Slider

4955 Articles

This Week In Security: Cloudflare Wasn’t DNS, BADAUDIO, And Not A Vuln

November 21, 2025 by 8 Comments

You may have noticed that large pieces of the Internet were down on Tuesday. It was a problem at Cloudflare, and for once, it wasn’t DNS. This time it was database management, combined with a safety limit that failed unsafe when exceeded.

Cloudflare’s blog post on the matter has the gritty details. It started with an update to how Cloudflare’s ClickHouse distributed database was responding to queries. A query of system columns was previously only returning data from the default database. As a part of related work, that system was changed so that this query now returned all the databases the given user had access to. In retrospect it seems obvious that this could cause problems, but it wasn’t predicted to cause problems. The result was that a database query to look up bot-management features returned the same features multiple times.

That featurelist is used to feed the Cloudflare bot classification system. That system uses some AI smarts, and runs in the core proxy system. There are actually two versions of the core proxy, and they behaved a bit differently when the featurelist exceeded the 200 item limit. When the older version failed, it classified all traffic as a bot. The real trouble was the newer Rust code. That version of the core proxy threw an error in response, leading to 5XX HTTP errors, and the Internet-wide fallout. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Cloudflare Wasn’t DNS, BADAUDIO, And Not A Vuln” →

So Long, Firefox, Part One

November 20, 2025 by 153 Comments

It’s likely that Hackaday readers have among them a greater than average number of people who can name one special thing they did on September 23rd, 2002. On that day a new web browser was released, Phoenix version 0.1, and it was a lightweight browser-only derivative of the hugely bloated Mozilla suite. Renamed a few times to become Firefox, it rose to challenge the once-mighty Microsoft Internet Explorer, only to in turn be overtaken by Google’s Chrome.

Now in 2025 it’s a minority browser with an estimated market share just over 2%, and it’s safe to say that Mozilla’s take on AI and the use of advertising data has put them at odds with many of us who’ve kept the faith since that September day 23 years ago. Over the last few months I’ve been actively chasing alternatives, and it’s with sadness that in November 2025, I can finally say I’m Firefox-free.

Continue reading “So Long, Firefox, Part One” →

Mating Cycles: Engineering Connectors To Last

November 20, 2025 by 56 Comments

If you take a look around you, chances are pretty good that within a few seconds, your eyes will fall on some kind of electrical connector. In this day and age, it’s as likely as not to be a USB connector, given their ubiquity as the charger of choice for everything from phones to flashlights. But there are plenty of other connectors, from mains outlets in the wall to Ethernet connectors, and if you’re anything like us, you’ve got a bench full of DuPonts, banana plugs, BNCs, SMAs, and all the rest of the alphabet soup of connectors.

Given their propensity for failure and their general reputation as a necessary evil in electrical designs, it may seem controversial to say that all connectors are engineered to last. But it’s true; they’re engineered to last, but only for as long as necessary. Some are built for only a few cycles of mating, while others are built for the long haul. Either way, connectors are a great case study in engineering compromise, one that loops physics, chemistry, and materials science into the process.

Continue reading “Mating Cycles: Engineering Connectors To Last” →

FLOSS Weekly Episode 855: Get In The Minecart, Loser!

November 19, 2025 by 2 Comments

This week Jonathan chats with Kevin, Colin, and Curtis about Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead! It’s a rogue-like post-apocalyptic survival game that you can play in the terminal, over SSH if you really want to! Part of the story is a Kickstarter that resulted in a graphics tile-set. And then there’s the mods!

Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 855: Get In The Minecart, Loser!” →

Hackers Can’t Spend A Penny

November 19, 2025 by 91 Comments

We aren’t here to praise the penny, but rather, to bury it. The penny, and its counterparts, have been vanishing all around the world as the cost of minting one far outweighs its value. But hackers had already lost a big asset: real copper pennies, and now even the cheaply made ones are doomed to extinction.

If you check your pockets and find a pre-1982 penny, it’s almost all copper. Well, 95% of its slightly-more-than-3-gram heft is pure copper. Since then, the copper penny’s been a fraud, weighing 2.5 g and containing only a 2.5% copper plate over a zinc core. During WWII, they did make some oddball steel pennies, but that was just a temporary measure.

Continue reading “Hackers Can’t Spend A Penny” →

Why Samsung Phones Are Failing Emergency Calls In Australia

November 19, 2025 by 66 Comments

We’re taught how to call emergency numbers from a young age; whether it be 911 in the US, 999 in the UK, or 000 in Australia. The concept is simple—if you need aid from police, fire, or ambulance, you pick up a phone and dial and help will be sent in short order.

It’s a service many of us have come to rely on; indeed, it’s function can swing the very balance between life or death. Sadly, in Australia, that has come to pass, with a person dying when their Samsung phone failed to reach the Triple Zero (000) emergency line. It has laid bare an obscure technical issue that potentially leaves thousands of lives at risk. Continue reading “Why Samsung Phones Are Failing Emergency Calls In Australia” →

In Praise Of Plasma TVs

November 18, 2025 by 42 Comments

I’m sitting in front of an old Sayno Plasma TV as I write this on my media PC. It’s not a productivity machine, by any means, but the screen has the resolution to do it so I started this document to prove a point. That point? Plasma TVs are awesome.

Always the Bridesmaid, Never the Bride

An Egyptian god might see pixels on an 8K panel, but we puny mortals won’t. Image “Horus Eye 2” by [Jeff Dahl]
The full-colour plasma screens that were used as TVs in the 2000s are an awkward technological cul-de-sac. Everyone knows and loves CRTs for the obvious benefits they offer– bright colours, low latency, and scanlines to properly blur pixel art. Modern OLEDs have more resolution than the Eye of Horus, never mind your puny human orbs, and barely sip power compared to their forbearers. Plasma, though? Not old enough to be retro-cool, not new enough to be high-tech, plasma displays are sadly forgotten.

It’s funny, because I firmly believe that without plasma displays, CRTs would have never gone away. Perhaps for that I should hate them, but it’s for the very reasons that Plasma won out over HD-CRTs in the market place that I love them.

What You Get When You Get a Plasma TV

I didn’t used to love Plasma TVs. Until a few years ago, I thought of them like you probably do: clunky, heavy, power-hungry, first-gen flatscreens that were properly consigned to the dustbin of history. Then I bought a house.

The house came with a free TV– a big plasma display in the basement. It was left there for two reasons: it was worthless on the open market and it weighed a tonne. I could take it off the wall by myself, but I could feel the ghost of OSHA past frowning at me when I did. Hauling it up the stairs? Yeah, I’d need a buddy for that… and it was 2020. By the time I was organizing the basement, we’d just gone into lockdown, and buddies were hard to come by. So I put it back on the wall, plugged in my laptop, and turned it on.

I was gobsmacked. It looked exactly like a CRT– a giant, totally flat CRT in glorious 1080p. When I stepped to the side, it struck me again: like a CRT, the viewing angle is “yes”. Continue reading “In Praise Of Plasma TVs” →