This Week In Security: Bad Signs From Microsoft, An Epyc VM Escape

July 2, 2021 by 14 Comments

Code signing is the silver bullet that will save us from malware, right? Not so much, particularly when vendors can be convinced to sign malicious code. Researchers at G DATA got a hit on a Windows kernel driver, indicating it might be malicious. That seemed strange, since the driver was properly signed by Microsoft. Upon further investigation, it became clear that this really was malware. The file was reported to Microsoft, the signature revoked, and the malware added to the Windows Defender definitions.

The official response from Microsoft is odd. They start off by assuring everyone that their driver signing process wasn’t actually compromised, like you would. The next part is weird. Talking about the people behind the malware: “The actor’s goal is to use the driver to spoof their geo-location to cheat the system and play from anywhere. The malware enables them to gain an advantage in games and possibly exploit other players by compromising their accounts through common tools like keyloggers.” This doesn’t seem to really match the observed behavior of the malware — it seemed to be decoding SSL connections and sending the data to the C&C server. We’ll update you if we hear anything more on this one.
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Good Enough For The Spruce Goose, Good Enough For Satellites

June 22, 2021 by 31 Comments

Wood products have a long history in aviation even though modern materials have eclipsed them in many areas. But lately we’ve noticed several plywood satellites, including this one the ESA plans to launch. The WISA Woodsat is a test of WISA plywood, a particular brand made in Finland to show how it can withstand the orbital environment.

Why not? Plywood is cheap and easy to form. You probably don’t want to make a pressure vessel with it, but most satellites don’t need that anyway.

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Hackaday Links: June 20, 2021

June 20, 2021 by 15 Comments

The hits just keep coming for Elon Musk, as this week Starlink users reported their new satellite dishes apparently can’t take the heat. Granted, the places these reports are coming from are really, really hot, like Topock, Arizona, where one Starlink beta tester is located and where the air temperature is expected to hit 123°F (50°C) on Saturday. One user contacted Starlink customer service and was told that Dishy McFlatface is programmed to shut down if the surface temperature exceeds 50°C, which even in non-Arizona locations would be easily exceeded on a rooftop or in an urban heat island. Users experiencing thermal shutdown are taking extreme measures to get back online in the heat of the day, like by setting up sprinklers to water-cool their dishes. Others are building solar shades, and one die-hard is even considering putting the dish on an antenna tower, to get it up into the relatively cooler air above the ground. But these are just workarounds, and according to the engineer who did the Starlink teardown we featured a while back, the permanent fix may just be to redesign the thermal management. In other words, this isn’t likely to be another one of those problems that gets fixed with an OTA software push. Which is probably to be expected for something that’s still in the “Better than Nothing Beta” release.

We’ve all heard that AI and robots are going to replace pretty much every job at some point, but if one customer’s experience with an AI drive-through window is any gauge, it might take quite a while to get there. In a video posted on TikTok (we know, we know), a customer at a Chicago-area McDonald’s showed that the fast-food giant put exactly zero effort into making the experience anything but engaging. The synthesized voice is creepy, and evokes all the wrong kinds of feelings, like the ones you get when you’re forced to use a voice-response system to get through “voice mail jail”. At least in those cases, the voice at least sounds semi-apologetic when it can’t understand what you’ve said. After listening to it once, we’d much rather have a real human, even if it is a surly teen. This seems like a missed opportunity by McDonald’s, which probably has the resources to put a little humanity into their AI.

A while back, we dropped a link about satellites made largely of wood. At the time it seemed interesting if a bit self-serving, since the effort was largely backed by a large Finnish plywood company. And while that aspect of the project hasn’t changed, we’ve now got a better idea of how the WISA Woodsat is put together, and what it will do once it flies later this year. To be clear, the 1U CubeSat is not 100% wood, which of course would make including any electronics problematic. Instead, the side and top panels of the satellite are made from plywood, which are attached to aluminum rails that integrate with the launcher on the mothership. There’s also a metal pantograph-style selfie-stick, because pics or it didn’t happen. The interesting bit is the pre-treatment of the birch plywood, which is dried in a thermal vacuum chamber to prevent outgassing in space. Additionally, the exterior surface of the wood panels was covered with a thin layer of aluminum oxide, to give the surface a chance against highly reactive atomic oxygen. There will be sensors inside the satellite to see if any outgassing occurs, so we could actually get some valuable data about using wood in satellites out of what otherwise could have been just a publicity stunt.

As our long global nightmare appears to be playing out its endgame, and as the world begins to reopen itself to normal pursuits, it’s nice to see that some cons and meetups are actually returning to meatspace. One such event will be BornHack 2021, that week-long campout in a Danish forest with hundreds of like-minded hackers, tinkerers, and artists. The Call for Participation deadline has been extended to July 1, which gives you just a little more time to consider giving a presentation. We’ve heard Jenny List speak glowingly of BornHack, and it actually looks like a lot of fun.

And finally, it’s said that one can never include too many comments when writing code. Not everyone feels that way, of course; I once had a co-worker complain that I commented my code too much, which of course meant that I redoubled my efforts to make sure I had as many comments as possible. That meant I often ran out of ideas for pithy, pertinent, and gratuitous comments to sprinkle into my code. It’s a shame What The Commit didn’t exist back then. Just click the link and you’ll get a fresh, auto-generated comment ready to copy into your commits or embed in your code. Have fun!

