Troubleshooting: A Method For Solving Problems The Right Way

September 3, 2021 by Ryan Flowers 48 Comments

We’ve all experienced that magic moment when, after countless frustrating hours of experimentation and racking your brain, the object of our attention starts working. The 3D printer finally produces good output. The hacked up laptop finally boots. The car engine finally purrs. The question is, do we know why it started working?

This is more important than you might think. Knowing the answer lets you confirm that the core problem was solved, otherwise you may have just fixed a symptom. And lack of understanding means fixing one problem may just create another.

The solution is to adopt a methodical troubleshooting method. We’re talking about a structured problem solving technique that when used properly can help us solve a problem at its core without leaving any loose ends. Such methodology will also leave you knowing why any solution did or didn’t work in the end, and will give you reproducible results.

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Pining For A De-Googled Smartphone

September 2, 2021 by Bryan Cockfield 89 Comments

Last summer in the first swings of the global pandemic, sitting at home finally able to tackle some of my electronics projects now that I wasn’t wasting three hours a day commuting to a cubicle farm, I found myself ordering a new smartphone. Not the latest Samsung or Apple offering with their boring, predictable UIs, though. This was the Linux-only PinePhone, which lacks the standard Android interface plastered over an otherwise deeply hidden Linux kernel.

As a bit of a digital privacy nut, the lack of Google software on this phone seemed intriguing as well, and although there were plenty of warnings that this was a phone still in its development stages it seemed like I might be able to overcome any obstacles and actually use the device for daily use. What followed, though, was a challenging year of poking, prodding, and tinkering before it got to the point where it can finally replace an average Android smartphone and its Google-based spyware with something that suits my privacy-centered requirements, even if I do admittedly have to sacrifice some functionality.

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So How Does A Rocket Fly Sideways, Anyway?

September 1, 2021 by Tom Nardi 43 Comments

It’s often said that getting into orbit is less about going up, and more about going sideways very fast. So in that sense, the recent launch conducted by aerospace startup Astra could be seen as the vehicle simply getting the order of operations wrong. Instead of going up and then burning towards the horizon, it made an exceptionally unusual sideways flight before finally moving skyward.

As you might expect, the booster didn’t make it to orbit. But not for lack of trying. In fact, that the 11.6 meter (38 feet) vehicle was able to navigate through its unprecedented lateral maneuver and largely correct its flight-path is a testament to the engineering prowess of the team at the Alameda, California based company. It’s worth noting that it was the ground controller’s decision to cut the rocket’s engines once it had flown high and far enough away to not endanger anyone on the ground that ultimately ended the flight; the booster itself was still fighting to reach space until the very last moment.

There’s a certain irony to the fact that this flight, the third Astra has attempted since their founding in 2016, was the first to be live streamed to YouTube. Had the company not pulled back their usual veil of secrecy, we likely wouldn’t have such glorious high-resolution footage of what will forever be remembered as one of the most bizarre rocket mishaps in history. The surreal image of the rocket smoothly sliding out of frame as if it was trying to avoid the camera’s gaze has already become a meme online, arguably reaching a larger and more diverse audience than would have resulted from a successful launch. As they say, there’s no such thing as bad press.

Naturally, the viral clip has spurred some questions. You don’t have to be a space expert to know that the pointy end of the rocket is usually supposed to go up, but considering how smooth the maneuver looks, some have even wondered if it wasn’t somehow intentional. With so much attention on this unusual event, it seems like the perfect time to take a close look at how Astra’s latest rocket launch went, quite literally, sideways.

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The Postmortem Password Problem

September 1, 2021 by Eric Evenchick 82 Comments

Death and passwords: two things we just can’t avoid. With so much of our lives tied up in cloud services nowadays, there’s good reason to worry about what happens to these accounts if we drop dead tomorrow. For many of us, important documents, photos, financial information and other data will be locked behind a login prompt. Your payment methods will also expire shortly after you have, which could lead to data loss if not handled promptly. The most obvious way to address this is to give a trusted party access in case of emergency.

A Bad Solution

Let’s start with the simplest solution: using the same password everywhere. Great, all you need to do is put this on a Post-it note, stuff it in an envelope, and let someone know where to find it. Unfortunately, using a single password for many services is a terrible idea. Password breaches happen, and if you’re using a single password across the internet, they can be disastrous.

