Black 4.0 Is The New Ultrablack

October 31, 2023 by 101 Comments

Vantablack is a special coating material, moreso than a paint. It’s well-known as one of the blackest possible coatings around, capable of absorbing almost all visible light in its nanotube complex structure. However, it’s complicated to apply, delicate, and not readily available, especially to those in the art world.

It was these drawbacks that led Stuart Semple to create his own incredibly black paint. Over the years, he’s refined the formula and improved its performance, steadily building a greater product available to all. His latest effort is Black 4.0, and it’s promising to be the black paint to dominate all others.

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How Framework Laptop Broke The Hacker Ceiling

October 30, 2023 by 25 Comments

We’ve been keeping an eye on the Framework laptop over the past two years – back in 2021, they announced a vision for a repairable and hacker-friendly laptop based on the x86 architecture. They’re not claiming to be either open-source or libre hardware, but despite that, they have very much delivered on repairability and fostered a hacker community around the laptop, while sticking to pretty ambitious standards for building upgradable hardware that lasts.

I’ve long had a passion for laptop hardware, and when Hackaday covered Framework announcing the motherboards-for-makers program, I submitted my application, then dove into the ecosystem and started poking at the hardware internals every now and then. A year has passed since then, and I’ve been using a Framework as a daily driver, reading the forums on the regular, hanging out in the Discord server, and even developed a few Framework accessories along the way. I’d like to talk about what I’ve seen unfold in this ecosystem, both from Framework and the hackers that joined their effort, because I feel like we have something to learn from it.

If you have a hacker mindset, you might be wondering – just how much is there to hack on? And, if you have a business mindset, you might be wondering – how much can a consumer-oriented tech company achieve by creating a hacker-friendly environment? Today, I’d like to give you some insights and show cool things I’ve seen happen as an involved observer, as well as highlight the path that Framework is embarking upon with its new Framework 16.

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Brick-Laying Machine Builds Without Mortar

October 28, 2023 by 45 Comments

Move over, 3D printed houses. There’s a new game in town, and it is able to use standard concrete blocks to build the walls of a house in just one day.

Australian company FBR’s Hadrian X is a tablet-controlled system that follows CAD models to lay the blocks one by one. As you can see in the video after the break, the blocks are laid so quickly that there’s no time for mortar, so they dip the bottom of each block in construction adhesive instead. In the second video after the break, you can watch Hadrian-X build a curved wall.

There are several things to consider when it comes to outdoor robots, such as wind and unwanted vibration. In order to correct for these nuisances, FBR came up with Dynamic Stabilisation Technology (DST). While we don’t have a lot of details on DST, the company calls it “a highly accurate system that continuously adjusts the position of a robot’s end effector to ensure it is always held with stability at the correct point in 3D space.”

Curious about printed housing? Here’s the current-ish state of affairs.

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Mechanical Scorpion Robot Is A Cute Little Critter

October 27, 2023 by 1 Comment

Plenty of robots stick to a pair of driven wheels to keep locomotion simple. If you’re bold though, or just like creepy crawlies, you might instead appreciate this cute scorpion robot build.

Real scorpions have eight legs, but this design has just four legs, which keeps the parts count lower and control much simpler. It still looks a bit like a scorpion, though, by virtue of its cute little tail. It’s not just for show either—it mounts a camera which can be positioned at different angles via the tail’s servos. A Raspberry Pi Zero W is the brains of the operation, and allows the robot to be controlled via WiFi or Bluetooth.

Naturally, there is some additional complexity to the walking design. A full ten servos are used across the multiple legs and tail linkages. Most of the parts are 3D printed, however, so it’s quite easy to build at home once you’ve got all the parts to hand.

The robot critter has a shuffling gait, but we’d love to see it modified to walk and climb in different manners with the right programming and mechanical modifications. We’ve featured some other great creepy crawly builds over the years, too. Video after the break.

