Hackaday Links: August 16, 2026

August 16, 2026 by Tom Nardi 2 Comments

We’re no strangers to unusual hardware failures around these parts, but even so, a swarm of jellyfish clogging up the works is a new one to us. That’s exactly what happened to the cooling system at the Gravelines nuclear power plant in France earlier this week, resulting in three reactors having to be shut down. This isn’t even an isolated incident, as POLITICO points out that the same thing actually happened last year around this same time.

So why are jellyfish staging an annual protest against nuclear power? A warming of the North Sea has extended breeding seasons and produced larger populations of the plankton that the jellyfish feed on. This is great for the gelatinous sea creatures, but not exactly ideal if you’re trying to pump the water they live in through a complex cooling system. The French installed filter screens and monitoring systems after this happened in 2025, but clearly they’re going to need to keep working on the problem.

From a new problem to a very old one, a BBC investigation has revealed that the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) Blood and Transplant department was inadvertently leaking private patient data by sending it in the clear over the pager network. Sniffing pager messages was fairly trivial decades ago, and is even easier these days thanks to the proliferation of cheap software-defined radios and open source decoding software. Given the fragility of the underlying communication network they use, the NHS announced they were going to stop using pagers by 2021, but clearly not everyone got the memo.

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Hackaday Links: August 9, 2026

August 9, 2026 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

Bad news for anyone who was hoping for some relief from the memory shortage — Digitimes is reporting that the production capacity of major players such as Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix has already been booked for 2027 due to record demand. Their industry sources indicate that what we’re experiencing currently is just a prelude to when things get really ugly, which is why customers are paying a premium to lock in their orders so far out.

Although there’s been no official word from either side of the transaction, the Digitimes article further points out that these sort of agreements are usually 3 to 5 year contracts. If that’s the case, and nothing changes in supply and demand equation, we could be in for a very rough ride. There’s a potential opportunity here for other manufacturers to step in and start producing DRAM, possibly even focusing on lower-performance offerings intended for the consumer market, but setting up those production lines isn’t going to happen overnight. It’s always possible the AI bubble could pop in the next couple of years, but we’re not sure we’d put money on it.

There’s a developing story this weekend about the breach of customer data over at Framework. The maker of modular and repairable computers has recently sent an email out to all customers that their names, email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses were leaked due to an upstream zero-day attack against database provider Metabase.

Metabase disclosed the breach on August 3rd, but we were mildly surprised to see that Framework doesn’t seem to have made any public acknowledgement of the event so far. As far as we can tell, the only reason there are copies of the email from them circulating online is because several customers posted it to social media. In their statements to sources such as TechCrunch, Framework reps were also hesitant to give hard details such as how many customers were impacted. While we’re fans of what Framework is trying to do in terms of hardware customization and repairability, we have to admit that being cagey about this sort of thing isn’t a good look.

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Hackaday Links: August 2, 2026

August 2, 2026 by Tom Nardi 2 Comments

About a month ago, we brought you word that the commercial rescue mission designed by Katalyst Space to save NASA’s Swift gamma-ray observatory had reached orbit and early indicators were looking good. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for things to start going sideways, and up until very recently, the situation seemed pretty dire. But according to an interview with Katalyst’s CEO published yesterday by Ars Technica, the company has made some impressive progress on getting things back under control.

For reasons unknown, the robotic vehicle started tumbling out of control last week. Shortly after that, mission controllers lost contact with Swift. After 24 hours without contact from the ground, the spacecraft automatically performed a sort of “hard reset” in an attempt to regain communications. That got it talking again, but somewhere along the way the craft overheated, which in turn cooked the control circuitry for the reaction wheels, which would usually be used to control its orientation. Not great, not terrible.

As of yesterday’s update, we now know that engineers have figured out a way to gimbal the thrust from the craft’s xenon-fueled electric thrusters — which were originally intended for orbit-raising — to counteract its spinning. It’s slow going as these thrusters don’t have a lot of kick, but it seems to be working. We’ll keep an eye on this one and let you know when we know more.

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Hackaday Links: July 26, 2026

July 26, 2026 by Tom Nardi 15 Comments

At a time when so-called “artificial intelligence” seems inescapable, we were encouraged to see news that Amazon will be cracking down on third-party sellers that use AI-generated images for their product listings. They won’t be prevented from using the images, but they will need to clearly indicate that they don’t represent reality and were produced via artificial means. This comes in response to a recently enacted New York law that requires the disclosure of AI in advertisements.

Will this be the end of the cat sleeping bag?

But it’s not quite a clear cut as it might seem on the surface, as the New York law is actually about AI-generated people rather than products. Specifically, it’s designed to make it clear when a “synthetic performer” has been used in place of a human actor. As such, it would appear that the easiest way for Amazon sellers to dodge the new rule is to simply not include any humans in their AI slop images and videos. In other words, they can continue to post fake pictures of products without having to inform the consumer so long as they don’t show a fake person holding it.

