Copy Or Redesign?

May 9, 2026 by Elliot Williams 5 Comments

We got asked a great question in the mailbag segment on the Podcast this week: are there hacks that we have read about on Hackaday that we use in our everyday life? The answer was absolutely yes, and I loved Tom’s take it often goes the other way – he sees a hack, tests it out, and then writes it up.

But I started looking around the office and I found more examples of projects that were absolutely inspired by projects I had seen on Hackaday, yet weren’t the same. I made a DIY mechanical keyboard because I saw someone else do it. There are a few home-made battery packs that I probably wouldn’t have attempted without having read about someone doing the same thing. I riffed on [Ted Yapo]’s Tritiled project, making a slightly inferior, but workable knockoff, and they’ve been glowing for many years now.

That got me to thinking about reproducing a project versus taking inspiration from it, and though I enjoy both, I’m find myself most often in the “inspiration” mode. I just can’t leave well enough alone, even when I’m fundamentally copying someone. NIH syndrome? Expediency? Probably both, and sometimes with a dose of hubris or feature creep.

Looking back at [Ted]’s TritiLED, though, I found some great examples in both the rebuild and redesign modes on Hackaday.io. [schlion]’s Making Ted Yapo’s TritiLED couldn’t be a clearer example of the former, and it’s great to look over his shoulder and appreciate all the lessons he learned along the way. [Stephan Walter]’s Yet another ultra low power LED is inspired by [Christoph Tack]’s Ultra low power LED, which is in turn inspired by [Ted]’s project, like a conceptual grandchild.

In a way, I look at this like with music: sometimes you play the notes the way they were written down, and sometimes you riff on someone else’s theme. Both are equally valid, and both owe a debt to the upstream source. Is Hackaday the hackers’ jazz club? And which of these modes do you find yourself working in most?

Hackaday Podcast Episode 369: IR, E-Ink, And Avgas

May 8, 2026 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

In this episode, Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start things off by discussing the latest reason that cheap PCB fabrication isn’t quite as cheap as it once was. The conversation will then move on to hacking electronic shelf labels, stylish e-ink status displays, cutting metal at home with high current and a bit of water, a solarpunk message board hiding in a IKEA-style lantern, and pushing NFC out of its comfort zone. From there you’ll hear about a matching transistors, taking pictures of the International Space Station, and Linux on the PS5. They’ll wrap up this week’s episode by going over the surprisingly simple concept behind flow batteries, and learn who’s still using leaded gasoline and why.

Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download in DRM-free MP3.

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This Week In Security: Another Linux Exploit, Ubuntu Knocked Offline, Finals Interrupted, And Backdoored Tools

May 8, 2026 by Mike Kershaw 15 Comments

After the CopyFail vulnerability gave root access from any user on almost all distributions last week, this week we’ve got DirtyFrag. This chains the vulnerability in CopyFail (xfrm-ESP) and a new vulnerability in a RPC function which allows similar overwriting of the page cache.

Both vulnerabilities manipulate the Linux page cache where data from disk is stored for rapid access. The kernel will always prefer the cached version of a file, which means that anything that is able to manipulate the contents of the cache can effectively replace the contents of the file. Both of the vulnerabilities leverage a similar mechanism – picking a binary which is flagged to run as root, such as su, and replacing the contents that would prompt for the users password with a launcher to immediately run a shell.

Like CopyFail, DirtyFrag requires the ability to execute code on the target in the first place, but turning almost any code or command execution vulnerability in any network service into root raises the impact significantly, allowing an attacker to break out of containers and privilege environments, or establish a persistent presence in the system when the original vulnerabilities are discovered and closed.

The previous mitigations to block specific kernel modules related to CopyFail are not sufficient to block the new vulnerabilities. At the time of writing this, there are no available patches from the distributions, however the vulnerable kernel modules can be temporarily disabled.

CopyFail added to KEV

CISA (the United States cyber security agency) has added CopyFail to the KEV, or Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list. Attacks on the KEV have been observed under active exploitation, which in the case of CopyFail is hardly a surprise.

