Hack a Day » engineering

Recon 2008 recap

Juan Aguilar — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 03:50:00 +0000

[Tiller Beauchamp] gave a presentation on applied reverse engineering in OS X at this year’s REcon, but he also attended many of the other talks and gives his take on the highlights of REcon 2008 in a guest post on the ZDNet blog, Zero Day.

One of the highlights for him was Neohapsis’s [Chris Smith] discussing virtual machines implementing code obfuscation. The method uses custom instructions and runtime interpreter, which can help make the task of reverse engineering markedly more difficult if implemented properly.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, [Beauchamp] noted [Gerardo Richarte]‘s software reverse engineering tools that decompile and recompile software in iterative portions. This allows the recompiled software to be tested piece by piece. Be sure to read his post and see what you missed.

Accelerometer mouse from scratch

Will O'Brien — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:51:00 +0000

[Mahavir] sent in his group’s final project for the College of Engineering in Pune (it’s over here). They built an accelerometer based Bluetooth mouse. They ended up creating a mouse that maps rotational movements to x/y motion. From the video movement, it strikes us as responding the same way that touch pointer mice do. You can hit the demo video after the break or get more details from the project page. Even if you’re not into the mouse idea, you can probably learn something from their Bluetooth implementation.

The world’s spookiest weapons

Eliot — Fri, 16 May 2008 02:30:00 +0000

As purveyors of a fine hacks, we often get pitched on what are generally considered very bad ideas. Luckily, most of these ideas die on the drawing board due to a lack of time and energy or maybe having a shred of moral accountability. There’s nothing that government funding can’t fix though. Popular Science has put together a gallery of The World’s Spookiest Weapons. It’s a who’s who of real and speculative engineering that could lead to our eventual destruction. Opening with the atomic bomb, it moves quickly into more bizarre territory, everything from heat rays, to rail guns, to gassing people with elephant tranquilizers. Our personal favorite is The Rods from God. Imagine getting smote by a precisely targeted metal power pole dropped from space that has accelerated to 36,000 feet per second thanks solely to gravity. What a wondrous world we live in.

[via Acidus]