Under normal circumstances we’d leave something like this next one for our weekly security column, but the utter lack of security in the Pope’s official “Click To Pray” mobile application revealed by researcher BobDaHacker on Friday is just too good a story to pass up. For one thing, who knew that there was an “official” prayer app? We don’t dabble in theology around these parts, but we’re fairly sure the good book didn’t mention anything about requiring a smartphone to give praise.

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Hackaday Links: July 19, 2026

July 19, 2026 by Tom Nardi 6 Comments

We’ll start this week off by giving our congratulations to Skyroot Aerospace of India for successfully launching the country’s first privately developed orbital rocket yesterday. The company’s Vikram-1 booster stands 24 m (79 ft) tall and uses a somewhat unusual four-stage arrangement, with the first three stages using solid propellant and the final liquid-fueled stage being responsible for putting the payload into a precise orbit. With this successful launch, India becomes only the third country in the world with a private company capable of performing orbital launches.

Generally, the rocket should be moving when the countdown hits zero.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have SpaceX’s prototype Starship, which elected not to leave Earth during a last-second (literally) launch termination on Thursday. Aborted launches are, of course, nothing new in the world of rocketry, especially when dealing with an in-development vehicle that has 33 engines that need to fire up at the same moment before it can leave the pad. But this dramatic abort was unique as it was the first time lift-off of the massive 124.4 meter (408 ft) rocket had been called off when the engines were already running.

Onboard systems took advantage of the very narrow window between the time the Raptor engines are switched on and the rocket actually leaves the launchpad to decide that it was not a good day to visit space after all. Word from SpaceX is that two of the Raptor engines on the first stage will be replaced and that they should be ready to make another launch attempt sometime this upcoming week.

While getting rockets off the ground is never easy, one thing that seems to have no trouble going up is the price of gasoline. Even still, Americans seem largely uninterested in electric vehicles, or at the very least, the slate of EVs that are currently available to them — especially now that the $7,500 federal tax credit has ended. Yesterday, TechCrunch ran an article about all the EVs that have exited the US market over the last year due to stagnant sales or import difficulties, and it’s quite a list.

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Hackaday Links: July 12, 2026

July 12, 2026 by Tom Nardi 14 Comments

Although we’d rather bring you news of clever modifications and repairs down on the farm, more often than not, the name “John Deere” has appeared on the pages of Hackaday because of their opposition to farmers actually being able to work on the machines their livelihoods depend on. But thanks to a settlement reached between the company and the Federal Trade Commission this week, farmers seem to have been handed a much-needed win in the Right to Repair battle.

When a lawsuit against a company ends in a settlement, it usually means spending money they would rather pay than go to court. Indeed, earlier cases against John Deere have resulted in plenty of checks being written. But this time around, the FTC agreement requires Deere to make its diagnostic and repair software available to owners and independent shops. It also has a clause that prevents them from retaliating against owners who want to handle their own repairs rather than going through the company’s official service channels — hard to believe that’s something that actually needs to be specified, but it does give you a hint as to just how bad the situation has been. We’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this story.

Sounds like the Feds were busy this week, as the Federal Communications Commission also gave the green light to Reflect Orbital to launch a prototype satellite for their controversial “sunlight as a service” concept. The company plans to put the spacecraft into a roughly 600 km orbit around the planet, where it will deploy its 324-square-meter reflector and angle itself to illuminate a spot on the ground. It might sound like something a Bond villain would come up with, but Reflect Orbital says the capability will be used to beam sunlight directly onto solar panels at night and to provide light for search-and-rescue operations.

As you might expect, providing such a service on a global scale would require many such reflectors, which is where the concern really comes in. Critics note that a sky full of literal mirrors can cause all sorts of issues, ranging from the scientific to the scenic. The American Astronomical Society points out that each satellite in the constellation could appear to be four times as bright as the full Moon, and that it’s possible an amateur sky watcher could get an eyeball full of redirected sunlight should one of them unexpectedly zip past the aperture of their backyard telescope.

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Hackaday Links: July 5, 2026

July 5, 2026 by Tom Nardi 8 Comments

Happy belated July 4th to all the readers from the United States — hopefully you aren’t reading this from a hospital bed after losing a hand or burning off your eyebrows. While we suspect amateur firework shows and their related injuries will be around for many years to come, we did note that many major cities switched over to drone shows this year.

At least on paper, the appeal is obvious. Beyond the fact that drones are safer and quieter than pyrotechnics, they’re also capable of far more complex displays. Good luck trying to draw George Washington’s face in the sky with exploding rockets. But even if it’s a little more than nostalgia, there’s still something about the sights and sounds of fireworks that enthrall audiences. For many, the whole “rockets’ red glare” thing is a bit more meaningful than the “drones’ red LEDs.”

Earlier this week, we brought you news that Sony would stop producing physical PlayStation discs in January 2028. Many gamers are understandably concerned about the long-term implications such a move will have for software ownership, and while the negative reactions online haven’t bothered Sony enough to get them to amend their plans, they have clarified the situation with developers by explaining that games published before the cutoff date aren’t impacted. So if a developer has a hit title that drops in the summer of 2027 and they want to keep cranking out discs, additional orders can still be placed. Not much of a reprieve, but it will give the community a little more time to figure out what comes next.

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