Paged Out! Releases Long-Awaited Third Issue

December 27, 2023 by Tom Nardi 4 Comments

We’re happy to pass along word that Paged Out! has finally released Issue #3. This online zine covers a wide array of technical topics, from software development to hardware hacking, computer security, and electronics.

It’s distributed as a PDF, and is notable for its somewhat experimental format that limits each article to a single page. The first two issues were released back in 2019, but between a global pandemic and some administrative shuffling, progress on the current release was slowed considerably.

Among the 50 articles that make up the third Paged Out! there are a number of pieces focusing on hardware, such as the serial communications “cheat sheet” from [Jay Greco], and a pair of articles covering the state-of-the-art in custom keyboards. But overall the zine does lean hard into programming topics, and is probably best suited for those with an interest in software development and infosec.

Still, the line between hardware and software is getting blurrier all the time, so we’re sure you can find something in Paged Out! that should interest you no matter which side of the fence you’re on. Here’s hoping the time between releases can be reduced a bit for Issue #4.

Veteran SpaceX Booster Lost Due To Rough Seas

December 27, 2023 by Tom Nardi 44 Comments

With the notable exception of the now retired Space Shuttle orbiters, essentially every object humanity ever shot into space has been single-use only. But since December of 2015, SpaceX has been landing and refurbishing their Falcon 9 boosters, with the end goal of operating their rockets more like cargo aircraft. Today, while it might go unnoticed to those who aren’t closely following the space industry, the bulk of the company’s launches are performed with boosters that have already completed multiple flights.

This reuse campaign has been so successful these last few years that the recent announcement the company had lost B1058 (Nitter) came as quite a surprise. The 41 meter (134 foot) tall booster had just completed its 19th flight on December 23rd, and had made what appeared to be a perfect landing on the drone ship Just Read the Instructions. But sometime after the live stream ended, SpaceX says high winds and powerful waves caused the booster to topple over.

Continue reading “Veteran SpaceX Booster Lost Due To Rough Seas” →

The Tech That Died In 2023

December 25, 2023 by Al Williams 26 Comments

We don’t indulge too often in looking back, but [Chloe Albanesisu] at PC Magazine did and wrote the tech obituary for all the tech gadgets and services that died over this past year. Some of the entries are a bit predictable: Twitter died to be replaced by X, which is exactly like it, only different. Others we hardly noticed, like Netflix stopping its DVD shipments.

Google Glass died again, but this time it was the enterprise edition. Amazon gave up on both donating money through shopping and print subscriptions via Kindle.

Glass wasn’t the only Google casualty. Gmail lost its basic HTML version and shut down its smart whiteboard product, Jamboard. They also sold off their Internet domain business in an effort to focus on core businesses. Other notable Google shutdowns include their popular podcast app and Usenet support for Groups. Oh, and don’t forget their experiment in offering Pixels phones as a subscription. That’s done, too.

As you might expect, PC Magazine’s list is a bit consumer-oriented. What hacker-centric products and services vanished this year that you’ll miss? The Sculpteo Marketplace? XYZ Printing? Start up companies collapsed in 2023 at an alarming rate, but you didn’t hear about most of them. Were there any you were especially disappointed about? Let us know in the comments.

This Week In Security: Terrapin, Seized Unseized, And Autospill

December 22, 2023 by Jonathan Bennett 5 Comments

There’s a new SSH vulnerability, Terrapin (pdf paper), and it’s got the potential to be nasty — but only in an extremely limited circumstance. To understand the problem, we have to understand what SSH is designed to do. It replaces telnet as a tool to get a command line shell on a remote computer. Telnet send all that text in the clear, but SSH wraps it all inside a public-key encrypted tunnel. It was designed to safely negotiate an unfriendly network, which is why SSH clients are so explicit about accepting new keys, and alerting when a key has changed.

SSH uses a sequence counter to detect Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) shenanigans like packet deletion, replay, or reordering. That sequence isn’t actually included in the packet, but is used as part of the Message Authentication Check (MAC) of several encryption modes. This means that if a packet is removed from the encrypted tunnel, the MAC fails on the rest of the packets, triggering a complete connection reset. This sequence actually starts at zero, with the first unencrypted packet sent after the version banners are exchanged. In theory, this means that an attacker fiddling with packets in the pre-encryption phase will invalidate the entire connection as well. There’s just one problem.

