April 1, 2000
LinEP proudly announces that Mars Polar Lander is successfully revived. “The first signal we received from the craft was extremely week,” says LinEP spokesman. “After four months on the surface of the red planet, the batteries were dangerously low. We had only few minutes to realign the antennas and solar panels. LinEP engineers were up to the challenge. With the communication antennas pointed to the Earth and batteries being recharged Mars Polar Lander is under our full control. The early tests indicate that most lander’s systems and science instruments are in a good shape.”
LinEP issues an urgent appeal to Universities and scientific laboratories whose gauges and meters are installed on Mars Polar Lander to immediately contact LinEP. The craft has a limited life span. Every hour counts.
LinEP also appeals to the Linux open source community for help with writing drivers for the craft’s scientific devices. LinEP programmers have written the drivers for the lander’s main communication and control system, and two scientific devices. More drivers are needed.
One of the devices under LinEP control is Mars Microphone. It successfully passed functionality tests and will be switched on at 6 p.m. PST on Saturday, April 1, provided the batteries are sufficiently recharged by then. The transmission will last for about three minutes and will be available as live webcast at LinEP website (http://linep.homepage.com/microphone.html).
“We discovered that NASA was unable to establish communication with the lander because of fatal crash of the on-board computer’s operating system. Only wiping out flawed OS and loading Linux kernel revived the computer,” says LinEP spokesman.
The other key to success was LinEP ingenious use of Russian terrestrial antennas. These antennas and phased antenna arrays have been recently declassified and transferred to civilian control. They appeared to be superior to those at NASA’s disposal. LinEP expresses its gratitude to the local personnel who, despite clear danger of retribution from Russian authorities, provided LinEP with access to these marvels of modern technology. (For obvious reasons, LinEP withholds detailed information about antennas it uses.)
A similar tactic of replacing inferior operating system with a stripped down and specially adapted version of Linux allowed LinEP to take control of 13 Iridium communication satellites.
“This new approach is broad and general, and will no doubt be used many times in the future, by LinEP and others,” says LinEP spokesman. “Only our distaste of business methods patents as a class, and recent pioneering hack of Netpliance’s i-Opener by Ken Segler stopped us from applying for a US patent.”
With mounting costs and a small subscriber base, Iridium declared bankruptcy in August of 1999. Unable to raise new funds, Iridium asked the bankruptcy court to approve a plan that would crash the Iridium satellites into the atmosphere and let them burn up. There exist alternative plans. S.O.S. / Save Our Satellites (http://www.saveiridium.com), a “group of concerned individuals”, plans to acquire the Iridium Network and open it to everybody.
LinEP took on Save Our Satellites’ “Hack Iridium” challenge, and succeeded. Now, SOS and the entire open source community need not to come to the courts, feds and Iridium board as beggars. With 13 satellites firm under LinEP’s control, LinEP and open source community can negotiate with the other side as an equal partner.
LinEP expresses its apologies to the open source community for not immediately publishing the source code of its hack that allows the group to upload Linux kernel onto a variety of civilian and military computers and microcontrollers. (The source code of various specific device drivers will be shortly available from LinEP web site.)
About LinEP. LinEP (“Linux in Every Pot”) is a recently formed international group of progressive hackers dedicated to improving life standards of people everywhere through upgrading computer software that controls a wide variety of devices, apparata and vehicles, from “smart” microwave ovens, to network appliances, to battleships, to airplanes, to satellites.
