuse.
As I pry open the lid and pull out the odd-sized cells inside, a wave of memory pushed me back, more like a tidal bore... My very first psychotic break featured batteries as one of the many sub-plots.
There's even a little side-bit in Stephen King's The Dark Tower where one particular brand of battery is considered more trustworthy than the rest.
One thing that's changed between 1986 and now, is that I'm better able to invent stories without necesarrily believing them. So here's a story...
Say you're a moustache-twirling owner of the world, and you want to give your people lots of shiny trinkets, but you don't want them to do anything seriously bad to the system with these trinkets... You might imbue the power sources with an identity without letting on that one source of power is any different from any other.
I suppose this is only 'tin foil hat' material if I'm advancing some sort of remedy... "Here's how to protect yourself from those evil batteries". But it's not a perscription, it's merely a story.
House current is trivial as far as identity is concerned. The old X-10 system uses house wiring, and deliberately introduces modulated interference into the current as a way of sending signals. If I were a more competent engineer, I might could invent questions to ask of the house current, ways to look for signal within the noise. Imagine Tesla's work was never discredited, only buried, weaponized... Could you write an alternate history of consumer culture since Great War the second, where appliances can deliver useful information without being found out? I notice it's a lot easier to tell if my washing machine is turned off, than my television.
So if the house wiring can spy on you, portable electricity might present a kind of problem: disconnect from the grid, take the gadget away from the mothership, and it might be used for purposes unknown and uncontrollable.
I dunno, it's not silly enough to be fun, and I need a better sense of humor to make any of this crawl off the floor. All I know is that I've got four different cordless power-tools in the garage, and each tool uses a different-shaped battery that's not usable with any of the others. Each battery needs its own charger. And each charger plugs into that wall outlet, providing me with power that I don't always trust.
I suppose taking the larger view of it all, the shape of the battery is just one layer of onionskin security. The vast majority of people will accept that limitation, and work within its bounds. they're not the ones to worry about.
If I was going to get all Dr Horrible about it, I'd need at least two more layers of weirdness to make a convincing story. A paranoid granola James Bond would have to find and debug all of them in order to make a convincing case. But before he can get that far, the new gadgets have evolved, the old batteries don't work in the new gadgets, and 'net is maintained with a completely different mutated protein coat.
All those cell-phones in the waste stream.... what might they have told us if we'd known what to look for?