The innovation from the Terrapin researchers is that an attacker with MitM access to the connection can insert a number of benign messages in the pre-encryption phase, and then silently drop the first number of messages in the encrypted phase. Just a little TCP sequence rewriting for any messages between, and neither the server nor client can detect the deception. It’s a really interesting trick — but what can we do with it?

For most SSH implementations, not much. The 9.6 release of OpenSSH addresses the bug, calling it cryptographically novel, but noting that the actual impact is limited to disabling some of the timing obfuscation features added to release 9.5.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: Terrapin, Seized Unseized, And Autospill” →

NASA’s Tech Demo Streams First Video From Deep Space Via Laser

December 19, 2023 by Maya Posch 46 Comments

Everyone knows that the most important part of a tech demo is to make the right impression, and the team over at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) definitely had this part nailed down when they showed off streaming a cat video from deep space using laser technology as part of NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communication (DSOC) program. This system consists out of a ground-based laser transmitter and receiver along with a space-based laser transceiver, which for this experiment was positioned at a distance of 31 million kilometers – 80 times the distance between the Moon and Earth – as a part of the Psyche spacecraft.

After a range of tests with the system to shake out potential issues, the team found that they could establish a 267 Mbps link, with a one-way latency of a mere 101 seconds, allowing Psyche’s transceiver to transmit the preinstalled 15-second high-definition video in effectively real-time and making the cat Taters instantly world-famous. Although the potential for space-based cat videos cannot be underestimated, the main purpose of DSOC is to allow spacecraft to send back much larger data sets than they could before.

For robotic and potential future manned missions DSOC would mean high bandwidth video and data links, enabling more science, better communication and possibly the occasional cat video during interplanetary travel.

Continue reading “NASA’s Tech Demo Streams First Video From Deep Space Via Laser” →

When Is An Engineer Not An Engineer? When He’s A Canadian Engineer

December 18, 2023 by Jenny List 218 Comments

In medieval Europe, many professions were under the control of guilds. These had a monopoly over that profession in their particular city or state, backed up with all the legal power of the monarch. If you weren’t in the guild you couldn’t practice your craft. Except in a few ossified forms they are a thing of the past, but we have to wonder whether that particular message ever reached Western Canada.

An electoral candidate with an engineering degree who practices what any sane person would call engineering, has been ordered by a judge to cease calling himself an engineer. The heinous crime committed by the candidate, one [David Hilderman], is to not be a member of the ~~guild~~ Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of B.C. We get it that maybe calling a garbage truck driver a waste collection engineer may be stretching it a little, but here in the 21st century we think the Canadian professional body should be ashamed of themselves over this case. Way to encourage people into the engineering profession!

Here at Hackaday, quite a few of us writers are engineers. Stepping outside our normal third person, I, [Jenny List], am among them. My electronic engineering degree may be a little moth-eaten, but I have practiced my craft over several decades without ever being a member of the British IEE. No offence meant to the IEE, but there is very little indeed they have to offer me. If the same is true in Canada to the extent that they have to rely on legal sanctions to protect their membership lists, then we think perhaps the problem is with them rather than Canadian engineers. You have to ask, just how is an engineering graduate who’s not a guild member supposed to describe themselves? Some of us need to know, in case we ever find ourselves on holiday in Canada!

Header: Joe Gratz, CC0.

Renewable Energy: Beyond Electricity

December 18, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 72 Comments

Perhaps the most-cited downside of renewable energy is that wind or sunlight might not always be available when the electrical grid demands it. As they say in the industry, it’s not “dispatchable”. A large enough grid can mitigate this somewhat by moving energy long distances or by using various existing storage methods like pumped storage, but for the time being some amount of dispatchable power generation like nuclear, fossil, or hydro power is often needed to backstop the fundamental nature of nature. As prices for wind and solar drop precipitously, though, the economics of finding other grid storage solutions get better. While the current focus is almost exclusively dedicated to batteries, another way of solving these problems may be using renewables to generate hydrogen both as a fuel and as a means of grid storage. Continue reading “Renewable Energy: Beyond Electricity” →