Amazon Sidewalk: Should You Be Co-Opted Into A Private Neighbourhood LoRa Network?

November 30, 2020 by Jenny List 61 Comments

WiFi just isn’t very good at going through buildings. It’s fine for the main living areas of an average home, but once we venture towards the periphery of our domains it starts to become less reliable. For connected devices outside the core of a home, this presents a problem, and it’s one Amazon hope to solve with their Sidewalk product.

It’s a low-bandwidth networking system that uses capability already built into some Echo and Ring devices, plus a portion of the owner’s broadband connection to the Internet. The idea is to provide basic connectivity over longer distances to compatible devices even when the WiFi network is not available, but of most interest and concern is that it will also expose itself to devices owned by other people. If your Internet connection goes down, then your Ring devices will still provide a basic version of their functionality via a local low-bandwidth wide-area wireless network provided by the Amazon devices owned by your neighbours. Continue reading “Amazon Sidewalk: Should You Be Co-Opted Into A Private Neighbourhood LoRa Network?” →

Zoombombing The EU Foreign Affairs Council

November 25, 2020 by Jenny List 33 Comments

Those with security clearance are capable of making foolish mistakes, just like the rest of us. So is the story of how a Dutch journalist made an appearance on video meeting of the European Union’s Foreign Affairs Council (Dutch language, Google Translate link).

Ank Bijleveld's Tweeted picture, with the access details blacked out by Daniël Verlaan. — Netherlands Defence MInister Ank Bijleveld’s Tweeted picture, with the access details blacked out by Daniël Verlaan.

Like any other video call, if you had the link you could enter the meeting. So when Netherlands Defence Minister Ank Bijleveld Tweeted a photo of a video call last Friday, the address bar of the browser gave away the secret to anyone with a keen eye. Dutch journalist Daniël Verlaan working for the broadcaster RTL saw the URL on the screen and deduced the login credentials for the meeting.

We say “deduced”, but in fact there were five of the six digits in the PIN in the clear in the URL, leaving him with the difficult task of performing a one-digit brute-force attack and joining with the username “admin”. He joined and revealed his presence, then was admonished for committing a criminal offence before he left.

On one level it’s an opportunity for a good laugh at the expense of the defence ministers, and we certainly wouldn’t want to be Ank Bijleveld or probably the EU’s online security people once the inevitable investigation into this gets under way. It seems scarcely credible that the secrecy on such a high-security meeting could have sat upon such a shaky foundation without for example some form of two-factor authentication using the kind of hardware available only to governments.

EU policy is decided not by individual ministries but by delicate round-table summits of all 27 countries. In a pandemic these have shifted to being half-online and half in-real-life, so this EU defence ministers’ meeting had the usual mosaic video feed of politicians and national flags. And one Zoom-bombing journalist.

Circuit Boards You Can Stretch: Liquid Metal Nanomaterials Make A Strange Flex

November 19, 2020 by Dan Maloney 9 Comments

If you think polyimide-based flexible PCBs are cool, wait until you get a load of what polymerized liquid metal networks can do.

Seems like [CNLohr] has some pretty cool friends, and he recently spent some time with a couple of them who are working with poly LMNs and finding out what they’re good for. Poly LMNs use a liquid metal composed of indium and gallium that can be sprayed onto a substrate through a laser-cut stencil. This results in traces that show the opposite of expected behavior; where most conductors increase in resistance when stretched, pol LMNs stay just as conductive no matter how much they’re stretched.

The video below shows [CNLohr]’s experiments with the stuff. He brought a couple of traditional PCB-based MCU circuits, which interface easily with the poly LMN traces on a thick tape substrate. Once activated by stretching, which forms the networks between the liquid metal globules, the traces act much like copper traces. Attaching SMD components is as simple as sticking them to the tape — no soldering required. The circuits remain impressively stretchy without any apparent effect on their electrical properties — a characteristic that should prove interesting for wearables circuits, biological sensors, and a host of real-world applications.

While poly LMNs aren’t exactly ready for the market yet, they don’t seem terribly difficult to make, requiring little in the way of exotic materials or specialized lab equipment. We’d love to see someone like [Ben Krasnow] pick this up and run with it — it seems right up his alley.

Continue reading “Circuit Boards You Can Stretch: Liquid Metal Nanomaterials Make A Strange Flex” →

The Battle For Arecibo Has Been Lost

November 19, 2020 by Tom Nardi 98 Comments

It is with a heavy heart that we must report the National Science Foundation (NSF) has decided to dismantle the Arecibo Observatory. Following the failure of two support cables, engineers have determined the structure is on the verge of collapse and that the necessary repairs would be too expensive and dangerous to conduct. At the same time, allowing the structure to collapse on its own would endanger nearby facilities and surely destroy the valuable research equipment suspended high above the 300 meter dish. Through controlled demolition, the NSF hopes to preserve as much of the facility and its hardware as possible.

When the first support cable broke free back in August, we worried about what it meant for the future of this unique astronomical observatory. Brought online in 1963 as part of a Cold War project to study how ICBMs behaved in Earth’s upper atmosphere, the massive radio telescope is unique in that it has the ability to transmit as well as receive. This capability has been used to produce radar maps of distant celestial objects and detect potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids.

