Anything they want to. Hacking is not limited to a single discipline, but to an ideal of discipline. They strive for things ranging from brilliance to “just making it work” with what they have. They tend to bend or break set rules when they do this, or stay inside the lines, depending on what needs to be done. The hacking ideal states that there are no such things as “no-win” scenarios; it is about ingenuity, cunning, knowledge, experience, and – sometimes – just a little dash of audacity.

If you want to learn about what hackers do, just keep poking around the site. You’ll get it eventually.

A research team at MIT has developed a way to derive a unique chip ID from the inherent variances in manufacturing. Essentially, they measure the amount of time a signal takes to propagate through a series of multiplexers. The evil genius of this scheme is that any attempts to probe the chip while it’s computing the ID will change the physical properties of the chip, and thus change the unique ID!

You can listen to or watch the talk here: http://norfolk.cs.washington.edu/htbin-post/unrestricted/colloq/details.cgi?id=385

Yikes.

Sending a PIC away to MEFAS and messing with the internal parts is definitely a lazy-afternoon-grade project. :P