Give Us One Manual For Normies, Another For Hackers

We’ve all been there. You’ve found a beautiful piece of older hardware at the thrift store, and bought it for a song. You rush it home, eager to tinker, but you soon find it’s just not working. You open it up to attempt a repair, but you could really use some information on what you’re looking at and how to enter service mode. Only… a Google search turns up nothing but dodgy websites offering blurry PDFs for entirely the wrong model, and you’re out of luck.

These days, when you buy an appliance, the best documentation you can expect is a Quick Start guide and a warranty card you’ll never use. Manufacturers simply don’t want to give you real information, because they think the average consumer will get scared and confused. I think they can do better. I’m demanding a new two-tier documentation system—the basics for the normies, and real manuals for the tech heads out there.

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Build Your Own Glasshole Detector

Connected devices are ubiquitous in our era of wireless chips heavily relying on streaming data to someone else’s servers. This sentence might already start to sound dodgy, and it doesn’t get better when you think about today’s smart glasses, like the ones built by Meta (aka Facebook).

[sh4d0wm45k] doesn’t shy away from fighting fire with fire, and shows you how to build a wireless device detecting Meta’s smart glasses – or any other company’s Bluetooth devices, really, as long as you can match them by the beginning of the Bluetooth MAC address.

[sh4d0wm45k]’s device is a mini light-up sign saying “GLASSHOLE”, that turns bright white as soon as a pair of Meta glasses is detected in the vicinity. Under the hood, a commonly found ESP32 devboard suffices for the task, coupled to two lines of white LEDs on a custom PCB. The code is super simple, sifting through packets flying through the air, and lets you easily contribute with your own OUIs (Organizationally Unique Identifier, first three bytes of a MAC address). It wouldn’t be hard to add such a feature to any device of your own with Arduino code under its hood, or to rewrite it to fit a platform of your choice.

We’ve been talking about smart glasses ever since Google Glass, but recently, with Meta’s offerings, the smart glasses debate has reignited. Due to inherent anti-social aspects of the technology, we can see what’d motivate one to build such a hack. Perhaps, the next thing we’ll see is some sort of spoofed packets shutting off the glasses, making them temporarily inoperable in your presence in a similar way we’ve seen with spamming proximity pairing packets onto iPhones.

Little Lie Detector Is Probably No Worse Than The Big Ones

Want to know if somebody is lying? It’s always so hard to tell. [dbmaking] has whipped up a fun little polygraph, otherwise known as a lie detector. It’s nowhere near as complex as the ones you’ve seen on TV, but it might be just as good when it comes to finding the truth.

The project keeps things simple by focusing on two major biometric readouts — heart rate and skin conductivity. When it comes to the beating heart, [dbmaking] went hardcore and chose an AD8232 ECG device, rather than relying on the crutch that is pulse oximetry. It picks up heart signals via three leads that are just like those they stick on you in the emergency room. Skin conductivity is measured with a pair of electrodes that attach to the fingers with Velcro straps. The readings from these inputs are measured and then used to determine truth or a lie if their values cross a certain threshold. Presumably, if you’re sweating a lot and your heart is beating like crazy, you’re telling a lie. After all, we know Olympic sprinters never tell the truth immediately after a run.

Does this work as an actual, viable lie detector? No, not really. But that’s not just because this device isn’t sophisticated enough; commercial polygraph systems have been widely discredited anyway. There simply isn’t an easy way to correlate sweating to lying, as much as TV has told us the opposite. Consider it a fun toy or prop to play with, and a great way to learn about working with microcontrollers and biometric sensors.

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