In 1974, it was even used to broadcast the goodwill of humankind to any intelligent lifeforms that might be listening. Known as the “Arecibo Message”, the transmission can be decoded to reveal an assortment of pictograms that convey everything from the atomic numbers of common elements to the shape of the human body. The final icon in the series was a simple diagram of Arecibo itself, so that anyone who intercepted the message would have an idea of how such a relatively primitive species had managed to reach out and touch the stars.

There is no replacement for the Arecibo Observatory, nor is there likely to be one in the near future. The Five hundred meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in China is larger than Arecibo, but doesn’t have the crucial transmission capability. The Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California can transmit, but as it’s primarily concerned with communicating with distant spacecraft, there’s little free time to engage in scientific observations. Even when it’s available for research, the largest dish in the Goldstone array is only 1/4 the diameter of the reflector at Arecibo.

Just last week we wondered aloud whether a nearly 60 year old radio telescope was still worth saving given the incredible advancements in technology that have been made in the intervening years. Now, unfortunately, we have our answer.

RadioShack To Be Reborn As Online-First Retailer

November 19, 2020 by Tom Nardi 103 Comments

The good news is that as of today RadioShack has officially been purchased by Retail Ecommerce Ventures (REV), giving the troubled company a new lease on life. The downside, at least for folks like us, is that there are no immediate plans to return the iconic electronics retailer to its brick-and-mortar roots. As the name implies, REV specializes in online retail, having previously revamped the Internet presence of other bankrupt businesses such as Pier 1 Imports and Dressbarn.

While the press release doesn’t outright preclude the possibility of new physical RadioShack locations, it’s clear that REV believes the future of retail isn’t to be found in your local strip mall. As the US mulls further lockdowns in response to the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, it’s hard to disagree. There will be millions of bored kids and adults looking for something to do during the long winter nights, and an electronic kit or two shipped to their door might be just the thing.

REV says they plan to relaunch the rather dated RadioShack website just in time for the company’s 100th anniversary in 2021. As of this writing the website currently says that sales have been temporarily halted to allow for inventory restructuring, though it’s unclear if this is directly related to the buyout or not. Getting an accurate count of how much merchandise the company still has on hand after shuttering the majority of their physical locations in 2017 certainly sounds like something the new owners would want to do.

Like most of you, we have fond memories of the Golden Age of RadioShack, back before they thought selling phones and TVs was somehow a good idea. To their credit, they did try and rekindle their relationship with hackers and makers by asking the community what they’d want to see in their stores. But we all know how that story ended. While it doesn’t look like this news will get us any closer to having a neighborhood store that stocks resistors, there’s a certain comfort in knowing that RadioShack kits and books will still be around for the next generation.

The Special Fridges Behind The COVID-19 Vaccine, Why It’s Surprisingly Difficult To Be That Cool

November 17, 2020 by Jenny List 162 Comments

One of the big stories last week was the announcement of results from clinical trials that suggest a new COVID-19 vaccine developed through the joint effort of the American and German companies Pfizer and BioNTech is strongly effective in providing immunity from the virus. In the midst of what is for many countries the second spike of the global pandemic this news has been received with elation as well as becoming the subject of much political manoeuvring.

While we currently have two vaccine candidates with very positive testing results, one of the most interesting things for us is the need to keep doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine extremely cold until they are administered. Let’s dig into details of the refrigeration problem at hand.

Continue reading “The Special Fridges Behind The COVID-19 Vaccine, Why It’s Surprisingly Difficult To Be That Cool” →

Youtube-dl Makes Their Case, Returns To GitHub

November 16, 2020 by Tom Nardi 47 Comments

Last month, the GitHub repository for the popular program youtube-dl was taken down in response to a DMCA takedown notice filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The crux of the RIAA complaint was that the tool could be used to download local copies of music streamed from various platforms, a claim they said was supported by the fact that several copyrighted music files were listed as unit tests in the repository.

While many believed this to be an egregious misrepresentation of what the powerful Python program was really used for, the RIAA’s argument was not completely without merit. As such, GitHub was forced to comply with the DMCA takedown until the situation could be clarified. Today we’re happy to report that has happened, and the youtube-dl repository has officially been reinstated.

Represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the current maintainers of youtube-dl made their case to GitHub’s DMCA agent in a letter this afternoon which explained how the tool worked and directly addressed the issue of copyrighted videos being used as test cases in the source code. They maintain that their program does not circumvent any DRM, and that the exchange between the client and server is the same as it would be if the user had viewed the resource with a web browser. Further, they believe that downloading a few seconds worth of copyrighted material for the purpose of testing the software’s functionality is covered under fair use. Even still, they’ve decided to remove all references to the songs in question to avoid any hint at impropriety.

Having worked closely with the youtube-dl developers during this period, GitHub released their own statement to coincide with the EFF letter. They explained that the nature of the RIAA’s original complaint forced their hand, but that they never believed taking down the repository was the right decision. Specifically, they point out the myriad of legitimate reasons that users might want to maintain local copies of streamed media. While GitHub says they are glad that this situation was resolved quickly, they’ll be making several changes to their internal review process to help prevent further frivolous takedowns. Specifically the company says they will work with technical and legal experts to review the source code in question before escalating any further, and that if there’s any ambiguity as to the validity of the claim, they’ll side with the developers.

The Internet was quick to defend youtube-dl after the takedown, and we’re happy to see that GitHub made good on their promises to work with the developers to quickly get the repository back online. While the nature of open source code meant that the community was never in any real danger of losing this important tool, it’s in everyone’s best interest that development of the project can continue in the open.