Cloudflare’s AI Labyrinth Wants Bad Bots To Get Endlessly Lost

March 24, 2025 by 37 Comments

Cloudflare has gotten more active in its efforts to identify and block unauthorized bots and AI crawlers that don’t respect boundaries. Their solution? AI Labyrinth, which uses generative AI to efficiently create a diverse maze of data as a defensive measure.

This is an evolution of efforts to thwart bots and AI scrapers that don’t respect things like “no crawl” directives, which accounts for an ever-growing amount of traffic. Last year we saw Cloudflare step up their game in identifying and blocking such activity, but the whole thing is akin to an arms race. Those intent on hoovering up all the data they can are constantly shifting tactics in response to mitigations, and simply identifying bad actors with honeypots and blocking them doesn’t really do the job any more. In fact, blocking requests mainly just alerts the baddies to the fact they’ve been identified.

Instead of blocking requests, Cloudflare goes in the other direction and creates an all-you-can-eat sprawl of linked AI-generated content, luring crawlers into wasting their time and resources as they happily process an endless buffet of diverse facts unrelated to the site being crawled, all while Cloudflare learns as much about them as possible.

That’s an important point: the content generated by the Labyrinth might be pointless and irrelevant, but it isn’t nonsense. After all, the content generated by the Labyrinth can plausibly end up in training data, and fraudulent data would essentially be increasing the amount of misinformation online as a side effect. For that reason, the human-looking data making up the Labyrinth isn’t wrong, it’s just useless.

It’s certainly a clever method of dealing with crawlers, but the way things are going it’ll probably be rendered obsolete sooner rather than later, as the next move in the arms race gets made.

Rolling Foam Cutter Gives Mattress A Close Shave

March 24, 2025 by 19 Comments

There’s many different reasons why somebody might have to hack together their own solution to a problem. It could be to save money, or to save time. Occasionally it’s because the problem is unique enough that there might not be an accepted solution, so you’re on your own to create one. We think the situation that [Raph] recently found himself in was a combination of several of these aspects, which makes his success all the sweeter.

The problem? [Raph] had a pair of foam mattresses from his camper van that needed to be made thinner — each of the three inch (7.62 cm) pieces of foam needed to have one inch (2.5 cm) shaved off as neatly and evenly as possible. Trying to pull that off over the length of a mattress with any kind of manual tools was obviously a no-go, so he built a low-rider foam cutter.

With the mattresses laying on the ground, the idea was to have the cutter simply roll across them. The cutter uses a 45″ (115 cm) long 14 AWG nichrome wire that’s held in tension with a tension arm and bungee cords, which is juiced up with a Volteq HY2050EX 50 V 20 A variable DC power supply. [Raph] determined the current experimentally: the wire failed at 20 A, and cutting speed was too low at 12 A. In the end, 15 A seemed to be the sweet spot.

The actual cutting process was quite slow, with [Raph] finding that the best he could do was about 1/8″ (3 mm) per second on the wider of the two mattresses. While the result was a nice flat cut, he does note that at some point the mattresses started to blister, especially when the current was turned up high. We imagine this won’t be a big deal for a mattress though, as you can simply put that side on the bottom.

In the end, the real problem was the smell. As [Raph] later discovered, polyurethane foam is usually cut mechanically, as cutting it with a hot wire gives off nasty fumes. Luckily he had plenty of ventilation when he was making his cuts, but he notes that the mattresses themselves still have a stink to them a couple days later. Hopefully they’ll finish outgassing before his next camping trip.

As you can imagine, we’ve covered a great number of DIY foam cutters over the years, ranging from the very simple to computerized marvels. But even so, there’s something about the project-specific nature of this cutter that we find charming.

Next time on Star Trek: EmptyEpsilon... (Credit: EmptyEpsilon project)

Build A Starship Bridge Simulator With EmptyEpsilon

March 23, 2025 by 26 Comments

Who hasn’t dreamed of serving on the bridge of a Star Trek starship? Although the EmptyEpsilon project isn’t adorned with the Universe-famous LCARS user interface, it does provide a comprehensive simulation scenario, in a multiplayer setting. Designed as a LAN or WAN multiplayer game hosted by the server that also serves as the main screen, four to six additional devices are required to handle the non-captain tasks. These include helm, weapons, engineering, science and relay, which includes comms.

Scenarios are created by the game master, not unlike a D&D game, with the site providing a reference and various examples of how to go about this.

The free and open source game’s binaries can be obtained directly from the site, but it’s also available on Steam. The game isn’t limited to just Trek either, but scenarios can be crafted to fit whatever franchise or creative impulse feels right for that LAN party.

Obviously building the whole thing into a realistic starship bridge is optional, but it certainly looks like more fun that way.

“Unnecessary” Automation Of A DIY Star Lamp Build

March 23, 2025 by 10 Comments

It all started with a gift idea: a star-field lamp in the form of a concrete sphere with lightpipes poking out where the stars are, lit up from the inside by LEDs. When you’re making one of these, maybe-just-maybe you’d be willing to drill a thousand holes and fit a thousand little plastic rods, but by the time you’re making a second, it’s time to build a machine to do the work for you.