Password breaches are usually the result of an attacker finding a vulnerability that allows reading password data from an application’s database. Odds are high that your information has been leaked in one of these breaches. You can check if your email is on a list of known breaches with Have I Been Pwned. Don’t feel bad if you’ve been pwned, my email shows up on six different breaches, and this service only indexes publicly known breaches!

Depending on the competency of the company that was breached, your password may have been stolen in a few different formats. In the worst case, the passwords were stored as-is (i.e., cleartext), and the breach contains your actual password. Nowadays, storing passwords in cleartext is never considered acceptable. A hash of the password is stored instead. Attackers need to use a tool like hashcat to try to recover the passwords via brute force hash cracking. This is slow for complex passwords, but is always getting faster as GPUs improve.

So we really need to use different passwords everywhere, or our Tumblr account from 2013 could give access to our bank account. Given the large number of services we use and our inability to remember passwords, we’re going to need to use a password manager. Continue reading “The Postmortem Password Problem” →

Fusion Ignition: What Does The NIF’s 1.3 MJ Yield Mean For Fusion Research?

August 30, 2021 by Maya Posch 37 Comments

Earlier this month, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) announced to the world that they had achieved a record 1.3 MJ yield from a fusion experiment at their National Ignition Facility (NIF). Yet what does this mean, exactly? As their press release notes, the main advancement of these results will go towards the US’s nuclear weapons arsenal.

This pertains specifically to the US’s nuclear fusion weapons, which LLNL along with Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and other facilities are involved in the research and maintenance of. This traces back to the NIF’s roots in the 1990s, when the stockpile stewardship program was set up as an alternative to nuclear weapons testing. Much of this research involves examining how today’s nuclear weapons degrade over time, and ways to modernize the existing arsenal.

In light of this, one may wonder what the impact of these experimental findings from the NIF are beyond merely ensuring that the principle of MAD remains intact. To answer that question, we have to take a look at inertial confinement fusion (ICF), which is the technology at the core of the NIF’s experiments.

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Ask Hackaday: What Is Amazon Thinking By Entering The Palm-Reading Business?

August 27, 2021 by Kristina Panos 60 Comments

Have you heard about this One? At least three United States senators have, and they want to know what Amazon plans to do with all the biometric data collected by the Amazon One program. It’s their new contactless payment method that uses your unique palm print instead of cards or phones to make purchases, gain access to venues of work and play, and enter or pay in whatever other spaces Amazon can invade down the line. The idea is that one day, we’ll all be able to leave our homes without any form of money or ID of any kind, because we’ll all be stored away in Bezos’ big biometric file cabinet.

We tossed this one around in the writer’s room back when the Amazon One concept was nothing but a pile of buzzwords and a render or two, but these kiosks are now active in 50+ Whole Foods and Amazon 4-Star locations across the US. Here’s the deal: you can only sign up at a participating store that has a kiosk, because they have to scan your palms into the system. We were worried that the signup kiosk could easily take fingerprint scans at the same time, but according to the gifs in Morning Brew’s review, it just uses another of their point-of-sale palm scanners along with a touch screen and a card reader. But you still have to hover your entire hand over it, so who’s to say that the scan ends where the fingers begin?

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Bar code shown in a 3D plain in Vaporwave Aesthetic

Tech In Plain Sight: Check Digits And Human Error

August 25, 2021 by Al Williams 31 Comments

Computers in working order and with correct software don’t make mistakes. People, however, make plenty of mistakes (including writing bad software or breaking computers). In quality circles, there’s a Japanese term, poka yoke, which roughly means ‘error avoidance’. The idea is to avoid errors by making them too obvious for them to occur. For example, consider a SIM card in your phone. The little diagonal corner means it only goes in one way. If you put it in the wrong way, it is obviously wrong.

To be successful at poka yoke, you have to be able to imagine what a user might do wrong and then come up with some way to make it obvious that it is wrong. There are examples of this all around us and we sometimes don’t even know it. For example, what do your credit card number, your car’s VIN code, and a UPC code on a can of beans have in common?