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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.

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Hackaday Links: June 11, 2023

June 11, 2023 by 20 Comments

As Tom Nardi mentioned in this week’s podcast, the Northeast US is pretty apocalyptically socked in with smoke from wildfires in Canada. It’s what we here in Idaho call “August,” so we have plenty of sympathy for what they’re going through out there. People are turning to technology to ease their breathing burden, with reports that Tesla drivers are activating the “Bioweapon Defense Mode” of their car’s HVAC system. We had no idea this mode existed, honestly, and it sounds pretty cool — the cabin air system apparently shuts off outside air intake and runs the fan at full speed to keep the cabin under positive pressure, forcing particulates — or, you know, anthrax — to stay outside. We understand there’s a HEPA filter in the mix too, which probably does a nice job of cleaning up the air in the cabin. It’s a clever idea, and hats off to Tesla for including this mode, although perhaps the name is a little silly. Here’s hoping it’s not one of those subscription services that can get turned off at a moment’s notice, though.

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What Do You Want In A Programming Assistant?

June 10, 2023 by 57 Comments

The Propellerheads released a song in 1998 entitled “History Repeating.” If you don’t know it, the lyrics include: “They say the next big thing is here. That the revolution’s near. But to me, it seems quite clear. That it’s all just a little bit of history repeating.” The next big thing today seems to be the AI chatbots. We’ve heard every opinion from the “revolutionize everything” to “destroy everything” camp. But, really, isn’t it a bit of history repeating itself? We get new tech. Some oversell it. Some fear it. Then, in the end, it becomes part of the ordinary landscape and seems unremarkable in the light of the new next big thing. Dynamite, the steam engine, cars, TV, and the Internet were all predicted to “ruin everything” at some point in the past.

History really does repeat itself. After all, when X-rays were discovered, they were claimed to cure pneumonia and other infections, along with other miracle cures. Those didn’t pan out, but we still use them for things they are good at. Calculators were going to ruin math classes. There are plenty of other examples.

This came to mind because a recent post from ACM has the contrary view that chatbots aren’t able to help real programmers. We’ve also seen that — maybe — it can, in limited ways. We suspect it is like getting a new larger monitor. At first, it seems huge. But in a week, it is just the normal monitor, and your old one — which had been perfectly adequate — seems tiny.

But we think there’s a larger point here. Maybe the chatbots will help programmers. Maybe they won’t. But clearly, programmers want some kind of help. We just aren’t sure what kind of help it is. Do we really want CoPilot to write our code for us? Do we want to ask Bard or ChatGPT/Bing what is the best way to balance a B-tree? Asking AI to do static code analysis seems to work pretty well.

So maybe your path to fame and maybe even riches is to figure out — AI-based or not — what people actually want in an automated programming assistant and build that. The home computer idea languished until someone figured out what people wanted to do with them. Video cassette didn’t make it into the home until companies figured out what people wanted most to watch on them.

How much and what kind of help do you want when you program? Or design a circuit or PCB? Or even a 3D model? Maybe AI isn’t going to take your job; it will just make it easier. We doubt, though, that it can much improve on Dame Shirley Bassey’s history lesson.

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Retrotechtacular: A Closer Look At The VT Proximity Fuze

June 9, 2023 by 17 Comments

Here at Hackaday, our aim is to bring you only the freshest of hacks, which carries the burden of being Johnny-on-the-spot with our source material. So if something of obvious interest to our readers goes viral, we might just choose to skip covering it ourselves, figuring you all have probably seen it already. But, if we can dig a little deeper and bring extra value over and above what the viral content provides — well then that’s another story.

That’s pretty much the story behind the excellent video recently released by [Real Engineering] about “The Secret Weapon That Changed World War 2.” It concerns the VT series of proximity fuzes — it’s a legitimate alternate spelling of “fuse” if a somewhat archaic one — that were used for artillery shells and spin-stabilized rockets in World War II. The video gives an excellent overview of the development of the VT, which was used primarily in anti-aircraft artillery (AAA). The details about the development of the American VT fuze are excellent, although curiously there’s no mention that British experiments with a radio proximity fuze were part of the goldmine of information brought to America at great risk by the Tizard mission in 1940. While there has been plenty of contention about the exact role the British work played, it’s fair to say that it at least informed the development and fielding of the American VT fuze.

