News

3649 Articles

Give Your Projects A Retro Tint With This 8051-based Arduino Uno

February 5, 2024 by 37 Comments

Most of us are familiar with the Arduino Uno, a starting place for electronics projects since 2010. But what if the Arduino Uno was released in 1980? You’d probably get something like [ElectroBoy]’s 8051-based Arduino Uno.

28-pin DIP integrated circuit with a window revealing the die
Close-up shot of the 87C752, an 8051 with EPROM

The Arduino Uno-compatible board has an MCS-51 (often called 8051 instead) instead of the usual ATmega328P/ATmega168. Specifically, [ElectroBoy] uses the AT89S52. Like the ATmega microcontrollers, the AT89S52 has an 8-bit CPU with a Harvard architecture and very similar GPIO capabilities. Unlike the ATmega, however, the original MCS-51 has a CISC CPU (as opposed to ATmega being RISC) and a release date about 36 years earlier.

The board itself also has some differences from the original Arduino Uno. First of all, it has a USB type-C port, which is definitely a bonus. Secondly, it’s simpler: No USB-UART (which also means no USB programming), a different pin layout (Arduino shields likely won’t fit) and more I/Os than the ATmegas have. Sure, it’s not as practical as an actual Arduino Uno, but it’s definitely cool for our retrocomputing nerds.

Hackaday Europe 2024 Is On, And We Want You!

February 5, 2024 by 21 Comments

Hackaday Europe is on again for 2024, and we couldn’t be more excited! If you’re a European hacker, and have always wanted to join us up for Supercon in the states, here’s your chance to do so without having to set sail across the oceans. It’s great to be able to get together with our continental crew.

Just like last time, we’ll be meeting up in Berlin at Motionlab, Bouchestrasse 12 for a weekend of talks and workshops. On paper, the event runs April 13th and 14th, but if you’re in town on Friday the 12th, we’ll be going out for drinks and socializing beforehand. Saturday starts up at 9 AM and is going to be full of presentations, with food throughout and our own mix of hacking and music running until 2 AM. Sunday starts up a little bit later with brunch and as many lightning talks as we can fit into the afternoon.

And as always, we want you to bring a project or two along to show and tell. Half the fun of an event like this, where everyone is on the same wavelength, is the mutual inspiration that lurks in nearly every random conversation. It’s like Hackaday, but in real life!

So without further ado: get your tickets right here! We have a limited number of early-bird tickets at $70, and then the remainder will go on sale for $142 (plus whatever fees).

Call for Participation

So who is going to be speaking at Hackaday Europe? You could be! We’re also opening up the Call for Participation right now, both for talks and for workshops. Whether you’ve presented your work live before or not, you’re not likely to find a more appreciative audience for epic hacks, creative constructions, or you own tales of hardware, firmware, or software derring-do.

Workshop space is limited, but if you want to teach a group of ten or so people your favorite techniques or build up a swarm of small robots, we’d love to hear from you.

All presenters get in free, of course, and we’ll give you an early-bird price even if we can’t fit you into the schedule. So firm up what you’d like to share, and get your proposal in before Feb 22.

The Badge

Part of the fun of an event like this is sharing what you’re working on with a rare like-minded crowd. True story: we came into last year’s Hackaday Berlin event with a raw idea for our own Superconference badge, that we needed to have done by November. Talks with [Schneider] about the lovely badge for the Chaos Communications Camp inspired us to use those sweet round screens, and a chat with [Stefan Holzapfel] convinced us of the possibility to run an audio DAC at DC.

So it’s fitting that we’ll be bringing the Vectorscope badge to Berlin, with some new graphics of course. If you didn’t catch it at Supercon, it’s a emulation of an old-timey X-Y mode oscilloscope and a DAC to drive it in software. Folks had a great time hacking it at Supercon, and you will too. It’s analog, it’s digital, and it’s got room for a lot of art. We’d love to see what you bring to it!

Thanks and See You Soon!

