For Art’s Sake

March 28, 2026 by Elliot Williams 9 Comments

Hackers can be a strange folk. Our idea of beauty, for instance, can be rather odd. This week, Hackaday saw a few projects that were not just functional – the aesthetics were the goal. I don’t think we’ll be taking over the fine art world any time soon, but I’m absolutely convinced that the same muse that guides the hand that holds the paintbrush sometimes also guides the hand holding the soldering iron.

Take “circuit sculpture”, for instance. Heck, we even give it an art-inspired name that classifies it correctly. This week’s project that got me thinking about the aesthetics of hand-bent wire circuits was this marvelous clock build, but the works of Mohit Bhoite or Kelly Heaton are also absolute must-sees in this category.

Outside of the Hackaday orbit, one of my all-time favorite artists in this genre was Peter Vogel, who made complex audience-reactive sound sculptures that looked as good as they sound.

Is a wireframe animated moving jellyfish art? It was certainly intended to be beautiful, and I personally find it so. Watch some of the video clips attached to the project to get a better sense of it.

In the sculpture world, there is a sub-genre of kinetic art pieces where the work itself is secondary to the beauty of the motions that the pieces pull off. Think ballet, but mechanical. Perhaps my absolute favorite of these artists is Arthur Ganson. If you haven’t seen his work before, check out “Thinking Chair” for the beauty of movement, but don’t miss “Machine with Concrete” if you’re feeling more conceptual.

If you’re willing to buy an insane geartrain as art, what about these 3D printed wire strippers? Is this “art”? It’s clear that they were designed with real intent and attention to the aesthetics of the final form, and am I wrong for finding the way they move literally beautiful?

What’s your favorite offbeat hacker artform?

Hackaday Podcast Episode 363: The History Of PLA, Laser DIY PCBs, And Corporate Craziness

March 27, 2026 by Al Williams 7 Comments

What did Elliot Williams and Al Williams read on Hackaday last week? Tune in and find out. After a bit of news, [Vik Oliver] chimes in with some deep PLA knowledge. Then the topic changed to pressure advance measurements, SDRs, making super-resolution PCBs with a fiber laser, and more.

Want to 3D print wire strippers? A robot arm? Or just make your own Z-80? Those hacks are in there, too.

For the long articles, we talked about old tech, including the :CueCat and the Iomega Zip Drive. Let us know if you had either one in the comments.

What do you think? Leave us a comment or record something and send it to our mailbag.

Download a copy of the podcast with no corporate trackers in the clean MP3.

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This Week In Security: Second Verse, Worse Than The First

March 27, 2026 by Mike Kershaw 14 Comments

Isn’t there some claim events come in threes? After the extremely rare leak of the iOS Coruna exploit chain recently, now we have details from Google on a second significant exploit in the wild, dubbed Darksword.

Like Coruna, Darksword appears to have followed the path of government security contractors, to different government actors, to crypto stealer. It appears to focus on exploits already fixed in modern iOS releases, with most affecting iOS 18 and all patched by iOS 26.3.

Going from almost no public examples of modern iOS exploits to two in as many weeks is wild, so if mobile device security is of interest, be sure to check out the Google write-up.

Another FBI Router Warning

The second too early to be retro – but too important to ignore – repeat security item is a second alert by the FBI cautioning about end-of-life consumer network hardware under active exploitation, with the FBI tracking almost 400,000 device infections so far.

