Hackaday Links: August 6, 2023

August 6, 2023 by Dan Maloney 22 Comments

“Have you tried turning it off and on again?” is a common tech support maneuver that everyone already seems to know and apply to just about all the wonky tech in their life. But would you tell someone to apply it to a reservoir? Someone did, and with disastrous results, at least according to a report on the lead-up to the collapse of a reservoir in the city of Lewiston, Idaho — just across the Snake River from Clarkston, Washington; get it? According to the report, operators at the reservoir had an issue crop up that required a contractor to log into the SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) system running the reservoir. The contractor’s quick log-in resulted in him issuing instructions to local staff to unplug the network cable on the SCADA controller and plug it back in. Somehow, that caused a variable in the SCADA system — the one storing the level of water in the reservoir — to get stuck at the current value. This made it appear that the water level was too low, which lead the SCADA system to keep adding water to the reservoir, which eventually collapsed.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: August 6, 2023” →

Hackaday Podcast 230: Space Science, Superconductors, Supercaps, And Central Air

August 4, 2023 by Tom Nardi No comments

This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi start things off by tackling a pair of science stories, one that may or may not change the world, and the other that hopes to help us understand the very fabric of the universe. Afterwards they get to the important stuff: the evolution of Game Boy Camera hacking, the finer points of 3D print orientation, and mixing up electrically conductive concrete at home. From there the conversation shifts to a couple of 486 Turbo buttons, a quick yoke recipe, and a very handsome open source vacuum pickup tool. Stick around until the end to hear about the folly of humanoid robots, and the latest operating system to get the Jenny List treatment.

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!

Or download it yourself in fantastic MP3 format!

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast 230: Space Science, Superconductors, Supercaps, And Central Air” →

This Week In Security: Your Car’s Extended Warranty, Seizing The Fediverse, And Arm MTE

August 4, 2023 by Jonathan Bennett 15 Comments

If you’ve answered as many spam calls as I have, you probably hear the warranty scam robocall in your sleep: “We’ve been trying to reach you about your car’s extended warranty.” That particular robocalling operation is about to run out of quarters, as the FCC has announced a nearly $300 million fine levied against that particular operation. The scammers had a list of 500 million phone numbers, and made over five billion calls in three months. Multiple laws were violated, including some really scummy behavior like spoofing employer caller ID, to try to convince people to pick up the call.

Now, that record-setting fine probably isn’t ever going to get paid. The group of companies on the hook for the amount don’t really exist in a meaningful way. The individuals behind the scams are Roy Cox and Aaron Jones, who have already been fined significant amounts and been banned from making telemarketing calls. Neither of those measures put an end to the problem, but going after Avid Telecom, the company that was providing telephone service, did finally put the scheme down.

Mastodon Data Scooped

There are some gotchas to Mastodon. Direct Messages aren’t end-to-end encrypted, your posts are publicly viewable, and if your server operator gets raided by law enforcement, your data gets caught up in the seizure.

The background here is the administrator of the server in question had an unrelated legal issue, and was raided by FBI agents while working on an issue with the Mastodon instance. As a result, when agents seized electronics as evidence, a database backup of the instance was grabbed too. While Mastodon posts are obviously public by design, there is some non-public data to be lost. IP addresses aren’t exactly out of reach of law enforcement, it’s still a bit of personal information that many of us like to avoid publishing. Then there’s hashed passwords. While it’s better than plaintext passwords, having your password hash out there just waiting to be brute-forced is a bit disheartening. But the one that really hurts is that Mastodon doesn’t have end-to-end encryption for private messages. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Your Car’s Extended Warranty, Seizing The Fediverse, And Arm MTE” →

The State Of High Speed Rail, And A Look To Tomorrow

August 3, 2023 by Lewin Day 73 Comments

In the 21st century, the global transportation landscape is in shift. Politicians, engineers, and planners all want to move more people, more quickly, more cleanly. Amid the frenzy of innovative harebrained ideas, high-speed rail travel has surged to the forefront. It’s a quiet achiever, and a reliable solution for efficient, sustainable, and swift intercity and intercountry transit.

From the thriving economies of Europe and Asia to the burgeoning markets of the Middle East and America, high-speed rail networks are being planned, expanded, and upgraded whichever way you look. A combination of traditional and magnetic levitation (maglev) trains are being utilized, reaching speeds that were once the stuff of science fiction. As we set our sights towards the future, it’s worth taking a snapshot of the current state of high-speed rail, a field where technology, engineering brilliance, and visions of a greener tomorrow converge.

Continue reading “The State Of High Speed Rail, And A Look To Tomorrow” →

Truss-Braced Wings Could Bring New Look To Runways Worldwide

August 2, 2023 by Lewin Day 75 Comments

Airliners have looked largely the same for a long time now. The ongoing hunt for efficiency gains has seen the development of winglets, drag reducing films, and all manner of little aerodynamic tricks to save fuel, and hence money.

