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Hackaday Links: April 26, 2026

April 26, 2026 by 6 Comments

It’s been three weeks since the Artemis II crew returned to Earth, and while the mission might be over for Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Hammock Koch, and Jeremy Hansen, the work is only just beginning for engineers back at NASA. In a blog post earlier this week, the space agency went over the preliminary post-mission assessments of the spacecraft and its ground support equipment, and detailed some of the work that’s currently taking place as preparations begin for Artemis III.

During Artemis I, higher than expected damage was noted on both the Orion’s heat shield and the Space Launch System (SLS) launch pad. But according to NASA, the changes implemented after that first mission seem to have prevented similar issues this time around. The post also explains that reusable components of the Orion spacecraft, such as the avionics and the crew seats, are already in the process of being removed from Integrity so they can be installed in the next capsule on the production line.

While watching the live stream of the Artemis mission is the closest most of us will ever get to experiencing spaceflight, that doesn’t mean you can’t explore the solar system from the comfort of your own home — or more specifically, your browser. [Sani Huttunen] has created an incredible web-based solar system simulator that lets you explore our celestial neighborhood throughout different periods of time. You can tour the moons of Jupiter, see how the planets aligned on the date of your birth, and even check in on the Voyager probes. There are some very valid reasons to be skeptical about software moving to the web, but we’ve got to admit, this is a very slick demonstration of just how far modern browsers have come.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 367: Radioactive Weather, Continuous Pickles, And Moon Junk

April 24, 2026 by 5 Comments

When Elliot Williams and Al Williams compare their notes on the week in Hackaday, you know you’ll get at least one or two bad puns. How bad? Tune in and find out.

This week, Tom Nardi visits several in-person events, and Elliot and Al talk about smart buttons, Itanium, ejecting things from a rocket, and the infinite pickle. Will Elliot build the coin flipper? Will Al use plasma at his next cookout? Hard to say.

For the can’t miss articles, this week, Al swept the category with a post on splices and another on what human junk is still sitting on the moon.

What do you think? Leave us a comment or record something and send it to our mailbag.

Download a copy of the podcast with an MP3 from our continuous audio pipeline.

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This Week In Security: Annoyed Researchers, Dangling DNS, And Hacks That Could Have Been Worse

April 24, 2026 by 13 Comments

The author of the BlueHammer exploit, which was released earlier this month and addressed in the last Patch Tuesday, continues to be annoyed with the responses from the Microsoft security research and vulnerability response team, and has released another Windows zero-day attack against Windows Defender.

The RedSun exploit targets a logic and timing error in Windows Defender, convincing it to install the target file in the system, instead of quarantining the file and protecting the system. Not, generally, what you would hope would happen.

Since the RedSun attack requires local access in the first place, it seems unlikely Microsoft will release an out-of-sequence patch for it, however with public code available, we can probably expect to see malware leveraging it to establish higher permissions on an infected system.

Releasing exploits out of spite feels like a return to the late 1990s, and I almost don’t hate it.

University Domains Hijacked

Reported in Bleeping Computer, a group tracked as “Hazy Hawk” has been hijacking unmaintained DNS records of universities and government institutions to serve ad click spam.

The attack seems simple and doesn’t even require compromising the actual institution, using dangling DNS “CNAME” records. A “CNAME” entry in DNS acts essentially as an alias, pointing one domain name at another, which can be used to provide content from an official domain that is hosted on a cloud service where the IP address of the service might change.

A DNS “A” (or “AAAA” if you speak IPv6) record points a hostname – like “foo.example.com” – to an IP address – like “1.1.1.1”. A “CNAME” record points a hostname to another hostname, like “foo.some_cloud_host.com”. Scanning “high value” domains (like Ivy League universities) for “CNAME” records which point to expired domains (or domains on cloud hosted providers which no longer exist) lets anyone able to register that domain (or create an account with the proper naming scheme on the cloud host) to post any content they wish, and still appear to be the original name.

At least 30 educational institutions have been impacted, along with several government agencies including the CDC.

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VCF East And Maker Faire Make For A Busy Weekend

April 23, 2026 by 15 Comments

For those of us with an interest in hacking and making, events where we can meet up with like minded folks and check out the projects they’re working on don’t exactly happen every day. Unless you’re able to travel around the country (or even better, the world), you usually have to make do with the handful of annual events that are within a reasonable distance of your home. If you’re lucky that may give you two or three opportunities during the year to look forward to, generally spaced out enough that you’ve got adequate time to prepare ahead of the event and decompress afterwards.

