Los Angeles Hackaday Unconference Happening On 3/18

March 6, 2017 by Mike Szczys 3 Comments

Reserve your spot at the Los Angeles Hackaday Unconference on Saturday, March 18th. The Hackaday community is huge in LA and this event will fill up, so don’t delay.

The Unconference is a unique opportunity to decide the course of the day as it happens. Everyone who attends should be ready to stand and deliver at least eight minutes on a topic they find exciting right now. The energy this creates is the key to a level of involvement that can’t be matched at traditional conferences that have a divide between those presenting and those attending.

LA Joins Chicago and San Francisco

This announcement of the Los Angeles Hackaday Unconference joins two others happening the same day. Last week we announced San Francisco as a host location and the event is now full… but anyone in the area should still get their name on the waiting list. Four days ago we announced Chicago as the second location and that event will likely reach capacity today. [Shulie Tornel] and [Jasmine Brackett] are organizing things at the LA event which is being held at the Supplyframe Design Lab from 1 – 8 pm on 3/18.

Build Something that Matters

You can speak on any topic you want, but sometimes having a theme helps to get the ideas flowing. When considering your topic, keep Build Something that Matters in mind. Have you been looking into a technology, project, or idea that can make life a little (or a lot) better for the world? That would be an exquisite topic.

At the beginning of the day we’ll go around the room and get the talk title or subject from everyone there, then as a group we’ll hammer out a schedule for the day. As presentations progress, we encourage new impromptu talks to spring up, and can even split those off into a second talk space or discussion group. We’ll have food and drink on hand, as well as some interesting hardware to give out as door prizes.

The Hackaday Unconference is the ultimate idea and energy exchange in a crowd of your peers. You’ll have a hard time finding a cooler way to spend a Saturday this year. See you there!

Ask Hackaday: How Should Hackers Handle IP Agreements?

March 6, 2017 by Dan Maloney 82 Comments

My buddy Harold recently landed a new job at a great technology company. It came at a perfect time for him, having just been laid off from the corporate behemoth where he’d toiled away as an anonymous cog for 19 years. But the day before he was to start, the new company’s HR folks sent him some last-minute documents to sign. One was a broad and vaguely worded non-compete agreement which essentially said he was barred from working in any related industry for a year after leaving the company.

Harold was tempted not to sign, but eventually relented because one needs to put food on the table. Thankfully he’s now thriving at the new company, but his experience got me thinking about all the complications hackers face with the day jobs that so many of us need to maintain. Non-competes and non-disclosures are bad enough, but there’s one agreement that can really foul things up for a hacker: the Intellectual Property Agreement.

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An Eggcelent Eggspriment

March 5, 2017 by Michael Uttmark 52 Comments

After multiple iterations [Keef] has nailed down the fabrication process for an unusual component. Using only a heater water bath, some silicone and easily available reagents, [Keef] demonstrate how he manufactures a gastronomic enigma: the long egg.

The similarities between [Keef’s] process and the typical hacker iteration cycle are eggceptional. He starts out with a goal and iterates, modifying his methods until he gets the perfect long egg. Sound familiar? Cooking can be as much of a science as it is an art.

In his quest, [Keef] utilizes sausage casing, plastic bags, sticky tape, “lots of sweat and almost some tears” to hold eggs for cooking via an Anova Precision Cooker immersion circulator. However, [Keef] notes, the Anova is normally used for sous vide cooking so you might not have one sitting around. In that case, you can use a regular pan on a stovetop along with a digital thermometer, but you’ll have to be quite vigilant to keep the temperature steady.

But wait. Why would one want a long egg in the first place? I’ll leave this explanation to [Keef]. “Well, the main use is in a Gala Pie (a long pork pie baked in a loaf tin and often cut into slices for picnics). Or you could just slice the egg and lay it out on a platter and amaze your friends with how every slice is exactly the same size.”

Go check out [Keef’s] two videos. He has two, one that chronicles the eggciting initial attempts, and another that describes his final method. With [Keef’s] help, the number of long eggs outside of Denmark may substantially increase. But, if you’d rather have some pizza, we won’t be offended.

Reading The Unreadable SROM: Inside The PSoC4

March 4, 2017 by Elliot Williams 172 Comments

Wow. [Dmitry Grinberg] just broke into the SROM on Cypress’ PSoC 4 chips. The supervisory read-only memory (SROM) in question is a region of proprietary code that runs when the chip starts up, and in privileged mode. It’s exactly the kind of black box that’s a little bit creepy and a horribly useful target for hackers if the black box can be broken open. What’s inside? In the manual it says “The user has no access to read or modify the SROM code.” Nobody outside of Cypress knows. Until now.

This matters because the PSoC 4000 chips are among the cheapest ARM Cortex-M0 parts out there. Consequently they’re inside countless consumer devices. Among [Dmitry]’s other tricks, he’s figured out how to write into the SROM, which opens the door for creating an undetectable rootkit on the chip that runs out of each reset. That’s the scary part.