Like the warning two weeks ago, the FBI calls out a handful of consumer routers – but this time they’re devices that may actually still be service in some of our homes (or our less cutting edge friends and family), calling out devices from Netgear, TP-Link, D-Link, and Zyxel:

Netgear DGN2200v4 and AC1900 R700
TP-Link Archer C20, TL-WR840N, TL-WR849N, and WR841N
D-Link DIR-818LW, 850L, and 860L
Zyxel EMG6726-B10A, VMG1312-B10D, VMG1312-T20B, VMG3925-B10A, VMG3925-B10C, VMG4825-B10A, VMG4927-B50A, VMG8825-T50K

While many of these devices are over ten years old, they still support modern networking – some of them even supporting 802.11ac (also called Wi-Fi 5). Unfortunately, since support has been ended by the manufacturers, publicly disclosed vulnerabilities have not been patched (and now never will be, officially) Continue reading “This Week In Security: Second Verse, Worse Than The First” →

FLOSS Weekly Episode 867: Pangolin: People Can Lie

March 25, 2026 by Jonathan Bennett No comments

This week Jonathan chats with Milo Schwartz about Pangolin, the Open Source tunneling solution. Why do we need something other than Wireguard, and how does Pangolin fix IoT and IT problems? And most importantly, how do you run your own self-hosted Pangolin install? Watch to find out!

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Retail Fail: The :CueCat Disaster

March 25, 2026 by Al Williams 63 Comments

Digital Convergence Corporation is hardly a household name, and there’s a good reason for that. However, it raised about $185 million in investments around the year 2000 from companies such as Coca-Cola, Radio Shack, GE, E. W. Scripps, and the media giant Belo Corporation. So what did all these companies want, and why didn’t it catch on? If you are old enough, you might remember the :CueCat, but you probably thought it was Radio Shack’s disaster. They were simply investors.

The Big Idea

The :CueCat was a barcode scanner that, usually, plugged into a PC’s keyboard port (in those days, that was normally a PS/2 port). A special cable, often called a wedge, was like a Y-cable, allowing you to use your keyboard and the scanner on the same port. The scanner looked like a cat, of course.

However, the :CueCat was not just a generic barcode scanner. It was made to only scan “cues” which were to appear in catalogs, newspapers, and other publications. The idea was that you’d see something in an ad or a catalog, rush to your computer to scan the barcode, and be transported to the retailer’s website to learn more and complete the purchase.

The software could also listen using your sound card for special audio codes that would play on radio or TV commercials and then automatically pop up the associated webpage. So, a piece of software that was reading your keyboard, listening to your room audio at all times, and could inject keystrokes into your computer. What could go wrong?

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Hackaday Links: March 22, 2026

March 22, 2026 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

On Friday, Reuters reported that Amazon is going to try to get into the smartphone game…again. The Fire Phone was perhaps Amazon’s biggest commercial misstep, and was only on the market for about a year before it was discontinued in the summer of 2015. But now industry sources are saying that a new phone code-named “Transformer” is in the works from the e-commerce giant.

At this point, there’s no word on how much the phone would cost or when it would hit the market. The only information Reuters was able to squeeze out of their contacts was that the device would feature AI heavily. Real shocker there — anyone with an Echo device in their kitchen could tell you that Amazon is desperate to get you talking to their gadgets, presumably so they can convince you to buy something. While a smartphone with even more AI features we didn’t ask for certainly won’t be on our Wish List, if history is any indicator, we might be able to pick these things up cheap on the second-hand market.

On the subject of AI screwing everything up, earlier this week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported that The New York Times had started blocking the Internet Archive’s crawlers, citing concerns over their content being scraped up by bots for training data. The EFF likens this to a newspaper asking libraries to stop storing copies of their old editions, and warns that in an era where most people get their news via the Internet, not having an archived copy of sites like The Times will put holes in the digital record. They also point out that mirroring web pages for the purposes of making them more easily searchable is a widely accepted practice (ask Google) and has been legally recognized as fair use in court.

Assuming we take the NYT’s side of the story at face value, there’s a tiny part of our cold robotic heart that feels some sympathy for them. Over the last year or so, we’ve noticed some suspicious activity that we believe to be bots siphoning up content from the blog and Hackaday.io, and it’s resulted in a few technical headaches for us. On the other hand, what’s Hackaday here for if not to share information? Surely the same could be said for any newspaper, be it the local rag or The New York Times. If a chatbot learning some new phrases from us is the cost of doing business in 2026, so be it. Can’t stop the signal.

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