There’s been too much to do here at the Chaos Communication Camp — the Quadrennial outdoor meeting of hackers. Between talks and projects and workshops, there’s hardly been a minute to sit down and write up a summary. Nonetheless, I’ve sat in on a few talks. Here’s a quick overview of some of what happened on Day One, and a little look behind the scenes into what makes a 5,000-person hacker camp work.
Continue reading “Chaos Communication Camp 2015: Dispatch From Day One”
It happens every four years in Germany. The days are at their longest and the summer heat’s penetrating. It’s time to break out the tent and go camping. But who wants to go camping in the wilderness, where there’s no Gigabit Ethernet and nobody to hack on projects with? Much better to attend the Chaos Communications Camp 2015 with 5,000 other nerds. And Hackaday will be there!
If you’ve never been to a Chaos Camp, it’s an amazing experience. It’s like a DIY version of DEF CON, except that it takes place in tents in the countryside outside Berlin instead of gambling-themed hotels in the dry, dusty desert. There’s a lot more emphasis on actually doing stuff while at camp. (It’s meant to be a vacation, after all.) Indeed, presentations are shut down in the middle of the day for three and a half hours to give people time to hack and interact.
Have a look at the list of projects, events, sessions, villages, or talks to get a feeling of scale, and bear in mind that a lot of the most interesting activities are often unofficial: people getting together to work on stuff. There’s plenty of inspiration and room for cooperation to go around.
Like many cons these days, the badge itself will doubtless serve as at least one such source of inspiration, and the 2015 Camp’s badge is awesome. It’s essentially a HackRF One with an LPC4300 ARM Cortex M4 micro, large flash memory, USB, battery, audio, and an LCD screen on-board. Add an antenna and you’ve got an insanely versatile standalone radio hacking platform. We’re digging through the docs in anticipation. So expect some to see a bunch of SDR and RF hacks in the next few months as 5,000 hackers get these in their hands.
If you can’t make it (tickets have been sold out for a while now), you can check out the live streams. Not only will the talks be shown as they happen, but in keeping with the democratic ethos of the CCC, anyone who can set up an icecast server can set up their own stream.
And of course, we’ll be there reporting on as much as we can. If anything strikes your fancy and you’d like us to check it out for you, post up in the comments here. We can’t promise the impossible, but we’ll try. And if you’re going to camp as well, keep an eye out for Elliot and say Hi.
Ahh DEF CON! One group of hackers shows off how they’ve broken into all sorts of cool devices and other hackers (ahem… “security professionals”) lament the fact that the first group were able to do so. For every joyous “we rooted the Nest thermostat, now we can have fun” there’s a doom-mongering “the security of network-connected IoT devices is totally broken!”.
And like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, these two sides of the hacker persona can coexist within the same individual. At Hackaday, we’re totally paranoid security conscious, but we also like to tinker with stuff. We believe that openness and security are best friends forever. If you can open it, you can see if it’s well-made inside, at least in principle. How do we reconcile this with the security professional’s demand for devices that only accept signed binary firmware updates so that they can’t be tampered with?
We’ve got no answers, but we’ve got plenty of questions. Read on, and let us know what you think.
Continue reading “DEF CON Vs IoT: On Hackability And Security”
We should come clean right up front. We like blinky stuff, tech art, smoke machines, and dark atmospheric electronic music. This audiovisual installation piece (scroll down) by [supermafia] ticks off all our boxes. As the saying doesn’t really go, writing about site-specific audiovisual art pieces is like dancing about architecture, so go ahead and watch the video (Vimeo) below the break.
In this session of Logic Noise, we’ll be playing around with the voltage-controlled oscillator from a 4046 phase-locked loop chip, and using it to make “musical” pitches. It’s a lot of bang for the buck, and sets us on the path toward much more interesting circuits in the future. So watch the intro video right after the break, and we’ll dig straight in.
Continue reading “Logic Noise: 4046 Voltage-Controlled Oscillator, Part One”
[Voltagex] was fed up with BSODs on his Windows machine due to a buggy PL2303 USB/serial device driver. The Linux PL2303 driver worked just fine, though. A weakling would simply reboot into Linux. Instead, [Voltagex] went for the obvious workaround: create a tiny Linux distro in a virtual machine, route the USB device over to the VM where the drivers work, and then Netcat the result back to Windows.
OK, not really obvious, but a cool hack. Using Buildroot, a Linux system cross-compilation tool, he got the size of the VM down to a 32Mb memory footprint which runs comfortably on even a small laptop. And everything you need to replicate the VM is posted up on Github.
Is this a ridiculous workaround? Yes indeed. But when you’ve got a string of tools like that, or you just want an excuse to learn them, why not? And who can pass up a novel use for Netcat?
One of our favorite nuances of the C programming language (and its descendants) is the static keyword. It’s a little bit tricky to get your head around at first, because it can have two (or three) subtly different applications in different situations, but it’s so useful that it’s worth taking the time to get to know.
And before you Arduino users out there click away, static variables solve a couple of common problems that occur in Arduino programming. Take this test to see if it matters to you: will the following Arduino snippet ever print out “Hello World”?
void loop()
{
int count=0;
count = count + 1;
if (count > 10) {
Serial.println("Hello World");
}
}
Continue reading “Embed With Elliot: The Static Keyword You Don’t Fully Understand”
