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Something’s Up In Switzerland: Explaining The B Meson News From The Large Hadron Collider

May 13, 2021 by 50 Comments

Particle physics is a field of extremes. Scales always have 10really big number associated. Some results from the Large Hadron Collider Beauty (LHCb) experiment have recently been reported that are statistically significant, and they may have profound implications for the Standard Model, but it might also just be a numbers anomaly, and we won’t get to find out for a while. Let’s dive into the basics of quantum particles, in case your elementary school education is a little rusty.

It all starts when one particle loves another particle very much and they are attracted to each other, but then things move too fast, and all of a sudden they’re going in circles in opposite directions, and then they break up catastrophically…

Continue reading “Something’s Up In Switzerland: Explaining The B Meson News From The Large Hadron Collider” →

Toyota’s Hydrogen-Burning Racecar Soon To Hit The Track

May 13, 2021 by 90 Comments

With the rise of usable electric cars in the marketplace, and markets around the world slowly phasing out the sale of fossil fuel cars, you could be forgiven for thinking that the age of the internal combustion engine is coming to an end. History is rarely so cut and dry, however, and new technologies aim to keep the combustion engine alive for some time yet.

Toyota’s upcoming Corolla Sport-based hydrogen-burning racer. Credit: Toyota media

One of the most interesting technologies in this area are hydrogen-burning combustion engines. In contrast to fuel cell technologies, which combine hydrogen with oxygen through special membranes in order to create electricity, these engines do it the old fashioned way – in flames. Toyota has recently been exploring the technology, and has announced a racecar sporting a three-cylinder hydrogen-burning engine will compete in this year’s Fuji Super TEC 24 Hour race.

Hydrogen Engines?

The benefit of a hydrogen-burning engine is that unlike burning fossil fuels, the emissions from burning hydrogen are remarkably clean. Burning hydrogen in pure oxygen produces only water as a byproduct. When burned in atmospheric air, the result is much the same, albeit with small amounts of nitrogen oxides produced. Thus, there’s great incentive to explore the substitution of existing transportation fuels with hydrogen. It’s a potential way to reduce pollution output while avoiding the hassles of long recharge times with battery electric technologies. Continue reading “Toyota’s Hydrogen-Burning Racecar Soon To Hit The Track” →

The Laser Power Record Has Been Broken

May 10, 2021 by 46 Comments

Lasers do all sorts of interesting things and — as with so many things — more is better. Korean scientists announced recently they’ve created the most powerful laser beam. 1023 watts per square centimeter, to be exact. It turns out that 1022 Watts/cm2 may not be commonplace, but has been done many times already at several facilities, including the CoReLS petawatt (PW) laser used by the researchers.

Just as improving a radio transmitter often involves antenna work instead of actual power increases, this laser setup uses an improved focus mechanism to get more energy in a 1.1 micron spot. As you might expect, doing this requires some pretty sophisticated optics.

Continue reading “The Laser Power Record Has Been Broken” →

TrueTape64 Is A PC Interface For Your C64 Datasette

May 10, 2021 by 32 Comments

Back in the distant past of the 1980s, software was distributed on audio tape. Ones and zeroes were encoded as tones of different frequencies, and tapes were decoded by specialised hardware which could then spit out raw digital data to an attached computer. While software methods now exist to simply record audio from old tapes and turn them into data, [Francesco] wanted to do it the hardware way, and built a PC interface for his Commodore 64 Datasette.

The TrueTape64, as it has been named, is built around an Atmel ATTiny2313 microcontroller. This interfaces with the original Datasette hardware which takes care of reading the analog tape output and turning it into digital data. From there, the microcontroller communicates with an FTDI232 serial-to-USB adapter to get the data into a modern PC, where it’s compiled into a TAP image file via some Python magic.

It’s a barebones build, which goes so far as to run the Datasette’s motor off the USB power supply via a boost converter; those facing issues with the tape mechanism might do well to look there first. However, it does work, and a done job is a good job at the end of the day. We’ve seen similar hacks before, too – it’s great to see the community keeping cassette software alive!

