Hackaday Links: May 25, 2025

May 25, 2025 by Dan Maloney 24 Comments

Have you heard that author Andy Weir has a new book coming out? Very exciting, we know, and according to a syndicated reading list for Summer 2025, it’s called The Last Algorithm, and it’s a tale of a programmer who discovers a dark and dangerous secret about artificial intelligence. If that seems a little out of sync with his usual space-hacking fare such as The Martian and Project Hail Mary, that’s because the book doesn’t exist, and neither do most of the other books on the list.

The list was published in a 64-page supplement that ran in major US newspapers like the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. The feature listed fifteen must-read books, only five of which exist, and it’s no surprise that AI is to behind the muck-up. Writer Marco Buscaglia took the blame, saying that he used an LLM to produce the list without checking the results. Nobody else in the editorial chain appears to have reviewed the list either, resulting in the hallucination getting published. Readers are understandably upset about this, but for our part, we’re just bummed that Andy doesn’t have a new book coming out.

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This Week In Security: Signal DRM, Modern Phone Phreaking, And The Impossible SSH RCE

May 23, 2025 by Jonathan Bennett No comments

Digital Rights Management (DRM) has been the bane of users since it was first introduced. Who remembers the battle it was getting Netflix running on Linux machines, or the literal legal fight over the DVD DRM decryption key? So the news from Signal, that DRM is finally being put to use to protect users is ironic.

The reason for this is Microsoft Recall — the AI powered feature that takes a snapshot of everything on the user’s desktop every few seconds. For whatever reason, you might want to exempt some windows from Recall’s memory window. It doesn’t speak well for Microsoft’s implementation that the easiest way for an application to opt out of the feature is to mark its window as containing DRM content. Signal, the private communications platform, is using this to hide from Recall and other screenshotting applications.

The Signal blogs warns that this may be just the start of agentic AI being rolled out with insufficient controls and permissions. The issue here isn’t the singularity or AI reaching sentience, it’s the same old security and privacy problems we’ve always had: Too much information being collected, data being shared without permission, and an untrusted actor having access to way more than it should. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Signal DRM, Modern Phone Phreaking, And The Impossible SSH RCE” →

Web Dashboard And OTA Updates For The ESP32

May 10, 2025 by John Elliot V 10 Comments

Today we are happy to present a web-based GUI for making a web-based GUI! If you’re a programmer then web front-end development might not be your bag. But a web-based graphical user interface (GUI) for administration and reporting for your microcontroller device can look very professional and be super useful. The Mongoose Wizard can help you develop a device dashboard for your ESP32-based project.

In this article (and associated video) the Mongoose developers run you through how to get started with their technology. They help you get your development environment set up, create your dashboard layout, add a dashboard page, add a device settings page, add an over-the-air (OTA) firmware update page, build and test the firmware, and attach the user-interface controls to the hardware. The generated firmware includes an embedded web server for serving your dashboard and delivering its REST interface, pretty handy.

You will find no end of ESP32-based projects here at Hackaday which you could potentially integrate with Mongoose. We think the OTA support is an excellent feature to have, but of course there are other ways of supporting that functionality.

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A Gentle Introduction To COBOL

April 30, 2025 by Maya Posch 70 Comments

As the Common Business Oriented Language, COBOL has a long and storied history. To this day it’s quite literally the financial bedrock for banks, businesses and financial institutions, running largely unnoticed by the world on mainframes and similar high-reliability computer systems. That said, as a domain-specific language targeting boring business things it doesn’t quite get the attention or hype as general purpose programming or scripting languages. Its main characteristic in the public eye appears be that it’s ‘boring’.

Despite this, COBOL is a very effective language for writing data transactions, report generating and related tasks. Due to its narrow focus on business applications, it gets one started with very little fuss, is highly self-documenting, while providing native support for decimal calculations, and a range of I/O access and database types, even with mere files. Since version 2002 COBOL underwent a number of modernizations, such as free-form code, object-oriented programming and more.

Without further ado, let’s fetch an open-source COBOL toolchain and run it through its paces with a light COBOL tutorial.

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Vibing, AI Style

April 19, 2025 by Elliot Williams 48 Comments

This week, the hackerverse was full of “vibe coding”. If you’re not caught up on your AI buzzwords, this is the catchy name coined by [Andrej Karpathy] that refers to basically just YOLOing it with AI coding assistants. It’s the AI-fueled version of typing in what you want to StackOverflow and picking the top answers. Only, with the current state of LLMs, it’ll probably work after a while of iterating back and forth with the machine.

