Mystery Google Device Appears in Small-Town Iowa

I know tech companies like to protect their products and ideas, but is it normal to "scrub" the usernames of the guys who found this item, labeled "Pluto Switch"?

"At first, Google didn’t respond to their phone calls, the men said, and when it did, it wouldn’t explain the switch. But apparently, the company offered a reward for its return. “Finally got a hold of a Google network engineer, so the switches are heading home. He wouldn’t tell me what the connector type was so that’s still a mystery,” one of the men told the forum. “The engineer was cool and is going to send us some shirts the public can’t buy.”
www.wired.com...

all they got was t-shirts??....maybe samsung, or sony, or ibm, or cisco, or microsoft...would have paid big money for it...boy, one opportunity for some easy cash and they blew it. you don't think these companies would be ruthless enough to do that?? guess again.

google asks them to remove posts and delete threads for only God knows what reason and the spineless website owners are o.k. sure.

those kind of people are where they are for a reason.

you think if they asked google to remove something from their servers they'd to it.

they should have took that chip and started shopping it around to china, ibm, microsoft and cash in.

especially when they ignored you for weeks.

Originally posted by jimmyx
all they got was t-shirts??....maybe samsung, or sony, or ibm, or cisco, or microsoft...would have paid big money for it...boy, one opportunity for some easy cash and they blew it. you don't think these companies would be ruthless enough to do that?? guess again.

edit on 10-9-2012 by jimmyx because: spell

That would be immoral. (I would never have thought of doing such a thing.)

Very interesting. Cool find, buddy.

My guess would go with the possibility of the hardware been a product which is in testing or tryout stages. Maybe even a secret patented device which allows Google do have control over things we can only imagine, who knows! Very interesting.

If I'd of found it, I would of wanted to know wtf it was before I gave a back to anybody, especially Google...

S&F

I'm thinking the person quoted about the t-shirts was being glib. I would imagine there were nondisclosure agreements. But scrubbing their usernames? Sounds like they wanted to erase any trails that could lead anyone to these guys.

Red. Yellow. Blue. Black was 3 phase wiring in the UK up till 2006 so at least the power supply is dated.
The article was written for wired magazine so I'm not sure where they expect us to go with it.
With the large volume of traffic they get through the UK wouldn't a Saturn style optical switch be more efficient?

What confuses me is what they're calling a mystery....how did the package get to the wrong address? They say: delivered to wrong address by carrier. Ok... Whomever sent the package did they put a Person or Companies name on the package? Did they also put an address or re- turn address on the package? If not...did the carrier just guess whom the package belonged too?

If (whomever) did in fact put a name and address on the package why would another company whose name and address aren't on the package open it? Isn't normal protocol to mark the package ... Wrong address?

So, if the name and address did not belong to the person or persons receiving the package and they did open it...and not only did they open it but they took pictures of it and tried to figure out how it worked, wouldn't that be a federal offense? Tampering w/ mail?

I read the article 2x's and did not find anywhere how the package was sent... Did I miss the elementary? The 2 + 2? The smoking gun? It's almost as if someone wanted this scandal....something about the whole thing is perplexing....

The OP writes this..." "At first, Google didn’t respond to their phone calls, the men said, and when it did, it wouldn’t explain the switch. "

Why would google sit w/ these two guys and explain anything to them? As if they thought google owed them? Everything about this story stinks...

Originally posted by tracehd1
What confuses me is what they're calling a mystery....how did the package get to the wrong address? They say: delivered to wrong address by carrier. Ok... Whomever sent the package did they put a Person or Companies name on the package? Did they also put an address or re- turn address on the package? If not...did the carrier just guess whom the package belonged too?

If (whomever) did in fact put a name and address on the package why would another company whose name and address aren't on the package open it? Isn't normal protocol to mark the package ... Wrong address?

So, if the name and address did not belong to the person or persons receiving the package and they did open it...and not only did they open it but they took pictures of it and tried to figure out how it worked, wouldn't that be a federal offense? Tampering w/ mail?

I read the article 2x's and did not find anywhere how the package was sent... Did I miss the elementary? The 2 + 2? The smoking gun? It's almost as if someone wanted this scandal....something about the whole thing is perplexing....

I bet Google would hire you for their legal team, I would!

Originally posted by tanda7

Originally posted by tracehd1
What confuses me is what they're calling a mystery....how did the package get to the wrong address? They say: delivered to wrong address by carrier. Ok... Whomever sent the package did they put a Person or Companies name on the package? Did they also put an address or re- turn address on the package? If not...did the carrier just guess whom the package belonged too?

If (whomever) did in fact put a name and address on the package why would another company whose name and address aren't on the package open it? Isn't normal protocol to mark the package ... Wrong address?

So, if the name and address did not belong to the person or persons receiving the package and they did open it...and not only did they open it but they took pictures of it and tried to figure out how it worked, wouldn't that be a federal offense? Tampering w/ mail?

I read the article 2x's and did not find anywhere how the package was sent... Did I miss the elementary? The 2 + 2? The smoking gun? It's almost as if someone wanted this scandal....something about the whole thing is perplexing....

I bet Google would hire you for their legal team, I would!

edit on 10-9-2012 by tanda7 because: (no reason given)

Hahahaha awwwwww Ty....!!! I'm going to be sooooooo Embarressed if the answers there and I'm missing it....lol

en.wikipedia.org...

In my opinion.

