Real World Computing
Hacking the world
To this end, there are several simple programs out there, which can link Nagios on other systems to a Nabaztag. And obviously making a Nabaztag talk about network events needn't stop there - it could, for example, announce other events, such as noticing people logging onto certain websites or entering a building. However, such a facility is open to abuse, and could easily become a barrier to people actually doing certain things. Imagine linking every activity that could result in a mistake to a Nabaztag - say, every time the database administration ran a query and got it wrong the Nabaztag announces the fact. I'm sure that at that point the local DBA would stop running queries altogether, rather than making them write better queries.
The fact there are real products out there that use open-source software in places where proprietary software had always been used is a tribute to the quality of modern open source. Obviously, it takes a brave manufacturer to produce a product that other people can modify, but so far no-one appears to have suffered from doing this. In the case of Linksys, it has managed to sell a more expensive version of an existing product, that takes advantage of the fact that some people actually want to run customised versions of the device. Opening their device up to others seems to have done no harm to Buffalo, Garmin, Nabaztag or anyone else we know.
