New Privacy Policy Gets Audacity Back On Track

July 23, 2021 by 29 Comments

Regular readers will likely be aware of the considerable debate over changes being made to the free and open source audio editor Audacity by the project’s new owners, Muse Group. The company says their goal is to modernize the 20 year old GPLv2 program and bring it to a larger audience, but many in the community have questioned whether the new managers really understand the free software ethos. An already precarious situation has only been made worse by a series of PR blunders Muse Group has made over the last several months.

But for a change, it seems things might be moving in the right direction. In a recent post to Audacity’s GitHub repository, Muse Group unveiled the revised version of their much maligned Privacy Policy. The announcement also came with an admission that many of the key elements from the draft version of the Privacy Policy were poorly worded and confusing. It seems much of the problem can be attributed to an over-analysis of the situation; with the company inserting provocative boilerplate protections (such as a clause saying users must be over the age of 13) that simply weren’t necessary.

Ultimately, the new Privacy Policy bears little resemblance to the earlier draft. Which objectively, is a good thing. But it’s still difficult to understand why Muse Group publicly posted such a poorly constructed version of the document in the first place. Project lead Martin Keary, better known online as Tantacrul, says the team had to consult with various legal teams before they could release the revised policy. That sounds reasonable enough, but why where these same teams not consulted before releasing such a spectacularly ill-conceived draft?

The new Privacy Policy makes it clear that Audacity won’t be collecting any user data, and what little personally identifiable information Muse Group gets from the application when it automatically checks for an update (namely, the client’s IP address) isn’t being stored. It’s further explained in the GitHub post that the automatic update feature only applies to official binary builds of Audacity, meaning it will be disabled for Linux users who install it through their distribution’s package repository. The clause about working with unnamed law enforcement agencies has been deleted, as has the particularly troubling age requirement.

Credit where credit is due. Muse Group promised to revise their plans for adding telemetry to Audacity, and judging by the new Privacy Policy, it seems they’ve done an admirable job of addressing all of the issues brought up by the community. Those worried their FOSS audio editor of choice would start spying on them can rest easy. Unfortunately the issue of Audacity’s inflammatory Contributor License Agreement (CLA) has yet to be resolved, meaning recently christened forks of the audio editor dedicated to preserving its GPLv2 lineage are unlikely to stand down anytime soon.

Are Hackers Being Let Down In Education?

July 23, 2021 by 62 Comments

In my work for Hackaday over the years I have been privileged to interact with some of the most creative people I have ever met, I have travelled far more than I ever did when I toiled unseen in an office in Oxford, and I have been lucky enough to hang out in our community’s spaces, camps, and dives across Europe.

Among the huge diversity of skills and ideas though, it’s striking how many of us share similar experiences and histories that have caused us to find our people in rooms full of tools and 3D printers. One of these things I found surprising because I thought I was the only one; I never fit in with the other kids at school, I found much of the teaching incomprehensible and had to figure things out for myself. As an exercise recently I did a straw poll among some of my friends, and found that a significant majority had a similar experience. Clearly something must have gone badly wrong in the way we were being taught that so many of us could have been let down by our schooling, and maybe to understand the needs of our community it’s time to understand why.

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Hackaday Podcast 128: 3D-Printing Injection Molds, Squiggly Audio Tape, Curvy Mirrors, And Space Cadets

July 23, 2021 by No comments

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys bubble sort the best hardware hacks so you don’t miss ’em. This week we’re smitten by the perfection of a telephone tape loop message announcer. We enjoyed seeing Blender’s ray tracing to design mirrors, and a webcam and computer monitor to stand in for triple-projector-based fractal fun. There’s a bit of injection molding, some Nintendo Switch disassembling, and the Internet on a calculator. We close the show with a pair of Space stories, including the happy news this week that Wally Funk finally made it there!

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (60 MB or so.)

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

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3D Printed Roller Coaster Looks Pretty Darn Fun

July 23, 2021 by 10 Comments

Rollercoasters are great fun if you can deal with the exhilaration without throwing up or otherwise screaming until you pass out. Of course, the big outdoors ones are a little hard to get to at the moment, what with a pandemic raging outside. However, [3d_coasters] has built a tabletop design that, while it’s too small to ride, is nonetheless quite impressive. (Video, embedded below.)

