Hackaday Links: September 28, 2025

September 28, 2025 by Dan Maloney 14 Comments

In today’s “News from the Dystopia” segment, we have a story about fighting retail theft with drones. It centers on Flock Safety, a company that provides surveillance technologies, including UAVs, license plate readers, and gunshot location systems, to law enforcement agencies. Their flagship Aerodome product is a rooftop-mounted dock for a UAV that gets dispatched to a call for service and acts as an eye-in-the-sky until units can arrive on scene. Neat idea and all, and while we can see the utility of such a system in a first responder situation, the company is starting to market a similar system to retailers and other private sector industries as a way to contain costs. The retail use case, which the story stresses has not been deployed yet, would be to launch a drone upon a store’s Asset Protection team noticing someone shoplifting. Flock would then remotely pilot the drone, following the alleged thief back to their lair or hideout and coordinating with law enforcement, who then sweep in to make an arrest.

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Whither The Chip Shortage?

September 27, 2025 by Elliot Williams 40 Comments

Do you remember the global chip shortage? Somehow it seems so long ago, but it’s not even really been three years yet. Somehow, I had entirely forgotten about it, until two random mentions about it popped up in short succession, and brought it all flooding back like a repressed bad dream.

Playing the role of the ghost-of-chip-shortage-past was a module for a pair of FPV goggles. There are three versions of the firmware available for download at the manufacturer’s website, and I had to figure out which I needed. I knew it wasn’t V1, because that was the buggy receiver PCB that I had just ordered the replacement for. So it was V2 or V3, but which?

Digging into it, V2 was the version that fixed the bug, and V3 was the redesign around a different microcontroller chip, because they couldn’t get the V2 one during the chip shortage.

I saw visions of desperate hackers learning new toolchains, searching for alternative parts, finding that they could get that one chip, but that there were only 20 of them left and they were selling for $30 instead of $1.30. I know a lot of you out there were designing through these tough couple years, and you’ve all probably got war stories.

And yet here we are, definitively post-chip-shortage. How can you be sure? A $30 vape pen includes a processor that we would have killed for just three years ago. The vape includes a touchscreen, just because. And it even has a Bluetooth LE chip that it’s not even using. My guess is that the hardware designers just put it in there hoping that the firmware team would get around to using it for something.

This vape has 16 MB of external SPI Flash! During the chip shortage, we couldn’t even get 4 MB SPI flash.

It’s nice to be on the other side of the chip shortage. Just order whatever parts you want and you get them, but don’t take for granted how luxurious that feels. Breathe easy, and design confidently. You can finally use that last genuine STM32F103 blue pill board without fear of it being the last one on earth.

(Featured image is not an actual photo of the author, although he does sometimes have that energy.)

Hackaday Podcast Episode 339: The Vape Episode, A Flying DeLorean, And DIY Science

September 26, 2025 by Tom Nardi 7 Comments

Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start this week’s episode off with an update on the rapidly approaching 2025 Supercon in Pasadena, California. From there they’ll talk about the surprisingly high-tech world of vapes, a flying DeLorean several years in the making, non-contact pulse monitoring, and the potential of backyard radio telescopes to do real astronomy. You’ll hear about a dodecahedron speaker, a page turning peripheral, and 3D printed tools for unfolding boxes. They’ll wrap things up by taking a look at the latest generation of wearable smart glasses, and wonder if putting a bank of batteries in your home is really with the hassle.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download in DRM-free MP3.

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This Week In Security: Randomness Is Hard, SNMP Shouldn’t Be Public, And GitHub Malware Delivery

September 26, 2025 by Jonathan Bennett 3 Comments

Randomness is hard. To be precise, without dedicated hardware, randomness is impossible for a computer. This is actually important to keep in mind when writing software. When there’s not hardware providing true randomness, most rnd implementations use a seed value and a pseudo random number generator (PRNG). A PRNG is a function that takes a seed value, and turns it into a seemingly random value, and also produces a new seed for the next time a random value is needed. This could be as simple as a SHA256 sum, where the hash output is split to become the next seed and the random value.

The PRNG approach does still have a challenge. Where does the initial seed come from? There are a few common, if flawed, approaches, and one of the most common is to use the system clock. It’s not a bulletproof solution, but using the microsecond counter since the last system boot is often good enough, because there are a lot of them to choose from — the entropy is high. With that brief background in mind, let’s talk about what happens in VBScript. The Randomize call is used to seed that initial value, but Randomize has some quirks.

