That's not bunnie's only sweet hardware hack, of course. Check out the insanely clever design for a contact-tracing dongle he prototyped for the EU in 2020:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#trace-together
But really, you owe it to yourself to read bunnie at book length, and his best book is 2016's *The Hardware Hacker*, a tour-de-force, lay-friendly exegesis on the theory and practice of hardware hacking:
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@pluralistic In the world of true hackers, he’s a prince.
@pluralistic for those who prefer not youtube: bunny presentation is available from https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-xous-a-pure-rust-rethink-of-the-embedded-operating-system
@pluralistic he was here in san diego at chumby for years, and i never got to know him. i still kick myself for it. i ran barcamp san diego and they even sponsored a couple times. what a missed opportunity
@pluralistic
I know my original Xbox owes much to him, and even that is enough to appreciate the guy.
@pluralistic he’s also a spectacularly nice human in my experience
@bnys @pluralistic 100% agree. I've always been super thankful for all my interactions with bunnie. So many things are inspired by his work, including the laptop I'm typing on.
I first met bunnie when he came to EFF for help with the threats he'd received from Microsoft. At the time, bunnie was an electrical engineering grad student at MIT, and he'd taken the bootloader locks on the new Xbox platform as a personal affront and challenge. He applied his prodigious skill and talent to these digital handcuffs, and in short order, he had broken the Xbox and installed Linux on it.
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MIT's general counsel immediately washed its hands of any responsibility to defend this young grad student from bullying by a corporate monopolist, hanging him out to dry. So he turned to us - and we got his back. You can read all about it in *Hacking the Xbox*, his canonical work about hardware hacking and technological freedom (it's free!):
https://bunniefoo.com/nostarch/HackingTheXbox_Free.pdf
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In the many years since, I've been lucky enough to count bunnie as a friend, colleague and comrade, albeit one I only physically run into every year or so, usually at some tech event or on the playa at Burning Man, where he still camps with the MIT crew at The Institute.
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I just got to see bunnie in person again, over Christmas week at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg. He gave a late-night presentation with his collaborator Sean "xobs" Cross, entitled "Xous: A Pure-Rust Rethink of the Embedded Operating System":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbWWGkyIBGM
Don't let the technical-sounding title intimidate you! This was a banger of a talk, and as with every bunnie Huang production, it left a pleasant and persistent aftertaste.
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The background for this talk is bunnie's obsession with building a trustworthy computer. For decades, bunnie's been chasing the dream of a computer whose every component - operating system, drivers, firmware, *and hardware designs* - are open to inspection. Bunnie's reasoning here is that anything that can't be inspected (and, by extension, modified) by its users is a spot where bad guys can hide bad stuff, and where lurking bugs can fester until they are exploited by bad guys.
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Remember the spectacular (and still mysterious) claims that Apple's servers had all been compromised with minuscule hardware bugs? The single best explanation of that you will find comes from bunnie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqQhWitJ1As
Bunnie was doing all this before there was an "open source hardware" movement, and he remains at its vanguard.
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