Hackaday Columns

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This excellent content from the Hackaday writing crew highlights recurring topics and popular series like Linux-Fu, 3D-Printering, Hackaday Links, This Week in Security, Inputs of Interest, Profiles in Science, Retrotechtacular, Ask Hackaday, Teardowns, Reviews, and many more.

Ask Hackaday: What Will An LLM Be Good For In The Plateau Of Productivity?

March 9, 2026 by 56 Comments

A friend of mine has been a software developer for most of the last five decades, and has worked with everything from 1960s mainframes to the machines of today. She recently tried AI coding tools to see what all the fuss is about, as a helper to her extensive coding experience rather than as a zero-work vibe coding tool. Her reaction stuck with me; she referenced her grandfather who had been born in rural America in the closing years of the nineteenth century, and recalled him describing the first time he saw an automobile.

Après Nous, Le Krach

The Gartner hype cycle graph. Jeremykemp, CC BY-SA 3.0.

We are living amid a wave of AI slop and unreasonable hype so it’s an easy win to dunk on LLMs, but as the whole thing climbs towards the peak of inflated expectations on the Gartner hype cycle perhaps it’s time to look forward. The current AI hype is inevitably going to crash and burn, but what comes afterwards? The long tail of the plateau of productivity will contain those applications in which LLMs are a success, but what will they be? We have yet to hack together a working crystal ball, but perhaps it’s still time to gaze into the future. Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: What Will An LLM Be Good For In The Plateau Of Productivity?” →

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Hackaday Links: March 8, 2026

March 8, 2026 by 8 Comments

As pointed out by Tom’s Hardware, it’s been 26 years since the introduction of the gigahertz desktop CPU. AMD beat Intel to the punch by dropping the 1 GHz Athlon chip on March 6th of 2000, and partnered with Compaq and Gateway (remember them?) to deliver pre-built machines featuring the speedy silicon just a week later. The archived press release announcing the availability of the chip makes for some interesting reading: AMD compares the accomplishment with Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier, and mentions a retail price of $1,299 for the CPU when purchased in 1,000 unit quantities. In response Intel “launched” their 1 GHz Pentium III chip two days later for $990, but supply problems kept it out of customer’s hands for most of the year.

Speaking of breaking a barrier, Mobile World Congress took place this week in Barcelona, where TechCrunch reports there was considerable interest in developing a sub-$50 smartphone. The GSM Association’s Handset Affordability Coalition is working with major telecom carriers in Africa and as of yet unnamed hardware partners to develop the low-cost 4G device with the hopes of bringing an additional 20 million people online. While the goal is worthy enough, industry insiders have pointed out that the skyrocketing cost of memory will make it particularly challenging to meet the group’s aspirational price point.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: March 8, 2026” →

Choice, Control, And Interruption

March 7, 2026 by 47 Comments

We were talking about [Maya Posch]’s rant on smartphones, “The Curse of the Everything Device”. Maya’s main point is that because the smartphone, or computer, can do everything, it’s hard for a person to focus down and do one thing without getting distracted, checking their whatever feed, or getting an important push notification about the Oscars. She was suggesting tying your hands to the mast by using a device that can only accommodate the one function, like a dedicated writing tool or word processor.

[Kristina Panos] compared the all-singing, all-dancing black rectangle to an everything-device of old: the all-in-one stereo receiver with built-in tape player, record player, and not just FM, but also AM radio receiver. The point being, the hi-fi device also does a whole lot of things but isn’t similarly cursed. The tape player never interrupts your listening to the AM radio station. When the record is over, it doesn’t swap over to FM. Your agency is required.

Similarly, it’s probably not intrinsically problematic that the smartphone has a camera, a web browser, text messages, and heck even a telephone built in. It’s how they interact with each other and the user, each vying for user attention, and interrupting with popups and alarms. It’s maybe a simple matter of software! (Says the hardware guy.)

Where would a distraction-free, but fully featured, phone begin? With the operating system? It would be perverse to limit you to one app at a time, or to make switching between them more cumbersome. How about turning off notifications, and relying on changing context only when you think about it? Maybe that’s a middle ground. How do you cope with the endless distractions offered to you by your smartphone? By your main computer?

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 360: Cool Rubber Bands, Science-y Stuff, And The Whys Of Office Supplies

March 6, 2026 by 6 Comments
An early print of the linoleum block that Kristina started carving during the podcast. (It’s the original Cherry MX patent drawing, re-imagined for block printing.)

This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over assorted beverages to bring you the latest news, mystery sound results show, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so.

In the news, we’ve launched a brand-new contest! Yes, the Green-Powered Challenge is underway, and we need your entry to truly make it a contest. You have until April 24th to enter, so show us what you can do with power you scrounge up from the environment around you!

On What’s That Sound, Kristina was leaning toward some kind of distant typing sounds, but [Konrad] knew it was our own Tom Nardi’s steam heat radiator pinging away.

After that, it’s on to the hacks and such, beginning with an exploration of all the gross security vulnerabilities in a cheap WiFi extender, and we take a look inside a little black and white pay television like you’d find in a Greyhound station in the 80s and 90s.

We also discuss the idea of mixing custom spray paint colors on the fly, a pen clip that never bends out of shape, and running video through a guitar effects pedal. Finally, we discuss climate engineering with disintegrating satellites, and the curse of everything device.

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!

Download in DRM-free MP3 and savor at your leisure.