How To Get Into Cars: Land Speed Racing

June 17, 2021 by 12 Comments

Land speed racing is one of the oldest forms of motorsport, and quite literally consists of going very, very fast in (ideally) a straight line. The higher the speed your car can attain, the better! It’s about the pure pursuit of top speed above all else, and building a car to compete is a calling for a dedicated few. If you’d like to join them, here’s how to go about it.

Faster, Faster, Faster!

A great example of the “36HP” Volkswagen class, which challenges competitors to set land speed records using only classic VW engines, with categories for various levels of modification. Note the aero wheels and raked stance. Credit: Utah Salt Flats Racing Association

While taking the outright land speed record typically requires a jet-engined sled of singular design, there is plenty of land speed competition to be had in various classes for competitors fielding their own entries. There are vintage classes for older technology engines, still popular from the dawn of hotrodding, like Ford Flathead V8s and other contemporary motors. There are also classes split by engine displacement, number of cylinders, aerodynamic modifications, or the type of fuel used.

Racers often pick a record or set of records they wish to beat – for example, wanting to set the the fastest speed for a gasoline-powered, naturally-aspirated four cylinder – and build their car to that end. Alternatively, a racer might build a car with a large V8 engine, for example, to compete in one class, and then disable several cylinders on a later run to try and snatch records in lower classes as well. Continue reading “How To Get Into Cars: Land Speed Racing” →

Give 3D Printed Plastic A Well-Worn Metal Look

June 4, 2021 by 13 Comments

Affordable 3D printers let us turn ideas into physical reality without a big expensive workshop, but with their power came some disadvantages. The nature of FDM printers impart layer lines and nozzle ridges in the parts they produce. They can be minimized with optimized print settings, but never eliminated. [Emily Velasco] loves the power of 3D printing but not how the parts look. So she put in the effort to make 3D-printed plastic look like distressed metal and showed us how she did it. (Video also embedded after the break.)

This video is a follow-up to her Pet Eye project in response to feedback on Twitter. She had mentioned that the  salvaged metal box for Pet Eye wasn’t quite big enough to hold everything, so she had to extend its internal volume with a 3D print box on the back. It fit in so well that the offhand comment surprised many people who wanted to know more about how it was done. So she designed a demonstration cube covered with mechanical characteristics, and gave us this walkthrough of its transformation.

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Flat-Pack Pasta: Like Ikea Furniture Without The Weird Wrench

May 26, 2021 by 46 Comments

When it comes to food packaging, there’s no bigger scam than potato chip bags, right? People complain about the air (nitrogen, actually) inside, but it’s there for a reason — nitrogen pushes out oxygen, so the chips live in a state of factory-fresh dormancy until you rip open the bag and release the gas. If you want flat-pack chips, there’s always those uniformly-shaped potato slurry wafers that come in a can. But even those usually manage to have a few broken ones.

On the other hand, no one complains about the extra space in their box of fusilli — that would be silly. But seriously, successfully shipping fragile foods requires either flat packing or a lot of extra space, especially if that food comes in a myriad of fun 3D shapes like pasta does. Everybody knows that 3D pasta is superior to flat pasta because it holds sauces so much better. The pasta must be kept intact!

The great thing about pasta as a food is that it’s simple to make, and it’s more nutritious than potato chips. Because of these factors, pasta is often served in extreme situations to large groups of people, like soldiers and the involuntarily displaced. But storing large quantities of shapely pasta takes up quite a bit of space. And because of all that necessary air, much of the packaging goes to waste.

So what if you could keep your plethora of pasta in, say, a filing cabinet? A research team led by the Morphing Matter Lab at Carnegie Mellon University have created a way to make flat-pack pasta that springs to life after a few minutes in boiling water.

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Pocket Sized Wii Sets The Bar For Portable Builds

May 7, 2021 by 4 Comments

Over the last few years we’ve seen several projects that convert Nintendo’s Wii into a handheld console by way of a “trimming”, wherein the system’s motherboard is literally cut down to a fraction of its original size. This is made possible due to the fact that the majority of the console’s critical components were physically arranged in a tight grouping on the PCB. While it might not be the smallest one we’ve ever seen, the Wii SPii by [StonedEdge] is certainly in the running for the most technically impressive.

It took [StonedEdge] the better part of a year to go from the first early 3D printed case concepts to the fully functional device, but we’d say it was certainly time well spent. The general look of the portable is strongly inspired by Nintendo’s own GameBoy Advance SP, albeit with additional buttons and control sticks. In terms of software, the system is not only able to run Wii and Gamecube game ISOs stored on its SD card, but also several decades worth of classic titles through the various console emulators available for the system.

The Wii SPii makes use of a particularly difficult variation of the Wii miniaturization concept known as the OMEGA trim, and is supported by a custom PCB that’s responsible for things like power management and audio output. As it was never designed to be particularly energy efficient, the trimmed Wii motherboard will deplete the system’s dual 18650 cells in about two and a half hours, but at least you’ll be able to get charged back up quickly thanks to USB-C PD support. All of the hardware just fits inside the custom designed case, which was CNC milled from acrylic and then sandblasted to achieve that gorgeous frosted look.

[StonedEdge] says the Wii SPii was inspired by the work of accomplished smallerizer [GMan], and even uses some of the open source code he developed for the audio and power management systems. In fact, given its lengthy list of acknowledgements, this project could even be considered something of a community affair. Just a few years after we marveled at a functional Wii being crammed into an Altoids tin, it’s truly inspiring to see what this dedicated group of console modders has been able to accomplish by working together.

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