The KEV is designed as a tool to allow security teams in government and commercial industry to prioritize the highest risk vulnerabilities – or at least give another source of data to point at when you say “we really need to patch this now”.

Prolonged Ubuntu DDOS

On the heels of the CopyFail vulnerability impacting almost all distributions, Ubuntu has had to face a prolonged distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against the main infrastructure. Ars Technica reported at the beginning of the attack, and after several days, services appear to be restored. In the meantime, core services such as package updates, core repositories, and even the Ubuntu and Canonical websites were largely unreachable.

An Iraqi group claims responsibility for the attack, but it is unclear if they were the actual perpetrators – or why. The timing with the CopyFail vulnerability seems like an opportune moment to cause chaos by taking the update mechanisms of a major distribution offline, but in the era of modern Internet behavior, it could also just have been a Tuesday.

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Congratulations To The Green Powered Challenge Winners!

May 7, 2026 by Elliot Williams 3 Comments

For this challenge, we asked you to show off your hacks that power themselves sustainably from the environment around them. After all, nobody likes wires, and changing batteries is just a hassle. What’s better than an autonomous gizmo? Nothing.

Because this is Hackaday, we expected to see some finished-looking projects, some absolutely zany concepts, and basically everything in-between, and you did not disappoint! So without further ado, let’s have a look at the 2026 Green Powered Challenge winners, each of whom will be going on a $150 shopping spree at DigiKey, our contest’s sponsor.

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Retrotechtacular: Julius Sumner Miller Breaks Lamps With Magnets

May 6, 2026 by Al Williams 23 Comments

If you watched the Mickey Mouse Club way back when, you might remember Professor Wonderful, who was, in reality, physics professor [Julius Sumner Miller]. He also had his own show, “Why Is It So?” along with appearances on talk shows. We recently ran across one of the shows from 1962 where [Miller] uses electromagnets to break a lamp.

[Miller] moved to Australia, and this episode is from the Australian version of “Why Is It So?” As you might expect, given the topic, the professor covers Oersted and Faraday.

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Strange Ways To Make Cold

May 4, 2026 by Maya Posch 15 Comments

Making stuff cool and keeping it that way has been a pretty essential part of human civilization for thousands of years, with only in the past few hundred years man-made methods having become available that remove the reliance on the whims of nature and lugging around massive blocks of ice. The most important cooling method is undoubtedly that of vapor-compression refrigeration, but this is hardly the only method to transfer thermal energy from one location to another.

For example, we recently covered an elastocaloric cooling project by a group of scientists that uses strips of NiTi metal. By flexing these they induce a cooling effect which when put in a number of stages serves to transfer a significant amount of thermal energy between both sides, much like a vapor-compression system but without the gases and compressor. Meanwhile the Seebeck effect is relatively well-known from Peltier thermocouple devices, and features heavily in portable refrigerators and kin where these solid-state devices can also transfer thermal energy.

Of course, along with how they function the major question with all of these cooling technologies is how efficient they are, as this determines when you’d want to even consider them for a specific application.

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Hackaday Links: May 3, 2026

May 3, 2026 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

Software that collects public data from the Internet and uses it to provide half-assed answers to your questions might seem like a modern craze, but today we bid farewell to a website that helped pioneer pretend conversations all the way back in 1997 — as of May 1st, Ask Jeeves is no more.

Well, technically they dropped the “Jeeves” part back in 2006. Since then it’s just been Ask.com, but as the name implies the idea was more or less the same. Rather than the relatively rigid parameters and keywords required by traditional search engines, you could ask Jeeves questions about the world using natural language. Early advertisements showed the virtual valet answering arbitrary questions like “How many calories in a banana?,” which of course today seems commonplace and utterly unimpressive, but was a pretty wild for the 1990s.

It might seem surprising that a site designed from day one to offer a human-like Q&A experience should fold right as such technology is becoming commonplace. But of course, that commonality is the problem. When Google can answer your questions just as well (or poorly…) as Jeeves or anyone else, what’s the benefit for the average Internet user to seek out another service? But it’s still somewhat ironic, which is probably why the farewell message on Ask.com ends with the line “Jeeves’ spirit endures.”

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