But occasionally, the planets and geekdoms align. Such was the case this past weekend in the Northeastern United States, with Vintage Computer Festival East and the Philadelphia Maker Faire taking place simultaneously. Both are established must-see events for their respective communities and cover roughly the same geographical area, so if you happened to have a foot in each camp, this presented quite a difficult decision.

That is unless you took the third option. As the Philly Maker Faire was on Sunday and VCF took place over the span of the whole weekend, there was a narrow path to attend both events. It wouldn’t be ideal, of course. For one thing it would mean speed running VCF East, and there was a couple hundred miles of travel to contend with. We won’t even talk about the physical toll incurred — while there doesn’t appear to be any official dosage recommendation from the Surgeon General, surely this level of exposure to non-conforming technologists carries with it some risks.

But sometimes such sacrifices must be made, especially if you’re being paid to make them. So I packed up twice the normal number of Wrencher stickers, and hit the road in an effort to deliver a condensed version of my experience at these two fantastic events.

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 868: Remove The Noodles

April 22, 2026 by 1 Comment

This week Jonathan chats with Johannes Millan about Super Productivity and Parallel Code! Those are two very different projects, but both aiming for helping us get our work done. Super Productivity is a scheduling and time tracking suite, while Parallel Code is an almost-IDE for managing and isolating AI coding agents. This episode has something for everybody, so check it out!

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AI For The Skeptics: The Universal Function For Some Things Only

April 22, 2026 by 29 Comments

It’s a phrase we use a lot in our community, “Drink the Kool-Aid”, meaning becoming unreasonably infatuated with a dubious idea, technology, or company. It has its origins in 1960s psychedelia, but given that it’s popularly associated with the mass suicide of the followers of Jim Jones in Guyana, perhaps we should find something else. In the sense we use it though, it has been flowing liberally of late with respect to AI, and the hype surrounding it. This series has attempted to peer behind that hype, first by examining the motives behind all that metaphorical Kool-Aid drinking, and then by demonstrating a simple example where the technology does something useful that’s hard to do another way. In that last piece we touched upon perhaps the thing that Hackaday readers should find most interesting, we saw the LLM’s possibility as a universal API for useful functions.

It’s Not What An LLM Can Make, It’s What It Can Do

When we program, we use functions all the time. In most programming languages they are built into the language or they can be user-defined. They encapsulate a piece of code that does something, so it can be repeatedly called. Life without them on an 8-bit microcomputer was painful, with many GOTO statements required to make something similar happen. It’s no accident then that when looking at an LLM as a sentiment analysis tool in the previous article I used a function GetSentimentAnalysis(subject,text) to describe what I wanted to do. The LLM’s processing capacity was a good fit to my task in hand, so I used it as the engine behind my function, taking a piece of text and a subject, and returning an integer representing sentiment. The word “do” encapsulates the point of this article, that maybe the hype has got it wrong in being all about what an LLM can make. Instead it should be all about what it can do. The people thinking they’ve struck gold because they can churn out content slop or make it send emails are missing this. Continue reading “AI For The Skeptics: The Universal Function For Some Things Only” →

What Have We Dumped On The Moon?

April 22, 2026 by 56 Comments

If you read a headline that signs of intelligent life were found on the moon, you might suspect a hoax. But they are there! Humans have dumped a lot of stuff on the moon, both in person and via uncrewed rockets. So after the apocalypse, what strange things will some alien exo-archaeologist find on our only natural satellite?

The Obvious

Of course, we’ve left parts of rockets, probes, and rovers. Only the top part of the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module left the moon. (See for yourself in the Apollo 17 ascent video below.) The bottoms are still there, along with the lunar rovers and a bunch of other science instruments and tools. There are boots and cameras, as you might expect.

But what about the strange things? As of 2012, NASA compiled a list of all known lunar junk that originated on Earth. The list starts with material from the non-Apollo US programs like the Surveyor and Lunar Prospector missions. Next up is the Apollo stuff, which is actually quite a bit: an estimated 400,000 pounds, we’ve heard. This ranges from the entire descent stage and lunar overshoes to urine bags. There are even commemorative patches and a gold olive branch.

After that, the list shows what’s known to be on the surface from the Russian space program, along with objects of Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and European origin.

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