Mike Ritland

speaker

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

He does a lot of really cool things, science, math. He's got a book on security, but he also makes something called Klein bottles. Total deviation here, but you'll see why. So Klein bottles are, you know, a Mobius strip. You take a strip of paper and you pull the ends up, rotate, tape them together. Now you've got a 1D dimension. So if you follow it around on a pen, it's one dimensional.

Klein bottle is a 3D version of that. Anyway, he, I think he lives in Palo Alto, a small place. He runs like distribution entirely out of his house for that. So under his house, he has built an entire robotic warehouse system with like drives the thing around, pulls the stuff out. I think that's cool as hell.

um and it goes back to like the old school hacker mindset of just doing that i like that kind of stuff just catches me and i'll like okay cool i want to do as much manufacturing in home as i can because a my stuff is really small um but you know also let's just see how far i can take it how much more i can optimize like i this this orange clip that goes on these things that I ship with.

So you know which ones are bad. I've redesigned it like six times so far. Wow. I just want to see how much further can I take it.

It's a mix. So the process for it, I'm going to go back to this PCB as a reference here, but real quick. The process that I'm kind of taking right now is I ask one manufacturer, make the raw, the PCB, the green piece here. Then that gets shipped to another place that assembles the components to the PCB. They're basically running it through high heat.

They melt solder, and they all get glued to the board. Now you've got a functional piece of... And now, once it's glued to the board, here's one of my implants. And we can get some close-ups later. But here is, that's one of the implants. That's the size of it.

Yep. Inside the boot of the cable, basically.

Yeah, I know. I mean... Serious, man? Wow. Yeah, there's a lot of compromises to make that happen.

If you were not size-constrained on that, that would be ten times bigger because it would be so much easier to make with ten components instead of two or whatever. I forget how many I have in there. I think I got like 12. But, you know, times ten the components is normally what you'd see. So that creates the need to do a lot of creative engineering to compromise and get small.

But at some point, I'll show you it here. Here's that little one with the USB-C end on it. And here is the USB-C A. So that's kind of, you know, okay, components are on there. One shop did the green PCB. One shop put all the components on there. Cool. Well, that's what I got right now, right? It's not cable yet. So another shop is going to help integrate that into cables.

And so this other shop is going to integrate it into cables to some extent. There's still unfinished work to do, unfinished testing. Then And if it's the woven cable, there's another factory that has to do special cutting and crimping and searing of the ends so it doesn't unravel. Anyway, so three, four factories later, it ships over to me. I'll do the finishing work on them.

Sometimes it's closing the actual cables up, but at a minimum, it's testing everything, calibrating them, putting that initial firmware on there, tons of QA and QC work, packaging, I'm shipping it off to the Hack5 warehouse. Wow. Lots of work.

Yeah, so two places, basically. You can go to the o.mg.lol website. That's my primary website. Or you can go to my business partner. It redirects to my business partner, effectively, which is hack5, H-A-K-5, hack5.org, slash omg, and all of my products are up on their site. Wow.

That is incredible.

I'm not sure I would know.

Yeah. And there's been a lot of interesting challenges, too.

Oh, yeah, totally.

I'm happy to help all kinds of people secure their environments. Yeah, I mean, they know where to find me.

Let's see. Oh, you know, another thing that might be interesting here is this kind of kicked off right when the pandemic kicked off. It's like, you know, working with the factories, had to do all that remote work. And that immediately ran into the chip shortage. I saw that come in from like six months before everybody else did.

So immediately had to figure out all the supply chain logistics, where to find chips when they are out of the market everywhere, hoarding them. This is something I have put... the first two or three years of profits entirely back into production.

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