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Stealth Cell Tower Inside This Office Printer Calls To Say I Love You

November 2, 2016 by 35 Comments

If you look around the street furniture of your city, you may notice some ingenious attempts to disguise cell towers. There are fake trees, lamp posts with bulges, and plenty you won’t even be aware of concealed within commercial signage. The same people who are often the first to complain when they have no signal it seems do not want to be reminded how that signal reaches them. On a more sinister note, government agencies have been known to make use of fake cell towers of a different kind, those which impersonate legitimate towers in order to track and intercept communications.

In investigating the phenomenon of fake cells, [Julian Oliver] has brought together both strands by creating a fake cell tower hidden within an innocuous office printer. It catches the phones it finds within its range, and sends them a series of text messages that appear to be from someone the phone’s owner might know. It then prints out a transcript of the resulting text conversation along with all the identifying information it can harvest from the phone. As a prank it also periodically calls phones connected to it and plays them the Stevie Wonder classic I Just Called To Say I Love You.

In hardware terms the printer has been fitted with a Raspberry Pi 3, a BladeRF software-defined transceiver, and a pair of omnidirectional antennas which are concealed behind the toner cartridge hatch. Software comes via  YateBTS, and [Julian] provides a significant amount of information about its configuration as well as a set of compiled binaries.

In one sense this project is a fun prank, yet on the other hand it demonstrates how accessible the technology now is to impersonate a cell tower and hijack passing phones. We’re afraid to speculate though as to the length of custodial sentence you might receive were you to be caught using one as a private individual.

We’ve considered the Stingray cell phone trackers before here at Hackaday, as well as looking at a couple of possible counter-measures. An app that uses a database of known towers to spot fakes, as well as a solution that relies on an SDR receiver to gather cell tower data from a neighbourhood.

[via Hacker News]

ESP32 Modules Popping Up Everywhere, In Stock Almost Nowhere

November 2, 2016 by 46 Comments

We know what it’s like to wait for newly released electronic parts. Clicking refresh every day at your favorite online retailers, reading reviews published by the press who got preview units, and maybe even daring to order implausibly cheap devices from foreign lands. The ESP32 has many of us playing the waiting game, and we’ll level with you — they’re out of stock most places. But, if you look hard enough you can find one. At least, you could find them before we wrote this quick roundup of ESP32 hardware. If hearing about parts that are just out of reach is your sort of thing, then read on, you masochist!

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LED Matrix Shades You Can Actually See Though

November 2, 2016 by 16 Comments

[Gal Pavlin] admits to enjoying the occasional dance music show. For those who have never been to one, LED one-upmanship at these shows is a real and terrible thing, so much so that an entire market exists around it. To that end, [Gal] built a pretty spiffy set of LED glasses.

It took quite a bit of work to arrive at the final design. All the circuitry and LEDs fit entirely within the envelope of the lenses on a pair of sunglass frames of dubious parentage. The batteries squeeze in between the user’s head and temples.

On top of the clever packaging is an equally impressive set of features. Each lens is a matrix of 69 LEDs. They have an accelerometer, a microphone, and a light sensor. There’s even a vibrating alert motor, which we feel is just showing off.  Best of all, you can actually see through the glasses, thanks to clever layout and very tiny LEDs.

The device requires a tag connect or soldering on a pigtail to program. If you’d like to build one yourself all the files are available on [Gavin]’s site. There’s a video of it in operation after the break.

Continue reading “LED Matrix Shades You Can Actually See Though” →

SSH Enters The Mosh Pit

November 1, 2016 by 8 Comments

With so many systems depending on Linux, the secure shell SSH has become a staple for many developers. If you are connected to your Raspberry Pi via a cable or a wireless router a few feet away, SSH can provide you with an encrypted connection straight to the box. However, if you have a system out in a swamp somewhere with intermittent slow network access, SSH can be a real pain. When your IP address can change (for example, roaming on a cellular network), SSH has problems, too.

To combat these and other problems, you might consider an open source program called Mosh (mobile shell). There’s two parts to Mosh. One part works as a server while the other is the client application. Neither of these require root access. You can see a video about Mosh below.

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Hams In Space Part 2: The Manned Spaceflights

November 1, 2016 by 39 Comments

Whether it’s trying to make contacts across the planet with a transmitter that would have a hard time lighting an LED, or blasting signals into space and bouncing them off the moon, amateur radio operators have always been on the forefront of communications technology. As mankind took to space in the 1950s and 1960s, hams went along for the ride with the first private satellites. But as successful as the OSCAR satellites were, they were still at best only beacons or repeaters in space. What was needed was the human touch – a real live operator making contacts with people on the ground, showing the capabilities of amateur radio while generating public interest in the space program. What was needed was a ham in space. Continue reading “Hams In Space Part 2: The Manned Spaceflights” →

SpeedyCopter driving on the road

Vietnam War Helicopter Turned Amphibious Racecar

October 31, 2016 by 33 Comments

Our hats off to [SpeedyCop] and his [Gang of Outlaws] for turning a junked former Vietnam War helicopter into both an amphibious vehicle and a road race car. Yes, that’s right. It’s both driven on water and raced in the 24 Hours of LeMons at New Jersey Motorsports Park.

It started life as a 1969 Bell OH-58 Kiowa (US Army Vietnam Assault helo) and had not only served in Vietnam but also for a federal drug task force. It was chopped up for parts and the body found its way to [SpeedyCop] and friends. The body now sits on an 80s Toyota van chassis, has a Mazda Miata rear suspension, and Audi 3.0 V6 engine.

The pontoons were originally added to hide the seam between the helicopter body and the van but they then inspired the idea of making it amphibious. And with the addition of a four-blade, 7000 RPM propeller from a parasail boat, the idea became reality, as you can see in the video after the break (we suspect the trailing line is a rope to pull it back to shore in case of engine failure).

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Put That Amateur Radio License To Use On 915 MHz

October 31, 2016 by 106 Comments

Amateur radio enthusiasts in the US will be interested in Faraday, an open-source digital radio that runs on 915 MHz, which amateur radio enthusiasts may know better as the 33 cm band.

You can transmit on 915 MHz without a license (in the US), taking advantage of the Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) exemption. This means that there’s commodity hardware available for sending and receiving, which is a plus. But you can’t do so with any real power unless you have an amateur radio license. And that’s what makes Faraday interesting — it makes it very easy to transmit and receive digital data, with decent power and range, if you’re licensed. The band is currently under-utilized, so go nuts!

The hardware design and documentation is online, and so is the firmware. The founders of the project would like you to build out a big network of these devices, possibly meshing them together. Our only regret is that the 33 cm band is only really open for use in the US, both with a license and without. Of course, there’s very little the Faraday team can do about that.

We’re no strangers to digital-mode amateur radio around here. But if you’re an amateur who hasn’t played around with digital modes yet, this might be a good way to get your feet wet.

Thanks to [Daniel] for the tip!