ScareMail Tries To Disrupt NSA Email Surveillance

November 28, 2013 by 105 Comments

scaremail

Are you on the NSA’s email watchlist? Do you want to be?  This project is called ScareMail and it’s designed to mess with the NSA’s  email surveillance programs.

[Benjamin Grosser] has written it as a plugin for many popular web browsers, and it uses an algorithm to generate a clever but ultimately useless narrative in the signature of your email using as many probable NSA search terms as possible. The idea behind this is if enough people use it, it will overload the NSA’s search results, ultimately making their email keyword tracking useless.

So how does it work? The algorithm starts with natural language processing (NLP) and an original source of text — he picked Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Using the processor it identifies all nouns and verbs in the original text and replaces them with properly formatted and conjugated “scary” words that he’s indexed from a list of hypothetical NSA key words. To ensure each signature is unique, he makes use of a Markov chain to generate new texts that are completely different each time. The result is a somewhat coherent paragraph that doesn’t make any real sense.

But wait! Surveillance like this is bad, but hypothetically it could work! Well, maybe. But the point is: 

ScareMail reveals one of the primary flaws of the NSA’s surveillance efforts: words do not equal intent.

Stick around after the break to see a proper video explanation of ScareMail by [Ben] himself.

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Fail Of The Week: How A Cheap USB AC Adapter Might Indirectly Burn Your House Down

November 28, 2013 by 41 Comments

This Fail of the Week will remind our readers that every project they make, no matter how small they might be, may have big consequences if something goes wrong. Shown in the picture above is an oven that [Kevin] tweaked to perform reflow soldering. The story is he had just moved into a new place a few weeks ago and needed to make a new batch of boards. As he had cycled this oven many times, he was confident enough to leave the room to answer a few emails. A few minutes later, he had the unfortunate experience of smelling something burning as well as discovering white smoke invading his place.

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Persistence Of Vision Planetary Map

November 28, 2013 by 13 Comments

POV planetary map

Looking at the looping GIF above you’re probably thinking, oh, another hard drive POV setup… Well… Not quite.

This is one of [Dev’s] latest projects, and it is a planetary map that shows the angular positions of all 8 of the major celestial bodies from any given date between 1800 and 2050. It’s also capable of showing analogue clock hands, the phases of the moon, and other simple graphics.

The main unit is a hard disk, but [Dev] milled off many of the features on it to give it a more exposed, purpose-built look. He designed the LED bearing PCB from scratch using EagleCAD, which sits on the back of the drive, with the spindle poking through. It has 8 rings of 5 surface mounted LEDs, which shine through opaque plastic diffuser rings that he printed using Shapeways — they feature small recesses to fit snugly on the board over the LEDs. On the top level is a 1mm thick black disc of some unknown material that [Dev] had sitting around, which now has 8 holes machined into it in the exact position of the LEDs.

A Cortex-M0 drives the LEDs using an LPCXpresso board which allows the LEDs to sit across only one byte of a hardware I/O port. On the software end, each rotation of the disk is segmented into three hundred and sixty 1 degree slices. This system allows him to achieve a circular resolution of 8×360 pixels at 25 frames per second. Not bad for a persistence of vision device!

Stick around after the break to see the rather entertaining demo video of the device.

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The Game Of NIM

November 28, 2013 by 8 Comments

game of nim

[Greg] has been fascinated with the Game of NIM ever since he was a freshman in highschool. Recently he remembered it and decided to try his hand at making an AI version to play, written using Visual Basic.

If you’re not familiar with the game, it’s fairly simple. Each row of lights represents a certain type of object. The players make take as many objects from any one row, per turn. The player with the last object loses.

Now, as you can imagine, writing an AI into a game can be a rather challenging ordeal. [Greg’s] first attempt was to use a memory structure that captures every possible move. There’s only 15 moves, and 1 to 7 lights, and the options decrease as the game goes on so… That can’t be too bad, right? Upon running his freshly written code he got an out-of-memory error. Not just any out-of-memory error either, over an Exabyte of memory was needed! Whoops.

He eventually figured the proper code out, and what resulted in game play was a very interesting experience. You see, the computer learns from each game played. At first, it’s like playing a young child — easy to trick and beat. But as the games progressed, the computer picked up his patterns and never made the same mistake again. He simply lost track of the number of games he played with it, but it just kept getting better at better. Must be pretty satisfying to make something that learns from you — kind of like parenthood…

Anyway, [Greg] has an awesome writeup available on his blog, so you should definitely check it out — we can only summarize so much! Stick around after the break to see a video of the game in action.

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Something WiFi This Way Comes; Wicked Device Unveils Wildfire

November 28, 2013 by 17 Comments

WildFire-v2

Wicked Device has released the WildFire board to the world. WildFire is a an Arduino compatible processor board with a Texas instruments CC3000. WildFire adds a few interesting features to the typical ‘Duino clone. Instead of the ATMega328 used in the Arduino Uno, the WildFire uses an ATMega1284p, which gives 16K of SRAM and 128K of Flash ROM (as compared to 2K RAM and 32K Flash in an Uno). A micro SD card slot is also on-board for data logging functions.

In the name of full disclosure, we should mention that [Adam] has known [Victor and Ken] over at Wicked Device for a few years now, and got his hands on a pre-release version of the board to play with. As with any non-standard Arduino board, the WildFire does require some modification to the Arduino IDE. This took a bit of time with the pre-release board. Wicked Device has streamlined the process since then. Everything is contained in a zip file on their product page. Once the IDE is up and running, its easy to get the WildFire’s CC3000 connected to your local access point. From there the internet is your playground. For those of you already asking “So, Hack?”, watch this space – Adam is working on a hack using the WildFire board which will show up in a few days. 

Repairing Dead USB Flash Drives

November 27, 2013 by 28 Comments

Over the last few years, [Tobias] has repaired a number of USB Flash drives. This strikes us as a little odd, given small capacity Flash drives are effectively free in the form of conference handouts and swag, but we’re guessing [Tobias] has had a few too many friends lose their thesis to a broken Flash drive.

In all his repairs, [Tobias] found one thing in common The crystal responsible for communicating with the USB controller is always broken. In a way, this makes a lot of sense; everything else on a Flash drive is silicon encased in an epoxy package, where the crystal is a somewhat fragile piece of quartz. Breaking even a small part of this crystal will drastically change the frequency it resonates at making the USB controller throw a fit.

[Tobias]’ solution for all his Flash drive repairs is to desolder and change out the crystal, bringing the drive back to life. Some of the USB Flash drives even have multiple pads for different crystal packages, making it easy to kludge together a solution should you need to repair a Flash drive five minutes ago.

Turning A Storefront Into A Video Game

November 27, 2013 by 17 Comments

invasion

[Kris]’ house/office has a huge store window, and instead of covering it up with newspapers, decided to do something cool. He’s had projections and other art pieces on display for his neighbors, but his new storefront arcade game very likely beats all of those.

Every video game needs a display, and this one is no slouch. The display is a 16*90 matrix of WS2812 LEDs with inset into a laser cut grid and put behind a layer of plexiglass. With this grid, the display has a great raster effect that’s great for the pixeley aesthetic [Kris] was going for. In front of the window is an MDF and steel arcade box powered by an Arduino Due.

The game is driven by the Adafruit neopixel library, with a few modifications to support alpha blending. There’s no external memory for this game – everything is running on a second Arduino Due inside the window.

It’s a great looking game, and if you’re ever in [Kris]’ area – behind the zoo in Antwerp – you’re free to walk up and give this game a spin.

Video demo below.

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