This Week In Security: National Backdoors, Web3 Backdoors, And Nearest Neighbor WiFi

December 6, 2024 by Jonathan Bennett 16 Comments

Maybe those backdoors weren’t such a great idea. Several US Telecom networks have been compromised by a foreign actor, likely China’s Salt Typhoon, and it looks like one of the vectors of compromise is the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) systems that allow for automatic wiretapping at government request.

[Jeff Greene], a government official with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), has advised that end-user encryption is the way to maintain safe communications. This moment should forever be the touchstone we call upon when discussing ideas like mandated encryption backdoors and even the entire idea of automated wiretapping systems like CALEA. He went on to make a rather startling statement:

I think it would be impossible for us to predict a time frame on when we’ll have full eviction

There are obviously lots of unanswered questions, but with statements like this from CISA, this seems to be an extremely serious compromise. CALEA has been extended to Internet data, and earlier reports suggest that attackers have access to Internet traffic as a result. This leaves the US telecom infrastructure in a precarious position where any given telephone call, text message, or data packet may be intercepted by an overseas attacker. And the FCC isn’t exactly inspiring us with confidence as to its “decisive steps” to fix things. Continue reading “This Week In Security: National Backdoors, Web3 Backdoors, And Nearest Neighbor WiFi” →

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

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Folding Keyboard Mod

December 5, 2024 by Kristina Panos 3 Comments

Let’s face it, failed Kickstarters are no good. But they can spark good things, like real versions of technologies that might have actually been faked for the platform. A touchscreen mouse, for instance, with shortcuts that can be programmed for various applications.

A DIY mouse with a large touch screen. — Image by [Sam Baker] via Hackaday.IO

This story is one of scope creep, as [Sam Baker] says in the project details. At first, he thought he could just basically duct tape a touchscreen with shortcuts to an existing mouse. A couple of mouse teardowns later, [Sam] arrived at the conclusion that things would not be so simple.

After some digging around, [Sam] found a repository where someone created a way to communicate with the ADNS-5050 optical sensor, so [Sam] started by creating a breakout board for this sensor. By combining that with an ESP32 dev board and a touchscreen, [Sam] had his shortcut mouse.

Does it work? Yes. Is it useful? Well, yes. And also no. The beauty part of using a regular mouse is that you don’t have to look down at it to know where the buttons are. In the future, [Sam] would like to implement some kind of buttons for tactility. In the meantime, haptic feedback could be nice.

Continue reading “Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Folding Keyboard Mod” →

FLOSS Weekly Episode 812: Firefox And The Future

December 4, 2024 by Jonathan Bennett 7 Comments

This week, Jonathan Bennett and David Ruggles chat with Sylvestre and Brian about Firefox! What’s up in the browser world, what’s coming, and what’s the new feature for Firefox on mobile that has Jonathan so excited? Watch to find out!

Subscribe to catch the show live, and come to Hackaday for the rest of the story!

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Hack On Self: Headphone Friend

December 4, 2024 by Arya Voronova 3 Comments

In the last two articles, I talked about two systems relying on audio notifications. The first one is the Alt-Tab annihilator system – a system making use of my window monitoring code to angrily beep at me when I’m getting distracted. The other is the crash prevention system – a small script that helps me avoid an annoying failure mode where I run out of energy before getting myself comfortable for it.

I’ve been appreciating these two systems quite a bit – not only are they at my fingertips, they’re also pretty effective. To this day, I currently use these two systems to help me stay focused as I hack on my own projects or write articles, and they are definitely a mainstay in my self-hacking arsenal.

There is a particular thing I’ve noticed – audio notifications help a fair bit in a way that phone or desktop notifications never would, and, now I have a framework to produce them – in a way that calls for a purpose-tailored device. It’s just wireless headphones, Pi-powered, connected through WiFi, and a library to produce sounds on my computer, but it turns out I can squeeze out a lot out of this simple combination.

Here’s a pocketable device I’ve developed, using off-the-shelf hardware – an audio receiver/transmitter with extra IO, paired to my laptop. And, here’s how I make use of this device’s capabilities to the fullest.

Audio Output

In the “producing sound out of a Pi” article, I’ve mentioned USB-C 3.5mm soundcards. You can use them with a USB-C host port, and you don’t even need any sort of resistors for that – the soundcard doesn’t try and detect state of the CC pin, and why would it, anyway? Get VBUS, GND, D+, and D-, and you got yourself an audio card with high quality output.

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Fail Of The Week: The SMD Crystal Radio That Wasn’t

December 3, 2024 by Dan Maloney 18 Comments

The crystal radio is a time-honored build that sadly doesn’t get much traction anymore. Once a rite of passage for electronics hobbyists, the classic coil-on-an-oatmeal-carton and cat’s whisker design just isn’t that easy to pull off anymore, mainly because the BOM isn’t really something that you can just whistle up from DigiKey or Mouser.

Or is it? To push the crystal radio into the future a bit, [tsbrownie] tried to design a receiver around standard surface-mount inductors, and spoiler alert — it didn’t go so well. His starting point was a design using a hand-wound air-core coil, a germanium diode for a detector, and a variable capacitor that was probably scrapped from an old radio. The coil had three sections, so [tsbrownie] first estimated the inductance of each section and sourced some surface-mount inductors that were as close as possible to their values. This required putting standard value inductors in series and soldering taps into the correct places, but at best the SMD coil was only an approximation of the original air-core coil. Plugging the replacement coil into the crystal radio circuit was unsatisfying, to say the least. Only one AM station was heard, and then only barely. A few tweaks to the SMD coil improved the sensitivity of the receiver a bit, but still only brought in one very local station.

[tsbrownie] chalked up the failure to the lower efficiency of SMD inductors, but we’re not so sure about that. If memory serves, the windings in an SMD inductor are usually wrapped around a core that sits perpendicular to the PCB. If that’s true, then perhaps stacking the inductors rather than connecting them end-to-end would have worked better. We’d try that now if only we had one of those nice old variable caps. Still, hats off to [tsbrownie] for at least giving it a go.

Note: Right after we wrote this, a follow-up video popped up in our feed where [tsbrownie] tried exactly the modification we suggested, and it certainly improves performance, but in a weird way. The video is included below if you want to see the details.

Continue reading “Fail Of The Week: The SMD Crystal Radio That Wasn’t” →

A Brief History Of Calculator Watches

December 2, 2024 by Al Williams 32 Comments

When humans counted on their fingers, everyone had a state-of-the-art (at the time) calculator at all times. But as we got smarter about calculation, we missed that convenience. When slide rules were king, techies were known to carry them around like swords swinging from their belts. These were replaced with electronic calculators, some also swinging from belt loops, but no matter how small they were, they still were not that handy, no pun intended. That changed around 1975. The Time Computer Calculator company produced an amazing calculator watch for Pulsar. At the time, Pulsar was a brand of the Hamilton Watch Company.

A Pulsar calculator watch (photo: The Smithsonian)

There were a few problems. First, the watch was thick. Despite its size, it had tiny keys, so you had to use a little stylus to push the keys — not as handy as you might wish. On top of that, 1975 display technology used power-hungry LEDs. So, the display was prone to turning off quickly, and the batteries died quickly.

Unsurprisingly, Hamilton, in conjunction with Electro/Data, had earlier rolled out the first LED watch in 1972. With an 18-karat gold case, it went for a cool $2,100 — a whole lot of money in 1972. The first calculator watch was also gold and went for almost $4,000. Soon, though, they brought out a stainless and a gold-filled version that came in at under $500.

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