Electron Microscope Conversion Hack

Some of you probably know this already, but there’s actually more than one kind of electron microscope. In electronics work, the scanning electron microscope (SEM) is the most common. You hit something with electrons and watch for secondary electron emissions. However, biologists more often use a TEM — a transmissive electron microscope — which passes electrons through a sample to image it. [Breaking Taps] built a small device to convert his SEM into a TEM.

One key idea is that in a SEM, the beam’s position on the target is the only thing that matters. Any secondary electron detected is a result of that spot’s composition, no matter where you collect them. Common detectors pick up back-scattered electrons bouncing back toward the electron source.  There are also low-energy electrons bouncing off in random directions, depending on the topology of the target.

The slow electrons can be attracted by a single detector that has a strong positive charge. TEM  doesn’t detect secondary electron emissions. Instead, it passes electrons through a target and collects the ones that pass through a very thin sample using a screen that glows when electrons hit it.

The idea, then, is to create a STEM-SEM device. There’s a sample holder and an angled reflector that shoots electrons passing toward the SEM’s detector. The back-scatter detector is not used, and a shield prevents the detector from seeing secondary emissions from the target itself.

You can buy these, but they are well over $1,000, so in true hacker fashion, [Breaking Taps] made his own.  You could, too, but you’d need a pretty good machine shop and — oh yeah — a scanning electron microscope.

While we have seen some home labs with electron microscopes, you need some high-tech vacuum and high-voltage gear, so it isn’t too common. Armed with a STEM, you can even see the shadows of atoms.

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Detecting Machine-Generated Content: An Easier Task For Machine Or Human?

In today’s world we are surrounded by various sources of written information, information which we generally assume to have been written by other humans. Whether this is in the form of books, blogs, news articles, forum posts, feedback on a product page or the discussions on social media and in comment sections, the assumption is that the text we’re reading has been written by another person. However, over the years this assumption has become ever more likely to be false, most recently due to large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-2 and GPT-3 that can churn out plausible paragraphs on just about any topic when requested.

This raises the question of whether we are we about to reach a point where we can no longer be reasonably certain that an online comment, a news article, or even entire books and film scripts weren’t churned out by an algorithm, or perhaps even where an online chat with a new sizzling match turns out to be just you getting it on with an unfeeling collection of code that was trained and tweaked for maximum engagement with customers. (Editor’s note: no, we’re not playing that game here.)

As such machine-generated content and interactions begin to play an ever bigger role, it raises both the question of how you can detect such generated content, as well as whether it matters that the content was generated by an algorithm instead of by a human being.

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Electronic Shoe Explores Alleged Chess Misbehavior

A few months ago, a scandal erupted in the chess world which led to some pretty wild speculation around a specific chess player. We won’t go into any of the details except to say that there is virtually no physical evidence of any method this player allegedly used to cheat in a specific in-person chess match. But [Teddy Warner] and partner [Jack Hollingsworth] were interested in at least providing a proof-of-concept for how this cheating could have been done, though, and came up with this device which signals a chess player through a shoe.

The compact device is small enough to fit in the sole of one of the player’s shoes, and is powered by an ATtiny412 microcontroller paired with a HC-06 Bluetooth module. The electronics are fitted into a 3D printed case along with a small battery which can then be placed into the sole of a shoe, allowing the wearer to feel the vibrations from a small offset-weight motor. With a second person behind a laptop and armed with a chess engine, the opponent’s moves can be fed into the computer and the appropriate response telegraphed through the shoe to the player.

While [Teddy] and [Jack] considers the prototype a success in demonstrating the ease at which a device like this could be used, and have made everything related to this build open source, this iteration did have a number of issues including that the motor buzzing was noticeable during play, and that his chess engine made some bizarre choices in the end game. It also requires the complicity of a second person, which is something this other chess cheating machine does away with. They also note that it’s unlikely that any chess players at the highest levels use devices like these, and that other chess experts have found no evidence of any wrongdoing in this specific scandal.

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The Radioactive Source Missing In Australian Desert Has Been Found

Nuclear material is relatively safe when used, stored, and managed properly. This generally applies to a broad range of situations, from nuclear medicine to nuclear power generation. Some may argue it’s impossible to use nuclear weapons safely. In any case, stringent rules exist to manage nuclear material for good reason.

Sometimes, though, things go wrong, mistakes are made, and that nuclear material ends up going AWOL. That’s the situation that faced authorities in Australia, as they scoured over a thousand kilometers of desert highway for a tiny missing radioactive source with the potential to cause serious harm. Thankfully, authorities were able to track it down.

