Turning Soviet Electronics Into A Nixie Tube Clock

August 27, 2023 by 17 Comments

Sometimes you find something that looks really cool but doesn’t work, but that’s an opportunity to give it a new life. That was the case when [Davis DeWitt] got his hands on a weird Soviet-era box with four original Nixie tubes inside. He tears the unit down, shows off the engineering that went into it and explains what it took to give the unit a new life as a clock.

Each digit is housed inside a pluggable unit. If a digit failed, a technician could simply swap it out.

A lot can happen over decades of neglect. That was clear when [Davis] discovered every single bolt had seized in place and had to be carefully drilled out. But Nixie tubes don’t really go bad, so he was hopeful that the process would pay off.

The unit is a modular display of some kind, clearly meant to plug into a larger assembly. Inside the unit, each digit is housed in its own modular plug with a single Nixie tube at the front, a small neon bulb for a decimal point, and a bunch of internal electronics. Bringing up the rear is a card edge connector.

Continues after the break…

Continue reading “Turning Soviet Electronics Into A Nixie Tube Clock” →

Going To Extremes To Block YouTube Ads

August 26, 2023 by 109 Comments

Many users of YouTube feel that the quality of the service has been decreasing in recent years — the platform offers up bizarre recommendations, fails to provide relevant search results, and continues to shove an increasing amount of ads into the videos themselves. For shareholders of Google’s parent company, though, this is a feature and not a bug; and since shareholder opinion is valued much more highly than user opinion, the user experience will likely continue to decline. But if you’re willing to put a bit of effort in you can stop a large chunk of YouTube ads from making it to your own computers and smartphones.

[Eric] is setting up this adblocking system on his entire network, so running something like Pi-hole on a single-board computer wouldn’t have the performance needed. Instead, he’s installing the pfSense router software on a mini PC. To start, [Eric] sets up a pretty effective generic adblocker in pfSense to replace his Pi-hole, which does an excellent job, but YouTube is a different beast when it comes to serving ads especially on Android and iOS apps. One initial attempt to at least reduce ads was to subtly send YouTube traffic through a VPN to a country with fewer ads, in this case Italy, but this solution didn’t pan out long-term.

A few other false starts later, all of which are documented in detail by [Eric] for those following along, and eventually he settled on a solution which is effectively a man-in-the-middle attack between any device on his network and the Google ad servers. His router is still not powerful enough to decode this information on the fly but his trick to get around that is to effectively corrupt the incoming advertising data with a few bad bytes so they aren’t able to be displayed on any devices on the network. It’s an effective and unique solution, and one that Google hopefully won’t be able to patch anytime soon. There are some other ways to improve the miserable stock YouTube experience that we have seen as well, like bringing back the dislike button.

Thanks to [Jack] for the tip!

GTA 6 Hacker Found To Be Teen With Amazon Fire Stick In Small Town Hotel Room

August 26, 2023 by 115 Comments

International cybercrime, as portrayed by the movies and mass media, is a high-stakes game of shadowy government agencies and state-sponsored hacking groups. Hollywood casting will wheel out a character in a black hoodie and shades, probably carrying a metallic briefcase as they board an executive jet.

These things aren’t supposed to happen in a cheap hotel room in your insignificant hometown, but the story of a British teen being nabbed leaking the closely guarded details of Grand Theft Auto 6 in a Travelodge room in Bicester, Oxfordshire brings the action from the global into the local for a Hackaday scribe. Bicester is a small town best known for a tacky outlet mall and as a commuter dormitory stop on the line to London Marylebone, it’s not exactly Vice City.

The teen in question is one [Arion Kurtaj], breathlessly reported by the BBC as part of the Lapsus$ gang, which is a sensationalist way of talking up a group of kids expert at computer infiltration but seemingly inept at being criminals. After compromising British telcos he was exposed by another group and nabbed by the authorities, before being moved to the hotel for his own safety.

Here the story becomes more interesting for Hackaday readers, because though denied access to a computer he purchased an Amazon Fire stick presumably at the Argos in the Sainsburys next door, and plugged it into the Travelodge TV. Using this he was able to access cloud services, we’re guessing a virtual Linux environment or similar, before continuing to compromise further organisations including Rockstar Games to leak that GTA 6 footage. He’s yet to be sentenced, but we’re guessing that he’ll continue to spend some time at His Majesty’s pleasure.

The moment of excitement in one’s hometown and the sensationalist reporting aside, we can’t help feeling sad that a teen with that level of talent evidently wasn’t given the support and encouragement by Oxfordshire’s education system necessary to put it to better use. Let’s hope when he’s older and wiser the teenage conviction won’t prevent him from having a useful career in the field.

Microsoft Discontinues Kinect, Again

August 26, 2023 by 17 Comments

The Kinect is a depth-sensing camera peripheral originally designed as a accessory for the Xbox gaming console, and it quickly found its way into hobbyist and research projects. After a second version, Microsoft abandoned the idea of using it as a motion sensor for gaming and it was discontinued. The technology did however end up evolving as a sensor into what eventually became the Azure Kinect DK (spelling out ‘developer kit’ presumably made the name too long.) Sadly, it also has now been discontinued.

