Mobile Phones And The Question Of Declining Sperm Quality

November 28, 2023 by Lewin Day 105 Comments

In a world increasingly reliant on technology, a pressing question arises: can our dependence on gadgets, particularly mobile phones, be affecting our health in unexpected ways? A growing body of research is now pointing towards a startling trend – declining sperm quality in the human population – with mobile phones emerging as a potential culprit.

Recent studies have been sounding the alarm over a noticeable decline in sperm counts and quality across the globe. This decline isn’t just about quantity; it’s about the vitality, motility, and overall health of sperm cells. The implications of this trend are profound, affecting fertility rates and possibly even the long-term viability of populations. The situation is murky and complicated, but new studies suggest that cellular phones could have a role to play.

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How Do You Prove An AI Didn’t Make Your Art?

November 27, 2023 by Lewin Day 92 Comments

In the world of digital art, distinguishing between AI-generated and human-made creations has become a significant challenge. Almost overnight, tool sets for generating AI artworks became commonly available to the public, and suddenly, every digital art competition had to contend with potential submissions. Some have welcomed AI, while others demand competitors create artworks by their own hand and no other.

The problem facing artists and judges alike is just how to determine whether an artwork was created by a human or an AI. So what can be done?

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Australia’s Second Largest Telco Went Dark, And Chaos Reigned

November 22, 2023 by Lewin Day 51 Comments

Engineers tend to worry about uptime, whether it’s at a corporate server farm or just our own little hobby servers at home. Every now and then, something will go wrong and take a box offline, which requires a little human intervention to fix. Ideally, you’ll still have a command link that stays up so you can fix the problem. Lose that, though, and you’re in a whole lick of trouble.

That’s precisely what happened to Australia’s second largest telecommunications provider earlier this month. Systems went down, millions lost connectivity, and company techs were left scrambling to put the pieces back together. Let’s dive in and explore what happened on Optus’s most embarrassing day in recent memory.

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How To Talk To Your Scope

November 21, 2023 by Al Williams 21 Comments

It used to be only high-end test equipment that had some sort of remote control port. These days, though, they are quite common. Historically, test gear used IEEE-488 (also known as GPIB or, from the originator, HPIB). But today, your device will likely talk over a USB port, a serial port, or a LAN connection. You’d think that every instrument had unique quirks, and controlling it would be nothing like controlling another piece of gear, especially one from another company. That would be half right. Each vendor and even model indeed has its unique command language. There has been a significant effort to standardize some aspects of test instrument control, and you can quickly write code to control things on any platform using many different programming languages. In a few posts, I will show you just how easy it can be.

The key is to use VISA. This protocol is defined by the IVI Foundation that lets you talk to instruments regardless of how they communicate. You do have to build an address that tells the VISA library how to find your device. For example: “TCPIP::192.168.1.92::INSTR.” But once you have that, it is easy to talk to any instrument anywhere.

I say that thinking it is a problem is half right because talking to the box is one task of the two you need to complete. The other is what to say to the box and what it will say back to you. There are a few standards in this area, but this is where you get into problems. Continue reading “How To Talk To Your Scope” →

2023 Halloween Hackfest: This Year’s Spooky Winners

November 20, 2023 by Tom Nardi 1 Comment

With the zombies, ghouls, and ghosts now safely returned to their crypts until next October, it’s time to unveil this year’s winners for the 2023 Halloween Hackfest.

For this contest, sponsors DigiKey and Arduino challenged the community to come up with their best creations for what’s arguably the most hacker-friendly of holidays. Pretty much everything was fair game, from costumes to decorations. The top three winners will get $150 credit from DigiKey and some treats from Arduino — just don’t try to eat them.

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The Case For A Technology Aware Lobby Correspondent

November 17, 2023 by Jenny List 24 Comments

We cover all manner of stories here at Hackaday, including awesome hardware hacks, the latest trends and inventions, and in-depth guides to fascinating technologies. We also cover a few news stories from the wider world outside our community, usually when they have some knock-on effect that has an impact on us. Recently this last category of stories has included laws which present a threat to online encryption and privacy in the UK and in the European Union, for example. They’re not the most joyful of news, but it’s vital for everyone with an interest in online matters to be informed about them.

A Long And Inglorious History

A quad flat-pack computer chip, made by VLSI — The infamous Clipper chip. Travis Goodspeed, CC BY 2.0

Those of us who have followed the world of technology will know that badly thought out laws with a negative impact on technology have a long and inglorious history. Some like the infamous backdoored Clipper chip encryption device die an inglorious death as industry or the public succeed in making them irrelevant, but others such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA live on for decades and present an ongoing malign influence. Most recently our ongoing coverage of dubious drone stories included a hefty dose of equally dubious action from lawmakers.

When considering these pieces of legislation it’s easy to characterise the politicians who advance them as gullible idiots easily swayed by any commercial lobbyist with a fistful of cash. But the reality is far more nuanced, while some of them may well be tempted by those lobbyists they are in most cases neither gullible nor foolish. Instead they are better characterised as clueless on technical issues, and thus easily swayed by received opinion rather than by technological reality. If there’s a fault in the system it’s that the essential feedback which provides the checks and balances is missing, and oddly while sitting here writing this story, the responsibility for this comes close to home. The solution doesn’t lie in changing the politicians, but in changing how they are treated by journalists. Continue reading “The Case For A Technology Aware Lobby Correspondent” →

A Look At All The Badge Hacks Of Supercon 2023

November 15, 2023 by Tom Nardi 6 Comments

For those of you who’ve had the opportunity to join us in Pasadena for Supercon, you’ll know it’s a wild ride from start to finish. Singling out a single moment as our favorite is pretty much impossible, but certainly the Sunday Badge Hacking Ceremony has to rank up there. It’s the culmination of ~78 hours of intense hardware and software hacking, and that’s not even counting the pre-show work that attendees often put into their creations. Every year, without fail, this community manages to pull off badge hacks that are beyond anything we could have imagined — and we’re the ones who made the thing in the first place.

Unfortunately, in the mad rush, we’ve never had a chance to actually photograph the hacked badges and share them with the Hackaday readers. This year, at the urging of some of the badge hackers themselves, we were able to throw together a suitable overhead light at the last minute and actually snapped shots of each badge after it was presented to the audience.

The resulting images, sorted by badge hacking category, are below. While some proved difficult to photograph, especially with an impromptu setup, we’re happy to at least have a complete record of this year’s creations. Hopefully we’ll be able to improve on our technique for 2024 and beyond. If yours shows up, or if you’d like to share your appreciation, sound off in the comments below!

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