Sometimes those moments arise when a new device comes on the market and hardware hackers immediately take to it. Over a few days, an observer can watch them reverse engineer it and have all sorts of fun making it do things it wasn’t intended to by the original manufacturer. We’re watching this happen in real time from afar this morning, as Dutch hackers are snapping up a promotional kids’ game from a supermarket (mixed Dutch/English, the site rejects Google Translate).
The Albert Heijn soundbox is a small handheld device with a barcode reader and a speaker, and as far as we can see it forms part of an animal identification card game. The cards have a barcode on the back, and sliding them through a reader causes a sample of that animal’s sound to be played. They’re attractively cheap, so of course someone had to take a look inside. So far the parts including the microcontroller have been identified, the ROM has been dumped and the audio reverse-engineered, and the barcode format has been cracked. Still to come are the insertion of custom audio or codes and arbitrary code execution, but knowing these hackers that won’t take long. If you’re Dutch, we suggest you head over to your local Albert Heijn with a few euros, and join in the fun.
European supermarkets can be fruitful places for the hardware hacker, as we’ve shown you before.
“you can translate it under firefox: select some text , right-mouse-btn [Translate selection in English], then on the translation box translate full page”
Doesn’t work in my Firefox for whatever reason. I just highlighted the text, copied it, and pasted it into Google Translate on another tab.
I also have FIrefox and I have TWP – Translate Web Page. It worked on the linked web site.
@xChris said: “…you can translate it under firefox: select some text , right-mouse-btn [Translate selection in English], then on the translation box translate full page.”
Works perfect. I didn’t know Firefox could do that – until now – thanks to you :-)
Works in my Firefox 130.0 (64-bit).
As I don’t have a Xwitter account, the link to the “teardown” did me no good.
Ofc, it would be a bit tough to get one (or more) here in the USA.
I did a teardown as well of this cute Albert Heijn soundbox since I wanted to get it controlled by an Arduino R4. You can view the results of the teardown overhere:
https://botberg.eu/electronica/ah-dierenkaartjes-barcodes-ontcijferd-en-tot-leven-gewekt-met-arduino-r4-wifi-en-reverse-engineering/
I went the page at your link above, my Firefox 130.0 (64-bit) immediately produced a drop-down box offering to translate the page automatically from Dutch to English, I let it do the translation and it came out really well. It seems the auto-translate is new in Firefox as a Beta add-in function. I’m somewhat impressed – but now how do I turn the auto-translate on and off? OK – I clicked the translate gear icon in the right of the address bar and all the control options appeared. Here is the Firefox Translate “About” page:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/website-translation
Here’s an interesting Firefox Translate fact… Note: Unlike other browsers that rely on cloud services, Firefox keeps your data safe on your device. There’s no privacy risk of sending text to third parties for analysis because translation happens on your device, not externally.
And just yesterday I translated the comments in a C source code file by dumping the whole file into some online translator that refused to do more then 100 or so lines at a time (only one out of 10 lines were German comments). But still it was nice It just ignored the bulk of the source code and only translated the comments. All together the translation and cleanup afterwards took about an hour. Translation tools are getting better and getting easier to access. About a year ago I had to install a plugin in firefox for online translations.
Not having an account and the posts being gated, and simply refusing to click Twitter links are not the same.
No account and i could see everything
I did click on the link, and it took me to the Xwitter page, but it remained “static”, i.e. nothing else happened when clicking within the link.
It seems I was able to ignore these things very well, as I’ve visited the AH multiple times while the project was live, but I totally ignored it. I’ve just pulled the dump from the Revspace forum, and it’s quite nice content. I suspect it wouldn’t take much to fill the memory with Dutch hacker culture ‘snippets’.
It reminds me of the time when Littlest Pet Shop figurines had circular barcodes to use in their app… Of course someone had to crack them, just out of curiosity!