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The GREMLIN sensor suite contains several sensing modalities to detect, track, characterize and identify UAP in areas of interest. (Credit: US AARO)

US’s UFO-Hunting Aerial Surveillance System Detailed In Report

November 17, 2024 by 16 Comments

Formerly known as Unidentified Flying Objects, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) is a category of observations that are exactly what the UAP label suggests. This topic concerns the US military very much, as a big part of national security involves knowing everything that appears in the skies. This is the reason for the development of a new sensor suite by the Pentagon called GREMLIN. Recently, a new report has provided more details about what this system actually does.

Managed by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) within the DoD, GREMLIN blends many different sensors, ranging from radar to ADS-B and RF monitors, together to establish a baseline and capture any anomalies within the 90-day monitoring period to characterize them.

UAPs were a popular topic even before the 1950s when people began to see them everywhere. Usually taking the form of lights or fast-moving objects in the sky, most UAP reports can be readily classified as weather balloons, satellites like Starlink, airplanes, the Northern Lights, the ISS, or planets like Mars and Venus. There are also curious phenomena such as the Hessdalen lights, which appear to be a geological, piezoelectric phenomenon, though our understanding of such natural lighting phenomena remains limited.

But it is never aliens, that’s one thing we know for sure. Not that UFO’s don’t exist. Really.

Vintage telephone

World’s First Virtual Meeting: 5,100 Engineers Phoned In

November 16, 2024 by 11 Comments

Would you believe that the first large-scale virtual meeting happened as early as 1916? More than a century before Zoom meetings became just another weekday burden, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) pulled off an unprecedented feat: connecting 5,100 engineers across eight cities through an elaborate telephone network. Intrigued? The IEEE, the successor of the AIEE, just published an article about it.

This epic event stretched telephone lines over 6,500 km, using 150,000 poles and 5,000 switches, linking major hubs like Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. John J. Carty banged the gavel at 8:30 p.m., kicking off a meeting in which engineers listened in through seat-mounted receivers—no buffering or “Can you hear me?” moments. Even President Woodrow Wilson joined, sending a congratulatory telegram. The meeting featured “breakout sessions” with local guest speakers, and attendees in muted cities like Denver sent telegrams, old-school Zoom chat style.

The event included musical interludes with phonograph recordings of patriotic tunes—imagine today’s hold music, but gloriously vintage. Despite its success, this wonder of early engineering vanished from regular practice until our modern virtual meetings.

We wonder if Isaac Asimov knew about this when he wrote about 3D teleconferencing in 1953. If you find yourself in many virtual meetings, consider a one-way mirror.

This Week In Security: Hardware Attacks, IoT Security, And More

November 15, 2024 by 9 Comments

This week starts off with examinations of a couple hardware attacks that you might have considered impractical. Take a Ball Grid Array (BGA) NAND removal attack, for instance. The idea is that a NAND chip might contain useful information in the form of firmware or hard-coded secrets.

The question is whether a BGA desolder job puts this sort of approach out of the reach of most attackers. Now, this is Hackaday. We regularly cover how our readers do BGA solder jobs, so it should come as no surprise to us that less than two-hundred Euro worth of tools, and a little know-how and bravery, was all it took to extract this chip. Plop it onto a pogo-pin equipped reader, use some sketchy Windows software, and boom you’ve got firmware.

What exactly to do with that firmware access is a little less straightforward. If the firmware is unencrypted and there’s not a cryptographic signature, then you can just modify the firmware. Many devices include signature checking at boot, so that limits the attack to finding vulnerabilities and searching for embedded secrets. And then worst case, some platforms use entirely encrypted firmware. That means there’s another challenge, of either recovering the key, or finding a weakness in the encryption scheme. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Hardware Attacks, IoT Security, And More” →

The Diablo Canyon NPP in California. This thermal plant uses once-through cooling. (Credit: Doc Searls)

US DOE Sets New Nuclear Energy Targets

November 14, 2024 by 63 Comments

To tackle the growing electrification of devices, we’ll need to deploy more generation to the grid. The US Department of Energy (DOE) has unveiled a new target to triple nuclear generating capacity by 2050.

Using a combination of existing Generation III+ reactor designs, upcoming small modular and micro reactors, and “legislation like the ADVANCE Act that streamlines regulatory processes,” DOE plans to add 35 gigawatt (GW) of generating capacity by 2035 and an additional 15 GW installed per year by 2040 to hit a total capacity of 200 GW of clean, green atom power by 2050.

