Hackaday Links: December 2, 2018

December 2, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

CircuitPython is becoming a thing! CircuitPython was originally developed from MicroPython and ported to various ARM boards by Adafruit. Now, SparkFun is shipping their own CircuitPython board based on the nRF52840, giving this board an ARM Cortex-M4 and a Bluetooth radio.

You like contests, right? You like circuit boards too, right? Hackster.io now has a BadgeLove contest going on to create the Blinkiest Badge on Earth. Yes, this is a #badgelife contest, with the goal of demonstrating how much you can do in a single circuit badge. Prizes include a trip to San Francisco, a badass drone, a skateboard, a t-shirt, or socks. YES, THERE ARE SOCKS.

We have a date for the Vintage Computer Festival Pacific Northwest 2019. It’s going down March 23 and 24 at the Living Computers Museum in Seattle. The call for exhibitors is now open so head over and check it out. So far the tentative list of exhibits and presenters include Attack of the SPARC Clones, and I must mention that SPARC systems are showing up on eBay with much higher frequency lately. I have no idea why.

Need another con? How about a KiCAD con? The inaugural conference for KiCAD users is happening next April in Chicago and the call for talk proposals just opened up. The con focuses on topics like using KiCAD in a manufacturing setting, what’s going on ‘under the hood’ of KiCAD, and how to use KiCAD to make an advanced product.

Spanish police have stopped a homemade scooter. Someone, apparently, was tearing around a public road in Galacia on a homemade scooter. From the single picture, we’re going to say ‘not bad.’ It’s a gas-powered weed wacker mounted to a homemade frame.

Every year, in December, we take a look back at what Hackaday has accomplished in the past twelve months. Sure, we gave out hundreds of thousands of dollars in awards in the Hackaday Prize, and yes, we’ve pushed our coverage of tech advancements into weird, uncharted, but awesome territory. Our biggest accomplishment, though, is always how many readers we reach. This year, we had a slight fall-off in our readership in the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea. We’re down from 156 views in 2017 to 75 views this year. While the year isn’t over, we don’t expect that number to change much. What was the cause of this drop-off? We’re not quite sure. Only time will tell, and we’re looking forward to serving fresh hacks every day to the DPRK in 2019.

34C3: North Korea’s Consumer Technology

December 30, 2017 by Adam Fabio 19 Comments

[Will Scott] and [Gabe Edwards] shed some light on the current state of consumer computing technology at 34C3 in their talk DPRK Consumer Technology. The pair has also created a website to act as a clearinghouse for this information — including smartphone OS images up at koreaComputerCenter.org.

Not a whole lot is known about what technology North Korean citizens have available to them. We have seen Red Star OS, the Mac-like Linux based operating system used on PC based desktops. But what about other systems like smartphones?

[Will] and [Gabe] found that cell phones in North Korea are typically manufactured by Chinese companies, running a custom version of the Android Operating system. The phone hardware is common — the phone sold as the Pyongyang 2407 in North Korea is also sold in India as the Genie v5. If you can get your hands on the Genie, you can run the Korean version of the Android OS on that hardware.

Continue reading “34C3: North Korea’s Consumer Technology” →

32C3: Inside Glorious Leader’s Operating System

December 30, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 46 Comments

North Korea is a surveillance state propped up by a totalitarian government infamous for human rights abuses and a huge military that serves the elite while the poor are left to fight over scraps. Coincidently, that’s exactly what North Korea says about the United States.

There is one significant difference between the two countries: North Korea has developed its own operating system for its citizens, called Red Star OS. It’s an operating system based on Linux, but that has a few interesting features that allow Glorious Leader to take care of his citizens. A deep teardown of what has gone into the development of Red Star OS hasn’t been available until now, with [Florian Grunow] and [Niklaus Schiess]’s talk at the Chaos Communication Congress this week.

The first question anyone must ask when confronted with an operating system built by a country that doesn’t have much electricity is, “why?” This question can only be answered philosophically; the late Kim Jong-Il stressed the importance of North Korea developing “their own style” of programming, and not relying on western operating systems. Nearly everything in Red Star has been modified, with a custom browser called Naenara, a crypto tool, a clone of Open Office, a software manager, and a custom music composition tool. Red Star also had to have the look and feel of OS X; that is, after all, what Glorious Leader uses.

Red Star goes much deeper than custom browsers and a desktop theme. There are other, subtler components inside the OS. There is a program that verifies the integrity of the system by checking signatures of the custom files against a database. If a file has been tampered with, the system reboots. Since this tamper check runs on bootup, Red Star makes it nearly impossible to modify files for study. This is one of the big features designed into Red Star – system integrity is paramount.

