In the dawning of the IBM PC era, the computer case was a heavy, stout thing. These were industrial machines, built with beefy paddle power switches, and weighing as much as a ton of bricks. Painted in only the ugliest beige, they set the tone for PC design for the next couple of decades.
At the turn of the millennium, the winds of change swept through. The Apple iMac redefined the computer as a hip, cool device, and other manufacturers began to reconsider their product aesthetics. Around the same time, the casemodding scene took off in earnest, with adherents building ever wilder battle stations for internet clout and glory.
With all the development that has gone in the last 40 years of the PC platform, we’ve seen great change and improvement in almost every area. But in building a new rig this past month, this writer discovered there’s one element of the modern PC that’s still trapped in the past.
Years before Steve Jobs showed off the first iPhone, the BlackBerry was already the must-have accessory for mobile professionals. Back then, nobody was worried about watching movies or playing the latest games on their mobile devices, they just wanted a secure and fast way to send and receive email on the go. For that, the BlackBerry was king.
Fast forward to today, and the company is just a shell of what it once was. They don’t even bother making their own hardware anymore. Over the last several years they’ve opted to partner with a series of increasingly obscure manufacturers to produce a handful of lackluster Android phones so they still have something to sell to their dwindling userbase. Anyone excited about the new 5G BlackBerry being built by Texas start-up OnwardMobility? Did you even know it was in the works before now?
A DoD Common Access Card
But this article isn’t about BlackBerry phones. It’s about something that’s even more irrelevant to consumers: the BlackBerry Smart Card Reader. Technically, this little device isn’t dependent on the phones of the same name, but it makes sense that Research In Motion (which eventually just renamed itself to BlackBerry Limited) would market the gadget under the brand of their most popular product. Though as you might expect, software was available to allow it to work with the BlackBerry phone that you almost certainly owned if you needed a dedicated smart card reader.
For those who might not be aware, a smart card in this context is a two-factor authentication token contained in an ID card. These are used extensively by organizations such as the Department of Defense, where they’re known as Common Access Cards, that require you to insert your ID card into a reader before you can log into a secure computer system. This sleek device was marketed as a portable reader that could connect to computers over USB or Bluetooth. Worn around your neck with the included lanyard, the battery-powered reader allowed the card itself to remain on the user’s body while still being readable by nearby devices.
Civilians will recognize the basic technology from modern “Chip and PIN” debit and credit cards, but we’ve never had to stick one of those into our laptop just to log in. To be sure, the BlackBerry Smart Card Reader was never intended for the average home computer user, it was sold to companies and organizations that had tight security requirements; which just so happened to be the same places that would likely already be using BlackBerry mobile devices.
Of course, times and technology change. These devices once cost $200 apiece and were purchased in vast quantities for distribution to trusted personnel, but are now all but worthless. Even in new and unopened condition, they can be had for as little as $10 USD on eBay. For that price, it’s certainly worth taking a peek inside. Perhaps the hacker community can even find new applications for these once cutting-edge devices.
The fastest remote-controlled airplane flight ever recorded took place in 2018, with a top speed of 545 miles/hour. That’s 877 km/h, or Mach 0.77!
What was the limiting factor, preventing the pilot-and-designer Spencer Lisenby’s plane from going any faster? The airstream over parts of the wing hitting the sound barrier, and the resulting mini sonic booms wreaking havoc on the aerodynamics. What kind of supercharged jet motor can propel a model plane faster than its wings can carry it? Absolutely none; the fastest RC planes are, surprisingly, gliders.
Dynamic soaring (DS) was first harnessed to propel model planes sometime in the mid 1990s. Since then, an informal international competition among pilots has pushed the state of the art further and further, and in just 20 years the top measured speed has more than tripled. But dynamic soaring is anything but new. Indeed, it’s been possible ever since there has been wind and slopes on the earth. Albatrosses, the long-distance champs of the animal kingdom, have been “DSing” forever, and we’ve known about it for a century.
DS is the highest-tech frontier in model flight, and is full of interesting physical phenomena and engineering challenges. Until now, the planes have all been piloted remotely by people, but reaching new high speeds might require the fast reaction times of onboard silicon, in addition to a new generation of aircraft designs. The “free” speed boost that gliders can get from dynamic soaring could extend the range of unmanned aerial vehicles, when the conditions are right. In short, DS is at a turning point, and things are just about to get very interesting. It’s time you got to know dynamic soaring.
With social media and online services are now huge parts of daily life to the point that our entire world is being shaped by algorithms. Arcane in their workings, they are responsible for the content we see and the adverts we’re shown. Just as importantly, they decide what is hidden from view as well.
Important: Much of this post discusses the performance of a live website algorithm. Some of the links in this post may not perform as reported if viewed at a later date.
The initial Zoom problem that brought Twitter’s issues to light.
Recently, [Colin Madland] posted some screenshots of a Zoom meeting to Twitter, pointing out how Zoom’s background detection algorithm had improperly erased the head of a colleague with darker skin. In doing so, [Colin] noticed a strange effect — although the screenshot he submitted shows both of their faces, Twitter would always crop the image to show just his light-skinned face, no matter the image orientation. The Twitter community raced to explore the problem, and the fallout was swift.