Boeing now has its eye on bigger, tastier goals. It believes by switching to a truss-braced wing design, it could net double-digit efficiency gains. It’s working together with NASA to see if this concept could change the face of commercial aviation in decades to come.

Aspect Ratio Matters

The ASH 31 glider features wings with an aspect ratio of 33.5, and a lift-to-drag ratio of 56. *Credit: Manfred Munch, CC-BY-SA 3.0*

The key goal of using a truss-braced wing is to enable an airliner to use a wing much thinner and narrower than usual. These “high aspect ratio” wings are far more efficient than the stubbier, wider wings currently common on modern airliners. But why is aspect ratio so important, and how does it help

If you’ve ever looked at a glider, you will have noticed its incredibly long and narrow wings, which stand it apart from the shorter, wider wings used on airliners and conventional small aircraft. These wings are said to have a high aspect ratio, the ratio between the square of the wingspan and the projected area of the wing itself.

These wings are highly desirable for certain types of aircraft, as lift-to-drag ratio increases with aspect ratio. Any wing that generates lift also generates some drag, but this can be minimized through careful wing design. By making the wings longer and narrower, and thus higher in aspect ratio, the wing tip vortices generated by the wing are weakened. This reduces drag on the plane, and quite significantly so. Continue reading “Truss-Braced Wings Could Bring New Look To Runways Worldwide” →

The Past, Present, And Future Of CircuitPython

August 1, 2023 by Tom Nardi 37 Comments

Modern microcontrollers like the RP2040 and ESP32 are truly a marvels of engineering. For literal pocket change you can get a chip that’s got a multi-core processor running at hundreds of megahertz, plenty of RAM, and more often than not, some form of wireless connectivity. Their capabilities have been nothing short of revolutionary for the DIY crowd — on any given day, you can see projects on these pages which simply wouldn’t have been possible back when the 8-bit Arduino was all most folks had access to.

Limor Fried

Thanks to the increased performance of these MCUs, hackers and makers now even have a choice as to which programming language they want to use. While C is still the language of choice for processor-intensive tasks, for many applications, Python is now a viable option on a wide range of hardware.

This provides a far less intimidating experience for newcomers, not just because the language is more forgiving, but because it does away with the traditional compile-flash-pray workflow. Of course, that doesn’t mean the more experienced MCU wranglers aren’t invited to the party; they might just have to broaden their horizons a bit.

To learn more about this interesting paradigm shift, we invited the fine folks at Adafruit to the Hack Chat so the community could get a chance to ask questions about CircuitPython, their in-house Python variant which today runs on more than 400 devices.

Continue reading “The Past, Present, And Future Of CircuitPython” →

Timeline of the universe. A representation of the evolution of the universe over 13.77 billion years. The far left depicts the earliest moment we can now probe, when a period of "inflation" produced a burst of exponential growth in the universe. (Size is depicted by the vertical extent of the grid in this graphic.) For the next several billion years, the expansion of the universe gradually slowed down as the matter in the universe pulled on itself via gravity. More recently, the expansion has begun to speed up again as the repulsive effects of dark energy have come to dominate the expansion of the universe. The afterglow light seen by WMAP was emitted about 375,000 years after inflation and has traversed the universe largely unimpeded since then. The conditions of earlier times are imprinted on this light; it also forms a backlight for later developments of the universe. (Credit: NASA)

ESA’s Euclid Space Telescope And The Quest For Dark Energy

July 31, 2023 by Maya Posch 30 Comments

Most of what humankind and other mammalian species on Earth experience of the Universe is primarily restricted to the part of the electromagnetic spectrum which our optical organs can register. Despite these limitations, we have found ways over the centuries which enable us to perceive the rest of the EM spectrum, to see both what is incredibly far away, and what is incredibly small, to constantly get a little bit closer to understanding what makes the Universe into what we can observe today, and what it may look like in the future.

An essential element of this effort are space telescopes, which gaze into the depths of the Universe with no limitations imposed by the Earth’s atmosphere, or human activity. Among the many uses of space telescopes, the investigation of the expansion of the Universe is perhaps the most fascinating, as this brings us ever closer to the answers to the most fundamental questions about not only its shape, but also to its future, which may include hitherto unknown types of matter and energy.

With the recently launched Euclid space telescope, another chapter is being opened in the saga on dark energy and matter, and their nature and effects on the Universe, as well as whether they exist at all. Yet how exactly do you use a space telescope to ferret out the potential effects of dark energy?

Continue reading “ESA’s Euclid Space Telescope And The Quest For Dark Energy” →