A Field Guide To The North American Utility Pole

February 22, 2016 by Dan Maloney 149 Comments

We live under the umbrella of an intricate and fascinating web of infrastructure that enables every aspect of modern technology. But how often do we really look at it? I’ve been intrigued by utility poles for years, and I’ve picked up a thing or two that I’d like to share. Bear in mind these are just my observations from the ground in my area; I’m sure utility professionals will have better information, and regional practices will no doubt lead to very different equipment arrangements. But here’s a little of what I’ve picked up over my years as a pole geek.

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Linux Mint Hacked Briefly – Bad ISOs, Compromised Forum

February 22, 2016 by Bob Baddeley 34 Comments

On February 20th, servers hosting the Linux Mint web site were compromised and the site was modified to point to a version of Mint with a backdoor installed. Very few people were impacted, fortunately; only those who downloaded Mint 17.3 Cinnamon on February 20th. The forum user database was also compromised.

What is most impressive here is not that Linux Mint was compromised, but the response and security measures that were already in place that prevented this from becoming a bigger problem. First, it was detected the same day that it was a problem, so the vulnerability only lasted less than a day. Second, it only affected downloads of a specific version, and only if they clicked a specific link, so anyone who was downloading from a direct HTTP request or a torrent is unaffected. Third, they were able to track down the names of three people in Bulgaria who are responsible for this hack.

As far as the forum compromise, the breech netted usernames, emails, and encrypted passwords, as well as personal information that forum users may have entered in signatures or private messages. It’s always nice to see when compromised sites are not storing passwords in plain text, though.

There is one security measure which should have protected against this and failed for a couple of reasons, and that’s the signature. Normally, the file download is accompanied by a signature which is generated from the file, like an MD5 or SHA checksum. By generating the checksum of the downloaded ISO file and comparing it to the reported signature on the web site, one can confirm that the file has downloaded correctly and that it is the same file. In this case anyone downloading the bad ISO should have caught that the downloaded file was not the official one because the signatures did not match. This can fail. Most people are too lazy to check (and there is no automated checking process). More importantly, because the attackers controlled the web site, they could change the site to report any signature they wanted, including the signature for the bad ISO file.

If you are affected by this, you should change your password on the forum and anywhere you use the same email/password. More importantly, as great as the verification signature is, shouldn’t there be a better way to verify so that people use it regularly and so that it can’t be compromised so easily?

Kicking The Tires Before You Buy: 3d Printers

February 22, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 103 Comments

So you’re looking to buy your first 3D printer, and your index finger is quivering over that 300 US Dollar printer on Amazon.com. Stop! You’re about to have a bad time. 3D printing has come a long way, but most 3D printers are designed through witchcraft, legends, and tall tales rather than any rigorous engineering process. I would say most 3D printer designs are either just plain bad, or designed by a team of Chinese engineers applying all their ingenuity to cost cutting. There are a few that are well designed, and there is a comparatively higher price tag attached.

I’ll start by going through some of the myths and legends that show up in 3D printers. After that I’ll go through some of the common, mostly gimmick, features that typically hinder your printer’s ability, rather than adding any useful function. Next I’ll go onto the things that will actually make your printer better. Finally, I’ll add some special consideration if you’re a beginner buying your first printer.

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Shoot Darts At The Shins Of Total Strangers

February 22, 2016 by Elliot Williams 15 Comments

[Michael Brumlow] found us and sent us a link. Within a few seconds, we were driving a webcam-enabled Nerf dart tank through his office and trying not to hit walls or get stepped on by his co-workers. Unfortunately, it was out of darts at the time, but you can find them all over the floor if you scout around.

All of the code details, including the link where you can test drive it yourself, are up on [Michael]’s GitHub. The brains are an Intel Edison board, and the brawns are supplied by an Arduino motor controller shield and (for the latest version) a chassis bought from China.

It runs fairly smoothly, considering the long round trip from [Michael]’s office in Texas, through wherever Amazon keeps their Web Services, over to us in Germany and back. Once we got used to the slight lag, and started using the keyboard’s arrow keys for control, we were driving around like a pro.