Of course, we can’t put on an event like this without help from our fantastic sponsors, so we’d like to say thanks to DigiKey for sponsoring not only the stateside Superconference, but also Hackaday Europe 2024. And as always, thanks to Supplyframe for making it all possible.

April is coming up fast, so get your proposals in and order your tickets now! We can’t wait to see you all.

Will There Be Any Pi Left For Us?

February 2, 2024 by 72 Comments

Our world has been abuzz with the news that Raspberry Pi are to float on the London Stock Exchange. It seems an obvious move for a successful and ambitious company, and as they seem to be in transition from a maker of small computers into a maker of chips which happen to also go on their small computers, they will no doubt be using the float to generate the required investment to complete that process.

New Silicon Needs Lots Of Cash

An RP1 chip on a Raspberry Pi 5.
The most important product Raspberry Pi have ever made.

When a tech startup with immense goodwill grows in this way, there’s always a worry that it could mark the start of the decline. You might for instance be concerned that a floated Raspberry Pi could bring in financial whiz-kids who let the hobbyist products wither on the vine as they license the brand here and there and perform all sorts of financial trickery in search of shareholder value and not much else. Fortunately we don’t think that this will be the case, and Eben Upton has gone to great lengths to reassure the world that his diminutive computers are safe. That is however not to say that there might be pitfalls ahead from a hobbyist Pi customer perspective, so it’s worth examining what this could mean.

As we remarked last year, the move into silicon is probably the most important part of the Pi strategy for the 2020s. The RP2040 microcontroller was the right chip with the right inventory to do well from the pandemic shortages, and on the SBCs the RP1 all-in-one peripheral gives them independence from a CPU house such as Broadcom. It’s not a difficult prediction that they will proceed further into silicon, and it wouldn’t surprise us to see a future RP chip containing a fully-fledged SoC and GPU. Compared to their many competitors who rely on phone and tablet SoCs, this would give the Pi boards a crucial edge in terms of supply chain, and control over the software.

Continue reading “Will There Be Any Pi Left For Us?” →

This Week In Security: Glibc, Ivanti, Jenkins, And Runc

February 2, 2024 by 4 Comments

There’s a fun buffer overflow problem in the Glibc __vsyslog_internal() function. This one’s a real rollercoaster, because logging vulnerabilities are always scary, but at a first look, it seems nearly impossible to exploit. The vulnerability relies on a very long program name, which can overflow an internal buffer. No binaries are going to have a name longer than 1024 bytes, so there’s no problem, right?

Let’s talk about argv. That’s the list of arguments that gets passed into the main() function of every Linux binary when it launches. The first string in that list is the binary name — except that’s a convention, and not particularly enforced anywhere. What really happens is that the execve() system call sets that list of strings. The first argument can be anything, making this an attacker-controlled value. And it doesn’t matter what the program is trying to write to the log, because the vulnerability triggers simply by writing the process name to a buffer.

There is a one-liner to test for a vulnerable Glibc:

exec -a "`printf '%0128000x' 1`" /usr/bin/su < /dev/null

and the Qualys write-up indicates that it can be used for an escalation of privilege attack. The good news is this seems to be a local-only attack. And on top of that, a pair of other lesser severity issues were found and fixed in glibc while fixing this one.
Continue reading “This Week In Security: Glibc, Ivanti, Jenkins, And Runc” →

This Time It’s Toyota: Takata Airbag Recalls Continue

February 1, 2024 by 22 Comments

The automotive industry is subject to frequent product recalls, as manufacturers correct defects in their vehicles that reveal themselves only after some use. While such events may be embarrassing for a marque, it’s not necessarily a bad thing — after all, we would rather put our trust in a carmaker prepared to own up and fix things rather than sweep their woes under the carpet.

There’s one recall that’s been going on for years which isn’t the vehicle manufacturer’s fault though, and now it seems Toyota are the latest to be hit, with some vehicles as old as two decades being part of it. Long time Hackaday readers will probably recognize where this is going as we’ve covered it before; at its centre are faulty airbag charges from Takata, and the result has been one of the largest safety related recalls in automotive history.