The coaster is of the launch design. It relies on an elastic cord that is wound up to high tension to launch the train up to speed, with the train then coasting around the rest of the curves on the track. The quality of the modelling is highly impressive, too. The doors at the boarding platform are even actuated to simulate riders boarding the train! Everything is controlled by an Arduino, a handful of micro servos, and a DC motor.

As you might imagine, this project didn’t happen overnight. 600 hours were logged in Fusion 360 developing the track, and slicing the models in Cura for 3D printing took a further 5 hours. The actual printing process itself took 800 hours, not including finishing, so this project certainly isn’t one for the faint of heart. The final model weighs a full 30 lbs.

Believe it or not, we’ve featured 3D printed rollercoasters before, too. Video after the break.

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This Week In Security: NSO, Print Spooler, And A Mysterious Decryptor

July 23, 2021 by 22 Comments

The NSO Group has been in the news again recently, with multiple stories reporting on their Pegasus spyware product. The research and reporting spearheaded by Amnesty International is collectively known as “The Pegasus project”. This project made waves on the 18th, when multiple news outlets reported on a list of 50,000 phone numbers that are reported as “potential surveillance targets.” There are plenty of interesting people to be found on this list, like 14 heads of state and many journalists.

There are plenty of questions, too. Like what exactly is this list, and where did it come from? Amnesty international has pointed out that it is not a list of people actively being targeted. They’ve reported that of the devices associated with an entry on the list that they have been able to check, roughly 50% have shown signs of Pegasus spyware. The Guardian was part of the initial coordinated release, and has some impressive non-details to add:

The presence of a phone number in the data does not reveal whether a device was infected with Pegasus or subject to an attempted hack. However, the consortium believes the data is indicative of the potential targets NSO’s government clients identified in advance of possible surveillance attempts.

Amazon’s AWS was named as part of the C&C structure of Pegasus, and in response, they have pulled the plug on accounts linked to NSO. For their part, NSO denies the validity of the list altogether. Continue reading “This Week In Security: NSO, Print Spooler, And A Mysterious Decryptor” →

LEGO Pole Climbers Are Great Study In What It Takes To Go Vertically Upwards

July 23, 2021 by 3 Comments

Climbing a pole with a robot might sound complicated and hard, but it doesn’t have to be. This video from [Brick Experiment Channel] demonstrates multiple methods of doing the job while keeping things simple from a mechanical perspective. (Video, embedded below.)

The first method uses a gravity locking design, where the weight of the battery pack is placed on a lever arm to increase the normal force on the wheels gripping the pole. Increasing the length of the lever arm, reducing the angle of the crawler, or adding grippier tyres can all be used to increase the grip with this design. The final design of this type is able to climb most of the way up an 8 meter flagpole without too much trouble.

The next version uses rubber bands to help add tension to grip the pole. This too works well and makes it to the top of the flagpole. The final build is a circulating design that looks truly wild in action, and winds its way to the top of the flagpole as well.

It’s great to see the experimental method of designing these Lego creations, as well as seeing how they do in the wild. [Brick Experiment Channel] has been featured here before, too.

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Tardygrade Walker Is A Lesson In 3D Printed Design

July 23, 2021 by 12 Comments

The ability to quickly create complex parts with 3D printers has created a platform to show off mechanical design skills. This is true in the case of [Dejan Ristic]’s capable little Tardygrade walking robot, which uses only two servos and a bunch of clever 3D printed parts.

The robot’s chassis is split into two subassemblies, each with a pair of feet on diagonal corners. As one pair of feet lifts the robot, the other section of the robot can rotate before coming back down, allowing the robot to turn. One servo handles the actuation of the feet, while the other rotates the body as required. An ESP32 based controller creates a web server user interface, and power comes from a lipo cell.

The interesting part of this robot is in how [Dejan] designed it for printing and assembly. All the parts can print without support, and in the correct orientation to optimize strength. There are only six screws in the assembly holding the servo and servo horns, while everything else uses snap fits or short pieces of filament. Take a look at the videos after the break to gain some appreciation of the design effort and attention to detail that went into this robot. Even the contact surfaces of the feet were carefully designed for optimum walking over flat surfaces and small obstacles.

This reminds us of [gzumwalt]’s little 3D printed creations, like the fridge crawler and mechanical edge-avoiding robot.