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1006 Articles

Hacker Abroad: Visiting Espressif And Surprising Subway Ads

March 22, 2019 by 17 Comments

Thursday was my final day in Shanghai. After spending all of Wednesday at Electronica Asia, I headed over to the Espressif Headquarters which is just one subway stop away. This is of course the company behind the well-known ESP8266 and its younger sibling, the ESP32. My host was Ivan Grotkothov, Director of Software Platforms. The backstory on how he found his way to the company is truly interesting, as are the stories he shared on some of the legend and lore surrounding the WiFi capable chips the company makes — and the new one whose existence just leaked out this week.

Join me below for that and few other fun things from my last day in this city of 26 million people.

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Hacker Abroad: Massive Conference Brings Big News Of Hackaday Prize China

March 21, 2019 by 15 Comments

My first full day in China was spent at Electronica, an absolutely massive conference showcasing companies involved in electronics manufacturing and distribution. It’s difficult to comprehend how large this event is, filling multiple halls at the New International Expo Center in Shanghai.

I’ve seen the equipment used for PCB assembly many times before. But at this show you get to see another level below that, machines that build components and other items needed to build products quickly and with great automation. There was also big news today as the 2019 Hackaday Prize China was launched. Join me after the break for a look at this equipment, and more about this new development for the Hackaday Prize.

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Hacker Abroad: A Very Long Way To China

March 20, 2019 by 30 Comments

It turns out that Shanghai is a very long way from my home in Wisconsin. I’ve traveled here for Electronica China, and although it made for an incredibly long travel “day”, it turned out to be quite enjoyable. I hacked some hardware on the plane ride, I took a maglev to my hotel, met up with Sophi for drinks, and explored the neighborhood for some Shanghai breakfast. Continue reading “Hacker Abroad: A Very Long Way To China” →

Our Right To Repair Depends On A Minimally Viable Laptop

March 7, 2019 by 142 Comments

It’s never been harder to repair your electronics. When the keyboard in your shiny new MacBook dies, you’ll have to send it to a Genius. When the battery in your iPhone dies, you’ll have to break out the pentalobe screwdrivers. Your technology does not respect your freedom, and this is true all the way down to the source code: the Library of Congress is thankfully chipping away at the DMCA in an effort that serves the Right to Repair movement, but still problems remain.

The ability — or rather, right — to repair will inevitably mean using electronics longer, and keeping them out of the garbage. That’s less e-waste, but it’s also older, potentially slower and less powerful portable workstations. This is the question: how long should you keep your electronics running? When do you start getting into the false economy of repairing something just because you can? What is the minimally viable laptop?

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1 Trillion USD Refund! (PDF Enclosed)

March 6, 2019 by 5 Comments

Security researchers have found that it is possible to alter a digitally signed PDF without invalidating its signatures. To demonstrate it, they produced a fake document “refund order” of $1,000,000,000,000 dollars, with a valid signature from Amazon. This sparked my attention, since I was quite sure that they didn’t use some sort of quantum device to break the cryptography involved in the signing process. So what exactly is going on?

The researchers claim to found at least three different ways to, in their words:

… use an existing signed document (e.g., amazon.de invoice) and change the content of the document arbitrarily without invalidating the signatures. Thus, we can forge a document signed by invoicing@amazon.de to refund us one trillion dollars.

That’s not good news if you take into account that the main purpose of digitally signing a document is, well, prevent unauthorized changes in that document. The good news is that you can update your software to fix this flaws because of this research; the main PDF readers companies were given time to fix the issues. The bad news is that if you rely on the signature verification for any sensitive process, you likely want to go back and see if you were using vulnerable software previously and check that documents were correctly validated. I’m thinking about government institutions, banks, insurance companies and so on.

The implications are yet to be seen and probably won’t even be fully known.

There are three classes of attacks that work on different software. I’ll try to go into each one from what I could tell from reading the research.

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Putting The Brakes On High-Frequency Trading With Physics

February 26, 2019 by 65 Comments

In the middle of the East Coast’s slow broil in the summer of 2018, a curious phenomenon surfaced. As a tropical air mass settled in and smothered the metropolitan New York area, a certain breed of stock speculator began feeling the financial heat as the microwave signals linking together various data centers and exchanges began to slow down. These high-frequency traders rely on getting information a fraction of a second before other traders see the same thing and take advantage of minuscule price differences to make money hand over fist.

While you won’t catch us shedding many tears over the billions these speculators lost during the hot spell, we did find the fact that humidity can slow microwave propagation enough to make this a problem for them a fascinating subject, enough so that we covered it in some detail at the time. While financial markets come and go and the technology to capitalize them changes at a breakneck pace, physics stays the same, and it can make or break deals with no regard to the so-called fundamentals.

So it was with great interest that we happened upon Tom Scott’s recent video outlining how one new stock exchange is using physics to actually slow down stock trades, in an attempt to gain a competitive advantage over the other exchanges. In light of the billions lost over the summer to propagation delays amounting to a mere 10 microseconds, we couldn’t help but wonder how injecting a delay 35 times longer using a “magic shoebox” was actually good for business. It turns out to be an interesting story.

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Stethoscopes, Electronics, And Artificial Intelligence

February 25, 2019 by 20 Comments

For all the advances in medical diagnostics made over the last two centuries of modern medicine, from the ability to peer deep inside the body with the help of superconducting magnets to harnessing the power of molecular biology, it seems strange that the enduring symbol of the medical profession is something as simple as the stethoscope. Hardly a medical examination goes by without the frigid kiss of a stethoscope against one’s chest, while we search the practitioner’s face for a telltale frown revealing something wrong from deep inside us.

The stethoscope has changed little since its invention and yet remains a valuable if problematic diagnostic tool. Efforts have been made to solve these problems over the years, but only with relatively recent advances in digital signal processing (DSP), microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), and artificial intelligence has any real progress been made. This leaves so-called smart stethoscopes poised to make a real difference in diagnostics, especially in the developing world and under austere or emergency situations.

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