Modern-day hard disk drives (HDDs) hold the interesting juxtaposition of being simultaneously the pinnacle of mass-produced, high-precision mechanical engineering, as well as the most scorned storage technology. Despite being called derogatory names such as ‘spinning rust’, most of these drives manage a lifetime of spinning ultra-smooth magnetic storage platters only nanometers removed from the recording and reading heads whose read arms are twitching around using actuators that manage to position the head precisely above the correct microscopic magnetic trace within milliseconds.
Despite decade after decade of more and more of these magnetic traces being crammed on a single square millimeter of these platters, and the simple read and write heads being replaced every few years by more and more complicated ones, hard drive reliability has gone up. The second quarter report from storage company Backblaze on their HDDs shows that the annual failure rate has gone significantly down compared to last year.
The question is whether this means that HDDs stand to become only more reliable over time, and how upcoming technologies like MAMR and HAMR may affect these metrics over the coming decades.
Hackaday Remoticon happens November 6-8 worldwide! The weekend will be packed with virtual activities, and most of them are hands-on workshops that you can participate in from the comfort of your home, lab, garage, basement, lair, or other socially distanced location of your choosing.
The news today is that everyone should register for Remoticon right now, and that we’re opening up registration for about half of the total workshops. More details on the remaining workshops, demos, and some special events will be available in a future article.
Get a Ticket for Remoticon, Then Register for Workshops
Step 1: Register for the Con. What you want to do right now is head over to the Remoticon ticketing page and register for the conference. We need to get a headcount so that our servers don’t melt down during this massive online social event. You can get a ticket for free, or you can choose pay as you wish — scroll to the bottom of the tickets under “Donations” — and those proceeds go to charities that feed, house, or educate people. In these hard times, if you’re in a position to spare a few bucks, please do so.
Step 2: Buy your workshop ticket(s). A workshop isn’t a workshop unless you can ask questions and get help along the way. Workshop tickets are for attendees who want to participate live, interacting with the presenters and other attendees via video chat. We’ve made all workshop tickets $10 as “skin in the game” to help ensure that these limited slots go to good use. Proceeds from workshop tickets will be used to offset the costs of hosting Remoticon.
If there is one request that we get every Supercon, it’s to film the workshops. This year, we can! If you can’t attend a workshop that you’re interested in we plan to record, edit, and publish them all so everyone can follow along at a later date.
The registration page has workshop descriptions listed when you select your ticket, but here are the titles whet your appetite. Thank you to everyone who submitted a workshop proposal, none of this is possible without you, naturally.
By now, you’ve likely heard that scientists have found a potential sign of biological life on Venus. Through a series of radio telescope observations in 2017 and 2019, they were able to confirm the presence of phosphine gas high in the planet’s thick atmosphere. Here on Earth, the only way this gas is produced outside of the laboratory is through microbial processes. The fact that it’s detectable at such high concentrations in the Venusian atmosphere means we either don’t know as much as we thought we did about phosphine, or more tantalizingly, that the spark of life has been found on our nearest planetary neighbor.
Venus, as seen by Mariner 10 in 1974
To many, the idea that life could survive on Venus is difficult to imagine. While it’s technically the planet most like Earth in terms of size, mass, composition, and proximity to the Sun, the surface of this rocky world is absolutely hellish; with a runaway greenhouse effect producing temperatures in excess of 460 C (840 F). Life, at least as we currently know it, would find no safe haven on the surface of Venus. Even the Soviet Venera landers, sent to the planet in the 1980s, were unable to survive the intense heat and pressure for more than a few hours.
While the surface may largely be outside of our reach, the planet’s exceptionally dense atmosphere is another story entirely. At an altitude of approximately 50 kilometers, conditions inside the Venusian atmosphere are far more forgiving. The atmospheric pressure at this altitude is almost identical to surface-level pressures on Earth, and the average temperature is cool enough that liquid water can form. While the chemical composition of the atmosphere is not breathable by Earthly standards, and the clouds of sulfuric acid aren’t particularly welcoming, it’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility that simple organisms could thrive in this CO2-rich environment. If there really is life on Venus, many speculate it will be found hiding in this relatively benign microcosm high in the clouds.
In short, all the pieces seem to be falling into place. Observations confirm a telltale marker of biological life is in the upper levels of the Venusian atmosphere, and we know from previous studies that this region is arguably one of the most Earth-like environments in the solar system. It’s still far too early to claim we’ve discovered extraterrestrial life, but it’s not hard to see why people are getting so excited.
But this isn’t the first time scientists have turned their gaze towards Earth’s twin. In fact, had things gone differently, NASA might have sent a crew out to Venus after the Apollo program had completed its survey of the Moon. If that mission had launched back in the 1970s, it could have fundamentally reshaped our understanding of the planet; and perhaps even our understanding of humanity’s place in the cosmos.
