Gizmodo
This porcupine-looking box is call Slurpr, and it's bristling with electronic gear inside, namely six Wi-Fi interfaces bundled together to make one blasting fast super-broadband connection with nine Ethernet ports for all to enjoy.
You may have noticed multiple Wi-Fi networks showing up when you boot up your laptop, right? Why not use all of them at the same time with the Slurpr? Here's how it's done.
The Slurpr's inventor, a guy from Amsterdam named Boris, calls it a magic box, and for good reason. It's actually a small PC running Debian Linux, and inside are shoehorned six wireless network interfaces.
It's running on a 266MHz MIPS CPU, with 64MB of RAM, and Linux is installed on a CompactFlash card. All that compact hardware is said to be supersensitive to Wi-Fi, picking up the six most powerful signals and binding them together, complete with load balancing.
The next step for the Slurpr's creators is to decide whether they're going to make the box work with encrypted networks, and to what extent they'll let it break into password-protected Wi-Fi routers belonging to those who may not want their networks broken into.
Meanwhile, the Slurpr is available for pre-order with a €100 deposit, and when it's ready to ship, it will cost €999, or about $1342.
Slurpr, the mother of all wardrive boxes [Geek Technique]
Comments
Grey area.
Interesting.
By the way, the last time I was nearby when a guy named Boris from Amsterdam opened a "magic box" I came to halfway through a 12-Piece KFC Family Dinner while playing Quake2 multiplayer online on a custom built PC, so this doesn't surprise me one little bit.
Good times.
I'm a little at a loss to understand the point of this device...
You take 6 other people's connections, and use them all. Load balancing across all of them.
So you either do that and then only borrow a little from each to get a normal to x2 normal speed internet connection.
Or you hog up all six go supper fast, until they all start locking down their internet because you are stealing their bandwidth..
It is like a device to encourage people to lock down the wireless access..
It is anti-war driving. Or it is so war driving that it makes everyone around hate war driving.
I've wanted a device like this for so long. Cool that it is finally happening (though it is a bit pricy, so I might be more inclined to build one myself, though it wouldn't look as small, nice, and neat).
Magic box? I wonder if he has some magic beans he wants to sell us too...
Well, with B/G there's only 3 disparate networks you can really connect to. So if you're in a confluence of channels 1/6/11, AND there's 3 unprotected A networks, you can really start going to town.
You're not going to see any performance gains from connecting to two separate networks on the same channel. They'd constantly be stepping on each other.
I mean, isn't this essentially what n is?
Then why are there only five antennas?
There are Six antennas, Monty! How many do you see now?
Monty, the back pick shows connections for 6 antennas. The two middle antennas are almost on top of each other, so they probably left one off for the picture.
Great for hacking everyone in Starbucks -- simultaneously.
There are 5 antennas.
There...are FOUR antennas!
Don't go thinking that if you grab six peoples 6Mbs connetion you now magically have an effective 36Mbs connection for you to download torrents with. What you can have is six 6Mbs whereas one TCP connection's max throughoutput will be still 6Mbs, not 36Mbs. But you could say download six torrents all at 6Mbs, you know, to catch up on all the latest linux distros.
Read up on channel bonding. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_bonding since to get the 36Mbs that I know some of you are lusting for there has to be cooperation from the ISP.
In general I would consider some with more than 2 or 3 radios in the 2.4ghz ism (b/g) spectrum to be unusable, and you're going to have to be really close to an 802.11a ap in order to use that antenna for A...
That does look like an interesting if fairly straight forward use of a routerboard 532/564.
http://www.routerboard.com/rb500.html
...Actually a torrent may be a bad example since IIRC the protol has you connecting to many sources to get the data, i guess for a torrent you could get an effective bandwidth for a downloading being the sum of the connections. But for downloading a file from a single host you would still be limited to the 6Mbs.
I could see someone buying 2 or more high speed cable lines and using this device to combine them, in my area 12 mbps is 50 bucks ... 24mbps anyone?
styrofoam, that's what I thought initially. But consider this. Your 54 Mbps wifi network is connected to a 1.5 Mbps - 6 Mbps uplink. I'm not sure if you can split the entire 54Mbps between, say, 6 networks on the same channel. But if it is possible, then you can have 6x the amount of uplink bandwidth, which is still lower than 54 Mbps.
Cool! Now you can go to jail 6 times for surfing from a parking lot!
YIKES!!!!! those aren't antennas - they're PROBES!!!!! (one for each of the assholes who sends in $200.oo deposits to a guy from Amsterdam named Boris )
This reminds me of when I had dual ISDN at home. Dedicated up and dedicated down streams.
This unit was built with components from www.mikrotik.com. You can get all the part for about $800.00, and it includes a license for the mikrotik router os.
There... are... FOUR... Lights!!!
*spittle*
Whilst it seems fairly pointless for what it's desgined for, the fact that it's running linux (and form the loks of it booting from a CompactFlash card menas it'd be a brillian wardriving device provided you could power it in the car.
A few modifications to the shipped linux configuration, and you could set it up with six kismet drones/servers which you could then access from a laptop via ethernet, or just make it store to a file (though the laptop option would be much more interesting and would allow for immediate viewing of the networks).
My god, it's full of antenas
It's a device designed to help you efficiently steal as much bandwidth as possible.
I'm sure it's illegal in just about every place they have internet. But if you're interested in something like this, you don't really care.
It's Cyber Punk. Get it?
Well it does kinda look like Vivian from the Young Ones.
Well the last time I ran into a guy named Boris in Amsterdam he introduced me to his wife who invited me to slurpr her magic box. Oh yeah, and it looked like a porcupine.
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