Mike Ritland

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855 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard Feb 2025

Mike Ritland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Shawn Ryan Show · #164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare · 29 Jan 2025 podcast

These are LEDs, but LEDs, when you shine light on them, they actually emit a little bit of energy on the lines, like a reverse solar panel, right? They're inefficient solar panel. But you can literally use them as eyes for this. So depending on what direction it's facing, one eye is gonna see more light than the other. That's where the light source is coming from.

And there's a really tiny brain in the middle. It's literally four logic gates. which is tiny. Your phone has millions of logic gates in it, right? Like a calculator. My cable has hundreds of thousands of logic gates. This thing, it's got four, okay?

What do you call it? A logic gate. So basically, all computing comes down to the concept of binary, on or off. Think of it like a light switch, right? It's on or off. You can do math with that. Let's go through it real quick, actually. We got three light switches, right? Yeah. Got to think which direction we're going here. So we got one on, two off. That can give us a one.

Turn them all off, that's a zero, right? Easy. Now we put two in the picture. You turn two on, you basically double the last one. So if two are on, that's going to be three, right? Basically, the first switch is the value of 1 or 0. The next one is 2 or 0. And then the next one will be 4 or 0. Next one is 8 or 0. That's binary math, right? Okay.

And all decision-making can kind of be based on this. So in this sense, it's very analog. But basically, this will eventually fill up and have enough energy charged that these four logic gates are suddenly making a decision. Like... This side's filled. Which eye is sensing the most light?

And at that point, it's gonna fire the opposing leg with all the energy it's gotten here to steer towards that. So you have this little bug-looking thing that walks, right? And it just constantly steers towards the light source. And to me, I thought that was really cool because A, it focuses on aesthetics, which is not super common.

And B, it uses really cool hardware hacks, like I said, with the lights here that normally it's for emitting light, but now you can reverse that and use it in an unintended way. And you can use really minimal logic

to do what you want and you know i've applied some of that to my cables as well not this specifically just the mindset of like you don't need 10 things in this cable you can strip it down to one if you're really creative wow that's how you that's how you shrink things so um that's that's kind of where that connects with you know like hey let's fake let's focus on uh aesthetics but also minimizing

and just using things in unintended ways to get more out of it. So that was... kind of a good point in which it kind of just opened my eyes to also, you know, soldering and electronics, but also the art of it and all that. So yeah, BeamBots, that was a good pausing point for my many hobbies that I would pick up over time that eventually led into what would become the OMG cable.

Yeah, so I think this was about 2013. So first, Defense Distributed. It's the company behind the Liberator, which is a 3D-printed gun, and also the Ghost Gunner, which is a desktop mill. that you can mill out a lower receiver, AR-15 platforms was the first commonly.

I did not, no. So I got very interested in that. That was done by Cody Wilson. So let's crack that whole topic open a little bit more. So I think it was 2013. There was a lot of experimentation in the 3D printing space with firearms, right? Cody introduced it to the world. He basically inflicted this idea upon the public psyche in this amazing way that just caught my attention in a couple ways.

First, it's this approach of like, hey, we're going to give this to the world in a way that is irrevocable. Like... Going back to that, like the police politics concept I was mentioning, it's just like, okay, what if you create something? Like there's voting and opinion having, but you create something and put it in the world. Nothing can change that at that point.

I just thought that was just amazing from like the political standpoint, regardless of what topic or what opinion you may or may not have on firearms, the politics of it and the power of creation was amazing to me. And he did it with a level of art and bravado that was just perfect for the delivery of this.

Yeah, another great example of like no opinion on that is going to change its existence. It exists. And like if you're thinking about like real politics and participating, like creation is one of the most powerful things you can do. And that's what I kind of learned from watching that. But yeah, I decided like, hey, I want to know more what they're doing.

And I've helped out with security and just computer stuff in general. Used what I had. Like, hey, can I help to a lot of different places, whether it's like Nine Inch Nails communities, just to get more insight of how the artistic process works there. Or in the case of Cody, just helping out with the security of that, just to kind of see how they work.

A bunch of anarchists getting together, building a company, and... Just the whole fight that they were in, it was very fascinating to me just to observe that. And that kind of stuck with me, both the creation, the power of creation, and the artistic approach they took to it. That was one of the things I kind of had in mind when I first created the OMG cable.

It's like, hey, at the time, I thought I was just going to open source this thing and put it out there. Yeah. That ended up not making sense because it was really hard to make. You can't just DIY it. But yeah, it was one of the motivators in my head at the time when I was first kind of putting it out into the world. So yeah, one of the many things is just like, hey, this is a fixation.

I want to know more and I'm just going to focus on it for a while. So yeah, they're still doing their thing. So what did you do there? I just helped out with some security stuff.

Network and IT. I mean, every company has got to have that, right? So I'm like, hey, you know, you're probably a small shop, probably don't have the level of security and understanding for your systems, but I don't know, maybe I can help. So it just helped out and it allowed me to get more insight into how they run things and just more exposure to like how the artist works, right?

Because that allows me to just kind of figure out... There's a lot of things I would experiment with, but I never found like my medium, right? Like as an artist, right? Like I... I've gotten music, you know, I'm not that great with music, you know, visual arts, not that great with that.

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