So maybe we quibble with the channel name “Unnecessary Automation,” but we won’t quibble with the results. It’s a machine that orients a sphere, drills the hole, inserts the plastic wire, glues it together with a UV-curing glue, and then trims the end off. And if you like crazy machines, it’s a beauty.

The video goes through all of the design thoughts in detail, but it’s when it comes time to build the machine that the extra-clever bits emerge. For instance, [UA] used a custom 3D-printed peristaltic pump to push the glue out. Taking the disadvantage of peristaltic pumps – that they pulse – as an advantage, a custom housing was designed that dispensed the right amount between the rollers. The rolling glue dispenser mechanism tips up and back to prevent drips.

There are tons of other project-specific hacks here, from the form on the inside of the sphere that simplifies optic bundling and routing to the clever use of a razor blade as a spring. Give it a watch if you find yourself designing your own wacky machines. We think Rube Goldberg would approve. Check out this video for a more software-orientated take on fiber-optic displays.

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Hackaday Links: March 23, 2025

March 23, 2025 by 9 Comments

What a long, strange trip it’s been for NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Bruce Wilmore, who finally completed their eight-day jaunt to space after 289 days. The duo returned to Earth from the ISS on Tuesday along with two other returning astronauts in a picture-perfect splashdown, complete with a dolphin-welcoming committee. For the benefit of those living under rocks these past nine months, Williams and Wilmore slipped the surly bonds way back in June on the first crewed test flight of the Boeing Starliner, bound for a short stay on the ISS before a planned return in the same spacecraft. Alas, all did not go to plan as their ride developed some mechanical difficulties on the way upstairs, and so rather than risk their lives on a return in a questionable capsule, NASA had them cool their heels for a couple of months while Starliner headed home without them.

There’s been a lot of talk about how Butch and Suni were “stranded,” but that doesn’t seem fair to us. Sure, their stay on the ISS was unplanned, or at least it wasn’t Plan A; we’re sure this is always a contingency NASA allows for when planning missions. Also unfortunate is the fact that they didn’t get paid overtime for the stay, not that you’d expect they would. But on the other hand, if you’re going to get stuck on a work trip, it might as well be at the world’s most exclusive and expensive resort.

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RTL-SDR With Only A Browser

March 23, 2025 by 15 Comments

Surely by now you’ve at least heard of RTL-SDR — a software project that let’s cheap TV tuner dongles work as a software-defined radios. A number of projects and tools have spun off the original effort, but in his latest video, [Tech Minds] shows off a particularly unique take. It’s a Web browser-based radio application that uses WebUSB, so it doesn’t require the installation of any application software. You can see the program operating in the video below.

There are a few things you should know. First, you need the correct USB drivers for your RTL-SDR. Second, your browser must support WebUSB, of course. Practically, that means you need a Chromium-type browser. You may have to configure your system to allow raw access to the USB port, too.

Watching the video, you can see that it works quite well. According to the comments, it will work with a phone, too, which is an interesting idea. The actual Web application is available as open source. It isn’t going to compete with a full-fledged SDR program, but it looked surprisingly complete.

These devices have grown from a curiosity to a major part of radio hacking over the years. Firefox users can’t use WebUSB — well, not directly, anyway.

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Building The Simplest Atomic Force Microscope

March 23, 2025 by 22 Comments

Doing it yourself may not get you the most precise lab equipment in the world, but it gets you a hands-on appreciation of the techniques that just can’t be beat. Today’s example of this adage: [Stoppi] built an atomic force microscope out of mostly junk parts and got pretty good results, considering. (Original is in German; read it translated here.)

The traditional AFM setup uses a piezo micromotor to raise and lower the sample into a very, very fine point. When this point deflects, it reads the height from the piezo setup and a motor stage moves on to the next point. Resolution is essentially limited by how fine a point you can make and how precisely you can read from the motion stages. Here, [stoppi]’s motion stage follows the traditional hacker avenue of twin DVD sleds, but instead of a piezo motor, he bounces a laser off of a mirror on top of the point and reads the deflection with a line sensor. It’s a clever and much simpler solution.

A lot of the learnings here are in the machine build. Custom nichrome and tungsten tips are abandoned in favor of a presumably steel compass tip. The first-draft spring ended up wobbling in the X and Y directions, rather than just moving in the desired Z, so that mechanism got reinforced with aluminum blocks. And finally, the line sensors were easily swamped by the laser’s brightness, so neutral density filters were added to the project.

The result? A nice side effect of the laser-bouncing-off-of-mirror setup is that the minimum resolvable height can be increased simply by moving the line sensors further and further away from the sample, multiplying the deflection by the baseline. Across his kitchen, [stoppi] is easily able to resolve the 35-um height of a PCB’s copper pour. Not bad for junk bin parts, a point from a crafts store, and a line sensor.

If you want to know how far you can push a home AFM microscope project, check out [Dan Berard]’s absolutely classic hack. And once you have microscope images of every individual atom in the house, you’ll, of course, want to print them out.