Breaking The Parental Lock On An XBox 360 Is Very Much An Inconvenience

July 28, 2026 by Maya Posch 8 Comments

There are many ways to soft-brick a device to the point where it cannot easily be used again, and “Cloud locks” or parental locks are probably at the top of the list here. [eWastelander] recently got an XBox 360 console for a mere $15 that had been tossed out without removing said parental lock. This led him down the fun path of exploring just how deep this lock goes that’s supposed to keep little Timmy from doing naughty things on the family gaming console.

The short version is that, unless you want to go medieval on the hardware and perform a NAND Flash-level reset, your best bet is probably to brute-force the pass code. You do not even have to mash in the thousands of codes yourself, but can use a keyboard emulator on something like a Teensy development board. This got [eWastelander] into the console after a mere five hours of the little MCU running through the combinations.

There used to be a reset code as well, as detailed over at Console Mods, but this is unique to each console and this feature got removed in newer firmware revisions. In the video, attempts to modify the console via a soft mod failed due to the compromised games that provide a backdoor not being ‘Everyone’ rated, which is probably a common outcome here.

Ultimately it seems that either you plug in an MCU board or you break out the NAND Flash programmer. Brute-forcing the XBox 360 pass code is something that we covered back in 2013 already, with in 2020 [Agent24] porting the code to the Teensy, with the code download link provided in the video description. Since Microsoft long since stopped providing the reset service via its support, this might be the only way to revive an otherwise junk XBox 360.

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FreeBSD Just Removed The Last Of Its GPL-Licensed Code

July 28, 2026 by Maya Posch 44 Comments

With a recent change that removed dialog in favor of bsddialog, FreeBSD has now retired the last piece of GPL-licensed code in its base system. Although the impact of this change will be minor for users, it does highlight once again the Open Source divide that has split developers since the 1990s, when [Linus Torvalds] attached a scribbled set of notes to the v0.01 Linux kernel release that would later be replaced with the very similar GPL license and its derivatives.

This history and its impacts are also the subject of a recent video by [Brodie Robertson]. For the FreeBSD project the biggest change here is probably that the entire GNU subtree in the codebase is now gone, As detailed in the video, this is the end of a very long-running project, whereby FreeBSD in its early days incorporated GNU code for userland tools. These components and its replacements are detailed in the FreeBSD wiki.

Naturally, this change has upset some people for reasons best known to themselves, but from a project management perspective this makes a lot of sense. Not having BSD-incompatible licenses like GPL in your source code massively simplifies matters. The main difference being that the GPL is reciprocal, requiring that derivative works also be released under the GPL — a feature that is often at odds with commercial projects. Meanwhile, the BSD licenses merely require the use of BSD-licensed code to be declared.

The upshot of the BSD-license in the case of FreeBSD is that it has found it and its components used in many commercial products, including MacOS/OS X, the PlayStation’s Orbis OS, and of course the BSD networking stack is happily used in Windows, macOS and just about anywhere else. Meanwhile the GPL forced Linksys to open the firmware to its WRT54G series of routers, ultimately leading to the development of OpenWrt and similar projects.

Although the OSS licensing flamewars will likely never end, it’s hard to disagree that FreeBSD is pretty healthy at over thirty years old, even if using it as a desktop OS comes with a few asterisks.

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De-Aging Human Tissue Using Special Enzyme To Remove AGEs

July 27, 2026 by Maya Posch 8 Comments

With human bodies being bags of mostly salty water and countless messy biochemical processes, it’s little wonder that over time some residues tend to collect in these systems. Although evolution has seen fit to also evolve a range of mechanisms to clean up many of those messes, some of these waste products are left to gather, such as advanced glycation end-products (AGEs). Implicated in everything from diabetes to chronic kidney disease and general aging-related conditions, recently researchers have developed a way to break down one type of these AGEs.

Called N(6)-Carboxymethyllysine (CML), there is evidence to suggest that the presence of AGEs like it in the extracellular matrix (ECM) has damaging effects on the ECM’s functioning, as observed in e.g. the inhibiting of collagen crosslinking and the resulting ‘aging’ of skin among other tissues. Essentially these waste product jam up the normal biochemical machinery, while also triggering pro-inflammatory factors.

Beyond aging-related conditions, this can result in a whole range of other diseases that may be resolved if these waste products could be cleaned out. To this end [Narisa Trabosh] et al. of the San Francisco-based Revel Pharmaceuticals laboratory created CMLase, an enzyme that breaks down CML.