An automotive airbag is a fabric structure inflated at high speed by a small explosive charge when triggered by the sharp deceleration of an incident. It is intended to cushion any impact the occupant might make upon the car’s interior. The problem with the faulty Takata units is that moisture ingress could alter the properties of the charge, and this along with corrosion could increase its power and produce a hail of metal fragments on detonation.

Our colleague [Lewin Day] has penned a series of informative and insightful investigations of the technology behind the Takata scandal, going back quite a few years. With such relatively ancient vehicles now being recalled we can’t help wondering whether it would be easier for Toyota to run a buyback scheme and take the cars off the road rather than fix them in this case, but we’re curious as non automotive safety engineers why the automotive airbag has evolved in this manner. Why is one of very few consumer explosive devices not better regulated, why is it sold with an unlimited lifetime, and why are they not standardized for routine replacement on a regular schedule just like any other vehicle consumable?

2003-2004 Toyota Corolla: IFCAR, Public domain.

Roman Dodecahedrons: A Mystifying Archaeological Find

January 29, 2024 by 122 Comments

Much about archaeology can be described as trying to figure out the context in which objects and constructions should be interpreted. A good example of this are the metal dodecahedrons (twelve-sided shape) which have been found during archaeological excavations at former Roman sites. Since 1739 over 115 of them have been recorded, most recently a fully intact copper specimen found near the Lincolnshire village of Norton Disney during the Summer of 2023 by a local group of archaeologists.

Two ancient Roman bronze dodecahedrons and an icosahedron (3rd c. AD) in the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Bonn, Germany. (Credit: Kleon3, Wikimedia)
Two ancient Roman bronze dodecahedrons and an icosahedron (3rd c. AD) in the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Bonn, Germany. (Credit: Kleon3, Wikimedia)

As the Norton Disney History and Archaeology Group notes on their page, this is the 33rd example of one of these items found in what was once Roman Britain, lending credence to the idea that such dodecahedrons originated within the Gallo-Roman culture.

As for the objects themselves, the ones so far found were dated to between the 2nd and 4th century CE, are all made out of some kind of metal alloy (e.g. bronze), are usually a dodecahedron but sometimes different (e.g. an icosahedron with 20 faces), yet all are hollow and usually with a single large hole in each face. The dodecahedron found at Norton Disney was analyzed to consist out of 75% copper, 7% tin and 18% lead, with a width of 8.6 cm and weighing in at 254 grams.

Continue reading “Roman Dodecahedrons: A Mystifying Archaeological Find” →

This Week In Security: MOAB, Microsoft, And Printers

January 26, 2024 by 15 Comments

This week, news has broken of the Mother of All Breaches, MOAB. It’s 12 terabytes and 26 billion records, averaging about 500 bytes each. Now note that a record here is likely not a discrete email address, but simply a piece of data — a row on the database.

Now before we all lose our minds over this, there’s an important detail to take note of: These aren’t new leaks. This is a compilation of leaks, and as far as researchers have checked, there aren’t any new leaks disclosed here. This was someone’s database of accumulated leak data, accidentally re-leaked via an unsecured database. [Troy Hunt] goes so far as to speculate that it could be from a breach search service, which sounds pretty plausible.

There was yet another release of credentials late last week that hasn’t attracted as much attention, but seems to represent a much bigger issue. The Naz.api data set isn’t a breach where a company was hacked, and their entire user database was stolen. Instead, this one is combination of a credential stuffing list and stealer logs.

Credential stuffing is basically a smarter brute force attack, where the credentials from one breach are tried on multiple other sites. Such a list is just the results where guesses were successful. The really interesting bit is that this dataset seems to include stealer logs. Put simply, that’s the results of malware that scrapes victim machines for credentials.

Naz.api has over 70 million unique email addresses, and it looks like about a third of them are new, at least according to the Haveibeenpwned dataset. Now that’s significant, though not really worthy of the MOAB title, either. Continue reading “This Week In Security: MOAB, Microsoft, And Printers” →