The cool parts are scattered throughout [Dmitry]’s long and detailed writeup. He also found that the chips that have 8 K of flash actually have 16 K, and access to the rest of the memory is enabled by setting a single bit. This works because flash is written using routines that live in SROM, rather than the usual hardware-level write-to-register-and-wait procedure that we’re accustomed to with other micros. Of course, because it’s all done in software, you can brick the flash too by writing the wrong checksums. [Dmitry] did that twice. Good thing the chips are inexpensive.

The nitty-gritty on the ROP (return oriented programming) tricks that [Dmitry] had to pull, and a good look into the design of the system itself, are all up on [Dmitry]’s blog. We can’t wait to see what other buried treasure he’s going to find as he continues to play around with these chips. And in case you’re wondering what type of mad genius it takes to pull this off, consider that [Dmitry] runs Linux on AVRs, fools nRF24 chips into transmitting Bluetooth LE beacons, and re-writes his own airplane’s GPS.

[Main image is a PSoC4200 dev kit, and [Dmitry] has only been working with the 4000 and 4100 series. Just so you know.]

Raiders Of The Lost OS: Reclaiming A Piece Of Polish IT History

March 3, 2017 by James Hobson 48 Comments

In today’s digital era, we almost take for granted that all our information is saved and backed up, be it on our local drives or in the cloud — whether automatically, manually, or via some other service. For information from decades past, that isn’t always the case, and recovery can be a dicey process. Despite the tricky challenges, the team at [Museo dell’Informatica Funzionante] and [mera400.pl], as well as researchers and scientists from various museums, institutions, and more all came together in the attempt to recover the Polish CROOK operating system believed to be stored on five magnetic tapes.

Originally stored at the Warsaw Museum of Technology, the tapes were ideally preserved, but — despite some preliminary test prep — the museum’s tape reader kept hanging at the 800 BPI NRZI encoded header, even though the rest of the tape was 1600 BPI phase encoding. Some head scratching later, the team decided to crack open their Qualstar 1052 tape reader and attempt to read the data directly off the circuits themselves!!

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Chicago To Host Hackaday Unconference

March 2, 2017 by Mike Szczys 41 Comments

We’re excited to announce that Chicago will play host to the Hackaday Unconference on March 18th. We are happy to expand our unconference plans to include this event at Pumping Station One from 1-8pm on 3/18.

Astute readers will notice that this is the second location we have announced this week. On Monday we shared the news that San Francisco would host an unconference. Hackaday’s [Sophi Kravitz] and [Jordan Bunker] are organizing things in SF. [Brian Benchoff], [Bob Baddeley], and [Mike Szczys] will be in Chicago for this event that takes shape based on what you find most interesting.

We’re excited that PS:One is opening their doors for us. We’ll make sure there’s food, beverage, some exciting hardware-based door prizes, and other select swag.

Hackaday Unconference is Based on You

The Hackaday Unconference is all about finding interesting talks from anyone who attends. If you go, and you definitely should, be ready to stand up and deliver eight minutes on something that you find interesting right now. The day will start by going around and asking everyone for a talk title or topic. We’ll all make a collective decision on the schedule for the day and roll with it as talks are bound to spawn extemporaneous discussion and follow up presentations that build on the most exciting of concepts. Unconferences are interactive and not bound by the traditional presenter/audience divide of a conference.

You may speak about anything you like, but it sometimes deciding what to talk about is easier if there are some constraints. Consider the theme of the Hackaday Unconference to be Build Something That Matters. You hear this a lot from us because we think it is important. There is immense talent and incredible experience found in the Hackaday community and we like to take some time in life to direct that for the good of all people. If you have an idea to direct creative energy toward high ideal, it’s likely to make a great presentation.

Soak Up the Excitement to Propel Your Next Project

Pressure is low, excitement is high, and the potential for something spontaneous and awesome to happen is palpable. The ‘here and now’ aspect of an unconference sets it apart from events where speakers, talk subjects, and slide decks are decided upon weeks ahead of time. RSVPs will fill up. Don’t miss out on this chance to jumpstart your excitement for a current project, or to discover the direction of your next adventure.

Origin Of Wireless Security: The Marconi Radio Hack Of 1903

March 2, 2017 by Richard Baguley 33 Comments

The place is the historic lecture theater of the Royal Institution in London. The date is the 4th of June 1903, and the inventor, Guglielmo Marconi, is about to demonstrate his new wireless system, which he claims can securely send messages over a long distance, without interference by tuning the signal.

The inventor himself was over 300 miles away in Cornwall, preparing to send the messages to his colleague Professor Fleming in the theater. Towards the end of Professor Flemings lecture, the receiver sparks into life, and the morse code printer started printing out one word repeatedly: “Rats”. It then spelled out an insulting limerick: “There was a young man from Italy, who diddled the public quite prettily”. Marconi’s supposedly secure system had been hacked.

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