The Pluto Switch: Mystery Google Device Appears in Small-Town Iowa

By Cade Metz | Wired.com


Photos of the mystery computing device appeared on the web in late February. Taken with a smartphone, they were a bit washed out and a little blurry in places, but you could easily read the name printed on the long, thin piece of hardware. Pluto Switch, the label said.


The images were posted by two men who said the device had unexpectedly turned up at a branch office in the tiny farmland town of Shelby, Iowa population: 641 and they were hoping someone could tell them what it was.


A closeup of the Pluto Switch, a mystery hardware device that landed on the edge of Iowa this past winter.


Clearly, these two men were familiar with the ins and outs of computer networking, and clearly, this was a networking switch, a way of shuttling data between machines. But theyd never heard of the Pluto Switch, and it was littered with networking ports theyd never seen before. Any ideas? they asked. The writing on the back is Finnish.


According to posts they made to an obscure web discussion forum dedicated to networking hardware networking-forum.com they couldnt actually get the thing to work. But they turned up a few clues indicating who the device belonged to, and eventually, after putting two and two together, they said theyd located the owner and sent the switch back.


It belonged, they said, to Google.


At first, Google didnt respond to their phone calls, the men said, and when it did, it wouldnt 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 wouldnt tell me what the connector type was so thats still a mystery, one of the men told the forum. The engineer was cool and is going to send us some shirts the public cant buy.


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Read the full article at: wired.com


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