Linux Fu: Remote Execution Made Easy

August 11, 2020 by Al Williams 20 Comments

If you have SSH and a few other tools set up, it is pretty easy to log into another machine and run a few programs. This could be handy when you are using a machine that might not have a lot of memory or processing power and you have access to a bigger machine somewhere on the network. For example, suppose you want to reencode some video on a box you use as a media server but it would go much faster on your giant server with a dozen cores and 32 GB of RAM.

Remote Execution

However, there are a few problems with that scenario. First, you might not have the software on the remote machine. Even if you do, it might not be the version you expect or have all the same configuration as your local copy. Then there’s the file problem. the input file should come from your local file system and you’d like the output to wind up there, too. These aren’t insurmountable, of course. You could install the program on the remote box and copy your files back and forth manually. Or you can use Outrun.

There are a few limitations, though. You do need Outrun on both machines and both machines have to have the same CPU architecture. Sadly, that means you can’t use this to easily run jobs on your x86-64 PC from a Raspberry Pi. You’ll need root access to the remote machine, too. The system also depends on having the FUSE file system libraries set up.

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Boom Hopes To Reignite Supersonic Travel With XB-1

August 10, 2020 by Tom Nardi 69 Comments

Since the last Concorde rolled to a stop in 2003, supersonic flight has been limited almost exclusively to military aircraft. Many have argued that it’s an example of our civilization seeming to slip backwards on the technological scale, akin to returning to the Age of Sail. There’s no debating that we have the capability of moving civilian passengers and cargo at speeds above Mach 1 safely, it’s just something that isn’t done anymore.

Concorde on its final flight, November 2003

Of course to be fair, there’s plenty of good reasons why the sky isn’t filled with supersonic aircraft. For one, they’ve historically been more drastically expensive to build and operate than their slower peers. The engineering that goes into an aircraft that can operate for an extended period of time at supersonic speeds doesn’t come cheap, nor do the materials required. But naturally, the same could have been said for commercial jet aircraft at one time. With further development, the cost would eventually come down.

The real problem holding supersonic aircraft back is much more practical: they are just too loud. From the roar of their powerful engines on takeoff to the startling and sometimes even dangerous “sonic boom” they leave in their wake, nobody wants them flying over their homes or communities. In fact, civilian flight above Mach 1 over land has been outlawed in the United States for exactly this reason since 1973 under the Federal Aviation Administration’s regulation 91.817.

For any commercial supersonic aircraft to be viable, it needs to not only be much cheaper to build and operate than older designs, but it also needs to be far quieter. Which is exactly what Boom hopes to demonstrate with their XB-1 prototype. The sleek craft will never enter into commercial service itself, but if all goes according to plan during its 2021 test flights, it may prove that the state-of-the-art in aircraft design is ready to usher in a new era of supersonic civilian transport.

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Recreating Retrocomputers Hack Chat

August 10, 2020 by Dan Maloney 1 Comment

Join us on Wednesday, August 12 at noon Pacific for the Recreating Retrocomputers Hack Chat with Mike Gardi!

Building the first commercial computers in the late 1950s and early 1960s was certainly a complex a task, but building the computer industry was even harder. Sure, engineers were already getting on board with designing in silicon and germanium instead of glass and tungsten, and all digital circuits are really just abstractions of analog designs most of them were already familiar with. But what about all the other people who would need to get up to speed on the workings of digital computers? What good is a tool if the only people who know how to use it art the ones who built it?

To make computers make money, companies needed legions of installers, operators, programmers, marketers, and salespeople, and all of them needed training. And so early computer companies put a lot of effort into building training devices to get people up to speed. These trainers helped teach everything from basic logic circuits and Boolean relationships to simple programming concepts, and each of them contributed in their own way to developing the computer industry that we know today.

Mike Gardi has a unique hobby: among other things, he builds faithful replicas of some of the nicer examples of these lost bits of computing history. His reproduction of Claude Shannon’s Minivac 601 trainer is a great example of the art, as is the DEC H-500 Computer Lab build he’s currently working on. Along the way, he’s explored some side alleys on the road to our computerized world, like Dr. Nim and the paperclip computer. All his builds are lovingly created from 3D-prints and really capture the essence of the toys and tools of the time.

Join us as we take a trip inside this niche realm of retrocomputing and find out why Mike finds it fascinating enough to devote the time it obviously takes to build such exacting replicas. We’ll talk about what projects he’s got going on right now, what he has planned for the future, and maybe even dive into some of his secrets for such great looking 3D prints.

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

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

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Hackaday Links: August 9, 2020

August 9, 2020 by Dan Maloney 15 Comments

We regret to admit this, but we completely missed the fact that Windows 10 turned five years old back in March. Granted, things were a little weird back then — at least it seemed weird at the time; from the current perspective, things were downright normal then. Regardless, our belated congratulations to Microsoft, who, like anyone looking after a five-year-old, spends most of their time trying to keep their charge from accidentally killing itself. Microsoft has done such a good job at keeping Windows 10 alive that it has been installed on “one billion monthly active devices”. Of course, back in April of 2015 they predicted that the gigainstall mark would be reached in 2018. But what’s a couple of years between friends?

