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Hands-On: The Pandemic DEF CON Badge Is An Audio Cassette

July 24, 2020 by 29 Comments

My DEF CON Safe Mode badge just arrived in the mail this afternoon. The Vegas-based conference which normally hosts around 30,000 attendees every year has moved online in response to the global pandemic, and the virtual event spins up August 6-9. Known for creative badges, North America’s most well-known infosec con has a tick-tock cycle that alternates electronic and non-electronic badges from year to year. During this off-year, the badge is an obscure deprecated media: the audio cassette.

This choice harkens back to the DEF CON 23 badge which was an vinyl record — I have the same problem I did back in 2015… I lack access to playback this archaic medium. Luckily [Grifter] pointed everyone to a dump of the audio contents over at Internet Archive, although knowing how competitive the badge hacking for DEF CON is, I’m skeptical about the reliability of these files. Your best bet is to pull the dust cover off your ’88 Camry and let your own cassette roll in the tape deck. I also wonder if there are different versions of the tape.

But enough speculation, let’s look at what physically comes with the DEF CON 28 badge.

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Stay At Home, HOPE And DEF CON Will Come To You

July 21, 2020 by 4 Comments

We’ve often heard conferences like HOPE and DEF CON called Hacker Summer Camp (although there are certainly more camp-like camps that also fit the bill). As we get into the hot parts of the summer, heading indoors for security talks, workshops, and untold shenanigans sounds like a good idea… if it weren’t for an ongoing pandemic. The good news is that you can still get a strong dose of these cons over the next three weekends as they’re being offered virtually.

Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) is a biennial conference hosted in NYC. After much drama about the dank Hotel Pennsylvania hiking prices astronomically for the con, a new venue was found and we all breathed a sigh of relief. The best laid plans, etc. etc. — you know how this turns out. But beginning this Saturday, July 25th, over 100 speakers will present in HOPE’s first-ever live online presentation. Hackaday is a proud sponsor of HOPE 2020.

DEF CON happens every year, and every year we tell you that DEF CON has been cancelled. What do you do if it has actually been cancelled when the boy constantly cries wolf? Well it’s not cancelled, it’s morphed into what is called DEF CON Safe Mode — an online offering for all to enjoy. Go head, hook your computer up to the online version of DEF CON, what could go wrong? Find out when the virtual con goes live starting August 6th.

These are not the same as meeting up IRL. There are so many chance interactions and spectacles to see that you simply cannot spark with a virtual offering. However, the platform for presenters, the coming together to talk, learn, and share about privacy, security, and internet freedom are meaningful and worth our time. So support your favorite cons by joining in, even when it’s from the comfort of your own couch.

School’s In Session With HackadayU

June 17, 2020 by 13 Comments

The global COVID-19 pandemic has kept many of us socially isolated from friends, family, and colleagues for several months at this point. But thanks to modern technology, the separation has only been in the physical sense. From job interviews to grade school book reports, many of the things we’d previously done in person are now happening online. The social distancing campaign has also shown that virtual meetups can be a viable alternative to traditional events, with several notable hacker conventions already making the leap into cyberspace.

With this in mind, we’re proud to announce HackadayU. With weekly online videos and live office hours, these online classes will help you make the most of your time in isolation by learning new skills or diving deeper into subjects with experienced instructors from all over the world. Whether you’re just curious about a topic or want to use these classes to help put yourself on a new career path, we’re here to help.

In a community like ours, where so many people already rely on self-study and tutorial videos, these four week classes are perfect for professional engineers and hobbyists alike. To make sure HackadayU is inclusive as possible, classes will be offered on a pay-as-you-wish basis: we’ll pick up the tab for the instructor’s time, and you kick in whatever you think is fair. All money collected will be donated to charities that help feed, house, and educate others. We know these are tough times, and the hope is that HackadayU can not only benefit the members of our core community, but pass on some goodwill to those who are struggling.

Classes will be rolling out through the rest of 2020, but here’s a look at some of what we’ve got planned: Continue reading “School’s In Session With HackadayU” →

Mitigating Con Deprivation: Disobey 2020

May 17, 2020 by 6 Comments

While the Coronavirus-induced lockdown surely makes life easier for the socially anxious and awkward ones among us, it also takes away the one thing that provides a feeling of belonging and home: conferences. Luckily, there are plenty of videos of past events available online, helping to bypass the time until we can mingle among like-minded folks again. To put one additional option on the list, one event you probably never even heard of is Disobey, Finland’s annual security conference that took place for its fifth time in Helsinki earlier this year, and they recently published the playlist of this year’s talks on their YouTube channel.

