Author: Adam Zeloof

55 Articles

Falsified Photos: Fooling Adobe’s Cryptographically-Signed Metadata

November 30, 2023 by 34 Comments

Last week, we wrote about the Leica M11-P, the world’s first camera with Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) credentials baked into every shot. Essentially, each file is signed with Leica’s encryption key such that any changes to the image, whether edits to the photo itself or the metadata, are tracked. The goal is to not only prove ownership, but that photos are real — not tampered with or AI-generated. At least, that’s the main selling point.

Although the CAI has been around since 2019, it’s adoption is far from widespread. Only a handful of programs support it, although this list includes Photoshop, and its unlikely anybody outside the professional photography space was aware of it until recently. This isn’t too surprising, as it really isn’t relevant to the casual shooter — when I take a shot to upload to Instagram, I’m rarely thinking about whether or not I’ll need cryptographic proof that the photo wasn’t edited — usually adding #nofilter to the description is enough. Where the CAI is supposed to shine, however, is in the world of photojournalism. The idea is that a photographer can capture an image that is signed at the time of creation and maintains a tamper-proof log of any edits made. When the final image is sold to a news publisher or viewed by a reader online, they are able to view that data.

At this point, there are two thoughts you might have (or, at least, there are two thoughts I had upon learning about the CAI)

  1. Do I care that a photo is cryptographically signed?
  2. This sounds easy to break.

Well, after some messing around with the CAI tools, I have some answers for you.

  1. No, you don’t.
  2. Yes, it is.

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Noble Graphs: Displaying Data With Neon Like Its 1972

October 17, 2023 by 11 Comments

In the days before every piece of equipment was an internet-connected box with an OLED display, engineers had to be a bit more creative with how they chose to communicate information to the user. Indicator lights, analog meters, and even Nixie tubes are just a few of the many methods employed, and are still in use today. There are, however, some more obscure (and arguably way cooler) indicators that have been lost to time.

[Aart Schipper] unearthed one such device while rummaging around in his father’s shed: a pair of Burroughs Bar Graph Glow-Transfer Displays. These marvelous glowing rectangles each have two bars (think the left and right signals on an audio meter, which is incidentally what they were often used for), each with 201 neon segments. Why 201, you may ask? The first segment on each bar is always illuminated, acting as a “pilot light” of sorts. This leaves 200 controllable segments per channel. Each segment is used to “ignite” its neighboring segment, something the manufacturer refers to as the “Glow-Transfer Principle.” By clever use of a three-phase clock and some comparators, each bar is controlled by one analog signal, keeping the wire count reasonably low.

Don’t get us wrong, the warm, comforting glow of Nixie tubes will always have a special place in our hearts, but neon bar graphs are just hard to beat. The two do have a similar aesthetic though, so here’s hoping we see them used together in a project soon.

Thanks to [Jan] for the tip!

An observatory atop a hill

The Ultimate US Astronomy Roadtrip

October 9, 2023 by 10 Comments

Have 73 hours to kill and fancy a 4,609-mile road trip? Then you can check out some of the best observatories in the US (although we would probably recommend taking a couple of weeks rather than cramming the trip into three days, so you can spend at least one night stargazing at each).

Matador Network compiled a list of what they call the top ten US observatories, and published the daunting map you see above. Even if your trip is plagued by cloudy skies, rest assured the destinations will still be worth a visit. From Arizona’s Lowell Observatory, where the evidence Edwin Hubble used to formulate the Big Bang Theory was collected, to the Green Bank National Radio Observatory in West Virginia, home of Earth’s largest fully-steerable radio telescope, each site has incredibly rich history.

All of the observatories are open to the public in some way or another, but some are only accessible a few days per month, so make sure you plan your trip carefully! You may even want to travel with your own homemade telescope, Game Boy astrphotography rig, or, if you’re really dedicated, portable radio telescope.

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Design Cities In A Snap With Buildify

July 21, 2022 by 7 Comments

Designing 3D environments is hard, but it doesn’t have to be. A week ago, if you decided to design an entire city in Blender, say for a game or animation, you probably would have downloaded some asset pack full of building shapes and textures and painstakingly placed them over the course of days, modifying the models and making new ones as needed. Now, you would just need to download Buildify, feed it an asset pack, and watch the magic happen.

Buildify, made by [Pavel Oliva], is one of the most impressive bits of Blender content we’ve seen in a long time. It lets you generate entire cities by drawing the outlines of buildings. You can grab walls and resize individual structures, and the walls, windows, doors, textures, and everything else will automatically rearrange as needed. You can even select a region on Open Street Maps and watch as Buildify recreates the area in Blender using your chosen asset pack (maybe a KiCad PCB design could be used as the source material too?). It’s really something incredible to see, and you’ve just got to watch the video below to understand just how useful this tool can be.

