Day: August 21, 2020

Hand-Stitched Keycaps For Truly Luxurious Typing

August 21, 2020 by 15 Comments

We’ve seen some very unique custom keycaps recently, but nothing quite like the embroidered ones that [Billie Ruben] has been experimenting with. Using a clever 3D printed design, she’s crafted what could well be one of the most easily customizable keycaps ever made…assuming you’ve got a needle and thread handy.

The idea is to take a standard keycap blank and pop an array of 25 holes in the face. Your thread or yarn is run through these holes, allowing you to create whatever shape you wish within the 5 x 5 matrix. While it’s somewhat tight quarters on the underside of the cap, nothing prevents you from using multiple colors or even materials to do your stitching. As an added bonus, the soft threads should provide a very comfortable and particularly tactile surface to tap on.

Now the most obvious application is to simply stitch up versions of all the alphanumeric keys, but there’s clearly room for some interpretation here. [Billie] has already shown off some simple iconography like a red heart and we’re sure creative folks will have no trouble coming up with all sorts of interesting needlepoint creations to top their prized mechanical keyboards.

The intricate details necessary to make this idea work may be beyond the common desktop FDM 3D printer, so [Billie] ran these prototypes off on a resin printer (she attributes the visible layer lines to a hasty print). She’d love to hear feedback from other keyboard aficionados who’ve made the leap to liquid goo printing, so be sure to drop her a line if you print out a set of your own. It sounds like a new version is in the works which will provide a false bottom to cover the stitching from below, but functionally these should get you started.

This Week In Security: Bluetooth Hacking, NEC Phones, And Malicious Tor Nodes

August 21, 2020 by 4 Comments

One of the fun things about vulnerability research is that there are so many places for bugs to hide. Modern devices have multiple processors, bits of radio hardware, and millions of lines of code. When [Veronica Kovah] of Dark Mentor LLC decided to start vulnerability research on the Bluetooth Low Energy protocol, she opted to target the link layer itself, rather than the code stack running as part of the main OS. What’s interesting is that the link layer has to process data before any authentication is performed, so if a vulnerability is found here, it’s guaranteed to be pre-authentication. Also of interest, many different devices are likely to share the same BLE chipset, meaning these vulnerabilities will show up on many different devices. [Veronica] shares some great info on how to get started, as well as the details on the vulnerabilities she found, in the PDF whitepaper. (Just a quick note, this link isn’t to the raw PDF, but pulls up a GitHub PDF viewer.) There is also a video presentation of the findings, if that’s more your speed.

The first vuln we’ll look at is CVE-2019-15948, which affects a handful of Texas Instruments BT/BLE chips. The problem is in how BLE advertisement packets are handled. An advertisement packet should always contain a data length of at least six bytes, which is reserved for the sending device address. Part of the packet parsing process is to subtract six from the packet length and do a memcpy using that value as the length. A malicious packet can have a length of less than six, and the result is that the copy length integer underflows, becoming a large value, and overwriting the current stack. To actually turn this into an exploit, a pair of data packets are sent repeatedly, to put malicious code in the place where program execution will jump to.

The second vulnerability of note, CVE-2020-15531 targets a Silicon Labs BLE chip, and uses malformed extended advertisement packets to trigger a buffer overflow. Specifically, the sent message is longer than the specification says it should be. Rather than drop this malformed message, the chip’s firmware processes it, which triggers a buffer overflow. Going a step further, this chip has non-volatile firmware, and it’s possible to modify that firmware permanently. [Veronica] points out that even embedded chips like these should have some sort of secure boot implementation, to prevent these sort of persistent attacks.
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GTA V Mod Shows (And Cheats) Those Stunt Jump Hoops

August 21, 2020 by No comments

While the recent announcement of Grand Theft Auto V for the upcoming next-generation game consoles was a disappointment for those fervently waiting for a successor in the infamous video game series, it shows that after almost seven years of its initial release, the epic title is still going strong — and rightfully so. But a game as varied and complex as GTA V isn’t without some quirks, especially if you’re going for 100% completeness.

The stunt jumps seem a particular pesky nut to crack here, so [Anthony Som] made it his mission to shed some light on what qualifies as a successful jump by reverse engineering the system and writing both a mod for displaying the landing zone and a cheat to instant success.

If you’re not familiar with the game, its vast open world map features a variety of side quests, one of them being stunt jumps, where certain locations allow you to launch the vehicle you’re driving into the air in hopes to land on an adjacent road or area — whether to evade the people chasing you, or just for fun. There’s no telling how to actually succeed though, the game just tells you if you did or not afterwards, causing some degree of frustration. As an avid speedrunner (as in finishing a game in the shortest possible time), [Anthony] was looking for a way to increase the success rate for those stunt jumps, and decided to dig into the code to find out how to get there. Of course, being a proprietary game, he had to resort to reverse engineering and utilizing GTA’s vivid modding scene to do so.

His initial outcome was a mod that displays the launch and landing area as rectangles inside the game itself, which was a great help. But well, after already getting that far, [Anthony] figured he might as well continue and add a cheat mode to teleport the car right inside that expected landing area and be done with second-guessing his attempts once and for all.

If you’re curious about modding GTA yourself, his write-up has a few good pointers for that, and of course features some real examples of it. Whether this is a good idea for the self-driving AI that uses GTA as learning environment is probably a different story though.

Transparent OLED Hitting The Market With Xiaomi’s Mi TV LUX Transparent Edition

August 21, 2020 by 46 Comments

One of the major advantages of OLED over LCD panels is that the former can be made using far fewer layers as the pixels themselves are emitting the light instead of manipulating the light from a backlight. This led some to ask the question of whether it’s possible to make an OLED panel that is transparent or at least translucent. As Xiaomi’s new Mi TV LUX OLED Transparent Edition shows, the answer there is a resounding ‘yes’. Better yet, for a low-low price of about $7,200 you can own one of these 55″ marvels.

Transparent OLED technology is not new, of course. Back in 2018 LG was showing off a prototype TV that used one of the early transparent OLED panels. In the video that is embedded after the break, [Linus] from Linus Tech Tips goes hands-on with that LG prototype while at LG in South Korea, while including a number of crucial details from an interview from one of the engineers behind that panel.

As it turns out, merely removing the opaque backing from an OLED panel isn’t enough to make it transparent. In order for an OLED panel to become transparent, the circuitry in the pixel layer and TFT layer need to be aligned as best as possible to allow for many, many tiny holes to be punched through the display.

Looking at [Linus]’s experiences with the LG prototype, it does appear that this kind of technology would be highly suitable for signage purposes, while also allowing for something like an invisible television or display in a room that could be placed in front of a painting or other decoration. Once displaying an image, the screen is bright enough that you can comfortably make out the image. Just don’t put any bright lights behind the TV.

Anyone else anxious waiting for sub-10″ versions of these panels?

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