Catching The BOAT: Gamma-Ray Bursts And The Brightest Of All Time

September 18, 2024 by Dan Maloney 12 Comments

Down here at the bottom of our ocean of air, it’s easy to get complacent about the hazards our universe presents. We feel safe from the dangers of the vacuum of space, where radiation sizzles and rocks whizz around. In the same way that a catfish doesn’t much care what’s going on above the surface of his pond, so too are we content that our atmosphere will deflect, absorb, or incinerate just about anything that space throws our way.

Or will it? We all know that there are things out there in the solar system that are more than capable of wiping us out, and every day holds a non-zero chance that we’ll take the same ride the dinosaurs took 65 million years ago. But if that’s not enough to get you going, now we have to worry about gamma-ray bursts, searing blasts of energy crossing half the universe to arrive here and dump unimaginable amounts of energy on us, enough to not only be measurable by sensitive instruments in space but also to effect systems here on the ground, and in some cases, to physically alter our atmosphere.

Gamma-ray bursts are equal parts fascinating physics and terrifying science fiction. Here’s a look at the science behind them and the engineering that goes into detecting and studying them.

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2024 Hackaday Superconference Speakers, Round One

September 17, 2024 by Elliot Williams 6 Comments

Supercon is the Ultimate Hardware Conference and you need to be there! We’ve got a stellar slate of speakers this year — way too many to feature in one post. So here’s your first taste, and a reminder that Supercon will sell out so get your tickets now before it’s too late.

In addition to the full-length talks, we’ve got a series of Lightning Talks, so if you want to share seven minutes’ of insight with everyone there, please register your Lightning Talk idea now.

But Supercon has a lot more than just talks! The badge heavily features Supercon Add-Ons, and we want to see the awesome SAOs you are working on. There will be prizes, and we’ll manufacture four of our favorite designs in small batches for the winners, and make a full run for Hackaday Europe in 2025. Want to know more about SAOs? They’re the ideal starter PCB project.

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Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The (Mc)Cool Typewriter

September 16, 2024 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

A hand and wrist with a gesture detection ring and a control box on the wrist. — Image by [ambrush] via Hackaday.IO

Okay, so this isn’t a traditional keyboard, but you can probably figure out why the RuneRing is here. Because it’s awesome! Now, let me give you the finer points.

Hugely inspired by both ErgO and Somatic, RuneRing is a machine learning-equipped wearable mouse-keyboard that has a configurable, onboard ML database that can be set up to detect any gesture.

Inside the ring is a BMI160 6-axis IMU that sends gesture data to the Seeed Studio nRF52840 mounted on the wrist. Everything is powered with an 80mAh Li-Po lifted from a broken pair of earbuds.

Instead of using a classifier neural network, RuneRing converts IMU data to points in 24-dimensional space. Detecting shapes is done with a statistical check. The result is a fast and highly versatile system that can detect a new shape with as few as five samples.

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Hack On Self: Collecting Data

September 16, 2024 by Arya Voronova 11 Comments

A month ago, I’ve talked about using computers to hack on our day-to-day existence, specifically, augmenting my sense of time (or rather, lack thereof). Collecting data has been super helpful – and it’s best to automate it as much as possible. Furthermore, an augment can’t be annoying beyond the level you expect, and making it context-sensitive is important – the augment needs to understand whether it’s the right time to activate.

I want to talk about context sensitivity – it’s one of the aspects that brings us closest to the sci-fi future; currently, in some good ways and many bad ways. Your device needs to know what’s happening around it, which means that you need to give it data beyond what the augment itself is able to collect. Let me show you how you can extract fun insights from collecting data, with an example of a data source you can easily tap while on your computer, talk about implications of data collections, and why you should do it despite everything.

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Hackaday Links: September 15, 2024

September 15, 2024 by Dan Maloney 10 Comments

A quick look around at any coffee shop, city sidewalk, or sadly, even at a traffic light will tell you that people are on their phones a lot. But exactly how much is that? For Americans in 2023, it was a mind-boggling 100 trillion megabytes, according to the wireless industry lobbying association CTIA. The group doesn’t discuss their methodology in the press release, so it’s a little hard to make judgments on that number’s veracity, or the other numbers they bandy about, such as the 80% increase in data usage since 2021, or the fact that 40% of data is now going over 5G connections. Some of the numbers are more than a little questionable, too, such as the claim that 330 million Americans (out of a current estimate of 345.8 million people) are covered by one or more 5G networks. Even if you figure that most 5G installations are in densely populated urban areas, 95% coverage seems implausible given that in 2020, 57.5 million people lived in rural areas of the USA. Regardless of the details, it remains that our networks are positively humming with data, and keeping things running is no mean feat.

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This Week In Security: Malicious Rollback, WHOIS, And More

September 13, 2024 by Jonathan Bennett 4 Comments

It’s time to talk about Microsoft’s patch Tuesday, and the odd vulnerability rollback that happened. CVE-2024-43491 has caught some attention, as it’s a 9.8 on the CVSS scale, is under active exploitation, and results in Remote Code Execution (RCE). Yikes, it sounds terrible!

First off, what actually happened? The official statement is that “build version numbers crossed into a range that triggered a code defect”. We don’t know the exact details, but it’s something like an unsigned integer that was interpreted as a signed integer. A build number could have rolled over 32767, and what was intended to be 32768 or higher suddenly became −32767. Lots of “if greater than or equal” logic breaks down in that situation. Because of a logic flaw like this, certain versions of Windows 10 were unintentionally opting out of some historical security fixes.

And that’s where the high CVSS score and active exploitation descriptor comes from. This is simply the highest score of the resurgent flaws, and an acknowledgement that they have been exploited in the past. The good news is that this only applies to Windows 10 build 1507, so either the original install without any of the major updates installed, or one of the Windows 10 Enterprise Long-Term Servicing Branch (LTSB) versions. It seems that the March 2024 monthly security update introduced the problem, and it wasn’t fixed until this month’s updates. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Malicious Rollback, WHOIS, And More” →

FLOSS Weekly Episode 800: Champagning The Ladybird Browser

September 11, 2024 by Jonathan Bennett 5 Comments

This week Jonathan Bennett and Aaron Newcomb chat with Andreas Kling about Ladybird, the new browser in development from the ground up. It was started as part of SerenityOS, and has since taken on a life of its own. How much of the web works on it? How many people are working on the project? And where’s the download button? Listen to find out!

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