Places To Visit: Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord

September 28, 2026 by Jenny List 18 Comments

There are many benefits to spending time in the park, but perhaps few of them have a Hackaday angle. There’s a park in Germany you might want to make an exception for, and it lies in the Ruhrpott city of Duisburg.

I was lucky enough last month to join a friend as she toured Germany for the first time with a caravan. It’s a large country with many beautiful places, so her choice might seem unexpected at first sight. The Ruhrpott, or Ruhr area, is a loose conurbation of industrial cities that loosely follows the river Ruhr on its trip to the Rhine on the western edge of the country. It’s close to deposits of coal and iron ore, so just like similar areas in other countries, it became a centre for heavy industry. Today that continues, but as you might expect it’s also dotted with the remains of former industries. It’s one of those which is our subject for today, and it offers a very unusual opportunity.

A view out over a wooded post industrial landscape against a grey cloudy sky. In the foreground is a hiuge traverser crane. — Looking out over the former ore bunkers shows just how huge this site is.

Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord is a forest park on the northern side of the city of Duisburg. But of course that’s not the whole story, because until 1985 it was the site of the Thyssen ironworks. In rehabilitating the site they chose to keep the main structures of the ironworks intact as they reclaimed the surrounding polluted industrial land, so today it may be one of the few places in the world where you can free of charge get up-close and personal with a fully-intact and preserved blast furnace. The site has three of them remaining along with their associated ore and gas processing plants, and the largest and newest, blast furnace number 5, is a structure you can climb to its top. If you’ve ever been curious about iron smelting, this is the place to come. Continue reading “Places To Visit: Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord” →

Hackaday Links: September 27, 2026

September 27, 2026 by Al Williams 7 Comments

It isn’t quite hailing frequencies open, but researchers from Harvard claim they’ve picked up a radio signal directly from a nearby exoplanet. Before you get too excited, planets in our solar system also emit RF, so no one credible is claiming these are extraterrestrial reruns of their version of I Love Lucy, but it is the first time they’ve localized a radio signal to an exoplanet, in this case, Beta Pictoris B.

Speaking of space, the asteroid formerly known as 1981 EC26 is now sporting a new moniker: (14331) Alyankovic. If you think that sounds like (Weird) Al Yankovic, you aren’t wrong. The Tucson Star reports that, thanks to the efforts of several planetary scientists who are also Weird Al fans, the International Astronomical Union made the name official. Apparently, another asteroid now bears a name in honor of Weird Al’s predecessor, Tom Lehrer.

If you follow open mobile phone software, you probably know the name postmarketOS, a Linux distribution based on Alpine aimed at mobile phones and tablets. Well, now you can forget it. The project announced a name change, so we’re now talking about Nura. Why Nura? According to the team, it is a shortened form of Nuraghe, some granite structures in Sardinia that are over 5,000 years old. The FAQ mentions that postmarketOS was hard to remember. We aren’t sure Nura is that much more memorable. Perhaps they should have pivoted to Phonz OS.

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The Least Annoying Of All Evils

September 26, 2026 by Elliot Williams 62 Comments

If you missed the hubbub this week, it was discovered that the Raspberry Pi Foundation added code in the firmware that locks the boot process up if non-original RAM chips are detected onboard. Hot-rodding your Pi is a time-honored tradition in these parts. We do wonder just how many folks are taking the risk of hot-airing the memory off the board, versus paying the extra cash to get one with more RAM. But according to Raspberry Pi, enough boards are showing up that have the RAM surreptitiously replaced, and often defective, that they took the step to lock the machine down.

Should users be alerted to potentially unscrupulous behavior by the companies selling them single-board computers? I think we’d all say “sure”. But should that entirely brick the device? And prevent people from upgrading their own? The hacker in me says “no”. Is there any way to reconcile these two? Our own [Arya Voronova] suggests that it’s no big deal to flash an older version of the initial firmware, and we concur, although it does leave behind all the improvements since 2023, and it will only get less fresh as time goes by.

How to announce that the board has non-factory memory without breaking it? [Jeff Geerling] suggested a non-matching-memory bit that users could check, but then they could also neglect to check. My cellphone has a screen that appears every bootup, and requires me to press the power button to continue, because I rooted the phone and installed an open-source OS. It’s a hassle for sure, but it’s a lot better than bricking the phone or disallowing user firmware entirely.

Doing the same thing for the Raspberry Pi isn’t as easy. You never know what, if any, peripherals are connected, so you can’t guarantee that there’s a screen to alert you or even necessarily a keyboard on which you could acknowledge. We’re reminded of a similar situation with FTDI USB-to-serial converter chips ages ago. Their driver software simply refused to work with counterfeit versions of their chips. Hackers were up in arms, largely because we couldn’t know if the parts were genuine at purchase time, and the counterfeits were widely distributed even by reliable resellers.

