I was expecting that the pin software would be IoT-standard terrible, so it was a pleasant surprise to see that the Humane team did their best to use SELinux and lock it down.
No knock on them for not getting it 100% right here, and besides, it's always been the case that once an attacker has physical access they will eventually get in.
“ Suddenly one day about a week in I got a random anonymous message on Signal containing a single file of 1,704 bytes. I cautiously examine this rogue file in a hex editor and find that it looks like a real private key.”
I’m very unfamiliar with Android development so I’m not sure what the author is implying here. Is this some random Humane owner sending his key to him, or maybe a former Humane employee?
There's a saying - anyone can design a building that stands, but only an engineer can design a building that just barely stands.
... And maybe something like this is, it was probably just too early.
Somewhat incredible people have this much dedicated focus.
This way they will just be forgotten.
I guess it's a few more parts if you don't want it to go through your phone, but is that all that's happening here? What am I missing?
Is the hard part just the size? Or battery efficiency? Seems like all stuff i have in my drawer from messing around w raspberry pis over the last ten years
From my perspective I was just interested in the excellent industrial design, which is something that is virtually impossible for a DIY setup to attain.
Debatable. The pin ran hot and had a short battery life, often less than a day even with the extended battery. The magnetic attachment was fiddly to use, and some users had trouble with it not staying put. The laser projector had serious usability problems - it wasn't very bright or clear, and interacting with the projected image (which was required to unlock the device, among other features) was extremely awkward.
One can argue that some of these are implementation issues, but working within the limitations of available technology is an inextricable part of industrial design. Dreaming up a perfect fantasy device is easy; designing one which can actually be implemented is much harder.
Building proofs of concept isn't that hard.
When you need to produce thousands of them, and you've got market/product/engineering requirements, V&V, component sourcing, production tooling to set up, and, importantly, a budget, things get hard (or at least time consuming) quickly.
This one looked a lot more lovely thanks to the amount of brain juice spent on it, but otherwise, the end result was ~same.
The reason for failure here is lack of a killer app. Everyone is excited, then when they get it it's a glorified todo list and maybe it can read your texts. This failure mode is quite common and we've seen it with other devices like smart glasses, the Rabbit R1 pin, I suspect openAI's pin is going to be similar, and so on. Your average non-tech-enthusiast consumer will need a real good reason to carry around a front-facing camera full time.
And the rabbit was just an android app bundled with a low end phone.
Which is very common when everyone has big hires screens and oodles of compute power in their pocket. What can a new entrant offer which couldn't be an app?
Even then, that use case is covered by Bluetooth headphones connected to a phone that can be either in a pocket or stowed safely 10m away.
A projector is none of that. A projector is a gimmick. The projector could cost $5 and it would still fail to capture an audience if it wasn't just a side-feature on a more conventional phone.
