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5054 Articles

Microplastics Are Everywhere: Land, Sea And Air

November 16, 2021 by 65 Comments

Plastics took off in the 20th century, with the new class of materials finding all manner of applications that metal, wood and paper simply couldn’t deliver on. Every field from electronics to the packaging of food found that plastics could play a role.

Now, over 150 years since the development of Parkesine in 1867, we’re now realizing that plastics come with more than a few drawbacks. They don’t break down well in nature, and now microplastics are beginning to appear all over the Earth, even in places where humans rarely tread. It seems they may even spread via the air, so let’s take a look at this growing problem and what can be done about it.

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Tech In Plain Sight: Eyeglasses

November 16, 2021 by 47 Comments

Glasses wearers, try a little experiment. Take off your glasses and look at this page or, at least, at something you can’t see well without your glasses. Now imagine if you lived in a time where there was nothing to be done about your vision. If you wear contacts or you have good vision — perhaps you had surgery — then congratulations. But for most of us, vision changes with age are a fact of life. Even many young people need glasses or some other intervention to get good eyesight. At first glance, you might think eyeglasses are an obvious invention, but it turns out we didn’t get real glasses for quite some time and modern glasses are truly a piece of high tech that hides — quite literally — right in front of your face.

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Mining And Refining: Pure Silicon And The Incredible Effort It Takes To Get There

November 15, 2021 by 30 Comments

Were it not for the thin sheath of water and carbon-based life covering it, our home planet would perhaps be best known as the “Silicon World.” More than a quarter of the mass of the Earth’s crust is silicon, and together with oxygen, the silicate minerals form about 90% of the thin shell of rock that floats on the Earth’s mantle. Silicon is the bedrock of our world, and it’s literally as common as dirt.

But just because we have a lot of it doesn’t mean we have much of it in its pure form. And it’s only in its purest form that silicon becomes the stuff that brought our world into the Information Age. Elemental silicon is very rare, though, and so getting appreciable amounts of the metalloid that’s pure enough to be useful requires some pretty energy- and resource-intensive mining and refining operations. These operations use some pretty interesting chemistry and a few neat tricks, and when scaled up to industrial levels, they pose unique challenges that require some pretty clever engineering to deal with.

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Hackaday Links: November 14, 2021

November 14, 2021 by 21 Comments

If you’re an infrastructure dweeb, it’s hard to drive past an electrical substation and not appreciate the engineering involved in building something like that. A moment’s thought will also make it hard to miss just how vulnerable a substation is to attack, especially those located way out in the hinterlands. And now we’re learning that late year, someone in Pennsylvania noticed this vulnerability and acted on it by attacking a substation with a commercial drone. Rather than trying to fly explosives over the substation fence, the attacker instead chose to dangle a copper wire tether under the drone, in an attempt to cause a short circuit. The attempt apparently failed when the drone crashed before contacting any conductors, and the attacker appears to have been ignorant of the extensive protective gear employed at substations that likely would have made a successful attack only a temporary outage. But it still points to the vulnerability of the grid to even low-skill, low-cost attacks.

We’ve probably all had the experience of using someone’s janky app and thinking, “Pfft! I could write something better than this!” That’s what a bunch of parents of school-age kids in Sweden thought, and they went ahead and did exactly that. Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out quite the way they expected. The problem app was called Skolplattform, which was supposed to make it easy for Stockholm’s parents to keep track of their kids’ progress at school. The app, which cost 1 billion Swedish Krona to develop, is by all accounts a disaster. But some frustrated parents managed to reverse engineer the API and build a new, better one on top of it. This resulted in Öppna Skolplattformen, an open-source app that actually works. Not to be upstaged, the city of Stockholm accused the parents of cyber crimes and data breaches. They also engaged the parents in an “API war”, constantly changing their system to nerf the new app and forcing the parents to rewrite it. In the end, the parents won, with Stockholm changing its position after a police report found that all data being accessed were voluntarily made public by the city. But it’s still a cautionary tale about the dangers of one-upping The Man.

Sam Battles is in a bit of a moral bind, and it’s something that others in our community may run into. Sam is perhaps better known as “Look Mum, No Computer” on YouTube, and as the proprietor of the “This Museum Is (Not) Obsolete” showcase of retro technology in England. He’s also an avid builder of analog synthesizers, including a world-record synth with a thousand oscillators called the “Megadrone.” He’d like to tackle another build to try to break his own records, but in a time of fragile supply chains and other woes too numerous to mention, doing so would likely require the world’s entire supply of some components. Hence the dilemma: do any of us as hobbyists have a moral obligation to tread lightly when it comes to component selection? It’s an interesting question, and one that’s sure to engender strong opinions, which of course we encourage you to share in the comments section. Please just try to keep it civil.