So what about it? Can you think up a tamper-evident signal that could run on boot on a Raspberry Pi, maybe a headless system installed in some difficult-to-reach place? Maybe ideally the equivalent of the cell phone’s scare message? It would have to be hard to overlook, but keep the machine running, notifying the user that things aren’t kosher, but not preventing them from getting to work. Sounds like a tall order to us.

Hackaday Podcast Episode 388: RAM-Swapping On Raspberry Pi, Raindrops On Radar, And A Fine Mesh

September 25, 2026 by Al Williams 1 Comment

This week, Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams had a lot to talk about. From advice for a young hacker to using a laser to break into a microcontroller, there was plenty to cover from the week in Hackaday.

From the “Point/Counter Point” department, there were dueling posts about how big a deal it is for Raspberry Pi to lock out RAM chip swapping. Ever want to do interactive debugging in MicroPython? For intellectual exercise, there’s the physics of raindrops becoming a radar antenna. If you are a history buff, there was even news about World War I codebreaking.

For the can’t-miss articles, the big news was the issues with LoRa mesh communities possibly clashing with the FCC rules and how to make your computer take dictation.

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

Direct download an MP3 created with ultra premium ones and zeros.

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This Week In Security: FBI Gets Hacked, Muse Vulnerable To ClickFix, Popular Rust Developers At Risk, And New Attacks Against RSA

September 25, 2026 by Mike Kershaw 13 Comments

The prolific ShinyHunters group has announced it used a zero-day vulnerability in Oracle PeopleSoft to exploit the FBI jobs website and gain access to the AWS GovCloud instances and dump 2 TB of employee data. GovCloud being a special, locked-down version of the Amazon Web Services cloud for US government users.

ShinyHunters has previously been involved in dozens of high-profile hacks and ransomware incidents. Some of the highest-profile incidents include Jaguar-Land Rover, causing a measurable impact on the UK GDP, Grubhub, Carnival Cruise Lines, Rockstar Games, and multiple universities and educational institutions, casinos, and other government agencies. ShinyHunters has also been credited with the hack of the Canvas educational program in the spring of 2026 where data including test results and chat logs of hundreds of millions of students, teachers, and staff was stolen. ShinyHunters has generally been identified as an international group of criminals, often teenagers, who will demand a BitCoin ransom of several million US dollars, with the threat of the stolen data being leaked if the victims do not pay.

On May 15, 2026 the FBI released a bulletin on the activities of ShinyHunters, focusing on the Canvas educational hack. In the report, the FBI said that the group uses “harassment strategies, sending threatening text messages and phone calls to victims and their family members”. ShinyHunters says that this is not accurate, and that they will release the FBI employee data, including information of employees and their family members, if the agency does not retract the statements, telling The Register “I have been doing my very best to combat these allegations, and this is the best way to do it”.

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UDP Broadcasting And The Brave New World Of IPv6

September 24, 2026 by Maya Posch 44 Comments

After recently working our way through UDP broadcasting and network subnetting all in the comfort zone of IPv4, it’s time to address the elephant in the room, the one wearing a bright neon ‘IPv6’ sign. Although it’s still very much a rumor at this point, supposedly IPv6 is slated to replace the venerable IPv4 protocol. Rather than just being IPv4-but-with-more-addresses, its designers took the opportunity to basically completely redesign the protocol for the futuristic world of the late 90s and the early 2000s.

Joking aside, IPv6 having been introduced in 1995 and still struggling to meaningfully displace IPv4 does invite some worries about just how easy it is to switch between these two fundamental internet protocols. Say if we wanted to join the future of the 2000s and adapt our software to speak IPv6 instead of IPv4, what would change about the aforementioned aspects of IPv4 UDP broadcasting and IPv4 subnetting?

Speaking as an ignorant developer who mostly knows IPv6 from those weird and hard to remember network addresses, as well as many broken router implementations, I’m not entirely convinced that I’m going to like what I’ll see.

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DIY Router On X86 E-Waste: OpenWrt And OPNsense

September 21, 2026 by Maya Posch 24 Comments

In previous installments of this series we looked at how creating a DIY router using an e-waste-level PC has changed over the years, before attempting to boot OpenWrt for x86 on it. After an initial SD card booting failure on one system, another system with a newer mainboard – an Intel Board D2500CC – was used which happily booted OpenWrt from an SD card inserted into a USB card reader.

Unfortunately, OpenWrt didn’t see any usable Ethernet interfaces despite having no less than four Intel Ethernet controllers and two hooked up to active networks. After recently getting back to the project, I found out why both onboard Intel 82574L Ethernet controllers didn’t show up in OpenWrt: the drivers for the Intel 82574L controllers are in the e1000e driver package, while only the e1000 package is present in the provided x86 image. This issue persists in the ‘generic’ image profile to this day.

Yet rather than diving head-first into building my own image that includes the kmod-e1000e package, I decided to give OPNsense a shake first.

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