Screw this light bulb in and it serves banned books

Connect to an open WiFi network, and a captive portal opens a shelf of banned ebooks. The access point is a smart light bulb. Rick Osgood reflashed the ESP32 chip inside with custom firmware, rewrote the partition table to carve out 2MB of the 4MB flash for storage, and built a web server that runs entirely off the bulb's power.

"At first this was disappointing but now I actually have grown to like the idea that you are limited on what books you can choose," he writes. "Each dead drop will be representative of the person who created it." The firmware erases stored Wi-Fi credentials, so you can leave the bulb in a public socket without exposing your home network password. The project is open source on Codeberg.

Previously:

• Discarded smart lightbulbs reveal your wifi passwords, stored in the clear
• A lightbulb worm could take over every smart light in a city in minutes