The Budweiser Red Light is one of the best pieces of marketing I’ve ever seen. And while I’m enough of a hockey fan to want to pick up one of these anyways, the real prize is in figuring out how to make the thing go off whenever I choose.

Where to get started? While I’ve seen an attempt to use/modify the Electric Imp card inside the light to accept requests, I thought my approach might be simpler: Sniff the network traffic to and from the light, replicate it to sound the alarm.

The instruments used to sniff the traffic were as follows:

• A MacBook Pro (to set up Internet Sharing upon for the Red Light to connect to)
• My Android OS smartphone (to install and pair to the Red Light using the app Budweiser developed for that purpose)
• WireShark (a network protocol analyzer) installed on the MacBook Pro, which also requires XQuartz

Instructions

I kept careful notes in case someone else wanted to replicate this experiment; those instructions are:

1. Enable Internet Sharing on the MacBook Pro, and make sure you set no password or key. (At home where I have an Windows 8.1 PC, I had attempted to set up a Wi-Fi hotspot but the Red Light appeared to have difficulty getting on that network.) I named my new Wi-Fi access point “BudRedLight”.
2. I had my Android OS smartphone join the Wi-Fi access point of “BudRedLight”, which it did without issue.
3. In order to sniff its traffic, we’ll need to get the Red Light on the “BudRedLight” access point as well. This means installing and setting up the official Budweiser Red Lights app, and using the interesting flashing light method of sending the Wi-Fi connection details from the phone to the Red Light.
4. Once that’s done, I left the app open on the phone, specifically staying on the screen that provided the “TEST YOUR LIGHT” button. The plan was to capture what was received by the Red Light once this was pressed.
5. Now that the Red Light and my phone were both on the “BudRedLight” access point, it was time to boot up WireShark on the MacBook Pro (I had to start XQuartz first so WireShark would run).
6. Let’s get WireShark listening to the traffic coming in and out of “BudRedLight”: Select the Capture menu option, and then Options. Unclick the “Use promiscuous mode on all interfaces option” (this will cut down on the amount of noise being captured). Instead, double-click on the Wi-Fi listing, and within it check the “Capture packets in promiscuous mode” option and hit OK. (Need a visual guide? Here’s a screenshot.)
7. Okay – we’re now capturing traffic! Tap the “TEST YOUR LIGHT“; this will make your phone send a HTTPS request up to some remote server, which in turn appears to send a TCP [PSH, ACK] packet to the Red Light. In the screenshot of WireShark below, I pressed the “TEST YOUR LIGHT” twice, resulting in the two [PSH, ACK] packets listed:
8. So what’s in that packet? Only 234 bytes of it contain actual data, so let’s see what that looks like (via WireShark):

Next Steps

So we’ve got an example of the data used to set off the Red Light, but we don’t really know what’s contained in that data.

Deep packet inspection isn’t really my thing, so at this point I’ve started asking around for possibilities. Here are the early contenders:

• Use tcpreplay, Ostinato or some other application to “replay” sending of the packet shown above to the Red Light; maybe we don’t really even need to know what’s in the packet and this will set it off.
• Find and use some other utility (or person!) that can tell us how to further decipher what’s in the data seen above.

If you’d like to help out, you certainly can! I’ve uploaded a zipfile of a PCAP file containing the packet I’ve displayed above. Feel free to try and dicipher or replay sending of that packet on your own! Please leave a comment if you do so; it’d be great to solve this for everyone.

If you’re looking to replace WordPress’s long load time for a 404 error page for at least the missing images on your website, consider adding the following to the .htaccess file that sits in the root of your WordPress installation airblown inflatables canada:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} \.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png)$
RewriteRule .* /wp-content/themes/your-theme/images/placeholder.png [L]

In practice, this looks something like:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} \.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png)$ 
RewriteRule .* /wp-content/themes/your-theme/images/placeholder.png [L]

RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

Working with Nginx? No problem, here’s the equivalent commands that go into your site configuration file:

location ~* (jpg|jpeg|gif|png) {
	expires 30d;
	access_log off;

	error_page 404 /wp-content/themes/your-theme/images/placeholder.png;
}

I hold a degree in computer science. I’ve been employed for 10+ years as a software developer. When the occasional news story comes out about liberal arts majors having trouble finding employment in today’s economy, there’s a part of me that feels smug. It says, “Yeah. All right. Go us. We made the right choice. We were rational about the job market.” And it is indeed very easy to indulge that part of myself by lapping up news that confirms my life choices.

But I’m also something of a contrarian. (Actually what’s probably more accurate is I hate to be wrong, so I feel compelled to understand the pro-arts side of the argument to prepare for it.) What is the appeal of the liberal arts in 2012? Are they necessary? In the end, I think my final position is that the liberal arts are important, and if a comparison must be done, they’re likely to  be more important than computer science or engineering. My reasoning: Engineering may allow us to live longer and better, but liberal arts let us find understanding in others and ourselves.

As evidence, I offer portions of a piece from 1997 by the late Earl Shorris. It’s about his attempt to teach a group of impoverished Americans about the humanities. It’s really quite profound and, I think, one of the only true ways to permanently solve poverty in the world. Enjoy the read.

Harper’s Magazine – On the Uses of a Liberal Education, Part II: As a weapon in the hands of the restless poor

We had never met before. The conversation around us focused on the abuse of women. [Viniece Walker]’s eyes were perfectly opaque—hostile, prison eyes. Her mouth was set in the beginning of a sneer.

“You got to begin with the children,” she said, speaking rapidly, clipping out the street sounds as they came into her speech.

She paused long enough to let the change of direction take effect, then resumed the rapid, rhythmless speech. “You’ve got to teach the moral life of downtown to the children. And the way you do that, Earl, is by taking them downtown to plays, museums, concerts, lectures, where they can learn the moral life of downtown.”

I smiled at her, misunderstanding, thinking I was indulging her. “And then they won’t be poor anymore?”

She read every nuance of my response, and answered angrily, “And they won’t be poor no more.”

“What you mean is—”

“What I mean is what I said—a moral alternative to the street.”

She didn’t speak of jobs or money. In that, she was like the others I had listened to. No one had spoken of jobs or money. But how could the “moral life of downtown” lead anyone out from the surround of force? How could a museum push poverty away? Who can dress in statues or eat the past? And what of the political life? Had Niecie skipped a step or failed to take a step? The way out of poverty was politics, not the “moral life of downtown.”

But to enter the public world, to practice the political life, the poor had first to learn to reflect. That was what Niecie meant by the “moral life of downtown.” She did not make the error of divorcing ethics from politics. Niecie had simply said, in a kind of shorthand, that no one could step out of the panicking circumstance of poverty directly into the public world.

Although she did not say so, I was sure that when she spoke of the “moral life of downtown” she meant something that had happened to her. With no job and no money, a prisoner, she had undergone a radical transformation. She had followed the same path that led to the invention of politics in ancient Greece. She had learned to reflect.

In further conversation it became clear that when she spoke of “the moral life of downtown” she meant the humanities, the study of human constructs and concerns, which has been the source of reflection for the secular world since the Greeks first stepped back from nature to experience wonder at what they beheld.

If the political life was the way out of poverty, the humanities provided an entrance to reflection and the political life. The poor did not need anyone to release them; an escape route existed. But to open this avenue to reflection and politics a major distinction between the preparation for the life of the rich and the life of the poor had to be eliminated.

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