The pay-what-you-want .blend file that you can grab off of [Pavel]’s website doesn’t include all the beautiful assets you can see in the video, but instead generates simple grey block buildings. He made one of the packs used in the video, and will be releasing it online for free soon. In the meantime, he links to other ones you can buy, or you can get really ambitious and create your own. We know it won’t be long until we’re seeing animations and games with Buildify-generated cities.

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Putting A Cheap Laser Rangefinder Through Its Paces

July 19, 2022 by 18 Comments

Sometimes a gizmo seems too cheap to be true. You know there’s just no way it’ll work as advertised — but sometimes it’s fun to find out. Thankfully, if that gadget happens to be a MILESEEY PF210 Hunting Laser Rangefinder, [Phil] has got you covered. He recently got his hands on one (for less than 100 euros, which is wild for a laser rangefinder) and decided to see just how useful it actually was.

The instrument in question measures distances via the time-of-flight method; it bounces a laser pulse off of some distant (or not-so-distant) object and measures how long the pulse takes to return. Using the speed of light, it can calculate the distance the pulse has traveled).

As it turns out, it worked surprisingly well. [Phil] decided to focus his analysis on accuracy and precision, arguably the most important features you’d look for while purchasing such an instrument. We won’t get into the statistical nitty-gritty here, but suffice it to say that [Phil] did his homework. To evaluate the instrument’s precision, he took ten measurements against each of ten different targets of various ranges between 2.9 m and 800 m. He found that it was incredibly precise (almost perfectly repeatable) at low distances, and still pretty darn good way out at 800 m (±1 m repeatability).

To test the accuracy, he took a series of measurements and compared them against their known values (pretty straightforward, right?). He found that the instrument was accurate to within a maximum of 3% (but was usually even better than that).

While this may not be groundbreaking science, it’s really nice to be reminded that sometimes a cheap instrument will do the job, and we love that there are dedicated folks like [Phil] out there who are willing to put the time in to prove it.

Extruded Resin FDM Printing (With Lasers!)

June 22, 2022 by 24 Comments

At this point, 3D printers are nearly everywhere. Schools, hackerspaces, home workshops, you name it. Most of these machines are of the extruded-filament variety, better known as FDM or Fused Deposition Modelling. Over the last few years, cheap LCD printers have brought resin printing to many shops as well. LCD printers, like their DLP and SLA counterparts, use ultraviolet light to cure liquid resin. These machines are often praised for the super-high detail they can achieve, but are realllly slow. And messy —  liquid resin gets everywhere and sticks to everything.

We’re not exactly sure what [Jón Schone] of Proper Printing was thinking when he set out to convert a classic printer to use resin instead of filament, but it had to be something along the lines of “Can you make FDM printing just as messy as LCD printing?”

It turns out you can. His extremely well-documented research is shown in the video below, and logs his design process, from initial idea to almost-kinda-working prototype. As you may expect, extruding a high-viscosity liquid at a controlled rate and laser-curing it is not an easy task, but [Jón] made a fantastic attempt. From designing and building his own peristaltic pump, to sending a UV laser through fiber-optic cables, he explored a ton of different approaches to making the printer work. While he may not have been 100% successful, the video is a great reminder that not all projects have to go the way we hope they will.

Even so, he’s optimistic, and said that he has a few ideas to refine the design, and welcomes any input from the community. This isn’t even the only new and interesting approach to resin printing we’ve seen in the last few weeks, so we share [Jón]’s optimism that the FDM Resin Printer will work (someday, at least).

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One Giant Leap (Backwards) For Humankind: What The Russia-Ukraine War Means For The ISS

March 21, 2022 by 89 Comments

The International Space Station was built not only in the name of science and exploration, but as a symbol of unity. Five space agencies, some representing countries who had been bitter Cold War rivals hardly a decade before the ISS was launched, came together to build something out of a sci-fi novel: a home among the stars (well, in Low Earth Orbit) for humans from around the globe to work with one another for the sake of scientific advancement, high above the terrestrial politics that governed rock below. That was the idea, at least.

So far, while there has been considerable sound and fury in social media channels, international cooperation in space seems to continue unhindered. What are we to make of all this bluster, and what effects could it have on the actual ISS?

Continue reading “One Giant Leap (Backwards) For Humankind: What The Russia-Ukraine War Means For The ISS” →