With slightly under 1500 hackers, makers, and generally curious people attending this year, Disobey is still on the smaller side of conferences, but comes with everything you’d expect: talks, workshops, CTF challenges, and a puzzle-ridden badge. Labeling itself as “The Nordic Security Event”, its main focus is indeed on computer and network security, and most of the talks are presented by professional security researchers, oftentimes Red Teamers, telling about some of their real-world work.

In general, every talk that teaches something new, discusses important matters, or simply provides food for thought and new insight is worth watching, but we also don’t want to give everything away here either. The conference’s program page offers some outline of all the talks if you want to check some more information up front. But still, we can’t just mention a random conference and not give at least some examples with few details on what to expect from it either, so let’s do that.

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Under The Hood Of Second Reality, PC Demoscene Landmark

May 3, 2020 by 31 Comments

In 1993, IBM PCs & clones were a significant but not dominant fraction of the home computer market. They were saddled with the stigma of boring business machines. Lacking Apple Macintosh’s polish, unable to match Apple II’s software library, and missing Commodore’s audio/visual capabilities. The Amiga was the default platform of choice for impressive demos, but some demoscene hackers saw the PC’s potential to blow some minds. [Future Crew] was such a team, and their Second Reality accomplished exactly that. People who remember and interested in a trip back in time should take [Fabien Sanglard]’s tour of Second Reality source code.

We recently covered another impressive PC demo executed in just 256 bytes, for which several commenters were thankful the author shared how it was done. Source for demos aren’t necessarily released: the primary objective being to put on a show, and some authors want to keep a few tricks secret. [Future Crew] didn’t release source for Second Reality until 20th anniversary of its premiere, by which time it was difficult to run on a modern PC. Technically it is supported by DOSBox but rife with glitches, as Second Reality uses so many nonstandard tricks. The easiest way to revisit nostalgia is via video captures posted to YouTube (one embedded below the break.)

A PC from 1993 is primitive by modern standards. It was well before the age of GPUs. In fact before any floating point hardware was commonplace: Intel’s 80387 math co-processor was a separate add-on to the 80386 CPU. With the kind of hardware at our disposal today it can be hard to understand what a technical achievement Second Reality was. But PC users of the time understood, sharing it and dropping jaws well beyond the demoscene community. Its spread was as close to “going viral” as possible when “high speed data” was anything faster than 2400 baud.

Many members of [Future Crew] went on to make impact elsewhere in the industry, and their influence spread far and wide. But PC graphics wasn’t done blowing minds in 1993 just yet… December 10th of that year would see the public shareware release of a little thing called Doom.

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Grace Under Pressure: Shelley Green Celebrates Crimped Connections

April 27, 2020 by 18 Comments

We think it’s pretty safe to assume that most of the electrical connections our readers are making out there involve solder or solder paste. But we’ve all made a crimp connection or two in our lifetimes. Maybe you’ve squeezed a butt connector here and there, or made an Ethernet cable. Beyond getting the wiring order right in the Ethernet cable, how much did you wonder about what was happening inside the connector?

It may seem like solder is the superior option for making a low-resistance electrical connection. After all, you’re welding metals together with another metal. And this is usually all fine and good for circuit boards with sedentary indoor lives. But if a joint needs to be mechanically stable and survive in potentially harsh environments, you don’t want an alloy holding things together. You want metal to metal contact, and crimping is where it’s at.

A well-made crimp should last for several decades, but as Shelley Green explained in her talk at the 2019 Hackaday Superconference, good quality crimps don’t happen by accident. Good crimps are meticulously designed, and carefully executed from start to finish.

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A Jaw-Dropping Demo In Only 256 Bytes

April 21, 2020 by 58 Comments

“Revision” is probably the Olympics of the demoscene. The world’s best tiny graphics coders assemble, show off their works, and learn new tricks to pack as much awesome into as few bytes as possible or make unheard-of effects on limited hardware. And of course, there’s a competition. Winning this year’s 256-byte (byte!) competition, and then taking the overall crowd favorite award, was [HellMood]’s Memories.

If you watch it in the live-stream from Revision, you’ll hear the crowd going (virtually) wild, and the announcer losing his grip and gasping for words. It’s that amazing. Not only are more effects put into 28 bytes than we thought possible, but there’s a full generative MIDI score to go with it. What?!?

But almost as amazing is [HellMood]’s generous writeup of how he pulled it off. If you’re at all interested in demos, minimal graphics effects, or just plain old sweet hacks, you have your weekend’s reading laid out for you. [HellMood] has all of his references and influences linked in as well. You’re about to go down a very deep rabbit hole.

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