The original Kinect was a pretty neat piece of hardware for the price, and a few years ago we noted that the newest version was considerably smaller and more capable. It had a depth sensor with selectable field of view for different applications, a high-resolution RGB video camera that integrated with the depth stream, integrated IMU and microphone array, and it worked to leverage machine learning for better processing and easy integration with Azure. It even provided a simple way to sync multiple units together for unified processing of a scene.

In many ways the Kinect gave us all a glimpse of the future because at the time, a depth-sensing camera with a synchronized video stream was just not a normal thing to get one’s hands on. It was also one of the first consumer hardware items to contain a microphone array, which allowed it to better record voices, localize them, and isolate them from other noise sources in a room. It led to many, many projects and we hope there are still more to come, because Microsoft might not be making them anymore, but they are licensing out the technology to companies who want to build similar devices.

Wireless Data Connections Through Light

August 25, 2023 by 38 Comments

When wired networking or data connections can’t be made, for reasons of distance or practicality, various wireless protocols are available to us. Wi-Fi is among the most common, at least as far as networking personal computers is concerned, but other methods such as LoRa or Zigbee are available when data rates are low and distances great. All of these methods share one thing in common, though: their use of radio waves to send data. Using other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum is not out of the question, though, and [mircemk] demonstrates using light as the medium instead of radio.

Although this isn’t a new technology (“Li-Fi” was first introduced in 2011) it’s not one that we see often. It does have a few benefits though, including high rates of data transmission. In this system, [mircemk] is using an LED to send the information and a solar cell as the receiver. The LED is connected to a simple analog modulator circuit, which takes an audio signal as its input and sends the data to the light. The solar cell sends its data, with the help of a capacitor, straight to the aux input on a radio which is used to convert the signal back to audio.

Some of the other perks of a system like this are seen here as well. The audio is clear even as the light source and solar cell are separated at a fairly significant distance, perhaps ten meters or so. This might not seem like a lot compared to Wi-Fi, but another perk shown is that this method can be used within existing lighting systems since the modulation is not detectable by the human eye. Outside of a home or office setting, systems like these can also be used to send data much greater distances as well, as long as the LED is replaced with a laser.

Continue reading “Wireless Data Connections Through Light” →

Rocket Range Australia, 1950s Style

August 25, 2023 by 11 Comments

The Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) of Australia just released a digitized version of a 1957 film documentary on Australia’s rocket research back in the day ( see video below the break ). The Woomera test range is an isolated place about 500 km northwest of Adelaide ( 2021 population 132 ) and hosts a small village, an airstrip, and launch facilities. In the Salisbury suburb of Adelaide, a former WW2 munitions factory complex was repurposed as a research center for rockets and long range weapons.

The documentary showcases a wide variety of state-of-the-art technologies from the late 1950s. As ancient as those appear today, a lot of the basic concepts haven’t changed — careful choreography of the launch countdown sequence of events, the antenna and radio systems to receive and store rocket telemetry, photographic records of the rocket in flight, and post-flight analyses of everything to fix problems and improve your designs. They tried to do as much as possible at the Salisbury campus, because as the narrator notes, it’s expensive to work at the distant test range, a concept which is still a consideration today. There’s even a glimpse of the residents’ leisure life in the barren village. It was a different time, to say the least. Continue reading “Rocket Range Australia, 1950s Style” →

Privacy And Photography, We Need To Talk

August 25, 2023 by 41 Comments

One of the fun aspects of our global community is that there are plenty of events at which we can meet up, hang out, and do cool stuff together. They may be in a Las Vegas convention center, a slightly muddy field in England, or a bar in Berlin, but those of us with a consuming interest in technology and making things have a habit of finding each other. Our events all have their own cultures which make each one slightly different from others.

The German events, for example, seem very political to my eyes — with earnest blue-haired young women seeking to make their mark as activists, while the British ones are a little more laid-back and full of middle-aged engineers seeking the bar. There are some cultural things which go beyond the superficial though and extend into the way the events are run, and it’s one of these which I think it’s time we had a chat about.

Our Community Takes Privacy Seriously

The relevant section about photography in the SHA2017 code of conduct.
The relevant section about photography in the SHA2017 code of conduct.

The hacker community differs from the general public in many ways, one of which is that we tend to have a much greater understanding of privacy in the online age. The Average Joe will happily sign up to the latest social media craze without a care in the world, while we quickly identify it as a huge data slurp in which the end user is the product rather than the customer.

The work of privacy activists in our community in spotting privacy overreaches may pass unnoticed by outsiders, but over the years it’s scored some big wins that benefit everyone. Part of this interest in privacy appears at our events; it’s very much not done to take a photograph of someone at a hacker event without their consent. This will usually be clearly stated in the code of conduct, and thus if taking a picture featuring someone it’s imperative to make damn sure they’re OK with it. Continue reading “Privacy And Photography, We Need To Talk” →