DuiPhone Hack

November 20, 2008 by Kimberly Lau 7 Comments

Tellart turned an iPhone into a duiPhone with its latest Sketchtools kit. Combine a 3G iPhone, an ordinary store-bought breathalyzer, and the NADA Mobile, which consists of a communication board, sensors, and actuators, and get a useful iPhone application. Blow into the mouthpiece, and the iPhone will inform you if you can safely drive, or if you should call a cab.

We’d like to find out more about the NADA Mobile, since it looks like it could be the start of a lot of fun projects. It’s the latest of Tellart’s Sketchtools line, which can only be accessed if you work with Tellart as a consultant, or if you work with them to organize a workshop for your organization.

[via Digg]

Ti-84 LED Mod

November 20, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 29 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrSJz9-ImHo]

Add lights to your graphing calculator. Do it now. [Sil3ntP8nd8] added some, and seems to have done a decent job. They are spread around the back, supplying a nice even light on, well, on whatever is under your calculator. It may be difficult to see too much detail though on account of the water marks. You have to protect your intellectual property though. This almost compares to the DS LED monstrosity we covered recently.

“Interplanetary Internet” Passes First Test

November 20, 2008 by Kimberly Lau 12 Comments

NASA just completed the first deep-space test of what could one day become the interplanetary internet. Images of Mars and its moon Phobos were sent back and forth between computers on Earth and NASA’s Epoxi spacecraft. Instead of TCP/IP a new protocol, named “Disruption/Delay Tolerant Networking” (DTN) was used. Information is only sent once with DTN, and stored at each node until another node is available to receive the information. To prevent hackers from interfering with the network, information that is transmitted over DTN is encrypted. The team at NASA is hoping to get the protocol accepted by the international community and setup a permanent node at the International Space Station next year.

[via Warren Ellis]

Professional Soldering Guide

November 19, 2008 by Eliot 25 Comments

solderguide

Curious Inventor pointed out a cache of training materials provided by IPC. IPC is a trade organization that publishes standards for producing and evaluating electronics. They’re great looking full color guides that most hobbyists will probably never get their hands on. They have low resolution video demos as well. Go snag them now in case they go away!

PSP 3000 Hacked

November 19, 2008 by Eliot 63 Comments

Peripheral manufacturer Datel has been hard at work attempting to crack the PSP 3000 since its release. They’ve developed the Lite Blue Tool battery to force the PSP into service mode so hackers can run any arbitrary code they want. According to MaxConsole, Datel performed a silicon level investigation of the PSP’s chips to determine how to break into service mode. This means they decapsulated the the chips and reverse engineered any cryptographic protections. We’d love to hear exactly what chips were being used since some are fundamentally flawed.

Silicon hacking has always been a favorite topic of ours and we suggest you check out [Chris Tarnovsky]’s decapsulation technique to learn more about it.

Clickjacking Webcast Tomorrow

November 19, 2008 by Eliot 2 Comments

[Jeremiah Grossman] and [Eric Lawrence] will be presenting on clickjacking and browser security in an online seminar tomorrow. Clickjacking allows an attacker to transparently place links exactly where a user would be clicking, essentially forcing the user to perform actions without their knowledge. This method of attack has been known for a few years, but researchers have focused their attention on it lately because they feel the threat has been underestimated. Recently, Adobe patched a vulnerability specifically because of this issue. Tune in tomorrow for more info on the attack.

SGI 10,000 Core Concept

November 19, 2008 by Eliot 19 Comments

sgi

In a bold move, Silicon Graphics has decided to see how much crap many cores they can shove in one box. The Molecule is 10,000 core rackmount machine designed to leverage low cost consumer CPUs like the Intel Atom. It emphasizes high memory bandwidth and throughput between CPUs. While this sort of space efficiency is interesting it’s certainly going to take some serious cooling to get designs like this off the ground.

[via Hacked Gadgets]