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A modchip described in the article - a small PCB with an epoxy blob on it, soldered to the Cisco switch PCB using four thin wires

Counterfeit Cisco Hardware Bypasses Security Checks With Modchips

Some pictures recently surfaced on social media, showing a small PCB tapped into four points on Cisco-branded boards. What is this about? A NSA backdoor so data can be exfiltrated to some third party? Well, that’s theoretically possible, but it’s actually used for bypassing hardware authenticity checks in Cisco hardware being cloned — a sizable industry. Of course, “can’t believe it’s not Cisco” hardware is only valuable insofar that it’s able to run the Cisco software, and that’s where the bodge boards play a major role.

An unidentified IC on the a different counterfeit Cisco board, with markings soldered offA 2020 report by F-Secure details an investigation, comparing three switches marked as Cisco 2960X – one known genuine and two known counterfeits. The counterfeits had the aforementioned implants either soldered to the bottom of the PCB or added to the board as a separate component, and the paper goes into why they’re important for successful counterfeiting.

Apparently, these chips emulate or bypass an I2C EEPROM containing part of the code executed during the boot sequence, and Cisco depends on this EEPROM’s contents for authenticity verification. Cisco software reads the EEPROM twice — once for verification, and once again for actually running it. The microcontroller included on the mod board can return a genuine binary with a valid signature on the first read, and a binary with hardware checks patched out for subsequent reads.

The paper will tell you about way more than this — it’s thorough yet captivating. As you’d expect, it devotes quite a bit of time to comparing genuine and counterfeit boards, showing that the cloning process is pretty to-the-T, save for some part substitutions. For instance, check out the PDF page 12 to see how via locations are exactly copied between PCBs in a bizarre way, or the Cisco file format and authenticity check analysis closer to the end of the report. All in all, the 38 pages of the document make for a fun foray into what makes Cisco authentication mechanisms tick, and what helps clone hardware makers bypass them.

Are such chips ever used for adding backdoors and data exfiltration? There’s no evidence of that, as much as that’s not to be excluded — bypassing anti-cloning protections would make other hijinks more viable no doubt, that said, only hardware authentication bypass measures were found so far. This mechanism also breaks during software updates, and absolutely, leaves some to be desired when it comes to its stated functionality. That said, such fun insights can help us, say, enforce right-to-repair, enable hardware reuse, and thwart many predatory business practices in areas where laws fail us.

DIY Adjustable Wrench? Nuts!

What do you do if you want a tiny little adjustable wrench? If you’re [my mechanics] you build your own. Where do you get the stock metal? Well, he started with an M20 nut. A few milling operations, a torch, some pliers, and work with a vice resulted in a nice metal blank just the right size to make each part of the wrench, including a new nut for the adjustment.

Want to do this yourself? If you do, we hope you have a well-equipped machine shop. You should also be comfortable working with red-hot metal.  Overall, it is an amazing piece of work, and you can watch the whole process in the video below.

Honestly, precision metalworking is a little out of our comfort zone. Like the recent wood bending we’ve seen, we always think, “Yeah, I could so do that!” Then we realize that we really couldn’t. But still fun to watch and maybe a few ideas we might be able to apply next time we have to bend a little metal.

The wrench is a scale model of a larger one, and it looks great. We would have liked to see it in use with a tiny nut, but we imagine it would work just fine. If you get excited about making things from a single piece of metal, may we suggest a nutcracker?

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A New Analog And CRT Neck Board For The MacIntosh SE

Keeping a 35-year old system like the MacIntosh SE and its successor, the SE/30, up and running requires the occasional replacement parts. As an all-in-one system, the analog board that provides the power for not only the system but also the 9″ (23 cm) built-in CRT is a common failure location, whether it is due to damaged traces, broken parts or worse. For this purpose [Kay Koba] designed a replacement analog board, providing it with a BOM of replacement components. This also includes the neck board, which is the part that the CRT itself connects to.

As [Kay] notes in the project log, the design was inspired after building [Kai Robinson]’s Classic Reloaded logic board, which we covered previously. After a few revisions, [Kay] has now begun selling the PCBs for $42. The product page also links to BOMs for both the analog board and the neck board, with most of the parts simple through-hole parts. If the board’s fancy styling and LEDs compared to the original board isn’t your cup of tea, it does look like there exists interest in a more subdued version as well.