It’s got a few glitches still, like the camera periodically overheating and running out of WiFi distance. [Michael] said he’d try to keep it charged up and running while you give it a shot. The controls are multiplexed in the cloud, so your chance of steering it is as good as anyone else’s. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when thousands of Hackaday readers try to control it at once!

It takes a certain kind of bravery to put your telepresence robot up on the open Internets. So kudos to you, [Michael], and we hope that you manage to get some work done this week, even though you will have all of Hackaday driving into your cubicle walls.

Punch Card Reader For The 10 Types Of People In The World

February 22, 2016 by Dan Maloney 7 Comments

Punch card data input is so 1890 US Census, right? Maybe not, if your goal is to educate kids about binary numbers and how they can encode characters. In which case, this paper clip and metal tape punch card reader might be just the thing you need.

Built as part of the educational outreach efforts of the MakeICT hackerspace, this project allows kids and adults to play with binary numbers and get some instant feedback. The reader itself is a simple affair of wood and plastic; bent paperclips make contact with a foil tape strip and LEDs show the state of the five input bits. A card is provided to students with spaces for the letters of a word that they want to input, along with a table to translate each letter into a number. Students use a paper punch to encode each character in binary. As the card is pulled through the reader, the letters are spoken by the Pi in turn and the whole word is pronounced at the end.

We’ll no doubt hear quibbles with the decision not to use ASCII for the character set, but we can see the logic in keeping the number of bits to a minimum and not distracting from the learning process. What’s cool about this is that it engages kids on so many levels. They learn about binary numbers, encoding systems, interfacing a computer to the real world, and if they care to delve deeper, they can learn about the code behind everything. It’s a great hook into the hacking arts.

And once the kids learn a thing or two, maybe they can use this punch-card Twitter interface to tweet their new-found knowledge.

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BBC Micro:Bit Gets An App

February 21, 2016 by Jenny List 10 Comments

It’s a small, cheap, British single board computer, and nobody can get hold of them. Another Raspberry Pi Zero story, you might think, but no, this is about the other small cheap and difficult to find British SBC, the BBC micro:bit. Samsung UK have produced an app for the micro:bit that allows owners to write code on their Android phones, and upload it to their micro:bit via Bluetooth.

The micro:bit story has played out with agonising slowness over the last year, but it seems that there may now be light at the end of the tunnel. The idea is a good one: give a small but very capable single board computer to every Year 7 (about 12 years old) child, and watch them learn something more useful about computers than how to use a Windows application. It has echoes of the BBC Micro 8-bit computer for schools sponsored by the UK government in the 1980s, and the hope is that it will help reproduce the same technical literacy enjoyed by 1980s kids.

The plan was for the youngsters to receive their boards last October but the project as been plagued by a series of delays and the latest estimate from January was that the boards would reach the kids after the school half-term. In other words within the next couple of weeks, depending on which part of the UK the school is located in.

We recently had a brief opportunity here at Hackaday to examine a micro:bit in the wild. It is a capable little board in its own right, being at heart an mbed, however the recommended web-based micro:bit IDE and compiler differs from the more usual mbed toolchain. One thing that caught our attention in the demo we were given was the micro:bit’s use of USB to deploy code; since schools lock down computer hardware to the n’th degree we were concerned that the micro:bits might not be visible on school USB ports. Easy Bluetooth deployment through the Samsung app promises to bypass that barrier, which can only be a good thing.

We’ve been watching the micro:bit story here at Hackaday from the start, most recently we noted the arrival of Python on the platform. If it has a formative influence on the generation of developers and engineers you’ll be hiring in the mid-2020s then we expect it to feature in many future stories.

Smart Sweatbands

February 21, 2016 by Al Williams 32 Comments

If you’ve ever known anyone who has to monitor their blood glucose level, you know it is annoying to have to prick your finger with a lancet to draw blood for each measurement. A new sweatband that incorporates flexible electronics can measure glucose–as well as sodium, potassium, and lactate–from your sweat, without a painful pin prick.

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