Of all the things that proved to be in short supply during the pandemic lockdowns, what surprised us most was not the toilet paper crunch. No, what really surprised us was the ongoing webcam supply pinch. Sure, it makes sense, with everyone suddenly working from home and in need of a decent camera for video conferencing. But we had no idea that the market was so dominated by one manufacturer — Logitech — that their cameras could suddenly become unobtainium. Whatever it is that’s driving the shortage, we’d take Logitech’s statement that “demand will be met in the next 4-6 weeks” with a huge grain of salt. After all, back-to-school shopping is likely to look vastly different this year than in previous years.

Speaking of education, check out the CrowPi2 STEM laptop. On the one hand, it looks like just another Raspberry Pi-based laptop, albeit one with a better level of fit and finish than most homebrew Pi-tops. With a Raspberry Pi 4b on board, it can do all the usual stuff — email, browse the web, watch videos. The secret sauce is under the removable wireless keyboard, though: a pretty comprehensive electronics learning lab. It reminds us of the Radio Shack “150-in-One” kits that so many of us cut our teeth on, but on steroids. Having a complete suite of modules and a breadboarding area built right into the laptop needed to program it is brilliant, and we look forward to seeing how the Kickstarter for this does.

Exciting news from Hackaday Superfriend Chris Gammell — he has launched a new podcast to go along with his Contextual Electronics training courses. Unsurprisingly dubbed the Contextual Electronics Podcast, he already has three episodes in the can. They’re available as both video and straight audio, and from the few minutes we’ve had to spend on them so far, Chris has done a great job in terms of production values and guests with Sophy Wong, Stephen Hawes, and Erik Larson leading off the series. We wish him luck with this new venture, and we’re looking forward to future episodes.

One of the best things about GoPro and similar sports cameras is their ability to go just about anywhere and show things we normally don’t get to see. We’re thinking of those gorgeous slo-mo selfies of surfers inside a curling wave, or those cool shots of a skier powder blasting down a mountain slope. But this is the first time we’ve seen a GoPro mounted inside a car’s tire. The video by the aptly named YouTuber [Warped Perception] shows how he removed the tire from the wheel and mounted the camera, a battery pack, and an LED light in the rim, then remounted the tire. The footage of the tire deforming as it contacts the ground is fascinating but oddly creepy. It sort of reminds us a little of the footage from cameras inside the Saturn V fuel tanks — valuable engineering information to be sure, but forbidden in some way.

DIY HID, OMG!

August 8, 2020 by Elliot Williams 15 Comments

William English, one of the creators of the mouse back in the 60s, passed away last week. And that got me thinking of how amazing it would have been to be in the place that was inventing what would become modern computing interfaces. What a special time! Of course, they probably had no idea.

From here, it looks like the mouse changed everything, but you have to realize that they were working in a world with light-pens, where you could actually draw on the screen. In contrast, the mouse seems positively non-futuristic. They must have known they’d come up with an improvement over the status quo, but did they know they’d created a revolution?

So where has the revolutionary spirit in DIY human interface devices gone? I’d claim it’s still alive and kicking. Indeed our own Kristina Panos has a series called “Inputs of Interest” and we’ve seen a ton of DIY keyboards of late. Then there are many varieties of dial inputs. I used to have a dedicated scroll wheel made out of a hard-drive platter, and when I was reading lots of PDFs on-screen, I have to say it earned its desk-space. Heck, we’ve even seen people make their own mouse.

But what I love about the story of the development of the mouse is that they asked the question “what is the best way to locate a point on a screen” and tried to answer it. Half of their success is probably in simply asking the right question, and the other half in prototyping something half-workable. My gut says that we don’t have inputs figured out 100% on mobile yet. This sounds like a job for Hackaday. What’s the next big human-interface design need? And have you got any crazy ideas to solve it?

Hackaday Remoticon

And this week, we announced the Hackaday Remoticon, our shelter-in-place version of the Supercon. It’s going to take place in November as usual, but online instead of IRL.

The good news? It’s going to be chock full of workshops, all streamed online and recorded for posterity. And for that we need your proposals. If you’d like to teach a group of distributed hackers learning your favorite techniques and tricks, this is your chance!

The bad news is of course that we won’t get to see you all in person. That’s going to make the 2021 Hackaday Supercon seem even more super.

Hackaday Podcast 079: Wobble Sphere, Pixelflut, Skeeter Traps, And Tracing Apps

August 7, 2020 by Mike Szczys 3 Comments

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams gaze upon the most eye-popping projects from the past week. Who would have known that springy doorstops could be so artistic? Speaking of art, what happens if you give everyone on the network the chance to collectively paint using pixels? There as better way to catch a rat, and a dubious way to lure mosquitoes. We scratch our heads at sending code to the arctic, and Elliot takes a deep look at the contact tracing apps developed and in use throughout Europe.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (60 MB or so.)

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This Week In Security: Garmin Ransomware, KeePass , And Twitter Warnings

August 7, 2020 by Jonathan Bennett 9 Comments

On July 23, multiple services related to Garmin were taken offline, including their call center and aviation related services. Thanks to information leaked by Garmin employees, we know that this multi-day outage was caused by the Wastedlocker ransomware campaign. After four days, Garmin was able to start the process of restoring the services.

It’s reported that the requested ransom was an eye-watering $10 million. It’s suspected that Garmin actually paid the ransom. A leaked decryptor program confirms that they received the decryption key. The attack was apparently very widespread through Garmin’s network, as it seems that both workstations and public facing servers were impacted. Let’s hope Garmin learned their lesson, and are shoring up their security practices. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Garmin Ransomware, KeePass , And Twitter Warnings” →