It’s a tempting vision, and it probably works for a lot of simple applications, in popular languages, or generally where the ground is already well trodden. And where the stakes are low, as [Al Williams] pointed out while we were talking about vibing on the podcast. Can you imagine vibe-coded ATM software that probably gives you the right amount of money? Vibe-coding automotive ECU software?

While vibe coding seems very liberating and hands-off, it really just changes the burden of doing the coding yourself into making sure that the LLM is giving you what you want, and when it doesn’t, refining your prompts until it does. It’s more like editing and auditing code than authoring it. And while we have no doubt that a stellar programmer like [Karpathy] can verify that he’s getting what he wants, write the correct unit tests, and so on, we’re not sure it’s the panacea that is being proclaimed for folks who don’t already know how to code.

Vibe coding should probably be reserved for people who already are expert coders, and for trivial projects. Just the way you wouldn’t let grade-school kids use calculators until they’ve mastered the basics of math by themselves, you shouldn’t let junior programmers vibe code: It simultaneously demands too much knowledge to corral the LLM, while side-stepping any of the learning that would come from doing it yourself.

And then there’s the security side of vibe coding, which opens up a whole attack surface. If the LLM isn’t up to industry standards on simple things like input sanitization, your vibed code probably shouldn’t be anywhere near the Internet.

So should you be vibing? Sure! If you feel competent overseeing what [Dan] described as “the worst summer intern ever”, and the states are low, then it’s absolutely a fun way to kick the tires and see what the tools are capable of. Just go into it all with reasonable expectations.

Porting COBOL Code And The Trouble With Ditching Domain Specific Languages

April 16, 2025 by Maya Posch 81 Comments

Whenever the topic is raised in popular media about porting a codebase written in an ‘antiquated’ programming language like Fortran or COBOL, very few people tend to object to this notion. After all, what could be better than ditching decades of crusty old code in a language that only your grandparents can remember as being relevant? Surely a clean and fresh rewrite in a modern language like Java, Rust, Python, Zig, or NodeJS will fix all ailments and make future maintenance a snap?

For anyone who has ever had to actually port large codebases or dealt with ‘legacy’ systems, their reflexive response to such announcements most likely ranges from a shaking of one’s head to mad cackling as traumatic memories come flooding back. The old idiom of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, purportedly coined in 1977 by Bert Lance, is a feeling that has been shared by countless individuals over millennia. Even worse, how can you ‘fix’ something if you do not even fully understand the problem?

In the case of languages like COBOL this is doubly true, as it is a domain specific language (DSL). This is a very different category from general purpose system programming languages like the aforementioned ‘replacements’. The suggestion of porting the DSL codebase is thus to effectively reimplement all of COBOL’s functionality, which should seem like a very poorly thought out idea to any rational mind.

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A Tricky Commodore PET Repair And A Lesson About Assumptions

April 14, 2025 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

The PET opened, showing the motherboard. (Credit: Ken Shirriff)

An unavoidable part of old home computer systems and kin like the Commodore PET is that due to the age of their components they will develop issues that go far beyond what was covered in the official repair manual, not to mention require unconventional repairs. A case in point is the 2001 series Commodore PET that [Ken Shirriff] recently repaired.

The initial diagnosis was quite straightforward: it did turn on, but only displayed random symbols on the CRT, so obviously the ICs weren’t entirely happy, but at least the power supply and the basic display routines seemed to be more or less functional. Surely this meant that only a few bad ICs and maybe a few capacitors had to be replaced, and everything would be fully functional again.

Initially two bad MOS MPS6540 ROM chips had to be replaced with 2716 EPROMs using an adapter, but this did not fix the original symptom. After a logic analyzer session three bad RAM ICs were identified, which mostly fixed the display issue, aside from a quaint 2×2 checkerboard pattern and completely bizarre behavior upon running BASIC programs.

Using the logic analyzer capture the 6502 MPU was identified as writing to the wrong addresses. Ironically, this turned out to be due to a wrong byte in one of the replacement 2716 EPROMs as the used programmer wasn’t quite capable of hitting the right programming voltage. Using a better programmer fixed this, but on the next boot another RAM IC turned out to have failed, upping the total of failed silicon to four RAM & two ROM ICs, as pictured above, and teaching the important lesson to test replacement ROMs before you stick them into a system.