There are other custom bits of software that hide files from the user even if they have root, and a ‘virus scanner’ that is anything but. This virus scanner checks documents for patterns that, when put through Google Translate, are strange, weird, and somewhat understandable. Phrases like, “punishment”, “hungry”, and “strike with fists” are detected in all documents, and depending on what the developers decide, these documents can be deleted on a whim.

While scanning a system for documents that contain non-approved speech is abhorrent enough, there’s another feature that would make any privacy advocate weep. Media files including DOCX, JPG, PNG, and AVI files are watermarked by every computer that opened the files. This allows anyone to track the origin of a file, with the obvious consequences to free speech that entails.

While most people in the US consider North Korea to be a technological backwater and oppressive regime, the features that make Red Star OS useful to the DPRK are impressive. The developers touched nearly everything in Red Star, and the features inside it are rather clever and make their style of surveillance very useful. They’re also doing this without any apparent backdoors or other spycraft; they’re putting all their surveillance out in the open for all to see, which is, perhaps, the best way to go about it.

Messing Around With Naenara, North Korea’s Web Browser

January 10, 2015 by Rick Osgood 34 Comments

[Robert] has been snooping around Naenara in order to learn more about how North Korea’s intranet might work. Naenara is the web browser that comes bundled with North Korea’s official Linux-based operating system known as Red Star OS. [Robert] once saw a screenshot of the browser and found it interesting that the browser seemed to automatically load a non-routable IP address immediately upon start-up. This made him curious about what other oddities one might uncover from the software.

Upon start-up, the browser tries to load a page located at IP address 10.76.1.11, which is a reserved IP address for private use. This indicated that North Korea’s “Internet” is actually more of in intranet. [Robert] suspects that the entire country may be running in private address space, similar to how your home or business likely runs.

[Robert’s] next thoughts were that the browser looks like a very old version of Mozilla Firefox, but with some default configuration changes. For one, all crashes are automatically transmitted to “the mothership”, as [Robert] calls it. He suspects this is to fix not only bugs, but also to find and repair any security vulnerabilities that may allow users more control.

There are some other interesting changes as well, such as the supported security certificates. The Naenara browser only accepts certificates issued by the DPRK, which would make it very easy for them to snoop on encrypted HTTPS traffic. there is also evidence suggesting that all traffic for the entire country is routed through a single government controlled proxy server.

None of these findings are all that surprising, but it’s still interesting to see what kind of information can be gleamed from poking around the browser and operating system. [Robert] has found more than just these few findings. You can check out the rest of his findings on his blog.

[via Reddit]

Hackaday Links: The Last One Of 2014

December 28, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

The guy behind the Microslice, a tiny Arduino-controlled laser cutter, has a new Kickstarter out. It’s called the Multibox PC, and it’s exactly what you need if you want to turn a Raspi, Banana Pi, HummingBoard, or Odroid U3 into an all-in-one desktop. 14″ 1366 x 768 LCD, and speakers turns dev boards into a respectable little Linux box.

If you’re learning to design schematics and lay out PCBs, you should really, really think about using KiCAD. It’s the future. However, Eagle is still popular and has many more tutorials. Here’s another. [Mushfiq] put together a series of tutorials for creating a library, designing a schematic, and doing the layout.

Another kickstarter wristwatch. But wait, this thing has a circular display. That’s really cool. It’s a 1.4″ 220×220 pixel, 262k color display. No, the display doesn’t use a polar coordinate system.

[Jari] wrote a digital logic simulator, Atanua, started selling licenses, and figured out it wasn’t worth developing on his own anymore. As promised, Atanua is now open source. If you want to look at the finances behind Atanua, here you go.

In 1970, you didn’t have a lot of options when it came to memory. One of the best options was Intel’s 1405 shift register – 512 bits of storage. Yes, shift registers as memory. [Ken Shirriff] got his hands on a memory board from a Datapoint 2200 terminal. Each of the display boards had 32 of these shift registers. Here’s what they look like on the inside

There’s a lot of talk about North Korean hackers, and a quick review of the yearly WordPress stats for Hackaday puts a tear in our eye. This year, there were fifty-four views from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. That’s just great. It’s awesome to see the hacker ethos make it to far-flung lands and through highly restricted firewalls. There’s still a long road ahead of us, though, and we’ll redouble our efforts on bringing the hacker mindset to Tuvalu and Saint Helena in the year 2015.