This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over the tubes to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week.
In Hackaday news, get your Supercon 2025 tickets while they’re hot! Also, the One Hertz Challenge ticks on, but time is running out. You have until Tuesday, August 19th to show us what you’ve got, so head over to Hackaday.IO and get started now. Finally, its the end of eternal September as AOL discontinues dial-up service after all these years.
On What’s That Sound, Kristina got sort of close, but this is neither horseshoes nor hand grenades. Can you get it? If so, you could win a limited edition Hackaday Podcast t-shirt!
After that, it’s on to the hacks and such, beginning with a talking robot that uses typewriter tech to move its mouth. We take a look at hacking printed circuit boards to create casing and instrument panels for a PDP-1 replica. Then we explore a fluid simulation business card, witness a caliper shootout, and marvel at one file in six formats. Finally, it’s a telephone twofer as we discuss the non-hack-ability of the average smart phone, and learn about what was arguably the first podcast.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Download in DRM-free MP3 and savor at your leisure.
Episode 333 Show Notes:
News:
- Get Your Tickets For Supercon 2025 Now!
- Announcing The 2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge
- End Of The Eternal September, As AOL Discontinues Dial-Up
What’s that Sound?
- Think you know what the sound is? Fill out the form for your shot at a shirt.
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
- Josef Prusa Warns Open Hardware 3D Printing Is Dead
- Talking Robot Uses Typewriter Tech For Mouth
- Hacking Printed Circuit Board To Create Casing And Instrument Panels
- That’s No Moon, Er, Selectric
- The WHY 2025 Badge And Its 18650s
- LEDs That Flow: A Fluid Simulation Business Card
Quick Hacks:
- Elliot’s Picks:
- Kristina’s Picks:
I wish the little embedded player thingy had a volume control. The volume level of the podcast is much higher than other things that play on my system. I have to turn the system volume down, but then other things get turned down too much.
Yeah, what the heck, Libsyn?! I’ll check to see if they have an alternate player style with the volume control, but I’m not too hopeful.
What does your browser do if you click on the MP3 file directly? Mine plays with a volume control.
Okay, that works!
The second year Open Sauce badge ran traces through the top section of the lanyard hole. While the metal lanyard didn’t cause a short it did/could scratch away at the trace and then break the circuit.
That’s not the one I was thinking of, but I’m sure it’s happened more than once.
It’s not the banking app itself that requires a locked down platform – the banking app is just a glorified web page and you can access that with any system. It’s the authentication app – the banks are using cellphones as a “trusted platform” to authenticate your transactions and refuse to operate if your phone’s software looks like something else than stock Android/iOS.
For example, if I load up LineageOS on my phone, and get the APK for my bank’s application, I can load it up and enter my credentials, but when it comes time to authenticate to actually let me in, I have to pick up another phone that uses stock Android and give it my thumbprint, because the authenticator refuses to start on the hacked phone.
So yes, I can access my online bank on a hacked device, but no, I need yet another device that the bank trusts to actually do anything with it.
The argument was that if phones were less locked down, the banks wouldn’t trust them for authentication, and we’d have to use some other means instead – like the old password lists or key generator widgets. It would be less convenient for everybody, for the point that some few people could hack their phones more easily.
And, more to the point, why would you hack your only phone, that you rely on for your daily business and communications? The first rule is that you don’t develop in production.
For hacking and breaking stuff, you’d rather do it on some other piece of hardware that you can sacrifice – something which could offer you better access to the physical IO – which means there’s no advantage in having an open system for your actual phone per se, and having it open to hacking simply inconveniences you for other systemic reasons.
Granted, if history went differently and phones were open platforms all along, we could have something along the lines of a trusted platform module in each phone that the banks would actually use to authenticate – much like how you can have a chip reader on your PC and insert your SSID card in it to log in to government services. That way you wouldn’t need to trust the device in the middle.
However, since history did not go that way, things would have to get worse before they can get better, and what for?