We've finally come upon a suitable replacment for the venerable, discontinued VPM vibrating pager disk motor. Ah, it was a splendid device, but it sure was easy to break those motor leads... Ah! But the new VPM2 has wires prebonded to the motor, and it's slightly smaller too! We welcome our new vibrating disk motor […]
Heartbleed & Solarbotics
Solar botics
April 10, 2014
As I imagine most of you out there have heard by now, there's a pretty serious vulnerability in the OpenSSL that was announced on April 7th called CVE-2014-0160, better known as Heartbleed. For those of you wondering what the heck this "Heartbleed" thing is, awhile back OpenSSL added a "heartbeat" feature which allowed servers and computers with a secure connection to "ping" each other regularly, in order to keep the connection open. The problem comes from a bug in OpenSSL which lets a computer without the secure connection to still ping this way, and that connection could be exploited to include up to 64K chunks from the server's RAM, which unfortunately can include recently decrypted usernames, passwords, etc.
What Is Solarbotics Doing About it?
We've already taken steps to patch this hole on our own servers, and have reissued our EV SSL certificate (if you take a peek at the cert, you'll notice the validation date has been bumped up to 4/9/2014) which has already been installed. We've also cleared all existing sessions on the server as those were at risk as well. The unfortunate side effect of that is that anyone who had been building a cart without logging in will need to do so again.
What Should You Be Doing About it?
You should be giving strong consideration to resetting & updating all your passwords (yes seriously), particularly for the important things in your life like email, banking, facebook/twitter/reddit etc. This vulnerability was announced Monday, and if someone happened to pick up your login credentials before this was patched on one of the sites you visit, the attackers could still have your login credentials. We recommend opting for two-factor verification where ever possible. Of course, not using the same password for everything becomes an important part as well and for those of you worried about keeping track, we're big fans of Keepass here at Solarbotics.
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Roundabout Pieces!
David Cook wrote a book. That book is a technically a Cook book, but we won't call it that. We'll call it Intermediate Robot Building (no, we don't have it yet, we're still waiting for our order!), and it heavily features the Roundabout Robot. If you're familiar with Mr. Cook's first book Robot Building for […]
New GM10 wheels and combo deal!
Today we are happy to finally bring colours to our GM10 Pager Gear motor wheels! Now available in Black, Red, Blue, Yellow and Light Grey. What's a motor and a wheel without a motor/wheel deal where you can get a GM10 pager gear motor with a wheel at a special price?
Solarbotics at RoboMaxx, Robothon
We're making the trip out to Robomaxx in Grants Pass, Oregon October 11-12. Gonna be there? Hunt down the dude in the cowboy hat wearing the "Solarbotics" Shirt. That'll be me. Maybe I'll have samples of our gearmotors burning a hole in my pocket. If it isn't me, tell him to give back my hat […]
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Warning: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.
Please visit www.P65Warnings.ca.gov for more information. This item was manufactured prior to August 31, 2018.