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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.

Hackaday Podcast Episode 394: Linux In Weird Places, Yet More Hidden SDRs, And A Supercon Wrapup

November 13, 2026 by No comments

Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi are back from Supercon, and they’ve got plenty of thoughts to share about it. But before they discuss this weekend’s higlights, they’ll cover the recent scuttling of the legendary SS United States, the discovery of even more hidden software-defined radios in everyday gadgets, Linux running on Kindles and microcontrollers, and a Game Boy flash cart that’s not designed for playing games. You’ll also hear about LEGO 3D printers, finding out where a video was recorded by the sound of the airplanes in the background, and a website that lets you listen in on the satellites flying over your house.

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, DRM-free MP3.

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This Week In Security: Four-Digit Patch Tuesday, SSH Exploited, GitBook Breach, Android GhostMap

November 13, 2026 by 3 Comments

It’s the second Tuesday of the month, and that means another Microsoft Patch Tuesday. The new normal is that the numbers are hard to believe. Brian Krebs reports that this month’s release fixes nearly 1,100 vulnerabilities, 63 of them rated critical, and over 500 that let an attacker elevate their privileges. Only one is reported as actively exploited: CVE-2026-124194, a spoofing bug in Outlook. Microsoft has now shipped more than 5,100 security fixes this year, after more than 1,400 last month, compared to an average of around 100 a month last year. Obviously AI tools get the credit for the volume of bugs fixed, but also of course for the volume of bugs found.

Everyone else is busy too. Apple pushed out-of-cycle updates for at least nine vulnerabilities across its operating systems, including an iMessage flaw which could let a remote attacker join a group chat and read its messages, and backported the fixes to iOS 18. Chrome 157 fixes CVE-2026-125350, another Chrome zero-day, a week after a Chrome release which fixed more than 200 bugs, Firefox 160 fixes almost 100 CVEs, and Adobe fixed more than 110.

Also since last week, zlib 1.4 shipped with more than a dozen security fixes, eight more vulnerabilities were disclosed in the X.Org server and XWayland, and Microsoft’s own Azure Linux update lists more than 470 CVEs fixed across the open source packages it ships. And for a perfect encapsulation of 2026, last month’s Patch Tuesday included a remote code execution bug in Windows Paint (CVE-2026-83844), though its description admits the code runs locally. So now I guess you can pop Calc through Paint? Does this count as a win?

Despite the absolute firehose of vulnerabilities, the Krebs article notices that of the roughly 95,000 CVEs assigned this year, only around 200 made it into the CISA list of known expoited vulnerabilities (KEV). If you have to pick and choose which updates are the most critical, start there.

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An INA219 board with a QWIIC connector and "female barrel jack to male barrel jack" cable soldered on. the qwiic end is plugged into the side of the Blepis PDA, with the screen showing a device found on the 0x40 address

Just Use QWIIC Already

November 12, 2026 by 20 Comments

Years ago, I wrote an article describing different I2C-on-a-connector ecosystems, explaining their strengths, weaknesses, and implementation details, as well as piling on a heap of fun stories. Looking back at it, it’s a great reference article, if I do say so myself. In particular, I highlighted QWIIC, which is a Sparkfun-borne standard for putting 3.3 V I2C on a JST-SH (or compatible) 4-pin connector.

I’ve since implemented a fair bit of QWIIC, and grew to like it so much more. I’m here to explain to you why you ought to be putting those JST-SH connectors in everything you design that touches I2C, all the cool things they let you do, where to buy a lot of cheap cables at once, and all the references you could need. I will also tell you about my USB pinout for QWIIC, something you should definitely know about.

In2ispensable Interconnect

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 883: Telnet Broke Us

November 11, 2026 by 3 Comments

This week Jonathan chats with Sattyam Jain about Agent Audit Kit and Agent Airlock. We’re in a brave new world, where anyone can use AI to generate an AI agent. But what keeps those builds secure? And what can we do to prevent AI jailbreaking where it matters? Listen to find out!
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CHIP 8: The Pong Game’s Afoot!

November 11, 2026 by 8 Comments

Writing a computer game has always been hard. It is only the nature of the difficulty that changes. A modern game is as much about graphics, sound, and storytelling as it is about programming. But in the early days of computers, writing a game was a challenge because of limited graphics, slow CPUs, and tiny memory capacity. If you wanted to write a game for an early microcomputer, you generally wrote it in assembly language. BASIC was available on many machines, but it was usually too slow for anything requiring fast animation. Assembly language was fast, but it was also difficult to write, debug, and port to another machine.

RCA — in particular [Joseph Weisbecker], the architect of the 1802 — introduced the COSMAC VIP into the primordial 1977 home video game market. In addition to using ready-made games, the idea was that you could create your own. But writing games in 1802 assembly language would be beyond most of RCA’s customers. [Weisbecker] devised CHIP-8, a tiny virtual machine. It wasn’t quite a programming language. Instead, it was a simple instruction set implemented by an interpreter running on a real computer. You wrote programs for the imaginary CHIP-8 processor, and the interpreter made them run on the actual hardware. CHIP-8 is perfect for the kind of games you’d see in those days and still has a following among those who love retro games. Continue reading “CHIP 8: The Pong Game’s Afoot!” →

How CRISPR Could Mark Mutated Cancer Cells For Termination

November 10, 2026 by 11 Comments

Over the past decades CRISPR, short for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”, has become somewhat of a household name, holding the promise of directly addressing genetic mutations by effectively removing, silencing, or even fixing them. Yet the original purpose of CRISPR is slightly less cute and cuddly: the evolutionary origin of these DNA sequences is that of a core component of the prokaryotic immune system.

In most medical applications today we only try to use CRISPR to detect sequences and then apply enzymes such as the well-known Cas9 to cut DNA at specific locations in the process of gene-editing. In a recent study (paywalled, bioRxiv pre-print) by Jingkun Zheng et al. in Nature such benign enzymes are dropped for Cas12a2, which turns a detection event into the release of a DNA-destroy enzyme as the molecular equivalent of a guided missile.

The pitched use case here is the detection of cancer-cell specific mutations in the DNA, following which the tumor cells will be instantly shredded from the inside. This could theoretically provide a cure for many cancer types, but should we expect to see this kind of therapy approved any time soon?

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UDP Broadcasting Meets The More Focused Multicasting

November 9, 2026 by 8 Comments

After previously exploring the basics of UDP broadcasting, why IPv4 subnets are an exciting feature that you really want to dive into, as well as the contentious topic of IPv6, there are still plenty of elephants to admire and cans of sardines to crack open. One of them being the topic of broadcasting versus multicasting, which at first glance sounds rather similar and may even have some wondering why you’d even bother with multicasting if you can just send-and-forget with IPv4 broadcast address.

Of course, we already found out that IPv4 broadcast addresses come in a few flavors, and that’s before you start even considering the implications of subnets and routing limits. When we then consider that in IPv6 broadcast addresses were dropped completely in favor of link-local multicast addresses, and that IPv4 also supports multicast, then this raises the question whether using IPv4 multicast’s own take on ‘link-local’ doesn’t make more sense.

Or perhaps more succinctly put, is IPv4’s take on link-local broadcasting as straightforward as IPv6’s?

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