The ports on the left look similar to HDMI port, If that's the case we may be getting a look at the next networking standard. HDMI maxes out at about 10 Gigabits per second. The top row is an add on card hopefully making it backwards compatible with existing network hardware.

reply to post by cavalryscout


Corporations are not people, they have no morals. They have only PR and legal considerations, that are passed trough a cost/benefit evaluation...

If no directly ownership was apparent over the device then the process is open, you can even keep it but the norm is to declare a lost and found and deliver it to the authorities. If the item is then not claimed or a verifiable owner found you normally get to keep it (if this is declared on your report of the finding).

Originally posted by randomname
google asks them to remove posts and delete threads for only God knows what reason and the spineless website owners are o.k. sure.

those kind of people are where they are for a reason.

you think if they asked google to remove something from their servers they'd to it.

they should have took that chip and started shopping it around to china, ibm, microsoft and cash in.

especially when they ignored you for weeks.

it's actually pretty easy to tell the google crawler to NOT crawl your website (removing it from their "servers")

< meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" / with a > at the end

bam, no more google bots.

Originally posted by Panic2k11
reply to post by cavalryscout

 

Corporations are not people, they have no morals. They have only PR and legal considerations, that are passed trough a cost/benefit evaluation...

If no directly ownership was apparent over the device then the process is open, you can even keep it but the norm is to declare a lost and found and deliver it to the authorities. If the item is then not claimed or a verifiable owner found you normally get to keep it (if this is declared on your report of the finding).

edit on 10-9-2012 by Panic2k11 because: (no reason given)

I'm pretty sure cavalryscout is being sarcastic, thus the "wink"
But you are right, Corp.s are not people, but you may know that legally (in most cases) they are people.

Originally posted by randomname
google asks them to remove posts and delete threads for only God knows what reason and the spineless website owners are o.k. sure.

those kind of people are where they are for a reason.

you think if they asked google to remove something from their servers they'd to it.

they should have took that chip and started shopping it around to china, ibm, microsoft and cash in.

especially when they ignored you for weeks.

I find it very interesting that everyone is being so tight lipped about it. At least in this article no one is willing to connect Google to this specific switch.

The forum administrator says the OP(s) requested the thread be removed, not Google. Also, the company who supposedly employed them deny any knowledge of them. Plus if Cauliflower is correct, then by tech standards this would be older hardware.

Is it possible this was an elaborate troll? If not it sure says a lot about Google's influence/tactics.

I just read the thread in question and on the second page, the op says "Looks like it's part of a project called Project Watchtower". ?? That sounds intriguing.
My first wave of searches haven't turned up anything that seems to fit.. I would love to know what Project Watchtower is. It's also interesting how no one on that forum questioned him about it.
Guess they don't have conspiracy radar over there.

Nothing mysterious about the hardware itself. It's a gateway switch made in Scandinavia (Sweden of Finland quite likely) by the ABB group. They're used in a lot of different devices and hardware to control the devices and the data flow. For simple safety switches to turn them on or off or to redirect the data to other devices (be it another router or a storage device.. go figure, Big Brother..)..

expo21xx.com...
www.abb.fi...

What comes to Google's reaction, it's hard to say. Either they had something to hide or just were busy dealing with something actually important. In theory with Google's custom rom it can as well redirect all the data from the city(town?) and connected area to NSA data mining centers as to just speed up the network traffic of standard google services, like search engine, youtube etc..

As long as they're not telling, it's all just useless speculation.

Most likely just a standard switch of sorts.....what they were probably worried about was the code and programming on the switch. If it was sent unsecured it could have been plugged in by anyone with the know how and used for any number of purposes or could have included any number of possible security issues if it had internal network programming already on in. They could probably care less about the hardware.

Originally posted by Vasa Croe
Most likely just a standard switch of sorts.....what they were probably worried about was the code and programming on the switch. If it was sent unsecured it could have been plugged in by anyone with the know how and used for any number of purposes or could have included any number of possible security issues if it had internal network programming already on in. They could probably care less about the hardware.

That sounds right. In this thread; www.networking-forum.com...,
most of the post are about accessing the code. At first they are having trouble, then finally some success. Way too technical for me, but they post what they found. If it is true Google ignored them at first, then finally asked for it back, it could be because they finally cracked it.

But I still want to know what Project Watchtower is!!!

Mods,
I hope I'm not breaking any rules by linking to another forum. If so please delete.

reply to post by tanda7


I do not understand why the American people that are in all aspects enslaved by corporations do not start to make this a talking point. I think this is the cornerstone of all other issues more important than the FED gold issue, lobbying etc...

Addressing that point alone would result in a larger ripple effect that would address also many of the other issues...

Originally posted by Panic2k11
reply to post by tanda7

 

I do not understand why the American people that are in all aspects enslaved by corporations do not start to make this a talking point. I think this is the cornerstone of all other issues more important than the FED gold issue, lobbying etc...

Addressing that point alone would result in a larger ripple effect that would address also many of the other issues...

I agree with you, occasionally you hear some noise about the issue, but not as much as I would have thought. From what I hear, the law was attached to another law that gave blacks the right to vote. Sneaky.

If I remember correctly the law states the board must protect the corporation above itself. The duty of the board of a corporation is to serve the corporation above all other concerns. Something like that.

As far as ownership of the item, I remember a public service tv spot that stated "if it arrives in your mail box, it's yours". Don't know if this is still the case, the public service spot was during the Carter administration.
I have no idea if this would even apply to deliveries made by private carriers.