Supercon 2023: The Road To Writing Great Step-by-Step Instructions

September 24, 2024 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

IKEA is known as a purveyor of build-it-yourself flatpack furniture. LEGO is known as a purveyor of build-it-yourself toys. Both are known for their instructions. The latter’s are considered incredibly clear and useful, while the former’s are often derided as arcane and confusing—though the major difference between the two is color printing.

These two companies are great examples of why instructions are important. Indeed, Sonya Vasquez has learned this lesson well, and came down to Supercon 2023 to tell us all about it. Prepare to learn all about how to write great step-by-step instructions that enable greatness and never frustrate the end user.

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Fukushima Daiichi: Cleaning Up After A Nuclear Accident

September 23, 2024 by Maya Posch 47 Comments

On 11 March, 2011, a massive magnitude 9.1 earthquake shook the west coast of Japan, with the epicenter located at a shallow depth of 32 km, a mere 72 km off the coast of Oshika Peninsula, of the Touhoku region. Following this earthquake, an equally massive tsunami made its way towards Japan’s eastern shores, flooding many kilometers inland. Over 20,000 people were killed by the tsunami and earthquake, thousands of whom were dragged into the ocean when the tsunami retreated. This Touhoku earthquake was the most devastating in Japan’s history, both in human and economic cost, but also in the effect it had on one of Japan’s nuclear power plants: the six-unit Fukushima Daiichi plant.

In the subsequent Investigation Commission report by the Japanese Diet, a lack of safety culture at the plant’s owner (TEPCO) was noted, along with significant corruption and poor emergency preparation, all of which resulted in the preventable meltdown of three of the plant’s reactors and a botched evacuation. Although afterwards TEPCO was nationalized, and a new nuclear regulatory body established, this still left Japan with the daunting task of cleaning up the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Removal of the damaged fuel rods is the biggest priority, as this will take care of the main radiation hazard. This year TEPCO has begun work on removing the damaged fuel inside the cores, the outcome of which will set the pace for the rest of the clean-up.

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Hackaday Links: September 22, 2024

September 22, 2024 by Dan Maloney 13 Comments

Thanks a lot, Elon. Or maybe not, depending on how this report that China used Starlink signals to detect low-observable targets pans out. There aren’t a lot of details, and we couldn’t find anything approximating a primary source, but it seems like the idea is based on forward scatter, which is when waves striking an object are deflected only a little bit. The test setup for this experiment was a ground-based receiver listening to the downlink signal from a Starlink satellite while a DJI Phantom 4 Pro drone was flown into the signal path. The drone was chosen because nobody had a spare F-22 or F-35 lying around, and its radar cross-section is about that of one of these stealth fighters. They claim that this passive detection method was able to make out details about the drone, but as with most reporting these days, this needs to be taken with an ample pinch of salt. Still, it’s an interesting development that may change things up in the stealth superiority field.

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Against Elitism

September 21, 2024 by Elliot Williams 104 Comments

A while back we got an anonymous complaint that Hackaday was “elitist”, and that got me thinking. We do write up the hacks that we find the coolest, and that could lead to a preponderance of gonzo projects, or a feeling that something “isn’t good enough for Hackaday”. But I really want to push back against that notion, because I believe it’s just plain wrong.

One of the most important jobs of a Hackaday writer is to find the best parts of a project and bring that to the fore, and I’d like to show you what I mean by example. Take this post from two weeks ago that was nominally about rescuing a broken beloved keyboard by replacing its brain with a modern microcontroller. On its surface, this should be easy – figure out the matrix pinout and wire it up. Flash in a keyboard firmware and you’re done.

Of course we all love a good hardware-rescue story, and other owners of busted Sculpt keyboards will be happy to see it. But there’s something here for the rest of us too! To figure out the keyboard matrix, it would take a lot of probing at a flat-flex cable, so [TechBeret] made a sweet breakout board that pulled all the signals off of the flat-flex and terminated them in nicely labelled wires. Let this be your reminder that making a test rig / jig can make these kind of complicated problems simpler.

Once the pinout was figured out, and a working prototype made, it was time to order a neat PCB and box it up. The other great trick was the use of 3D-printed mockups of the PCBs to make sure that they fit inside the case, the holes were all in the right places, and that the flat-flex lay flat. With how easily PCB design software will spit out a 3D model these days, you absolutely should take the ten minutes to verify the physical layout of each revision before sending out your Gerbers.

