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

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Wafer-Thin Keyboard

May 19, 2025 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

The mikecinq, an incredibly slim keyboard. — Image by [dynam1keNL] via reddit

But sir! I can’t believe I missed [dynam1keNL]’s initial flat offering from about a year ago, the mikefive, which came about when he and some friends ordered switches directly from Kailh and Kailh were like, do you want to try these even lower-profile PG1316 laptop switches? It’s called the mikefive because it’s 5 mm thick.

That’s okay, though, because now you’re caught up and I can talk about his latest keyboard, the mikecinq. The inspiration for this one includes the aesthetics of Le Chiffre and the slimness of Le Oeuf. As you’ll see in the gallery, the top is ever-so-slightly slanted downward from the top.

You can see it really well in the second picture — the top row is flush with the case, and the keys gradually get taller toward the thumb clusters. All [dynam1keNL] really had to do was 3D model the new case and screw in the PCB from his daily driver mikefive.

[dynam1keNL] ultimately found it nice and comfy, especially for the thumbs, but decided to take it one step further and designed a new switch footprint. Why? The PG1316s are surface-mount with contacts below the switch, so you really need a hotplate or oven to mount them.

So in order to deal with this, he made a dedicated mikecinq PCB with big cutouts with castellated holes beneath each switch. Now, the switch contacts are accessible from underneath and can be soldered with an iron.

You may have noticed that the mikefive production files are not available on GitHub — that’s because it was recently licensed and will be available soon. But if you want production files for the mikecinq, let him know in the comments.

Continue reading “Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Wafer-Thin Keyboard” →

Remembering The ISP That David Bowie Ran For Eight Years

May 19, 2025 by Lewin Day 14 Comments

The seeds of the Internet were first sown in the late 1960s, with computers laced together in continent-spanning networks to aid in national defence. However, it was in the late 1990s that the end-user explosion took place, as everyday people flocked online in droves.

Many astute individuals saw the potential at the time, and rushed to establish their own ISPs to capitalize on the burgeoning market. Amongst them was a famous figure of some repute. David Bowie might have been best known for his cast of rock-and-roll characters and number one singles, but he was also an internet entrepreneur who got in on the ground floor—with BowieNet.

Continue reading “Remembering The ISP That David Bowie Ran For Eight Years” →

Hackaday Links: May 18, 2025

May 18, 2025 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

Say what you want about the wisdom of keeping a 50-year-old space mission going, but the dozen or so people still tasked with keeping the Voyager mission running are some major studs. That’s our conclusion anyway, after reading about the latest heroics that revived a set of thrusters on Voyager 1 that had been offline for over twenty years. The engineering aspects of this feat are interesting enough, but we’re more interested in the social engineering aspects of this exploit, which The Register goes into a bit. First of all, even though both Voyagers are long past their best-by dates, they are our only interstellar assets, and likely will be for centuries to come, or perhaps forever. Sure, the rigors of space travel and the ravages of time have slowly chipped away at what these machines can so, but while they’re still operating, they’re irreplaceable assets.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: May 18, 2025” →

Open Source Hiding In Plain Sight

May 17, 2025 by Elliot Williams 21 Comments

On the podcast, [Tom] and I were talking about the continuing saga of the libogc debacle. [Tom] has been interviewing some of the principals involved, so he’s got some first-hand perspective on it all – you should really go read his pieces. But the short version is that an old library that many Nintendo game emulators use appears to have cribbed code from both and open-source real-time operating system called RTEMS, and the Linux kernel itself.

You probably know Linux, but RTEMS is a high-reliability RTOS for aerospace. People in the field tell me that it’s well-known in those circles, but it doesn’t have a high profile in the hacker world. Still, satellites run RTEMS, so it’s probably also a good place to draw inspiration from, or simply use the library as-is. Since it’s BSD-licensed, you can also borrow entire functions wholesale if you attribute them properly.

In the end, an RTOS is an RTOS. It doesn’t matter if it’s developed for blinking LEDs or for guiding ICBMs. This thought got [Tom] and I to thinking about what other high-reliability open-source code is out there, hidden away in obscurity because of the industry that it was developed for. NASA’s core flight system came instantly to mind, but NASA makes much of its code available for you to use if you’re interested. There are surely worse places to draw inspiration!

