Hackaday Podcast 187: The Sound Of Gleeful Gerbils, The Song Of The Hard Drive, And A Lipstick Pickup Lullaby

September 30, 2022 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos gushed about NASA’s live obliteration of minor planet Dimorphos using a probe outfitted with a camera. Spoiler alert: the probe reaches its rock-dappled rocky target just fine, and the final transmitted image has a decidedly human tinge.

Kristina brought the mystery sound again this week, much to Elliot’s sonic delight. Did he get it? Did he figure it out? Well, no. The important thing is one of you is bound to get it.

We kick off the hacks with a really neat 3D printed linkage that acts as an elevator for a marble run, and then we discuss a mid-century hack that helps you decide whether it’s time to emerge from the fallout shelter using the contents of your typical 1950s pockets. We spent a few minutes comparing our recent radiation exposure levels — Kristina wins with about a dozen x-rays so far this year, but no full-body CT scans. Then we talk guitars for a bit, remember a forgotten CPU from TI, and spend a few cycles talking about a tone-wheel organ that sounds like a chorus of gleeful gerbils.

Finally, we talk toner transfer for 3D prints, argue in defense of small teams versus large committees, and get all tangled up in cursive.

Direct download.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

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Microsoft Wants You (To Help With Assistive Tech)

September 30, 2022 by Jonathan Bennett 12 Comments

In college I had an exceptional piano teacher that was entirely blind. One day he noticed I had brought in my new-ish laptop, and his unexpected request — “can I look at your laptop?” — temporarily flabbergasted me. Naturally there wasn’t much he could do with it, so he gave it a once over with his fingers to understand the keyboard layout, and that was that. I still think about this experience from time to time, and the most obvious lesson is that my paradigm for using a computer didn’t map well to his abilities and disability.

The folks at Microsoft are thinking about this problem, too, and they’re doing a lot of work to make technology work for more users, like the excellent Xbox Adaptive Controller pictured above. Now, if you have some experience helping folks overcome the challenges of disability, or have a killer idea for an assistive technology solution, Microsoft is looking for projects to fund. Did you rig up a Raspberry Pi and webcam to automatically read text aloud? Maybe you pulled that old Kinect out, and are working on sign-language reader using 3D data points.

Make a pitch of your project or solid idea by the November 4th deadline, and just maybe you can get some help to make it a reality. Just make sure you come back and tell us about it! After all, some of the coolest hacks we’ve ever covered have been adaptive tech projects.

Thanks to [MauroPichiliani] for sending in this tip.

This Week In Security: Exchange 0-day, Doppelgangers, And Python Gets Bit In The TAR

September 30, 2022 by Jonathan Bennett 13 Comments

According to researchers at GTSC, there’s an unpatched 0-day being used in-the-wild to exploit fully patched Microsoft Exchange servers. When they found one compromised server, they made the report to Microsoft through ZDI, but upon finding multiple Exchange servers compromised, they’re sounding the alarm for everyone. It looks like it’s an attack similar to ProxyShell, in that it uses the auto-discover endpoint as a starting point. They suspect it’s a Chinese group that’s using the exploit, based on some of the indicators found in the webshell that gets installed.

There is a temporary mitigation, adding a URL-based request block on the string .*autodiscover\.json.*\@.*Powershell.. The exact details are available in the post. If you’re running Exchange with IIS, this should probably get added to your system right now. Next, use either the automated tool, or run the PowerShell one-liner to detect compromise: Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Path -Filter "*.log" | Select-String -Pattern 'powershell.*autodiscover\.json.*\@.*200. This one has the potential to be another really nasty problem, and may be wormable. As of the time of writing, this is an outstanding, unpatched problem in Microsoft Exchange. Come back and finish the rest of this article after you’ve safed up your systems.

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Slap This Big Red Button For An Instant Social Media Detox

September 30, 2022 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

Dangerous machines, like ones that can quickly reduce you to a fine red mist or a smoking cinder, tend to have a Big Red Button™ to immediately stop whatever the threat is. Well, if a more dangerous machine than social media has ever been invented, we’re not sure what it would be, which is why we’re glad this social media kill switch exists.

The idea behind [Gunter Froman]’s creation is to provide a physical interface to SocialsDetox, a service that blocks or throttles connectivity to certain apps and websites. SocialDetox blocks access using either DNS over HTTPS (DoH) or, for particularly pesky and addictive apps, a service-specific VPN. The service does require a subscription, the cost of which varies by the number of devices you want to protect, but the charges honestly seem pretty reasonable.

While SocialsDetox can be set up to block access on a regular schedule, say if you want to make the family dinner a social-free time, there may be occasions where killing social access needs to happen right now. This is where the Big Red Button comes into it, which is attached to a Wemos D1 Mini. Pressing the kill switch sends an API request to either enable or disable the service, giving you a likely much-needed break from the swirling vortex of hate and envy that we all can’t seem to live without. Except for Hackaday, of course — it’s totally not like that here.

