Have you ever wanted to ability to see through objects? Perhaps you have been looking for something special for your own personal TSA role playing adventures? Well, [Jeri Ellsworth] has your back. She has managed to cobble together her own millimeter centimeter wave scanner using a hacked set of Feed Horns (like from a satellite dish) to create the image. By reversing the power transistor on one of the Feed Horns, one of the horns is made into a transmitter, while one of the other horns stays as a receiver. This data is then fed into a FPGA by way of an A2D converter, where an image is assembled when the scanner is moved over a surface. X and Y axis tracking is handled by an optical mouse also controlled by the FPGA, and the whole setup is output to a monitor.

Right now there is no text write up, or any specific details as the hack will vary by whatever Feed Horn is available. However, the video does a great job of explaining some of the electrical concepts, as well as some very useful schematics. Be sure to watch the whole video after the break, and don’t blame us for any health complications, whether the radiation is ionizing or not.

Take a few moments and browse this gallery from the Library of Congress. Tasked with the job of preserving the roughly 150 million historical items, they are constantly developing new methods using bleeding edge technology. There is an odd balance of some of the oldest documents in tandem with some of the newest technology evident in these pictures. From doing spectral scans of ancient books to laser mapping warped phonographs, everything must be preserved and documented.

This method of book digitization allows you to scan an entire book by fanning through the pages. It uses a high-speed camera that captures 500 frames per second to get a good look at each page. Processing software isolates each pages, analyzes any curve in the paper due to the flipping, and smooths out the image for better optical character recognition results. The greatly reduces the time it takes to digitize a book, even compared to setups that automatically flip pages.

[Thanks Erico]

Have you ever felt like you needed a portable barcode scanner around the house? No? Well, [Mkanoap] did, so he made one. He has hooked his CueCat up to his Arduino to capture barcode data and store it on an SD card. He is using it as an inventory tool for his personal library. Where before he had to carry a laptop around to do his scanning, or lug the books to his desk, he now just scans wherever he pleases.

You may notice some silly sounds dubbed over the video. Take note, these are the actual sounds it plays. The camera didn’t pick them up well enough, so he dubbed them in. You wouldn’t want to miss out on the entire experience would you?

[Patrick] directed us to his project for alternate realism. The final goal is to be able to walk around in a space wearing a head mounted display, exploring a virtual representation of that space. This virtual representation could be altered, stylized, augmented and modified in countless ways. It is an exploration in perception, similar to enjoying different styles of painting, we could enjoy different styles of viewing a real space. Currently, it isn’t quite real time. He has to scan a room with a somewhat bulky device, then plug into his display to explore it. Being able to scan quickly and reliably enough shouldn’t be far off. [Patrick] notes that others have done almost real time scans at home already.

With all the noise about Conficker turning your computer into liquid hot magma on April 1st, there’s actually some positive news. Researchers from the HoneyNet Project have been following the worm since infections started in late 2008. They recently discovered an easy way to identify infected systems remotely. Conficker attempts to patch the MS08-067 vulnerability during infection. A flaw in the patch causes the machine to respond differently than both an unpatched system and an officially patched system. Using this knowledge, the team developed a proof of concept network scanner in python to find infected machines. You can find it in [Rich Mogull]‘s initial post. [Dan Kaminisky] has packaged it as an EXE and has instructions for how to build the SVN version of Nmap, which includes the new signature. Other network scanner vendors are adding the code as well.

In conjunction with this detection code, the team has also released the whitepaper Know Your Enemy: Containing Conficker. It discusses ways to detect, contain, and remove Conficker. They’ve combined this with a tool release that covers Conficker’s dynamic domain generation among other things.

Midnight Research Labs has just published a new tool. Depant will scan your network and check to see if services are using default passwords. It starts by performing an Nmap scan to discover available services on the network. It organizes these services by speed of response. Using Hydra it does brute force password checking of these services with a default password list. The user can supply an alternate list for the first phase or an additional list to be used in a followup check. Depant has many different options for configuring your scan and will certainly help you find that rogue piece of hardware on your network that someone failed to set up securely.

The system, known as Geometric Informatics and Velodyne Lidar, scanned the entire environment 900 times a minute to capture an entire party in real time.

The video was originally set to be released in mid July, but appears to have been moved back.