According to the DOE, 100 GW of nuclear power was deployed in the 1970s and 1980s, so this isn’t an entirely unprecedented scale up of nuclear, although it won’t happen overnight. One of the advantages of renewables over nuclear is the lower cost and better public perception — but a combination of technologies will create a more robust grid than an “all of your eggs in one basket” approach. Vehicle to grid storage, geothermal, solar, wind, and yes, nuclear will all have their place at the clean energy table.

If you want to know more about siting nuclear on old coal plants, we covered DOE’s report on the matter as well as some efforts to build a fusion reactor on a decommissioned coal site as well.

WAV2VGM Plays Audio Via OPL3 Synthesis

November 12, 2024 by 9 Comments

Once upon a time, computers didn’t really have enough resources to play back high-quality audio. It took too much RAM and too many CPU cycles and it was just altogether too difficult. Instead, they relied upon synthesizing audio from basic instructions to make sounds and music. [caiannello] has taken advantage of this with the WAV2VGM project.

The basic concept is straightforward enough—you put a WAV audio file into the tool, and it spits out synthesis instructions for the classic OPL3 sound card. The Python script only works with 16-bit mono WAV files with a 44,100 Hz sample rate.

Amazingly, check the samples, and you’ll find the output is pretty recognizable. You can take a song with lyrics (like Still Alive from Portal), turn it into instructions for an OPL3, and it’s pretty intelligible. It sounds… glitchy and damaged, but it’s absolutely understandable.

It’s a fun little retro project that, admittedly, doesn’t have a lot of real applications. Still, if you’re making a Portal clone for an ancient machine with an OPL3 compatible sound chip, maybe this is the best way to do the theme song? If you’re working on exactly that, by some strange coincidence, be sure to let us know when you’re done!

Minuteman ICBM Launch Tests Triple Warheads

November 12, 2024 by 75 Comments

On November 5th, the United States launched an LGM-30G Minuteman III ICBM from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Roughly 30 minutes later the three warheads onboard struck their targets 4,200 miles (6,759 km) away at the Reagan Test Site in the Marshall Islands. What is remarkable about this test is not that one of these ICBMs was fired — as this is regularly done to test the readiness of the US’ ICBMs — but rather that it carried three warheads instead of a single one.

Originally the Minuteman III ICBMs were equipped with three warheads, but in 2014 this was reduced to just one as a result of arms control limits agreed upon with Russia. This New Start Treaty expires in 2026 and the plan is to put three warheads back in the 400 operational Minuteman III ICBMs in the US’ arsenal. To this end a validation test had to be performed, yet a 2023 launch failed. So far it appears that this new launch has succeeded.

Although the three warheads in this November 5 launch were not nuclear warheads but rather Joint Test Assemblies, one of them contained more than just instrumentation to provide flight telemetry. In order to test the delivery vehicle more fully a so-called ‘high-fidelity’ JTA was also used which is assembled much like a real warhead, including explosives. The only difference being that no nuclear material is present, just surrogate materials to create a similar balance as the full warhead.

Assuming the many gigabytes of test data checks out these Minuteman III ICBMs should be ready to serve well into the 2030s at which point the much-delayed LGM-35 Sentinel should take over.

Photo manipulation of Skynet-1A hovering a planet

Britain’s Oldest Satellite On The Move: A Space Curiosity

November 11, 2024 by 9 Comments

Space and mystery always spark our curiosity, so when we stumbled upon the story of Skynet-1A, Britain’s first communication satellite from 1969, we knew it was worth exploring. The BBC recently highlighted its unexpected movement across the sky – you can check out their full coverage here. The idea that this half-century-old hunk of metal mysteriously shifted orbits leaves us with more questions than answers. Who moved Skynet-1A, and why?

Launched just months after the Apollo 11 Moon landing, Skynet-1A stood as a symbol of Cold War innovation, initially placed above East Africa to support British military communications. But unlike the silent drift of inactive satellites heading naturally eastward, Skynet-1A defied orbital norms, popping up halfway across the globe above the Americas. This wasn’t mere chance; someone or something had made it fire its thrusters, likely in the mid-1970s.

Experts like Dr. Stuart Eves and UCL’s Rachel Hill suggest the possibility of control being temporarily transferred to the US, particularly during maintenance periods at the UK’s RAF Oakhanger. Still, the specifics remain buried in lost records and decades-old international collaborations. Skynet-1A’s journey serves as a stark reminder of the persistent challenges in space and the gaps in our historical data.

Looking for more space oddities? Hackaday has some interesting articles on space debris. You can read the original BBC article here.