Day: May 30, 2025

This Week In Security: CIA Star Wars, Git* Prompt Injection And More

May 30, 2025 by 3 Comments

The CIA ran a series of web sites in the 2000s. Most of them were about news, finance, and other relatively boring topics, and they spanned 29 languages. And they all had a bit of a hidden feature: Those normal-looking websites had a secret login and hosted CIA cover communications with assets in foreign countries. A password typed in to a search field on each site would trigger a Java Applet or Flash application, allowing the spy to report back. This isn’t exactly breaking news, but what’s captured the Internet’s imagination this week is the report by [Ciro Santilli] about how to find those sites, and the fact that a Star Wars fansite was part of the network.

This particular CIA tool was intended for short-term use, and was apparently so effective, it was dragged way beyond it’s intended lifespan, right up to the point it was discovered and started getting people killed. And in retrospect, the tradecraft is abysmal. The sites were hosted on a small handful of IP blocks, with the individual domains hosted on sequential IP addresses. Once one foreign intelligence agency discovered one of these sites, the rest were fairly easily identified.
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3D Filament lizards show decomposable joints

Sustainable 3D Prints With Decomposable Filaments

May 30, 2025 by 24 Comments

What if you could design your 3D print to fall apart on purpose? That’s the curious promise of a new paper from CHI 2025, which brings a serious hacker vibe to the sustainability problem of multi-material 3D printing. Titled Enabling Recycling of Multi-Material 3D Printed Objects through Computational Design and Disassembly by Dissolution, it proposes a technique that lets complex prints disassemble themselves via water-soluble seams. Just a bit of H2O is needed, no drills or pliers.

At its core, this method builds dissolvable interfaces between materials like PLA and TPU using water-soluble PVA. Their algorithm auto-generates jointed seams (think shrink-wrap meets mushroom pegs) that don’t interfere with the part’s function. Once printed, the object behaves like any ordinary 3D creation. But at end-of-life, a water bath breaks it down into clean, separable materials, ready for recycling. That gives 90% material recovery, and over 50% reduction in carbon emissions.

This is the research – call it a very, very well documented hack – we need more of. It’s climate-conscious and machine-savvy. If you’re into computational fabrication or environmental tinkering, it’s worth your time. Hats off to [Wen, Bae, and Rivera] for turning what might otherwise be considered a failure into a feature.

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Today In Edinburgh: The Open Hardware Summit

May 30, 2025 by 9 Comments

Just a quickie for anyone who is in the neighborhood, today the Open Source Hardware Association’s annual Open Hardware Summit conference starts in Edinburgh, Scotland. If you’re able to make it, it’s a microcosm of the open-source hardware world, and full of great talks and great hackers.

If you’re not in Scotland, they have a livestream on YouTube that you should check out, as well as a Discord server for discussions during the event.  It’s going on right now!

 

What Does Linux Need? A Dial!

May 30, 2025 by 11 Comments

It’s fair to say that there can’t be many developers who have found the need for a rotary telephone dial as a peripheral for their Linux computer, but in case you are among them you might find [Stefan Wiehler]’s kernel driver for rotary dials to be of use.

It’s aimed at platforms such as systems-on-chip that have ready access to extra GPIOs, of which it will need a couple to service the BUSY and PULSE lines. There are full set-up instructions, and once it’s in place and configured it presents the dial as though it were a number pad.

We like this project, in fact we like it a lot. Interfacing with a dial is always something we’ve done with a microcontroller though, so it will be interesting to see whether it finds a use beyond merely curiosity. We can already see a generation of old-school dial IP phones using Linux-capable dev boards. He leaves us with a brief not as to whether Linus Torvalds would see it as worthy of mainline inclusion, and sadly however much we want things to be different, we agree that it might be wishful thinking.

If you’d like to use a dial phone, there can be simpler ways to do it.

Header: Billy Brown, CC BY 2.0 .