The Underhanded Hardware Challenge

August 21, 2008 by Eliot 7 Comments

The Polytechnic Institute of NYU is hosting an interesting embedded systems contest. They’ve constructed a solid state cryptographic device that uses a 128-bit private key. Contestants will be tasked with designing and implementing several trojans into the system that will undermine the security. The system is built on a Digilent BASYS Spartan-3 FPGA board. The trojans could do a wide variety of things: transmitting unencrypted, storing and transmitting previously entered plain text, or just shutting down the system entirely. The modified devices still need to pass the factory testing procedure though, which will measure power consumption, code size, and function. After a qualification round, participants will be given the necessary hardware to compete.

[via NYC Resistor (Happy Birthday!)]

Hackit: Modern Arcade Cabinets?

August 20, 2008 by Eliot 39 Comments

We’ve been contemplating getting into MAME arcade cabinet building. It was sparked by someone dropping off a Street Fighter II machine at our office. Many people have been seeking to build the perfect arcade cabinet clone, but looking over this old dusty cabinet we realized that retro isn’t really what we want. We want an arcade cabinet with a modern aesthetic.

Retro Thing recently posted [Martijn Koch]’s Retro Space. The cabinet takes design cues from old cabinets, but uses modern technology like a 24″ LCD. It does feature classic controls though. Wandering through arcades today, most of the machines appear to be DDR style or vehicle sims. No one is building modern gaming machines.

We’re still in the planning stages of this build. We’d definitely use classic controls and combine it with an LCD 24″ or larger. The brain would probably be a Playstation 3. We could run any emulator we want on the Linux side and also play modern PS3 games. How it will look is still up in the air. We’re leaning towards building a standup 4 player brawler machine for playing games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, X-Men, and The Simpsons.

Have any of you built a MAME machine before? How would you build an arcade machine with a modern aesthetic?

SIGGRAPH 2008: The Quest For More Pixels

August 20, 2008 by Eliot 8 Comments

Long before we started reporting on [Dan Kaminsky]’s DNS chicanery, he contributed a guest post about one of our favorite sources of new technology: SIGGRAPH. The stars have aligned again and we’re happy to bring you his analysis of this year’s convention. [photo: Phong Nguyen]

So, last week, I had the pleasure of being stabbed, scanned, physically simulated, and synthetically defocused. Clearly, I must have been at SIGGRAPH 2008, the world’s biggest computer graphics conference. While it usually conflicts with Black Hat, this year I actually got to stop by, though a bit of a cold kept me from enjoying as much of it as I’d have liked. Still, I did get to walk the exhibition floor, and the papers (and videos) are all online, so I do get to write this (blissfully DNS and security unrelated) report.

Continue reading “SIGGRAPH 2008: The Quest For More Pixels” →

Blip Festival: Reformat The Planet

August 18, 2008 by Eliot 7 Comments

Pitchfork.tv is showing the documentary Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet for one week only. The Blip Festival is an annual chiptune event in New York City featuring musicians who use video game consoles as part of their production. The documentary has a ton of artist interviews and music from all across the spectrum. Most of the initial featured artists are using the Game Boy LSDJ tracker cartridge. [Nullsleep] has put together a tutorial for the device. You’ll see a lot of other old hardware and hear discussions of coveted mods like adding backlights as well. [Mark Denardo] is shown using a PSP as part of his performance. Other people are using software like Fruity Loops to build tracks with Nintendo samples. Honestly, our favorite part was a clip of the loud objects doing a live soldering circuit bending performance on top of an overhead projector at the Bent Festival. Although not musical, Element Labs’ Versa TILE makes a fairly mesmerizing backdrop throughout the film too. You can find links to all the featured artists on last year’s festival page.

Blip Festival 2008 happens December 4-6 in Brooklyn, NY.

[via Waxy]

[photo: ziggy fresh]

Hack A Day T-Shirt Design Contest

August 18, 2008 by Eliot 29 Comments

We need a new t-shirt. The current design is entering its third year. Help us out by designing a new shirt to give away at conferences. Dash has donated a Dash Express for first prize.

Some ground rules:

You must incorporate the skull and wrenches logo in your design. You’ll find a larger version below.
You can enter as many designs as you like to hackaday.shirt@gmail.com (JPG, GIF, or PNG mockups only please)
The design can’t violate any copyright laws or trademarks.
The design should be one color and the shirt doesn’t have to be black.
By submitting your design you give us non-exclusive rights to use the image in the design of a Hack a Day t-shirt as well as for other Hack A Day promotional materials.
We reserve the right to choose no design at all if we don’t like any of the submissions.
The contest ends September 15th.

Continue reading “Hack A Day T-Shirt Design Contest” →

Upcoming Events

August 17, 2008 by Eliot 9 Comments

It looks like it’s time to update our event list. Here are some hacking related events happening through the rest of the year.

ToorCon September 26-28 San Diego, CA – In its tenth year, ToorCon has always been one of our favorites. The conference is fairly small, but features great content like last year’s fuzzing talk.
Arse Elektronika (NSFW) September 25-28 San Francisco, CA – Happening the same time as ToorCon, this conference covers the sexual side of human and machine interaction. The device list has gems like The Seismic Dildo, which only turns on if there is seismic activity in the world.
Maker Faire October 18-19 Austin, TX – It’s Maker Faire! In Texas!
Roboexotica December 4-7 Vienna, Austria – The premier festival for cocktail robotics is also back for the tenth time. They’re always looking for more exhibitors. Check out our Hackit for ideas.
25C3 December 27-30 Berlin, Germany I think we pretty much covered all the bases on this incredible conference yesterday.

Did we miss anything?

Scratch Built Jog Wheel

August 17, 2008 by Eliot 10 Comments

[whatsisface] sent in his scratch built clone of a Griffin PowerMate. The PowerMate… is just a big knob, so it’s easy to see why more than one person has attempted this. [whatsisface] was inspired by a bit-tech post that did nearly the same thing, only they used the head out of a VCR for the knob. All the other components, like the optical encoder, are salvaged from a mouse, which we talked about in our scavenging How-To. He used a RC car tire for the actual knob. While we’re sure it works great in dirt, we’d probably go with the weight and inertia of the VCR head instead. Have a look at the video below to see the knob being used with the Volumouse software.