Hackaday Podcast Episode 303: The Cheap Yellow Display, Self-Driving Under $1000, And Don’t Remix That Benchy

January 10, 2025 by Jenny List 1 Comment

As the holiday party season fades away into memory and we get into the swing of the new year, Elliot Williams is joined on the Hackaday Podcast by Jenny List for a roundup of what’s cool in the world of Hackaday. In the news this week, who read the small print and noticed that Benchy has a non-commercial licence? As the takedown notices for Benchy derivatives fly around, we muse about the different interpretations of open source, and remind listeners to pay attention when they choose how to release their work.

The week gave us enough hacks to get our teeth into, with Elliot descending into the rabbit hole of switch debouncing, and Jenny waxing lyrical over a crystal oscillator. Adding self-driving capability to a 30-year-old Volvo caught our attention too, as did the intriguing Cheap Yellow Display, an ESP32 module that has (almost) everything. Meanwhile in the quick hacks, a chess engine written for a processor architecture implemented entirely in regular expressions impressed us a lot, as did the feat of sending TOSLINK across London over commercial fibre networks. Enjoy the episode, and see you again next week!

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This Week In Security: Backdoored Backdoors, Leaking Cameras, And The Safety Label

January 10, 2025 by Jonathan Bennett 3 Comments

The mad lads at watchTowr are back with their unique blend of zany humor and impressive security research. And this time, it’s the curious case of backdoors within popular backdoors, and the list of unclaimed domains that malicious software would just love to contact.

OK, that needs some explanation. We’re mainly talking about web shells here. Those are the bits of code that get uploaded to a web server, that provide remote access to the computer. The typical example is a web application that allows unrestricted uploads. If an attacker can upload a PHP file to a folder where .php files are used to serve web pages, accessing that endpoint runs the arbitrary PHP code. Upload a web shell, and accessing that endpoint gives a command line interface into the machine.

The quirk here is that most attackers don’t write their own tools. And often times those tools have special, undocumented features, like loading a zero-size image from a .ru domain. The webshell developer couldn’t be bothered to actually do the legwork of breaking into servers, so instead added this little dial-home feature, to report on where to find all those newly backdoored machines. Yes, many of the popular backdoors are themselves backdoored.

This brings us to what watchTowr researchers discovered — many of those backdoor domains were either never registered, or the registration has been allowed to expire. So they did what any team of researchers would do: Buy up all the available backdoor domains, set up a logging server, and just see what happens. And what happened was thousands of compromised machines checking in at these old domains. Among the 4000+ unique systems, there were a total of 4 .gov. domains from governments in Bangladesh, Nigeria, and China. It’s an interesting romp through old backdoors, and a good look at the state of still-compromised machines.

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Retrotechtacular: Soldering The Tek Way

January 9, 2025 by Dan Maloney 40 Comments

For a lot of us, soldering just seems to come naturally. But if we’re being honest, none of us was born with a soldering iron in our hand — ouch! — and if we’re good at soldering now, it’s only thanks to good habits and long practice. But what if you’re a company that lives and dies by the quality of the solder joints your employees produce? How do you get them to embrace the dark art of soldering?

If you’re Tektronix in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the answer is simple: make in-depth training videos that teach people to solder the Tek way. The first video below, from 1977, is aimed at workers on the assembly line and as such concentrates mainly on the practical aspects of making solid solder joints on PCBs and mainly with through-hole components. The video does have a bit of theory on soldering chemistry and the difference between eutectic alloys and other tin-lead mixes, as well as a little about the proper use of silver-bearing solders. But most of the time is spent discussing the primary tool of the trade: the iron. Even though the film is dated and looks like a multi-generation dupe from VHS, it still has a lot of valuable tips; we’ve been soldering for decades and somehow never realized that cleaning a tip on a wet sponge is so effective because the sudden temperature change helps release oxides and burned flux. The more you know.

The second video below is aimed more at the Tek repair and rework technicians. It reiterates a lot of the material from the first video, but then veers off into repair-specific topics, like effective desoldering. Pro tip: Don’t use the “Heat and Shake” method of desoldering, and wear those safety glasses. There’s also a lot of detail on how to avoid damaging the PCB during repairs, and how to fix them if you do manage to lift a trace. They put a fair amount of emphasis on the importance of making repairs look good, especially with bodge wires, which should be placed on the back of the board so they’re not so obvious. It makes sense; Tek boards from the era are works of art, and you don’t want to mess with that.

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 815: You Win Some, You Lose Some

January 8, 2025 by Jonathan Bennett 2 Comments

This week, Jonathan Bennett and Randal chat with Matija Šuklje about Open Source and the Law! How do Open Source projects handle liability, what should a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) look like, and where can an individual or project turn for legal help?

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Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Circuit Sculpture Keyboard

January 7, 2025 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

The left half of GEMK-47, a mechanical keyboard with a round screen. — Image by [New-Concentrate6308] via reddit

Don’t worry, [New-Concentrate6308] is working on the GitHub for this final build of 2024, dubbed the GEMK_47. That stands for Grid Ergo Magnetic Keyboard, but I swear there are 48 keys.

What we’ve got here is a split ergo with an ortholinear layout. There’s a round screen and encoder on the left side, and a 35 mm trackpad on the right. There’s also space for some other round thing on this side, should you want another rotary encoder or whatever fits in place of the spacer.

Internally, there’s a Waveshare RP2040 Tiny and a mixture of Gateron Oil Kings and Gateron Yellow V3 switches. That lovely case is printed in silk silver PLA, but [New-Concentrate6308] wants to try metal-filled PLA for the next version. Although the original idea was to go wireless, ZMK didn’t play nicely with that round display, which of course is non-negotiable.

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Before GPS There Was LORAN

January 6, 2025 by Al Williams 38 Comments

We found it nostalgic to watch [ve3iku] fire up an old Loran-A receiver and, as you can see in the video below, he got it working. If you aren’t familiar with LORAN, it was a common radio navigation technique before GPS took over everything.

LORAN — an acronym for Long Range Navigation — was a US byproduct of World War II and was similar in many ways to Britain’s Gee system. However, LORAN operated at lower frequencies to improve its range. It was instrumental in helping convoys cross the Atlantic and also found use in the Pacific theater.

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Hackaday Links: January 5, 2025

January 5, 2025 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

Good news this week from the Sun’s far side as the Parker Solar Probe checked in after its speedrun through our star’s corona. Parker became the fastest human-made object ever — aside from the manhole cover, of course — as it fell into the Sun’s gravity well on Christmas Eve to pass within 6.1 million kilometers of the surface, in an attempt to study the extremely dynamic environment of the solar atmosphere. Similar to how manned spacecraft returning to Earth are blacked out from radio communications, the plasma soup Parker flew through meant everything it would do during the pass had to be autonomous, and we wouldn’t know how it went until the probe cleared the high-energy zone. The probe pinged Earth with a quick “I’m OK” message on December 26, and checked in with the Deep Space Network as scheduled on January 1, dumping telemetry data that indicated the spacecraft not only survived its brush with the corona but that every instrument performed as expected during the pass. The scientific data from the instruments won’t be downloaded until the probe is in a little better position, and then Parker will get to do the whole thing again twice more in 2025. Continue reading “Hackaday Links: January 5, 2025” →