So was this a 1337 hack? Maybe not. But was it worth reading for these two sweet tidbits, regardless of whether you’re doing a keyboard hack? Absolutely! And that’s exactly the kind of opportunity that elitists shut themselves off from, and it’s the negative aspect of elitism what we try to fight against here at Hackaday.

Hackaday Podcast Episode 289: Tiny Games, Two Modern Modems, And The Next Big Thing

September 20, 2024 by Kristina Panos 9 Comments

This week on the Podcast, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos joined forces to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week.

First up in the news: we’ve announced the 2024 Tiny Games Contest winners! We asked you to show us your best tiny game, whether that means tiny hardware, tiny code, or a tiny BOM, and you did so in spades. Congratulations to all the winners and Honorable Mentions, and thanks to DigiKey, Supplyframe, and all who entered!

We also announced the first round of Supercon speakers, so if you haven’t gotten your ticket yet, now’s the second best time.

But wait, there’s more! We’re already a few weeks into the next contest, where we want you to show us your best ~~Simple~~ Supercon Add-On. We love to see the add-ons people make for the badge every year, so this time around we’re really embracing the standard. The best SAOs will get a production run and they’ll be in the swag bag at Hackaday Europe 2025.

Then it’s on to What’s That Sound, which completely stumped Kristina once again. Can you get it? Can you figure it out? Can you guess what’s making that sound? If you can, and your number comes up, you get a special Hackaday Podcast t-shirt.

Now it’s on to the hacks, beginning with non-planar ironing for smooth prints, and a really neat business card that also plays tiny games. Then we’ll discuss USB modems, cool casts for broken wrists, and archiving data on paper. Finally, we ask two big questions — where do you connect the shield, and what’s the Next Big Thing gonna be? Inquiring minds want to know.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download in DRM-free MP3 and savor at your leisure.

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This Week In Security: Open Source C2, Raptor Trains, And End To End Encryption

September 20, 2024 by Jonathan Bennett 14 Comments

Open Source has sort of eaten everything in software these days. And that includes malware, apparently, with open source Command and Control (C2) frameworks like Sliver and Havoc gaining traction. And of course, this oddball intersection of Open Source and security has intrigued at least one security researcher who has found some interesting vulnerabilities.

Before we dive into what was found, you may wonder why open source malware tools exist. First off, trustworthy C2 servers are quite useful for researchers, who need access to such tools for testing. Then there is Red Teaming, where a security professional launches a mock attack against a target to test its defenses. A C2 is often useful for education and hobby level work, and then there are the true criminals that do use these Open Source tools. It takes all types.

A C2 system consists of an agent installed on compromised systems, usually aiming for stealth. These agents connect to a central server, sending information and then executing any instructions given. And finally there’s a client, which is often just a web interface or even a command line interface.

Now what sort of fun is possible in these C2 systems? Up first is Sliver, written in Go, with a retro command line interface. Sliver supports launching Metasploit on compromised hosts. Turns out, it accidentally supported running Metasploit modules against the server’s OS itself, leading to an easy remote shell from an authenticated controller account.

Havoc has a fancy user interface for the clients, and also a command injection flaw. A service name field gets used to generate a shell command, so you’re only a simple escape away from running commands. That’s not quite as useful as the API that failed open when a bad username/password was given. Oops. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Open Source C2, Raptor Trains, And End To End Encryption” →

Design And The Golden Rule

September 19, 2024 by Al Williams 37 Comments

You often learn the golden rule or some variation of it as early as kindergarten. There are several ways to phrase it, but you most often hear: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” While that’s catchy, it is really an aphorism that encourages us to consider the viewpoints of others. As people who design things, this can be tricky. Sometimes, what you want isn’t necessarily what most people want, and — conversely — you might not appreciate what most people want or need.

EDIT/1000

I learned this lesson many years ago when I used to babysit a few HP/1000 minicomputers. Minicomputer sounds grand, but, honestly, a Raspberry Pi of any sort would put the old HP to shame. Like a lot of computers in those days, it had a text editor that was arcane even by the standards of vi or emacs. EDIT/1000 couldn’t be sure you weren’t using a printing terminal, and the commands reflect that.

For example, printing a few lines around the current line requires the command: “/-2,L,5” which isn’t that hard, I suppose. To delete all lines that contain a percent sign, “1$ D/%/A/” assuming you don’t want to be asked about each deletion.

Sure, sure. As a Hackaday reader, you don’t find this hard to puzzle out or remember. But back in the 1980s, a bunch of physicists and chemical engineers had little patience for stuff like that. However, the editor had a trick up its sleeve.

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