The first is a great feature: calling Randomize a second time with the same seed doesn’t reset the PRNG engine back to the same initial state. And second, when called without a value, Randomize uses the number of system ticks since midnight as the PRNG seed. There are 64 ticks per second, giving five-and-a-half million possible seeds, or 22 bits of entropy. This isn’t great on its own, but Randomize internally typecasts that number of ticks into a narrower value, with a maximum possible of time-based seeds set at 65,536, which is a lot easier to brute-force.

We don’t know the exact application where the researchers at Doyensec found VBScript generating secure tokens, but in their Proof of Concept (PoC) test run, the generated token could be found in four guesses. It’s a terrible security fail for basically any use, and it’s a deceptively easy mistake to make.

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Spy Tech: The NRO And Apollo 11

September 25, 2025 by Al Williams 13 Comments

When you think of “secret” agencies, you probably think of the CIA, the NSA, the KGB, or MI-5. But the real secret agencies are the ones you hardly ever hear of. One of those is the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). Formed in 1960, the agency was totally secret until the early 1970s.

If you have heard of the NRO, you probably know they manage spy satellites and other resources that get shared among intelligence agencies. But did you know they played a major, but secret, part in the Apollo 11 recovery? Don’t forget, it was 1969, and the general public didn’t know anything about the shadowy agency.

Secret Hawaii

Captain Hank Brandli was an Air Force meteorologist assigned to the NRO in Hawaii. His job was to support the Air Force’s “Star Catchers.” That was the Air Force group tasked with catching film buckets dropped from the super-secret Corona spy satellites. The satellites had to drop film only when there was good weather.

In the 1960s, civilian weather forecasting was not as good as it is now. But Brandli had access to data from the NRO’s Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP), then known simply as “417”. The high-tech data let him estimate the weather accurately over the drop zones for five days, much better than any contemporary civilian meteorologist could do.

When Apollo 11 headed home, Captain Brandli ran the numbers and found there would be a major tropical storm over the drop zone, located at 10.6° north by 172.5° west, about halfway between Howland Island and Johnston Atoll, on July 24th. The storm was likely to be a “screaming eagle” storm rising to 50,000 feet over the ocean.

In the movies, of course, spaceships are tough and can land in bad weather. In real life, the high winds could rip the parachutes from the capsule, and the impact would probably have killed the crew.

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 848: Open The Podbay Doors, Siri

September 24, 2025 by Jonathan Bennett 1 Comment

This week Jonathan and Rob chat with Paulus Schoutsen about Home Assistant, ESPHome, and Music Assistant, all under the umbrella of the Open Home Foundation. Watch to see Paulus convince Rob and Jonathan that they need to step up their home automation games!

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Retrotechtacular: The Ferguson System

September 24, 2025 by Jenny List 37 Comments

Of the many great technological leaps made in the middle of the 20th century, one of the ones with perhaps the greatest impact on our modern life takes a back seat behind the more glamorous worlds of electronics, aeronautics, or computing. But the ancestor of the modern tractor has arguably had more of an impact on the human condition in 2025 than that of the modern computer, and if you’d been down on the farm in the 1940s you might have seen one.

The Ferguson system refers to the three-point implement linkage you’ll find on all modern tractors, the brainchild of the Irish engineer Harry Ferguson. The film below the break is a marketing production for American farmers, and it features the Ford-built American version of the tractor known to Brits and Europeans as the Ferguson TE20.

The evolution of the tractor started as a mechanisation of horse-drawn agriculture, using either horse-drawn implements or ones derived from them. While the basic shape of a modern tractor as a four wheel machine with large driving wheels at the rear evolved during this period, other types of tractor could be found such as rein-operated machines intended to directly replace the horse, or two-wheeled machines with their own ecosystem of attachments.

As the four-wheeled machines grew in size and their implements moved beyond the size of their horse-drawn originals, they started to encounter a new set of problems which the film below demonstrates in detail. In short, a plough simply dragged by a tractor exerts a turning force on the machine, giving the front a tendency to lift and the rear a lack of traction. The farmers of the 1920s and 1930s attempted to counter this by loading their tractors with extra weights, at the expense of encumbering them and compromising their usefulness. Ferguson solved this problem by rigidly attaching the plough to the tractor through his three-point linkage while still allowing for flexibility in its height. The film demonstrates this in great detail, showing the hydraulic control and the feedback provided through a valve connected to the centre linkage spring. Continue reading “Retrotechtacular: The Ferguson System” →