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This Week In Security: 1Password, Polyglots, And Roundcube

October 27, 2023 by 12 Comments

This week we got news of a security incident at 1Password, and we’re certain we aren’t the only ones hoping it’s not a repeat of what happened at LastPass. 1Password has released a PDF report on the incident, and while there are a few potentially worrying details, put into context it doesn’t look too bad.

The first sign that something might be amiss was an email from Okta on September 29th — a report of the current list of account administrators. Okta provides authentication and Single Sign-On (SSO) capabilities, and 1Password uses those services to manage user accounts and authentication. The fact that this report was generated without anyone from 1Password requesting it was a sign of potential problems.

And here’s the point where a 1Password employee was paying attention and saved the day, by alerting the security team to the unrequested report. That employee had been working with Okta support, and sent a browser session snapshot for Okta to troubleshoot. That data includes session cookies, and it was determined that someone unauthorized managed to access the snapshot and hijack the session, Firesheep style.

Okta logs seemed to indicate that the snapshot hadn’t been accessed, and there weren’t any records of other Okta customers being breached in this way. This pointed at the employee laptop. The report states that it has been taken offline, which is good. Any time you suspect malicious action on a company machine, the right answer is power it off right away, and start the investigation.

And here’s the one part of the story that gives some pause. Someone from 1Password responded to the possible incident by scanning the laptop with the free edition of Malwarebytes. Now don’t get us wrong, Malwarebytes is a great product for finding and cleaning the sort of garden-variety malware we tend to find on family members’ computers. The on-demand scanning of Malwarebytes free just isn’t designed for detecting bespoke malicious tools like a password management company should expect to be faced with.

But that turns out to be a bit of a moot point, as the real root cause was a compromised account in the Okta customer support system, as revealed on the 20th. The Okta report talks about stolen credentials, which raises a real question about why Okta support accounts aren’t all using two-factor authentication.

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Tim’s Draw Bot Gets Around With A Pen

October 26, 2023 by 5 Comments

If you grew up playing with LOGO on an old 8-bit computer, you’re probably familiar with the concept of a drawbot. It’s a simple robot that drags a pen around to draw on paper. [Tim] decided to build one that uses a simple skid-steer design to get around the page. 

An Arduino Nano is the brains of the operation, paired with a CNC Shield that allows it to drive a pair of stepper motors. The stepper motors drive the wheels via cogged belts, with the 3D-printed rims fitted with square rubber drive belts used as tires for additional grip. A third jockey wheel is used for balance, in addition to the two main driven wheels. A servo is used to raise and lower the pen as needed. All the hardware is mounted on to a simple tray chassis, which was 3D printed along with most of the other basic componentry.

The robot does a good job of plotting out a drawing on a small scale, with [Tim] using it to outline his name on paper. We’ve featured some other great drawbots before, too, including this nifty spray-can version. Video after the break.

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That Coin Toss Isn’t Actually 50/50

October 25, 2023 by 19 Comments

A coin flip is considered by many to be the perfect 50/50 random event, even though — being an event subject to Newtonian physics — the results are in fact anything but random. But that’s okay, because what we really want when we flip a coin is an unpredictable but fair outcome. But what if that’s not actually what happens?

There’s new research claiming that coin tosses demonstrate a slight but measurable bias toward landing on the same side they started. At least, this is true of coin flips done in a particular (but common) way. Coins flipped with the thumb and caught in the hand land with the same side facing up 50.8 percent of the time.

The new research builds on earlier work proposing that because of human anatomy, when a human flips a coin with their thumb, the motion introduces a slight off-axis tilt that biases the results. Some people do it less (biasing the results less) and some do it more, but while the impact is small it is measurable. As long as the coin is caught in the hand, anyway. Allowing the coin to fall on surfaces introduces outside variables.

Therefore, one can gain a slight advantage in coin flips by looking at which side is facing up, and calling that same side. Remember that the flipping method used must be that of flipping the coin with the thumb, and catching it with the hand. The type of coin does not matter.

Does this mean a coin flip isn’t fair? Not really. Just allow the coin to fall on a surface instead of catching it in the hand, or simply conceal which side is “up” when the coin is called. It’s one more thing that invites us all to ask just how random is random, anyway?