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Hackaday Podcast 222: VCF East Special Edition

June 9, 2023 by No comments

Editor in Chief Elliot Williams is spending the week communing with nature, which under normal circumstances would mean no podcast — after all, he’s the one who puts each episode together. But since your weekend would obviously be ruined without a dose of lo-fi Hackaday beats to kick things off, Managing Editor Tom Nardi made a valiant attempt to go it alone and produce…something.

This shortened episode will briefly go over the news, including updates about Hackaday’s various ongoing contests and the recent unearthly conditions in the US Northeast due to the Canadian wildfires, before diving into the results of last week’s What’s that Sound challenge. Listeners will then be treated to a special Quick Hacks segment from Jenny List, before settling in for the main event: a pair of fascinating interviews recorded during the 2023 Vintage Computer Festival East in Wall, NJ.

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!

Feel free to download the MP3 directly for safe keeping.

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This Week In Security: Minecraft Fractureiser, MOVEit, And Triangulation

June 9, 2023 by 2 Comments

Modded Minecraft is having a security moment, to match what we’ve seen in the Python and JavaScript repositories over the last few months. It looks like things started when a handful of burner accounts uploaded malicious mods to Curseforge and Bukkit. Those mods looked interesting enough, that a developer for Luna Pixel Studios (LPS) downloaded one of them to test-run. After the test didn’t pan out, he removed the mod, but the malicious code had already run.

Where this gets ugly is in how much damage that one infection caused. The virus, now named fractureiser, installs itself into every other Minecraft-related .jar on the compromised system. It also grabs credentials, cookies, cryptocurrency addresses, and the clipboard contents. Once that information was exfiltrated from the LPS developer, the attacker seems to have taken manual actions, using the purloined permissions to upload similarly infected mod files, and then marking them archived. This managed to hide the trapped files from view on the web interface, while still leaving them exposed when grabbed by the API. Once the malware hit a popular developer, it began to really take off.

It looks like the first of the malicious .jar files actually goes all the way back to mid-April, so it may take a while to discover all the places this malware has spread. It was first noticed on June 1, and investigation was started, but the story didn’t become public until the 7th. Things have developed rapidly, and the malware fingerprints has been added to Windows Defender among other scanners. This helps tremendously, but the safe move is to avoid downloading anything Minecraft related for a couple days, while the whole toolchain is inspected. If it’s too late and you’ve recently scratched that voxel itch, it might be worth it to take a quick look for Indicators of Compromise (IoCs).

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Books You Should Read: Prototype Nation

June 7, 2023 by 24 Comments

Over the years, I’ve been curious to dig deeper into the world of the manufacturing in China. But what I’ve found is that Western anecdotes often felt surface-level, distanced, literally and figuratively from the people living there. Like many hackers in the west, the allure of low-volume custom PCBs and mechanical prototypes has me enchanted. But the appeal of these places for their low costs and quick turnarounds makes me wonder: how is this possible? So I’m left wondering: who are the people and the forces at play that, combined, make the gears turn?

Enter Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation, by Silvia Lindtner. Published in 2020, this book is the hallmark of ten years of research, five of which the author spent in Shenzhen recording field notes, conducting interviews, and participating in the startup and prototyping scene that the city offers.

This book digs deep into the forces at play, unraveling threads between politics, culture, and ripe circumstances to position China as a rising figure in global manufacturing. This book is a must-read for the manufacturing history we just lived through in the last decade and the intermingling relationship of the maker movement between the west and east.

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Know Audio: Distortion Part One

June 6, 2023 by 28 Comments

If you follow audiophile reviewers, you’ll know that their stock-in trade is a very fancy way of saying absolutely nothing of quantifiable substance about the subject while sounding knowledgeable about imagined differences between devices that are all of superlative quality anyway. If you follow us, we’ll tell you that the only reviews that matter are real-world measurements of audio performance, and blind listening tests. We don’t have to tell you how to listen to music, but perhaps it’s time in our Know Audio series to look at how audio performance is measured.

Before reaching for the bench, it’s first necessary to ask just what we are measuring. What are the properties which matter in an audio chain, or in other words, just what is it that makes an audio device good?

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