Photo of the Echo Dot PCB, highlighting the capacitor that needs to be shorted out for the exploit to work

Squeezing Secrets Out Of An Amazon Echo Dot

April 1, 2023 by 44 Comments

As we have seen time and time again, not every device stores our sensitive data in a respectful manner. Some of them send our personal data out to third parties, even! Today’s case is not a mythical one, however — it’s a jellybean Amazon Echo Dot, and [Daniel B] shows how to make it spill your WiFi secrets with a bit of a hardware nudge.

There’s been exploits for Amazon devices with the same CPU, so to save time, [Daniel] started by porting an old Amazon Fire exploit to the Echo Dot. This exploit requires tactically applying a piece of tin foil to a capacitor on the flash chip power rail, and it forces the Echo to surrender the contents of its entire filesystem, ripe for analysis. Immediately, [Daniel] found out that the Echo keeps your WiFi passwords in plain text, as well as API keys to some of the Amazon-tied services.

Found an old Echo Dot at a garage sale or on eBay? There might just be a WiFi password and a few API keys ripe for the taking, and who knows what other kinds of data it might hold. From Amazon service authentication keys to voice recognition models and maybe even voice recordings, it sounds like getting an Echo to spill your secrets isn’t all that hard.

We’ve seen an Echo hijacked into an always-on microphone before, also through physical access in the same vein, so perhaps we all should take care to keep our Echoes in a secure spot. Luckily, adding a hardware mute switch to Amazon’s popular surveillance device isn’t all that hard. Though that won’t keep your burned out smart bulbs from leaking your WiFi credentials.

Apple Never Gave Them USB. Now, They’re Getting It For Themselves

April 1, 2023 by 14 Comments

These days we use USB as a default for everything from low-speed serial ports to high-capacity storage, and the ubiquitous connector has evolved into a truly multi-purpose interface. It’s difficult to believe then, that the first Apple Mac to be designed with a USB interface was shipped without it; but that’s the case with 1997’s grey Power Mac G3.

On the personality board are all the footprints for a single USB 1.1 port, but USB-hungry Apple fanboys had to wait for the translucent iMac and later G3 before they had a machine with the parts fitted. [Croissantking] is righting that particular wrong, by piecing together the missing Apple circuit using parts from contemporary cards for PCs. Over a long forum thread there are a few teething problems, but it certainly seems as though grey G3 owners will soon be able to have reliable USB upgrades.

If omitting USB from a 1997 Mac seems unexpected, it’s as well to remember how slow the first USB versions were. At the time SCSI was king in the high-speed peripheral world, and USB seemed more appropriate as a replacement for Apple Desktop Bus and the serial port. Even when they embraced USB they were reluctant to follow the standards of the PC world, as we remember finding out when for curiosity’s sake we tried swapping the mice and keyboards between an iMac and a Windows PC. We have USB’s success to thank for releasing Mac users from a world of hugely overpriced proprietary peripherals.

If you fancy hacking a ’90s PowerMac, make sure you get one that works.

Thanks [Doug] for the tip.

Working With Old High-Voltage EPROMs Is Fussy

March 31, 2023 by 19 Comments

EPROMs, those UV-erasable memory chips of the 80s and 90s, once played a crucial role in countless electronic devices. They’ve become relics of a bygone era, but for enthusiasts of vintage electronics, the allure of these light-sensitive devices remains strong. Today, we’re diving into [Kevin Osborn]’s nostalgic journey as he uncovers the secrets of old EPROMs loaded with Atari 7800 code.

[Kevin] used to work at General Computer Company, which produced the Atari 7800 and several games for the system. Thus, he had a handful of old carts and development EPROMs sitting up in his attic along with an old console. Recently, he decided to try and uncover what was on the EPROMs and begun an investigation. They wouldn’t run in his Atari, and he quickly realized why: the EPROMs weren’t cryptographically signed, so the system wouldn’t load them. Continue reading “Working With Old High-Voltage EPROMs Is Fussy” →

Creating A 3D Visualization Of Freely Moving Organisms Using Camera Array And Software Algorithm

March 31, 2023 by 3 Comments

Observing a colony, swarm or similar grouping of creatures like ants or zebrafish over longer periods of time can be tricky. Simply recording their behavior with a camera misses a lot of information about the position of their body parts, while taking precise measurements using a laser-based system or LiDAR suffers from a reduction in parameters such as the resolution or the update speed. The ideal monitoring system would be able to record at high data rates and resolutions, while presenting the recorded data all three dimensions. This is where the work by Kevin C. Zhou and colleagues seeks to tick all the boxes, with a recent paper (preprint, open access) in Nature Photonics describing their 3D-RAPID system.

