Well, despite the call for plaintext and the bigger than usual prize for May, the call for plaintext wasn’t responded to, so I can only name one partial winner: Roby got the first one right with it being a “Passport tag”. Since only one of the two answers was correct, the prize for this month is just going to be the normal Name that Ware prize, and not the bonus prize. Congrats and thanks for playing!
The first of May’s ware is an x-ray view of a US passport RFID tag. This is the RFID embedded in the new US passports, and its location is in the back cover. The primary hint to tell it was a passport was the barest outline of the thread forming the page binding of the passport in the lower part of the image. The second ware is an x-ray view of a Shenzhen Metro RFID payment token–that one was supposed to be the “just hard” one worthy of the prize :-) I wish I could have seen more of the plaintext on this one to help with the judging! Roby, email me for your prize!
For June, the winner is dgabler! Congratulations. I’m sure Karl and Felix also got it right, but Karl has won a lot and Felix had the inside track :-) It is in fact the debug board for an OpenMoko Neo1973. For those who aren’t familiar with the OpenMoko, it is a Linux-based open cell phone. It’s a very neat device and I thought it would be interesting to feature a sister product to the Chumby on this site. There are actually a surprisingly large number of coincidental ties between the OpenMoko project and the Chumby project, aside from the obvious fact that they are both open platforms. Sean Moss-Pultz, the lead of the OpenMoko project, actually grew up in the city that I currently live in. We occassionally meet up for drinks out here when he’s visiting family. And, just coincidentally, one of the factories in China that we subcontract to for building the chumby hardware is owned by the same parent company that does the OpenMoko (I don’t think the products are actually built in the same physical facility, though). Small world indeed!
