X-Ray Investigations Hack Chat

January 22, 2024 by Dan Maloney 7 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, January 24 at noon Pacific for the X-Ray Investigation Hack Chat with Ahron Wayne!

It’s hard to imagine a world where we didn’t figure out how to use X-rays to peer inside things. Before Röntgen’s discovery that X-rays could penetrate living tissue, doctors had only limited (and often unpleasant) ways to get a look at what was going on inside the human body, and few of us would want to return to those days.

As fantastically useful as X-rays and later computed tomography (CT) became in medicine, it didn’t take too long for other uses for the technology to come along. Non-clinical applications for X-ray and CT abound, including their use in non-invasively exploring relics of immense archaeological value. One recent effort in this space that gained a lot of coverage in the press was the combination of CT imaging and machine learning to read the ink inside carbonized papyrus scrolls from the ruins of Pompeii.

The result was the “Vesuvius Challenge,” where different teams looked for techniques to virtually unwrap the roasted relics. Ahron’s contribution to the project was a little unusual — he bought a used desktop CT scanner, fixed it up, and started experimenting with reading ink from the carbonized remains of simulated papyrus scrolls. In other words, he made some scrolls, cooked them to beyond well-done in the oven, and tried to understand what happens to ink on papyrus that gets blasted by a volcano. If that’s not enough to get you to stop by the Hack Chat when Ahron joins us, we’re not sure what else would be! Suffice it to say we’re pretty excited about what Ahron has to say about DIY CT, X-rays, collaborative open-source citizen science, and unwrapping the mysteries of Pompeii.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, January 24 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Featured image: Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Hackaday Links: January 21, 2024

January 21, 2024 by Dan Maloney 16 Comments

Have you noticed any apps missing from your Android phone lately? We haven’t but then again, we try to keep the number of apps on our phone to a minimum, just because it seems like the prudent thing to do. But apparently, Google is summarily removing apps from the Play Store, often taking the extra step of silently removing the apps from phones. The article, which seems to focus mainly on games, and has a particular bone to pick about the removal of RPG Wayward Souls, isn’t clear about how widespread the deletions are, or what exactly the reason behind the removals could be. But they sure are exercised about it, and rightly so since in some cases the deleted games have actually been paid for by the users, and Google pretty much says that if you think you’re getting a refund, think again. They make some interesting points, such as this being the very definition of larceny, while also acknowledging that in all likelihood Google has a get-out-of-jail-free card buried in some EULA somewhere permitting them to do exactly what they’re doing. Google’s gonna Google, right?

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: January 21, 2024” →

Hardware Should Lead Software, Right?

January 20, 2024 by Elliot Williams 26 Comments

Once upon a time, about twenty years ago, there was a Linux-based router, the Linksys WRT54G. Back then, the number of useful devices running embedded Linux was rather small, and this was a standout. Back then, getting a hacker device that wasn’t a full-fledged computer onto a WiFi network was also fairly difficult. This one, relatively inexpensive WiFi router got you both in one box, so it was no surprise that we saw rovers with WRT54Gs as their brains, among other projects.

Of course, some people just wanted a better router, and thus the OpenWRT project was born as a minimal Linux system that let you do fancy stuff with the stock router. Years passed, and OpenWRT was ported to newer routers, and features were added. Software grew, and as far as we know, current versions won’t even run on the minuscule RAM of the original hardware that gave it it’s name.

Enter the ironic proposal that OpenWRT – the free software group that developed their code on a long-gone purple box – is developing their own hardware. Normally, we think of the development flow going the other way, right? But there’s a certain logic here as well. The software stack is now tried-and-true. They’ve got brand recognition, at least within the Hackaday universe. And in comparison, developing some known-good hardware to work with it is relatively easy.

We’re hardware hobbyists, and for us it’s often the case that the software is the hard part. It’s also the part that can make or break the user experience, so getting it right is crucial. On our hacker scale, we often choose a microcontroller to work with a codebase or tools that we want to use, because it’s easier to move some wires around on a PCB than it is to re-jigger a software house of cards. So maybe OpenWRT’s router proposal isn’t backwards after all? How many other examples of hardware designed to fit into existing software ecosystems can you think of?