Arterial tissue treated with the CMLase enzyme shows a clear difference. (Credit: Trabosh et al., Nature communications, 2026)

The challenge here was to design this enzyme, which used a genetic selection approach in modified E. coli to narrow down suitable enzymes, optimized for dealing with free CML. Once they were fairly confident that they had a working enzyme, they had to test it and observe the results.

This testing was performed in model proteins in vitro, as well as in tissue samples from elderly donors. These latter included lens, skin and arterial tissue, all of which are long-lived tissues that have plenty of time to collect CML. After treatment with CMLase the presence of CML in these tissues was reduced by 55% for skin and 75% for arterial tissue.

Of course, as also noted in the article these are ex vivo experiments that do not yet directly translate to living patients. An initial human trial would need to show safety above all, even if the amount of waste produced by the clean-up of CML won’t be that significant.

Subsequent trials would need to demonstrate that such removal of CML leads to healthier tissues, which if confirmed would open the path for other pathogenic AGEs to get their own matching enzyme.

Re-Testing An Apollo Guidance Computer Module That Failed Certification Testing

July 27, 2026 by Maya Posch 5 Comments

After getting his hands on a rope driver module from the Apollo project era that had a big ‘Scrapped Module’ stamped on it, [Mike Stewart] was naturally left curious as to what exactly had failed in this module. Originally destined for the Apollo Guidance Computer, these Raytheon-manufactured modules were the pinnacle of space-grade high-tech of the 1960s, with requisite acceptance testing so as to not endanger a very expensive space mission.

The cool part here is that the acceptance documents for the module in question (B16-B17) have been scanned in and can be found on the Internet Archive. With the part itself being potted and very much inaccessible, this document helpfully lays out the expected measurements on the module’s pins, as well as schematics and mechanical drawings. Unfortunately the reasons for the rejection were not recorded, so replicating the failing test results is required to understand the reason.

NASA Rope Driver Module with suspicious exploration marks. (Credit: Mike Stewart, YouTube)

A slight complication here is that the testing procedure doesn’t just involve hooking up a multimeter for some voltage and capacitance measurements. There are also temperature and voltage extremes, and vibration tolerance involved, which would be somewhat complex to test, but most of all risk damaging a historical artefact. Thus a somewhat conservative testing procedure was chosen, even if this may not reveal the actual fault.

As noted in the video, sometimes modules were also rejected because someone simply dropped it on the floor along the way. However, generally if a module was found to be faulty they would open it to diagnose said fault, with a closer look at this module indeed revealing suspicious marks in the potting compound where it was apparently opened and conceivably repaired. This also might explain why they also put the ‘For engineering use only’ on it.

With multiple of such locations visible in the potting compound, these locations were mapped to the schematics for the module, to get some idea of what may have been accessed. After this, basic testing was performed on the module, as per the acceptance testing document.

Along the way an error was detected in said document, in the form of the wrong pin number. In table 4-2 the input pin 269 was mistakenly listed as having output pin number 169 when it should have been pin 168. Pin 169 is chassis ground, so this was presumably fixed in a later version of the document.

After all the testing with just stationary, room-temperature conditions, everything appeared to check out. This means that likely this was indeed a repaired module that got subsequently used for engineering purposes rather than installed in flight-ready hardware. The only issue found was that channels were out of calibration, but whether this was an original flaw or due to the module being half a century old is hard to tell in the absence of repair logs.

Overall it’s an exciting opportunity to document another part of history, since so many of the details pertaining to these original modules and related technologies got lost or muddled over the decades.

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Filling High Pressure CO2 Tanks From Sugar Fermentation Gas

July 26, 2026 by Maya Posch 15 Comments

After previously using the fermenting of sugar to obtain ethanol fuel, [Hyperspace Pirate] figured that it’d be a waste to just blast the other half of the yeast production in the form of carbon dioxide into the air. This poses the slight problem that gaseous CO₂ is fairly bulky, while compressing it into a liquid isn’t exactly for the faint of heart. This of course means that it’s a fun challenge, involving a beach ball, vapor-compression and various compressors.

Although at room temperature compressing CO₂ into a liquid requires quite extreme pressures, if you lower it to freezing temperatures it becomes quite feasible to use more typical off-the-shell compressors.

