Day: June 15, 2023

The Simplest Social Engineering Hack Of Them All

June 15, 2023 by 62 Comments

Here at Hackaday we cover news and interesting features for the hacker community, with an emphasis more on the hardware side. Nevertheless we also cover stories from time to time from the broader world of security. These usually involve vulnerabilities discovered through the patient work of software or hardware researchers, and are certainly what we’d call hacking. But what about those information security breaches that aren’t hacks like that at all? What happens when the person being breached simply gives you the information?

I’ve got one, and while it’s Not A Hack, it’s definitely something that we and those outside our community need to talk about. I’m talking about the depressingly common occurrence of organisations who should know better, gifting their letterhead to all and sundry in the form of freely editable Word documents. Continue reading “The Simplest Social Engineering Hack Of Them All” →

Raspberry Pi Pico W Now Supports Bluetooth

June 15, 2023 by 11 Comments

What’s the best kind of upgrade a piece of consumer technology can get? A free one that doesn’t require you to do anything other than accept a new version of the software it’s running.

That’s precisely what every current (and future) owner of the Raspberry Pi Pico W just got with the addition of Bluetooth support to SDK 1.5.1. This is possible because the CYW43439 radio chipset used on the wireless version of the Pi Pico has always had Bluetooth capabilities, they just weren’t officially accessible from the C or MicroPython environments until now. In a corresponding blog post, [Eben Upton] explains that part of the delay was due to difficulties in getting both WiFi and Bluetooth connections to work simultaneously over the three-pin SPI bus that links the two chips on the board.

One thing that struck us as particularly interesting here is the use of BlueKitchen’s BTStack to provide support for both Bluetooth Classic and Low Energy profiles. This library is released under a modified version of the BSD 3-Clause license that otherwise specifically forbids commercial usage. That would be a problem for anyone who wanted to sell a gadget built around the Pico W, so Raspberry Pi Ltd negotiated — and presumably paid for — a special dispensation so commercial use is in the clear.

We should note that technically Bluetooth support was available in a beta state previously, albeit without this new license agreement made with BlueKitchen. Though anyone with a keen eye knew Bluetooth support was coming well before that, our own [Elliot Williams] called it when he first set eyes on the Pi Pico W back in 2022.

Clay Makes For DIY Power Source, Just Add Water

June 15, 2023 by 17 Comments

[Robert Murray] starts out showing us some clay formations that house bees. He couldn’t take any of that clay home, but that’s no problem — clay is plentiful, and apparently, you can make a battery with it. Well, perhaps not really a battery. Adding water to zeolite — a clay often used as a filter material — generates heat, and where there’s heat, there can be electricity.

[Robert] uses a salvaged Peltier device, as you find in small electric refrigerators. These solid-state heat pumps usually convert electricity into a temperature differential, but in this case, it is used as a thermocouple, generating electricity from a temperature difference.

The clay used is a very fine aluminosilicate crystal known as zeolite 13X. Once it comes into contact with plain ordinary water, it immediately starts to boil. It’s a neat experiment, and with the Peltier underneath the metal container holding the clay, enough power is produced to spin a small motor. Of course this won’t power anything large, but on the other hand, plenty of things these days don’t take much power. This technique would work with any exothermic reaction of course, but there’s something compelling about the shelf-stability of water and clay.

Beats a potato, we suppose. Batteries don’t have to be difficult to make. It is only hard to make really good ones.

Continue reading “Clay Makes For DIY Power Source, Just Add Water” →