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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: January 12, 2025

January 12, 2025 by 5 Comments

The big news story of the week of course has been the wildfires in California, which as of Saturday have burned over 30,000 acres, destroyed 12,000 structures, caused 150,000 people to evacuate, and killed eleven people. Actually, calling them wildfires underplays the situation a bit because there are places where they’ve clearly become firestorms, burning intensely enough to create their own winds, consuming everything in their path in a horrific positive feedback loop. We’ve even seen fire tornados caught on video. We’ve got quite a few connections to the affected area, both personally and professionally, not least of which are all our Supplyframe colleagues in Pasadena, who are under immediate threat from the Eaton fire. We don’t know many details yet, but we’ve heard that some have lost homes. We’ve also got friends at the Jet Propulsion Labs, which closed a few days ago to all but emergency personnel. The fire doesn’t seem to have made it down the mountain yet, but it’s very close as of Saturday noon.

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Retrotechtacular: The 1951 Telephone Selector

January 11, 2025 by 20 Comments

Telephone systems predate the use of cheap computers and electronic switches. Yesterday’s phone system used lots of stepping relays in a box known as a “selector.” If you worked for the phone company around 1951, you might have seen the Bell System training film shown below that covers 197 selectors.

The relays are not all the normal ones we think of today. There are slow release relays and vertical shafts that are held by a “dog.” The shaft moves to match the customer’s rotary dial input.

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In Praise Of Simple Projects

January 11, 2025 by 34 Comments

Hackaday was at Chaos Communication Congress last week, and it’s one of those big hacker events that leaves you with so much to think about that I’m still processing it. Just for scope, the 38th CCC is a hacker event with about 15,000 attendees from all around Europe, and many from even further. If I were to characterize the crowd on a hardware-software affinity scale, I would say that it skews heavily toward the software side of the hacker spectrum.

What never ceases to amaze me is that there are a couple of zones that are centered on simple beginner soldering and other PCB art projects that are completely full 20 hours of the day. I always makes me wonder how it is possible to have this many hackers who haven’t picked up a soldering iron. Where do all these first-timers come from? I think I’m in a Hackaday bubble where not only does everyone solder at least three times a day, some of us do it with home-made reflow ovens or expensive microscopes.

But what this also means is that there’s tremendous reach for interesting, inviting, and otherwise cool beginner hardware projects. Hands-on learning is incredibly addictive, and the audience for beginner projects is probably ten times larger than that for intermediate or advanced builds. Having watched my own son putting together one of these kits, I understand the impact they can have personally, but it’s worth noting that the guy next to him was certainly in his mid-30s, and the girl across the way was even a few years younger than my son.

So let’s see some cool beginner projects! We’d love to feature more projects that could lure future hackers to the solder-smoky side.

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

January 10, 2025 by 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 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 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 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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