It’s Valentine’s Day today, and what better way to capture your beloved’s heart than by settling down together and listening to the Hackaday Podcast! Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List for this week’s roundup of what’s cool in the world of hardware. We start by reminding listeners that Hackaday Europe is but a month away, and that a weekend immersed in both hardware hacking and the unique culture offered by the city of Berlin can be yours.
The stand-out hack of the week is introduced by Elliot, Henrik Forstén’s synthetic aperture radar system mounted on a cheap quadcopter, pushing the limits of construction, design, and computation to create landscape imagery of astounding detail. Most of us will never create our own SAR system, but we can all learn a lot about this field from his work. Meanwhile Jenny brings us Sylvain Munaut’s software defined radio made using different projects that are part of Tiny Tapeout ASICs. The SDR isn’t the best one ever, but for us it represents a major milestone in which Tiny Tapeout makes the jump from proof of concept to component. We look forward to more of this at more reasonable prices in the future. Beyond that we looked at the porting of Google Find My to the ESP32, how to repair broken zippers, and tuning in to ultrasonic sounds. Have fun listening, and come back next week for episode 309!
We’d love it if you downloaded the MP3.
Episode 308 Show Notes:
News:
What’s that Sound?
- Congrats to [make piece not war] for guessing Olivia – Signal Identification Wiki
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
- Budget-Minded Synthetic Aperture Radar Takes To The Skies
- A Tiny Tapeout SDR
- Google FindMy Tools Run On An ESP32
- Hack That Broken Zipper!
- Hearing What The Bats Hear
- Make Custom Shirts With A 3D Print, Just Add Bleach
Quick Hacks:
- Elliot’s Picks:
- Jenny’s Picks:
5 people getting “What’s that sound” wasn’t the number I expected after last week’s “this is a big hint”…
Not all of our audience are hams, and for those who are , like Jenny said, not everyone is into it for the listening.
Re: google’s “find my device” and apple’s “find my”:
https://events.ccc.de/congress/2024/hub/en/event/escaping-big-brother-or-your-ex-counter-surveillance-for-women-s-shelters/
Brilliant talk by a hacker / security researcher who volunteers at a women’s shelter that helps women escaping abusive relationships.
She draws parallel’s with MITRE ATT&CK® vulnerabilities – chilling but also damning. Google and apple need to do better, current state is costing women their freedom, even lives.
That talk is sobering all over, thanks for posting it. The tag stuff is alongside manipulation by holding the kids, tracking the car, etc. It’s a very good watch, but not an easy one.
The basic premise: Imagine trying to get a black-hat hacker out of your system/life who up until that point was the sysadmin. Who is also a sadist and a conman. And a cosignatory on your bank account. And has bribery material. And…
Her take that the *tag systems were designed without thought is a bit too simple, IMO, though. They were designed with _extreme_ care for privacy / anonymity. But making it hard to track _you_ also makes it hard for me tell if I’m being tracked _by you_, and I really don’t see a way out of that, technical or otherwise.
For instance, if devices had a permanent MAC, you could track every person everywhere — a mass surveillance nightmare. At the other extreme, if the MACs change on each ping, then you can never tell if you’re being monitored, because the monitoring device is totally anonymous. They compromised by having the MACs refresh every so often, and this choice was deliberate. (There are workarounds to this, but the default in the Apple/Google hardware works like that.)
[Elin] of the talk would say that this means that Apple and now Google shouldn’t have rolled out these systems in the first place, and I definitely see her point. I don’t think there is a “do better”. It’s either run the network or don’t. (I could easily be missing something, and I’d be stoked if the system could be improved.)
Anyway, this is the state of play, and talking openly about what the trackers can and can’t do is important. This is vital if you’re either trying to escape an abusive relationship or running a shelter for those who are, but it’s good for the rest of us all too.