computer hacks

1321 Articles

computer hacks

Bridging The Air Gap; Data Transfer Via Fan Noise

July 1, 2016 by 45 Comments

When you want to protect a computer connected to the Internet against attackers, you usually put it behind a firewall. The firewall controls access to the protected computer. However, you can defeat any lock and there are ways a dedicated attacker can compromise a firewall. Really critical data is often placed on a computer that is “air gapped.” That is, the computer isn’t connected at all to an insecure network.

An air gap turns a network security problem into a physical security problem. Even if you can infect the target system and collect data, you don’t have an easy way to get the data out of the secure facility unless you are physically present and doing something obvious (like reading from the screen into a phone). Right? Maybe not.

Researchers in Isreal have been devising various ways to transmit data from air walled computers. Their latest approach? Transmit data via changing the speed of cooling fans in the target computer. Software running on a cellphone (or other computer, obviously) can decode the data and exfiltrate it. You can see a video on the process below.

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Restoring The Groundbreaking Xerox Alto

June 26, 2016 by 27 Comments

The Xerox Alto was a minicomputer that had a lot of firsts to its name: first GUI, first Ethernet connection, and first computer to use a laser printer. This is the computer that inspired Steve Jobs to build the Lisa. And this was built all back in 1973! So when [Ken Shirriff] and a team of other old-computer aficionados got their hands on one, you know they’d get to work.

[Ken]’s blog describes the start of what’s sure to be a long journey. It mostly describes the Alto system and locates its place in computer history, but there are some interesting sidelines as well — like how [Alan Kay] also basically outlined all of the functionality of the modern laptop / tablet along the way to the Alto; it was supposed to be an interim Dynabook.

Work on this grandfather-of-modern-computers is just getting started, and [Ken] and crew are dusting off the power supplies and cataloguing memory boards. You can be sure that we’ll follow along with this restoration project, and keep you informed.

New Hard Drives For Old Computers

June 21, 2016 by 33 Comments

After a certain age, computers start to show signs that they might need to be replaced or upgraded. After even more time, it starts getting hard to find parts to replace the failing components. And, as the sands slip through the hourglass, the standards used to design and build the computer start going obsolete. That’s the situation that [Drygol] found himself in when he was asked to build a SD-card hard drive for an Atari.

The 8-bit Atari in question was a fixture of home computing in the 80s. In fact, if you weren’t on the Commodore train, it’s likely that your computer of choice was an Atari. For the nostalgic among us, a new hard drive for these pieces of history is a great way to relive some of the past. Working off of information from the SIO2SD Wiki page, [Drygol] used the toner transfer method to build a PCB, 3D printed a case, and got to work on his decades-old computer.

Resurrecting old hardware is a great way to get into retrocomputing. Old protocols and standards are worth investigating because they’re from a time where programmers had to make every bit count, and there are some gems of genius hidden everywhere. Whether you’re reworking SIO from an old Atari, or building a disk emulator for an Apple ][, there are lots of options.

Walnut Windfall Winds Up In Custom Keyboard

June 21, 2016 by 7 Comments

When a neighbor decided to cut down a walnut tree, [voluhar] decided to make something of the wood. The result was this custom keyboard that combines wood and metal in a lovely and functional package.

Walnut is a wood with a rich heritage in consumer electronics. Back in the early days of TV, huge console sets were built into solid walnut cabinets and proudly displayed along with the other fine furnishings in a home. [voluhar]’s keyboard captures a little of that spirit while retaining all the functionality you’d expect. From the custom PCB to the engraved aluminum key caps, it looks like every part was machined with a CNC router. The keyboard sports satisfyingly clicky Cherry MX switches, and a few cleverly positioned LEDs provide subtle feedback on the state of the locking keys. As for the imperfections in the walnut case, we think it just adds to the charm and warmth of the finished product, which would look great on any desktop.

Wood has appeared in a couple of custom keyboards that we’ve featured before, like this all-wood version. But if you want the retro look without the wood, you could always try a keyboard built out of a typewriter.

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1000 CPUs On A Chip

June 20, 2016 by 42 Comments

Often, CPUs that work together operate on SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) or MISD (Multiple Instruction Single Data), part of Flynn’s taxonomy. For example, your video card probably has the ability to apply a single operation (an instruction) to lots of pixels simultaneously (multiple data). Researchers at the University of California–Davis recently constructed a single chip with 1,000 independently programmable processors onboard. The device is energy efficient and can compute up to 1.78 trillion instructions per second.

The KiloCore chip (not to be confused with the 2006 Rapport chip of the same name) has 621 million transistors and uses special techniques to be energy efficient, an important design feature when dealing with so many CPUs. Each processor operates at 1.78 GHz or less and can shut itself down when not needed. The team reports that even when computing 115 billion instructions per second, the device only consumes about 700 milliwatts.

Unlike some multicore designs that use a shared memory area to communicate between processors, the KiloCore allows processors to directly communicate. If you are just a diehard Arduino user, maybe you could scale up this design. Or, if you want to make use of the unused power in your video card under Linux, you can always try to bring KGPU up to date.

Make Math Real With This Analog Multiplier Primer

June 19, 2016 by 11 Comments

Remember learning all about functions in algebra? Neither do we. Oh sure, most of us remember linear plots and the magic of understanding y=mx+b for the first time. But a lot of us managed to slide by with only a tenuous grasp of more complex functions like exponentials and conic sections. Luckily the functionally challenged among us can bolster their understanding with this demonstration using analog multipliers and op amps.

[devttys0]’s video tutorial is a great primer on analog multipliers and their many uses. Starting with a simple example that multiplies two input voltages together, he goes on to show circuits that output both the square and the cube of an input voltage. Seeing the output waveform of the cube of a ramped input voltage was what nailed the concept for us and transported us back to those seemingly wasted hours in algebra class many years ago. Further refinements by the addition of an op amp yield a circuit that outputs the square root of an input voltage, and eventually lead to a voltage controlled resistor that can attenuate an input signal depending on its voltage. Pretty powerful stuff for just a few chips.

The chip behind [devttys0]’s primer is the Analog Devices AD633, a pretty handy chip to have around. For more on this chip, check out [Bil Herd]’s post on analog computing.

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Designing A Single Instruction Computer

June 11, 2016 by 23 Comments

Today’s computers are unimaginably complex, and so complicated it’s nearly impossible for anyone to comprehend everything a CPU can do in excruciating detail. It wasn’t always like this – the early CPUs of the 70s and 80s were relatively simple and can easily be recreated at the individual gate level. CPUs can be even simpler, as [Jack Eisenmann] demonstrates with a single instruction computer, the DUO Compact 2, made entirely out of 74-series logic chips and a bunch of memory.

[Jack] has a long history of building strange computers out of individual chips, including a TTL logic CPU and a significantly more complicated single instruction computer. The latest, though, is as simple as it gets. It’s just twenty chips, capable of calculating prime numbers, sorting strings, and everything else a computer is able to do.

With every one-instruction computer, there is the obvious question of what instruction this computer uses. For the DUO Compact 2 it’s a single instruction that accepts three arguments, A, B, and C. The instruction copies a byte from A to B, then jumps to the instruction at C. Is it even possible for a computer to add two numbers with this instruction? Yes, if you have massive look up tables stored in 2 Megabytes of Flash and 512 kB of RAM.

In the video below, [Jack] goes over how his tiny computer works and demonstrates prime number generation (it’s slow), string sorting (also slow), and displaying ’99 bottles of beer on the wall’ on the computer’s LCD. All the files to replicate this computer are available on [Jack]’s webpage, along with an emulator in case you don’t want to break out a breadboard for this one.

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