How The Xbox Was Hacked

The millennium: a term that few had any use for before 1999, yet seemingly overnight it was everywhere. The turning of the millenium permeated every facet of pop culture. Unconventional popstars like Moby supplied electronica to the mainstream airwaves while audiences contemplated whether computers were the true enemy after seeing The Matrix. We were torn between anxiety — the impending Y2K bug bringing the end of civilization that Prince prophesied — and anticipation: the forthcoming release of the PlayStation 2.

Sony was poised to take control of the videogame console market once again. They had already sold more units of the original PlayStation than all of their competition combined. Their heavy cloud of influence over gamers meant that the next generation of games wasn’t going to start in until the PS2 was on store shelves. On the tail of Sony announcing the technical specs on their machine, rumors of a new competitor entering the “console wars” began to spread. That new competitor was Microsoft, an American company playing in a Japanese company’s game.
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It Might Be Possible To Build A Stingray With A Raspberry Pi

If there’s one thing that’s making you insecure, it’s your smartphone. Your smartphone is constantly pinging the cell towers, giving out your location and potentially leaking your private information to anyone with a radio. This is the idea behind an IMSI catcher, or Stingray in common parlance, and now you too can build one with parts you can buy off of Amazon.

The key to this hack is a software defined radio dongle, or RTL-SDR, that has been repurposed to listen in on a GSM network. Literally the only hardware required is an RTL-SDR that can be bought online for less than fifteen dollars, and you can identify the IMSI, or unique ID linked to every SIM card, in smartphones around you. The only bit of software required is a small Python script from [Oros42], freely available on GitHub.

Of course, building an IMSI catcher with a desktop is of limited utility, and using a laptop is still a bit too bulky to surreptitiously conceal in a public location. No, to really get the bang for your buck out of this, you need to do this with a small single-board computer running off a battery pack. Luckily, [Joseph Cox] over at Motherboard reports, “It is likely possible” to run this on a Raspberry-Pi. We’re guessing it’s even more than “likely” possible.

Flywire Circuits At The Next Level

The technique of assembling circuits without substrate goes by many names; you may know it as flywiring, deadbugging, point to point wiring, or freeform circuits. Sometimes this technique is used for practical purposes like fixing design errors post-production or escaping tiny BGA components (ok, that one might be more cool than practical). Perhaps our favorite use is to create art, and [Mohit Bhoite] is an absolute genius of the form. He’s so prolific that it’s difficult to point to a particular one of his projects as an exemplar, though he has a dusty blog we might recommend digging through [Mohit]’s Twitter feed and marveling at the intricate works of LEDs and precision-bent brass he produces with impressive regularity.

So where to begin? Very recently [Mohit] put together a small wheeled vehicle for persistence of vision drawing (see photo above). We’re pretty excited to see some more photos and videos he takes as this adorable little guy gets some use! Going a little farther back in time there’s this microcontroller-free LED scroller cube which does a great job showing off his usual level of fit and finish (detail here). If you prefer more LEDs there’s also this hexagonal display he whipped up. Or another little creature with seven segment displays for eyes. Got those? That covers (most) of his last month of work. You may be starting to get a sense of the quality and quantity on offer here.

We’ve covered other examples of similar flywired circuits before. Here’s one of [Mohit]’s from a few years ago. And another on an exquisite headphone amp encased in a block of resin. What about a high voltage Nixie clock that’s all exposed? And check out a video of the little persistence of vision ‘bot after the break.

Thanks [Robot] for reminding us that we hadn’t paid enough attention to [Mohit]’s wonderful work!

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