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This Week In Security: Unicode Strikes, NPM Again, And First Steps To PS5 Crack

November 12, 2021 by 33 Comments

Maybe we really were better off with ASCII. Back in my day, we had space for 256 characters, didn’t even use 128 of them, and we took what we got. Unicode opened up computers to the languages of the world, but also opened an invisible backdoor. This is a similar technique to last week’s Trojan Source story. While Trojan Source used right-to-left encoding to manipulate benign-looking code, this hack from Certitude uses Unicode characters that appear to be whitespace, but are recognized as valid variable names.

const { timeout,ㅤ} = req.query;
Is actually:
const { timeout,\u3164} = req.query;

The extra comma might give you a clue that something is up, but unless you’re very familiar with a language, you might dismiss it as a syntax quirk and move on. Using the same trick again allows the hidden malicious code to be included on a list of commands to run, making a hard-to-spot backdoor.

The second trick is to use “confusable” characters like ǃ, U+01C3. It looks like a normal exclamation mark, so you wouldn’t bat an eye at if(environmentǃ=ENV_PROD){, but in this case, environmentǃ is a new variable. Anything in this development-only block of code is actually always enabled — imagine the chaos that could cause.

Neither of these are ground-breaking vulnerabilities, but they are definitely techniques to be wary of. The authors suggest that a project could mitigate these Unicode techniques by simply restricting their source code to containing only ASCII characters. It’s not a good solution, but it’s a solution. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Unicode Strikes, NPM Again, And First Steps To PS5 Crack” →

Quantum computer

Scientific Honesty And Quantum Computing’s Latest Theoretical Hurdle

November 11, 2021 by 25 Comments

Quantum computers are really in their infancy. If you created a few logic gates with tubes back in the 1930s, it would be difficult to predict all the ways we would use computers today. However, you could probably guess where at least some of the problems would lie in the future. One of the things we are pretty sure will limit quantum computer development is error correction.

As far as we know, every quantum qubit we’ve come up with so far is very fragile and prone to random errors. That’s why every practical design today incorporates some sort of QEC — quantum error correction. Of course, error correction isn’t news. We use it all the time on unreliable storage media or communication channels and high-reliability memory. The problem is, you can’t directly clone a qubit (a quantum bit), so it is hard to use traditional error correction techniques with qubits.

After all, the whole point to a qubit is we don’t measure it until the end of the computation which, like Schrödinger’s cat, seals its fate. So if you were to “read” a bunch of qubits to form a checksum or a CRC, you’d destroy their quantum nature in the process making your computer not very useful. You can’t even copy a bit to use something like triple redundancy, either. There seems to be no way to practically duplicate a qubit.

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Sulfur Hexafluoride: The Nightmare Greenhouse Gas That’s Just Too Useful To Stop Using

November 10, 2021 by 75 Comments

Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) is not nearly as infamous as CO2, with the latter getting most of the blame for anthropogenic climate change. Yet while measures are being implemented to curb the release of CO2, for SF6 the same does not appear to be the case, despite the potentially much greater impact that SF6 has. This is because when released into the atmosphere, CO2 only has a global warming potential (GWP) of 1, whereas that of methane is about 28 over 100 years, and SF6 has a GWP of well over 22,000 over that same time period.

Also of note here is that while methane will last only about 12.4 years in the atmosphere, SF6 is so stable that it lasts thousands of years, currently estimated at roughly 3,200 years. When we touched upon sulfur hexafluoride back in 2019 in the context of greenhouse gases, it was noted that most SF6 is used for — and leaks from — high-voltage switchgear (mechanical switches), transformers and related, where the gas’ inert and stable nature makes it ideal for preventing and quenching electrical arcing.

With the rapid growth of highly distributed energy production in the form of mostly (offshore) wind turbines and PV solar parks, this also means that each of these is equipped with its own (gas-filled) switchgear. With SF6 still highly prevalent in this market, this seems like an excellent opportunity to look into how far SF6 usage has dropped, and whether we may be able to manage to avert a potential disaster.

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