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This Week In Security: Getting Back Up To Speed

March 6, 2026 by 11 Comments

Editor’s Note: Over the course of nearly 300 posts, Jonathan Bennett set a very high bar for this column, so we knew it needed to be placed in the hands of somebody who could do it justice. That’s why we’re pleased to announce that Mike Kershaw AKA [Dragorn] will be taking over This Week In Security! Mike is a security researcher with decades of experience, a frequent contributor to 2600, and perhaps best known as the creator of the Kismet wireless scanner.

He’ll be bringing the column to you regularly going forward, but given the extended period since we last checked in with the world of (in)security, we thought it would be appropriate to kick things off with a review of some of the stories you may have missed.

Hacking like it’s 2009, or 1996

Hello all!  It’s a pleasure to be here, and it already seems like a theme of the new year so far has bringing in the old bugs – what’s old is new again, and 2026 has seen several fixes to some increasingly ancient bugs.

Telnet

Reported on the OpenWall list, the GNU inetd suite brings an update to the telnet server (yes, telnet) that closes a login bug present since 2015 linked to environment variable sanitization.

Under the covers, the telnet daemon uses /bin/login to perform user authentication, but also has the ability to pass environment variables from the client to the host. One of these variables, USER, is passed directly to login — unfortunately this time with no checking to see what it contains. By simply passing a USER variable of “-froot”, login would accept the “-f” argument, or “treat this user as already logged in”. Instant root!

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it might be because the exact same bug was found in the Solaris telnetd service in 2007, including using the “-f” argument in the USER variable. An extremely similar bug targeting other variables (LD_PRELOAD) was found in the FreeBSD telnetd service in 2009, and other historical similar bugs have afflicted AIX and other Unix systems in the past.

Of course, nobody in 2026 should be running a telnet service, especially not exposed to the Internet, but it’s always interesting to see the old style of bugs resurface.

Glibc

Also reported on the OpenWall list, glibc — the GNU LibC library which underpins most binaries on Linux systems, providing kernel interfaces, file and network I/O, string manipulation, and most other common functions programmers expect — has killed another historical bug, present since 1996 in the DNS resolver functions which could be used to expose some locations in the stack.

Although not exploitable directly, the getnetbyaddr resolution functions could still ease in breaking ASLR, making other exploits viable.

Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) is a common method of randomizing where in memory a process and its data are loaded, making trivial exploits like buffer overflows much harder to execute. Being able to expose the location of the binary in memory by leaking stack locations weakens this mechanism, possibly exposing a vulnerable program to more traditional attacks.

MSHTML

In February, Microsoft released fixes under CVE-2026-21513 for the MSHTML Trident renderer – the one used in Internet Explorer 5. Apparently still present in Windows, and somehow still accessible through specific shortcut links, it’s the IE5 and Active-X gift that keeps giving, being actively exploited.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: Getting Back Up To Speed” →

Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Beginner’s Guide To Split Keyboards

March 5, 2026 by 10 Comments

Curious about split keyboards, but overwhelmed by the myriad options for every little thing? You should start with [thehaikuza]’s excellent Beginner’s Guide to Split Keyboards.

Three different split keyboards.
Image by [thehaikuza] via reddit
Your education begins with the why, so you can skip that if you must, but the visuals are a nice refresher on that front.

He then gets into the types of keyboards — you got your standard row-staggered rectangles that we all grew up on, column-staggered, and straight-up ortholinear, which no longer enjoy the popularity they once did.

At this point, the guide becomes a bit of a Choose Your Own Adventure story. If you want a split but don’t want to learn to change much if at all about your typing style, keep reading, because there are definitely options.

But if you’re ready to commit to typing correctly for the sake of ergonomics, you can skip the Alice and other baby ergo choices and get your membership to the light side. First are features — you must decide what you need to get various jobs done. Then you learn a bit about key map customization, including using a non-QWERTY layout. Finally, there’s the question of buying versus DIYing. All the choices are yours, so go for it!

Via reddit

Continue reading “Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Beginner’s Guide To Split Keyboards” →

SpyTech: The Underwater Wire Tap

March 5, 2026 by 20 Comments

In the 1970s, the USSR had an undersea cable connecting a major naval base at Petropavlovsk to the Pacific Fleet headquarters at Vladivostok. The cable traversed the Sea of Okhotsk, which, at the time, the USSR claimed. It was off limits to foreign vessels, heavily patrolled, and laced with detection devices. How much more secure could it be? Against the US Navy, apparently not very secure at all. For about a decade starting in 1972, the Navy delivered tapes of all the traffic on the cable to the NSA.

Top Secret

You need a few things to make this a success. First, you need a stealthy submarine. The Navy had the USS Halibut, which has a strange history. You also need some sort of undetectable listening device that can operate on the ocean floor. You also need a crew that is sworn to secrecy.

That last part was hard to manage. It takes a lot of people to mount a secret operation to the other side of the globe, so they came up with a cover story: officially, the Halibut was in Okhotsk to recover parts of a Soviet weapon for analysis. Only a few people knew the real mission. The whole operation was known as Operation Ivy Bells.

The Halibut

The Halibut is possibly the strangest submarine ever. It started life destined to be a diesel sub. However, before it launched in 1959, it had been converted to nuclear power. In fact, the sub was the first designed to launch guided missiles and was the first sub to successfully launch a guided missile, although it had to surface to launch.

Oddly enough, the sub carried nuclear cruise missiles and its specific target, should the world go to a nuclear war, was the Soviet naval base at Petropavolvsk.

Continue reading “SpyTech: The Underwater Wire Tap” →