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Conference encourages Linux in the bathroom

By on January 10th, 2007 
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Australia's biggest Linux conference will kick off next week and the organiser has promised that attendees will get a lesson in how to control and monitor everyday objects -- including a toilet flush -- using the open source operating system.

Linux.conf.au, which will be held at the University of New South Wales in Sydney between 15-20 January, will feature presentations and tutorials from various open source software experts including Dr Andrew Stuart Tanenbaum and Jonathan Oxer, president of the conferences' organising body Linux Australia.

On the third day, Oxer will be presenting a talk titled Making Things Move: Finding Inappropriate Uses for Scripting Languages, which he said will include live demonstrations on how to hack everyday objects and then control them using software.

"I am going to try and show how to use skills and techniques that programmers already have and to link real world devices together," Oxer told ZDNet Australia in a telephone interview.

Oxer explained that he will, among other things, show how to automate a sprinkler system so it can be controlled from the Internet. The motivation behind his talk is to persuade programmers to look at how Linux can be used in the real world.

"The main purpose of the talk is to get people thinking about software development in a different way -- looking at objects as blocks that can be joined together. Basically treating the world like a big Lego set.

"It's a matter of taking a whole lot of these building blocks and, with minor modifications, show how they can be linked together to do interesting things," said Oxer.

In a recent entry on his blog, Oxer revealed that he is in the process of building a new bathroom that is completely automated using Linux.

"Everything in the new bathroom is going to be computer controlled or sensed, and I mean *everything*. The window winders will be electric, as will the curtains. Sensors will include ambient light, humidity, temperature, motion, door position, toilet flush, water flow, flowing water temperature, bath water temperature and anything else I can think of," he wrote.

Oxer said that during his talk he will be hacking hardware on the fly.

"I try and do as much as possible as a live demonstration -- such as writing a device driver on the spot to talk to a parallel port and then hooking up the parallel port to a device that I hack by soldering connections to it.

"In the space of 10 minutes you can go from a stock item to something you can control through software," said Oxer.

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However, Oxer warned that automating common objects requires thought because it opens up potential security risks.

"Imagine your door locks, security system and sprinkler system are all software controlled. A lot of people don't think that if they have a security flaw in their sprinkler system, which happens to have a Web interface, someone might be able to use that to get into their home network and then control their door locks.

"You need to think about the relationships between these things," he added.

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