[palmertech] and [Bibin] have both completed backlight projects for the Game Boy Pocket recently. The most difficult part of the transplant is carefully removing the reflective backing on the LCD. After a thorough cleaning, a diffuser and backlight panel were added. [palmertech] used a backlight salvaged from a DS, while [Bibin] built his own using LEDs. You can see his backlight in the video embedded below. There’s a disassembly video too.
Our own [Anthony Lineberry] has written up his experience participating in the 2008 Malware Challenge as part of his work for Flexilis. The contest involved taking a piece of provided malware, doing a thorough analysis of its behavior, and reporting the results. This wasn’t just to test the chops of the researchers, but also to demonstrate to network/system administrators how they could get into malware analysis themselves.
[Anthony] gives a good overview of how he created his entry (a more detailed PDF is here). First, he unpacked the malware using Ollydbg. Packers are used to obfuscate the actual malware code so that it’s harder for antivirus to pick it up. After taking a good look at the assembly, he executed the code. He used Wireshark to monitor the network traffic and determine what URL the malware was trying to reach. He changed the hostname to point at an IRC server he controlled. Eventually he would be able to issue botnet control commands directly to the malware. We look forward to seeing what next year’s contest will bring.
Make’s television series will be premiering on public television across the US over the next couple days. If it’s not showing in your area, you aren’t out of luck. All of the segments from the first episode have already been published online at makezine.tv.
Kit builder oomlout—we’ve featured their servo bot—needed to produce a lot of precut wires. After cutting and stripping more than their fair share, they decided to apply some heavy engineering to make things easier. They constructed a machine to do the job for them. It has three main components: a servo driven wire feeder to measure the length, a two servo wire stripper that uses an exacto blade, and finally a wire cutter made from snips and a drill motor. The machine is controlled using an Arduino. They’ve published all the plans and code to Thingiverse incase anyone else wants to build a similar machine for their own kit shop. A video of the machine is embedded below.
As promised, the iphone-dev team has released yellowsn0w. You can install/uninstall via Cydia. It works fine with the latest firmware too. This sentence is filler.
The Laughing Man is the antagonist from the anime series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. During each of his public appearances in the series he manages to hack all video feeds/cyborg eyes in the vicinity to obscure his face with the logo above.
[Ben Kurtz] had been watching the series recently and realized he could put together a similar effect using Processing. The interesting bit, and what makes this more fun than a simple demo, is that he’s using the OpenCV library. OpenCV is a open source computer vision library. [Ben] uses it to handle the facial recognition in Processing and then apply the image.
It’s only 100 lines and we wonder what other fun tricks could be employed. Here’s a Hack a Day skull you can swap in for the logo.
[thanks dakami]
[Tobias Engel] released a serious Nokia vulnerability today. By using a specially crafted SMS message, you can block the recipient from getting any future SMS messages. The attacker changes their Protocol Identifier to “Internet Electronic Mail” and then uses any email address 32 characters or more in their message. The recipient will receive no indication that they got the message and no other messages will be allowed until the phone is factory reset. You can see a demo video here. This affects many different varieties of S60 phones and no fix is known.
[Thanks fh]