Hackaday Podcast Episode 253: More Wood Robot, Glitching And Fuming Nitric Acid, We Heart USB-C

January 19, 2024 by Tom Nardi 4 Comments

This week Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start things off with a traffic report from the Moon, which has suddenly become a popular destination for wayward robots.

From there, they’ll go over a fire-tending contraption that’s equal parts madness and brilliance, two decades of routers being liberated by OpenWRT, impressive feats of chip decapping, and USB-C’s glorious rise to power.

You’ll also hear about the latest developments in laptop RAM, exploits against the flash encryption used on the ESP32, and Android powered oscilloscopes. The duo will wrap things up with horror stories from the self-checkout aisle, and a look at the fantastical rolling power station that Dan Maloney has been building in his driveway.

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!

Oh look, an MP3 version!

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast Episode 253: More Wood Robot, Glitching And Fuming Nitric Acid, We Heart USB-C” →

This Week In Security: Gitlab, VMware, And PixeFAIL

January 19, 2024 by Jonathan Bennett 3 Comments

There’s a Gitlab vulnerability that you should probably pay attention to. Tracked as CVE-2023-7028, this issue allows an attacker to specify a secondary email during a the password reset request. Only one email has to match the one on record, but the password reset link gets sent to both emails. Yikes!

What makes this worse is there is already a Proof of Concept (PoC) released, and it’s a trivial flaw. In an HTTP/S post containing the password reset request, just include two email addresses. Thankfully, a fix is already out. Versions 16.7.2, 16.6.4, and 16.5.6 contain this patch, as well as fixes for a flaw that allowed sneaking unauthorized changes into a previously approved merge request, and an issue with Slack and Mattermost where slash commands could be spoofed.

VMware

We don’t want to over-dramatise this vulnerability, but VMware is calling it an emergency. This one affects VMware vRealize and Aria Automation. According to the the CVSS calculator, it’s a low complexity network flaw, but does require at least some privileges. Hopefully more information will come out about this vulnerability, but for now that’s about all we know.

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Tech In Plain Sight: Windshield Frit

January 18, 2024 by Al Williams 30 Comments

You probably see a frit every day and don’t even notice it. What is it? You know the black band around your car’s windshield? That’s a frit (which, by the way, can also mean ingredients used in making glass) or, sometimes, a frit band. What’s more, it probably fades out using a series of dots like a halftone image, right? Think that’s just for aesthetics? Think again.

Older windshields were not always attached firmly, leading to them popping out in accidents. At some point, though, the industry moved to polyurethane adhesives, which are superior when applied correctly. However, they often degrade from exposure to UV. That’s a problem with a windshield, which usually gets plenty of sunlight.

The answer is the frit, a ceramic-based baked-on enamel applied to both sides of the windshield’s edges, usually using silk screening. The inner part serves as a bonding point for the adhesive. However, the outer part blocks UV radiation from reaching the adhesive. Of course, it also hides the adhesive and any edges or wiring beneath it, too.

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Linux Fu: Where’s That Darn File?

January 17, 2024 by Al Williams 20 Comments

Disk storage has exploded in the last 40 years. These days, even a terabyte drive is considered small. There is one downside, though. The more stuff you have, the harder it is to find it. Linux provides numerous tools to find files when you can’t remember their name. Each has plusses and minuses, and choosing between them is often difficult.

Definitions

Different tools work differently to find files. There are several ways you might look for a file:

Find a file if you know its name but not its location.
Find a file when you know some part of its name.
Find a file that contains something.
Find a file with certain attributes (e.g., larger than 100 kB)

You might combine these, too. For example, it is reasonable to query all PDF files created in the last week that are larger than 100 kB.

There are plenty of different types of attributes. Some file systems support tags, too. So, you might have a PERSONAL tag to mark files that apply to you personally. Unfortunately, tool support for tags is somewhat lacking, as you’ll see later.

Another key point is how up-to-date your search results are. If you sift through terabytes of files for each search, that will be slow. If you keep an index, that’s fast, but the index will quickly be out of date. Do you periodically refresh the index? Do you watch the entire file system for changes and then update the index? Different tools do it differently. Continue reading “Linux Fu: Where’s That Darn File?” →