A Dutch City Gets A €600,000 Fine For WiFi Tracking

May 8, 2021 by 53 Comments

It’s not often that events in our sphere of technology hackers have ramifications for an entire country or even a continent, but there’s a piece of news from the Netherlands (Dutch language, machine translation) that has the potential to do just that.

Enschede is an unremarkable but pleasant city in the east of the country, probably best known to international Hackaday readers as the home of the UTwente webSDR and for British readers as being the first major motorway junction we pass in the Netherlands when returning home from events in Germany. Not the type of place you’d expect to rock a continent, but the news concerns the city’s municipality. They’ve been caught tracking their citizens using WiFi, and since this contravenes Dutch privacy law they’ve been fined €600,000 (about $723,000) by the Netherlands data protection authorities.

The full story of how this came to pass comes from Dave Borghuis (Dutch language, machine translation) of the TkkrLab hackerspace, who first brought the issue to the attention of the municipality in 2017. On his website he has a complete timeline (Dutch, machine translation), and in the article he delves into some of the mechanics of WiFi tracking. He’s at pains to make the point that the objective was always only to cause the WiFi tracking to end, and that the fine comes only as a result of the municipality’s continued intransigence even after being alerted multiple times to their being on the wrong side of privacy law. The city’s response (Dutch, machine translation) is a masterpiece of the PR writer’s art which boils down to their stating that they were only using it to count the density of people across the city.

The events in Enschede are already having a knock-on effect in the rest of the Netherlands as other municipalities race to ensure compliance and turn off any offending trackers, but perhaps more importantly they have the potential to reverberate throughout the entire European Union as well.

This Week In Security: BYOVD, Spectre Vx, More Octal Headaches, And ExifTool

May 7, 2021 by 16 Comments

I learned a new acronym while reading about a set of flaws in the Dell BIOS update system. Because Dell has patched their driver, but hasn’t yet revoked the signing keys from the previous driver version, it is open to a BYOVD attack.

BYOVD, Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver, is an interesting approach to Windows privilege escalation. 64-bit versions of Windows have a security feature that blocks unsigned kernel drivers from the kernel. The exploit is to load an older, known-vulnerable driver that still has valid signatures into the kernel, and use the old vulnerabilities to exploit the system. The caveat is that even when a driver is signed, it still takes an admin account to load a driver. So what use is the BYOVD attack, when it takes administrative access to pull off?

SentinelLabs is witholding their proof-of-concept, but we can speculate. The particular vulnerable driver module lives in the filesystem at C:\Windows\Temp, a location that is writable by any process. The likely attack is to overwrite the driver on the filesystem, then trigger a reboot to load the older vulnerable version. If you’re still running Windows on your Dell machines, then make sure to go tend to this issue. Continue reading “This Week In Security: BYOVD, Spectre Vx, More Octal Headaches, And ExifTool” →

Prioritising Mechanical Multiplexer

May 4, 2021 by 17 Comments

When automating almost any moderately complex mechanical task, the actuators and drive electronics can get expensive quickly. Rather than using an actuator for every motion, mechanical multiplexing might be an option. [James Bruton] has considered using it in some of his many robotics projects, so he built a prioritizing mechanical multiplexer to demonstrate the concept.

The basic idea is to have a single actuator and dynamically switch between different outputs. For his demonstration, [James] used a motor mounted on a moving platform actuated by a lead screw that can engage a number of different output gears. Each output turns a dial, and the goal is to match the position of the dial to the position of a potentiometer. The “prioritizing” part comes in where a number of outputs need to be adjusted, and the system must choose which to do first. This quickly turns into a task scheduling problem, since there are a number of factors that can be used to determine the priority. See the video after the break to see different algorithms in action.

Instead of moving the actuator, all the outputs can connect to a single main shaft via clutches as required. Possible use cases for mechanical multiplexers include dispensing machines and production line automation. Apparently, the Armatron robotic arm sold by Radioshack in the ’80s used a similar system, controlling all its functions with a single motor.

[James] knows or two about robotics, having built many of them over the last few years. Just take a look at OpenDog and his Start Wars robots. Continue reading “Prioritising Mechanical Multiplexer” →