This system features a 9×6 camera grid, making for a total of 54 cameras which image the underlying surface. With 66% overlap between cameras across the horizontal dimension, there enough duplicate data between image stream that is subsequently used in the processing step to extract and reconstruct the 3D features, also helped by the pixel pitch of between 9.6 to 38.4 µm. The software is made available via the author’s GitHub.

Three configurations for the imaging are possible, ranging from no downsampling (1x) for 13,000×11,250 resolution at 15 FPS, to 2x downsampling (6,500×5,625@60FPS) and finally 4x (3,250×2,810@230FPS). Depending on whether the goal is to image finer features or rapid movement, this gives a range of options before the data is fed into the computational 3D reconstruction and stitching algorithm. This uses the overlap between the distinct frames to reconstruct the 3D image, which in this paper is used together with a convolutional neural network (CNN) to automatically determine for example how often the zebrafish are near the surface, as well as the behavior of fruit flies and harvester ants.

As noted in an interview with the authors, possible applications could be found in developmental biology as well as pharmaceutics.

Tiny Yet Functional Bike Built From Scratch

March 31, 2023 by 10 Comments

Sometimes, you just want to go ride your bike in the great outdoors, but you can’t be bothered throwing it in the back of the car. That wouldn’t be a problem if you rode this latest build from [The Q]: a bike small enough to fit in a handbag.

The build starts by customizing a rollerblade wheel to act as the driven rear wheel of the bike. It’s fitted with a tiny sprocket allowing it to be chain driven. Welding some steel tubes then nets a small diamond-layout bike frame. It’s fitted with a chain ring, pedals, and steering assembly just like a full-sized bike, just in absolute miniature.

Riding the bike is “uncomfortable,” in [The Q]’s own terms, but entirely possible. It basically requires the same level of contortion and technique as displayed by the clowns of your local circus. Don’t expect to use it as viable transportation, though. Walking would be much faster.

We’ve seen [The Q] build some wild bikes before, too, like this great hubless design. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Tiny Yet Functional Bike Built From Scratch” →

See Satellites In Broad Daylight With This Sky-Mapping Dish Antenna

March 31, 2023 by 16 Comments

If you look up at the night sky in a dark enough place, with enough patience you’re almost sure to see a satellite cross the sky. It’s pretty cool to think you’re watching light reflect off a hunk of metal zipping around the Earth fast enough to never hit it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work during the daylight hours, and you really only get to see satellites in low orbits.

Thankfully, there’s a trick that allows you to see satellites any time of day, even the ones in geosynchronous orbits — you just need to look using microwaves. That’s what [Gabe] at [saveitforparts] did with a repurposed portable satellite dish, the kind that people who really don’t like being without their satellite TV programming when they’re away from home buy and quickly sell when they realize that toting a satellite dish around is both expensive and embarrassing. They can be had for a song, and contain pretty much everything needed for satellite comms in one package: a small dish on a motorized altazimuth mount, a low-noise block amplifier (LNB), and a single-board computer that exposes a Linux shell.

After figuring out how to command the dish to specific coordinates and read the signal strength of the received transponder signals, [Gabe] was able to cobble together a Python program to automate the task. The data from these sweeps of the sky resulted in heat maps that showed a clear arc of geosynchronous satellites across the southern sky. It’s quite similar to something that [Justin] from Thought Emporium did a while back, albeit in a much more compact and portable package. The video below has full details.

[Gabe] also tried turning the dish away from the satellites and seeing what his house looks like bathed in microwaves reflected from the satellite constellation, which worked surprisingly well — well enough that we’ll be trawling the secondary market for one of these dishes; they look like a ton of fun.

Continue reading “See Satellites In Broad Daylight With This Sky-Mapping Dish Antenna” →

Move Aside Yoda, It’s Furby’s Turn On Luke’s Back

March 31, 2023 by 9 Comments

When you want a backpack that turns heads and gets people talking, you can get ahead of the conversation with a talking backpack. [Nina] created a rucksack with the legendary babbler itself, the infamous Furby.

Believe it or not, no actual Furbies were sacrificed in the making of this backpack. The build uses an Arduino Nano, two servos, and a DFPlayer Mini for audio. A 3D printed faceplate is used for the iconic eyes and face. The code is fairly simple, waiting for a random delay and then triggering one of four effects. It can play a sound or blink and does its best to move the mouth while the sound is playing thanks to the handy busy line coming off the sound module. A unicorn children’s backpack offered a furry shell to stuff the electronics inside. A custom PCB makes the whole thing just a little neater internally.

Perhaps next [Nina] can integrate voice recognition so that the backpack can answer simple questions like an Alexa-powered Furby we’ve seen before.

Continue reading “Move Aside Yoda, It’s Furby’s Turn On Luke’s Back” →