In the video both oil-less and regular compressors are used, mostly because ultimately you want to get pure CO2 into the bottle, without oil or water. Here a few methods are explored, including a pre-cooler with the oil-less compressor as it cannot quite hit the same pressures. With a typical compressor linked to an oil-separator you can directly fill the tank, which is pretty nice, though even with this removal of water turned out to be a chore.

Desiccating the gas that comes out of the fermentation vat, is attempted using a converted water filter that’s filled with desiccant beads, but as the later tests show, this isn’t quite good enough to prevent moisture to make it into the bottle and clogging its nozzle. Of course, moisture here is more acceptable than oil for most applications, so with some more work this could be quite a feasible method to fill bottles with liquid CO₂ for various nefarious applications like paintball guns and more.

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Repairing A “for Parts” Canon 7D Mark II DSLR

July 26, 2026 by Maya Posch 17 Comments

The exciting part of buying a ‘broken, for parts’ off a site like EBay is that you rarely know exactly just how ‘broken’ it truly is. Even if the seller insists that it’s thoroughly buggered, you just might be able to eke out a fix with some out-of-the-box thinking and plucky ingenuity. Such was the case for [Dieter Vansteenwegen] who gambled on a cheap Canon 7D Mark II DSLR body that was sold for a mere €180 on account of said broken condition.

After confirming that the DSLR’s condition was basically as described by the seller, with nothing on the LCD or HDMI output and the auto-focus not working while partially pressing the trigger button, but still taking a picture when fully pressed. Sometimes it would also show a standard maintenance message on the LCD, so clearly it ought to be working. Maybe the camera’s processor was just being chronically unhappy about something, in which case an easy fix might be possible.

As anyone who has ever taken a digital camera apart knows, you do not simply pop them open for a quick look. Somewhere in the nightmarish contraption of flatflex cables, PCBs and endless sub-assemblies there might be a fault, but where to start? Fortunately with some support from the custom Canon firmware community Magic Lantern and the website Photo Parts UA for reference images he was able to start tracing a number of pertinent signals.

With the auto-focus hint as guide, this was traced back to the MPU, which turned out to have a floating signal on the auto-focus pin that got interpreted as ‘active’. Likely the internal pull-up got damaged due to the use of an external trigger module as there’s no real protection on these lines. One bodge wire later to create an external 3.3 V pull-up the DSLR happily sprung back to life.

In terms of parts this definitely was a cheap repair, but it comes with the prerequisite of having the skills and equipment to perform said repair. Still, massive props and congratulations to [Dieter] for saving this DSLR from being merely a device to be picked over for parts.

How Film Industry Data Website The-Numbers.com Got Mauled By Bots

July 25, 2026 by Maya Posch 20 Comments

A lot has been made about the increase of automated traffic on the Internet, with the past years LLM-related crawlers having quite literally swarmed the picture here. Not only does this drive up traffic, it also increases load on web servers, whose owners find themselves faced with increased hosting costs. This recently led to The-Numbers.com going offline for a while as automated traffic was quite literally destroying their bottom line.

This saga is covered by [Stephen Follows], who had a chance to talk with the founder and CEO of the site, [Bruce Nash], after the site went basically offline for a few months. Since the website both licenses data for commercial purposes as well as offering the free access on its website, there were accusations of this being a ‘rug pull’.

The site was started in 1997, as a static HTML site on Geocities where [Bruce] provided box office analyses for investment purposes. Since that beginning traffic was generally polite, with human visitors and usually well-behaved search engine crawlers. Then around 2024 the first wave of scraper bots arrived, followed by a larger wave around December of 2025.

Despite implementing a few mitigations, such as LLM-targeted text, the increased traffic and the resulting load on a site architecture that was never designed for this ultimately led to a collapse. One of the major sources of traffic turned out to be from so-called ‘prediction markets’, like Polymarket, whose bots absolutely hammered the site.

Fortunately for [Bruce] and his team they do not rely on the free website for income, but they have had to massively rework the site’s architecture to bring back a semblance of the original features. As noted in the article, the amount of crawling traffic by these LLMs and ‘agentic AI’ tools is exponentially more than that for search engines, which makes this a major challenge.

Issues like these is why services such as Cloudflare are offering blocking features for such automated traffic. After all, unless such traffic is of use to you, you may as well treat it like a DDoS attack and cut it off at the root.

Thanks to [Ben] for the tip.