What other off-the-beaten-path software sources do you know of that might be useful for our crowd?

ChatGPT & Me. ChatGPT Is Me!

May 16, 2025 by Jenny List 64 Comments

For a while now part of my email signature has been a quote from a Hackaday commenter insinuating that an article I wrote was created by a “Dumb AI”. You have my sincerest promise that I am a humble meatbag scribe just like the rest of you, indeed one currently nursing a sore shoulder due to a sporting injury, so I found the comment funny in a way its writer probably didn’t intend. Like many in tech, I maintain a skepticism about the future role of large-language-model generative AI, and have resisted the urge to drink the Kool-Aid you will see liberally flowing at the moment.

Hackaday Is Part Of The Machine

As you’ll no doubt be aware, these large language models work by gathering a vast corpus of text, and doing their computational tricks to generate their output by inferring from that data. They can thus create an artwork in the style of a painter who receives no reward for the image, or a book in the voice of an author who may be struggling to make ends meet. From the viewpoint of content creators and intellectual property owners, it’s theft on a grand scale, and you’ll find plenty of legal battles seeking to establish the boundaries of the field.

Anyway, once an LLM has enough text from a particular source, it can do a pretty good job of writing in that style. ChatGPT for example has doubtless crawled the whole of Hackaday, and since I’ve written thousands of articles in my nearly a decade here, it’s got a significant corpus of my work. Could it write in my style? As it turns out, yes it can, but not exactly. I set out to test its forging skill. Continue reading “ChatGPT & Me. ChatGPT Is Me!” →

This Week In Security: Lingering Spectre, Deep Fakes, And CoreAudio

May 16, 2025 by Jonathan Bennett 5 Comments

Spectre lives. We’ve got two separate pieces of research, each finding new processor primitives that allow Spectre-style memory leaks. Before we dive into the details of the new techniques, let’s quickly remind ourselves what Spectre is. Modern CPUs use a variety of clever tricks to execute code faster, and one of the stumbling blocks is memory latency. When a program reaches a branch in execution, the program will proceed in one of two possible directions, and it’s often a value from memory that determines which branch is taken. Rather than wait for the memory to be fetched, modern CPUs will predict which branch execution will take, and speculatively execute the code down that branch. Once the memory is fetched and the branch is properly evaluated, the speculatively executed code is rewound if the guess was wrong, or made authoritative if the guess was correct. Spectre is the realization that incorrect branch prediction can change the contents of the CPU cache, and those changes can be detected through cache timing measurements. The end result is that arbitrary system memory can be leaked from a low privileged or even sandboxed user process.

In response to Spectre, OS developers and CPU designers have added domain isolation protections, that prevent branch prediction poisoning in an attack process from affecting the branch prediction in the kernel or another process. Training Solo is the clever idea from VUSec that branch prediction poisoning could just be done from within the kernel space, and avoid any domain switching at all. That can be done through cBPF, the classic Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) kernel VM. By default, all users on a Linux system can run cBPF code, throwing the doors back open for Spectre shenanigans. There’s also an address collision attack where an unrelated branch can be used to train a target branch. Researchers also discovered a pair of CVEs in Intel’s CPUs, where prediction training was broken in specific cases, allowing for a wild 17 kB/sec memory leak.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: Lingering Spectre, Deep Fakes, And CoreAudio” →

Falling Down The Land Camera Rabbit Hole

May 15, 2025 by Jenny List 24 Comments

It was such an innocent purchase, a slightly grubby and scuffed grey plastic box with the word “P O L A R O I D” intriguingly printed along its top edge. For a little more than a tenner it was mine, and I’d just bought one of Edwin Land’s instant cameras. The film packs it takes are now a decade out of production, but my Polaroid 104 with its angular 1960s styling and vintage bellows mechanism has all the retro-camera-hacking appeal I need. Straight away I 3D printed an adapter and new back allowing me to use 120 roll film in it, convinced I’d discover in myself a medium format photographic genius.

But who wouldn’t become fascinated with the film it should have had when faced with such a camera? I have form on this front after all, because a similar chance purchase of a defunct-format movie camera a few years ago led me into re-creating its no-longer-manufactured cartridges. I had to know more, both about the instant photos it would have taken, and those film packs. How did they work? Continue reading “Falling Down The Land Camera Rabbit Hole” →