EP 12 | Hillbilly hacker on junk hacking and the right to repair with Travis Goodspeed

Travis Goodspeed has a unique relationship with “stuff.” A renowned “hillbilly hacker” from Tennessee, Travis is a reverse engineer and device hacker without peer. He’s best known as an outspoken advocate of “junk hacking” - the practice of probing low end, low stakes devices like children’s toys and consumer as a way to understand more complex, higher stakes technology - from enterprise systems to critical infrastructure.

But taking stuff apart is just one of Travis’s passions. He’s equally famous for the stuff he’s created. His Github projects have spawned hundreds of forks and include the GoodWatch, a modification of a Casio calculator watch that Travis re-engineered to transmit and receive radio signals; Goodfet, an embedded bus adapter for microcontrollers and radios; as well as the Tytera MD-380: a low cost DMR radio that he reverse engineered to run custom firmware.

Not surprisingly: Travis is a passionate believer in the right to repair, which he describes as a kind of “natural right” that individuals should exercise, regardless of legal and commercial impediments. But his deep experience exploring the innards of connected devices and years spent navigating around the shoals of copyright and computer hacking laws have given Travis a nuanced take on our ability to exercise that natural right to repair.

In this conversation, Travis talks to Paul about growing up in east Tennessee, in and around Dollywood, where his mother worked as a stained glass master craftswoman for two decades. We also talk about his unique take on the right to repair, and the growing legions of stuff that populates our world - one informed by a deep understanding of the common hardware and software hiding beneath the sleek exteriors of connected devices.