The irony of using an IoT appliance to restrict access to social media is not lost on us, but you work with the tools you’ve got. And besides, we like the physical interface here, which sort of reminds us this fitting enclosure for a PiHole.

This Computer Is Definitely Not A Toy

September 30, 2022 by Jenny List 6 Comments

If you’ve ever eyed up a kids laptop and wondered whether it could take an upgrade with a single board computer, you’re not alone. [Labz] have taken a couple of Brazilian Max Steel toy computers from a decade or more ago, and made them into usable if unconventional portable computers (Brazilian Portuguese, but YouTube’s subtitle translation is your friend).

The computers are similar to the ones you may be familiar with from the likes of VTech, a QWERTY keyboard and fairly conventional form factor but with a tiny monochrome LCD and a few built-in games. In the video below the break we see both the laptop and desktop variants butchered with a rotary tool to receive new larger screens, with the laptop getting a Raspberry Pi and the desktop getting a small form factor PC. The laptop needed a 3D printed extension to make extra space, while the desktop received a PCI Express extension cable for a video card. Finally, an Arduino took care of the keyboard.

The cherry on the cake for this video comes at the end, when they find the now-grown-up kid from the original advert. Meanwhile, kids computers have featured here before a few times.

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Building A Replica Of An Obscure Romanian Computer

September 29, 2022 by Lewin Day 5 Comments

We’ve all seen emulated Apple II and Commodore 64 boards about the place. Few of us have heard of the Romanian ZX Spectrum clone known as the Cobra, let alone any efforts to replicate one. However, [Thomas Sowell] has achieved just that, and has shared the tale with us online.

The Cobra was named for its origins in the city of Brasov – hence, COmputer BRasov. The replica project was spawned for a simple reason. Given that sourcing an original Romanian Cobra would be difficult, [Thomas] realized that he could instead build his own, just as many Romanians did in the 1980s. He set about studying the best online resources about the Cobra, and got down to work.

The build started with board images sourced from Cobrasov.com, and these were used to get a PCB made. [Thomas] decided to only use vintage ICs sourced from the Eastern Bloc for authenticity’s sake, too. Most came from the former USSR, though some parts were of East German, Romanian, or Czechoslovakian manufacture. The project took place prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, so there weren’t any hassles shipping across borders.

With everything hooked up and the EEPROMs given a real Cobra ROM image, the computer burst into life. There were some hiccups, with an overheating video IC and some memory glitches. However, with some nifty tweaks and replacements subbed in, the computer came good. Other work involved adding a custom keyboard and modifying 3.5″ floppy drives to work with the system.

Overall, the build is a faithful tribute to what was an impressive piece of engineering from behind the Iron Curtain. [Thomas]’s work also embodies the DIY ethos behind many homebrew Cobra computers built back in the day.

If all this talk has got you curious about the full history of the Cobra and Romania’s underground computer movement, we have everything you’re looking for right here!

picture showing the re-built scale with an extra blue box with electronics on the bottom of it. on the scale, there's a transparent food-grade plastic glass with measurement marks on the side.

Urine Flow Measurement Made Accessible With UroFlow

September 29, 2022 by Arya Voronova 21 Comments

If you’re dealing with a chronic illness, the ability to continuously monitor your symptoms is indispensable, helping you gain valuable insights into what makes your body tick – or, rather, mis-tick. However, for many illnesses, you need specialized equipment to monitor them, and it tends to be that you can only visit your doctor every so often. Thankfully, we hackers can figure out ways to monitor our conditions on our own. With a condition called BPH (Benign Prostate Hyperplasia), one of the ways to monitor it is taking measurements of urinary flow rate. Being able to take these measurements at home provides better insights, and, having found flow rate measurement devices to be prohibitively expensive to even rent, [Jerry Smith] set out to build his own.

This build is truly designed to be reproducible for anyone who needs such a device. Jerry has intricately documented the project and its inner workings – the 31-page document contains full build instructions, BOM for ordering, PCB description and pinout diagrams, calibration and validation instructions, and even software flowcharts; the GitHub repo has everything else you might need. We’re pleasantly surprised – this amount of documentation isn’t typically seen in hacker projects, and is even more valuable considering that this is a medical device that other hackers in need will want to reproduce.

For the hardware, [Jerry] took a small digital scale of a certain model and reused its load cell-based weighing mechanism using an HX711 amplifier, replacing the screen and adding an extra box for control electronics. With an Arduino MKR1010 as brains of the operation, the hardware’s there to log flow data, initially recorded onto the SD card, with WiFi connectivity to transfer the data to a computer for plotting; a DS3234 RTC breakout helps keep track of the time, and a custom PCB ties all of these together. All of these things are easy to put together, in no small part due to the extensive instructions provided.