Hackaday Links: May 26, 2024

May 26, 2024 by Dan Maloney 5 Comments

Another day, another crop of newly minted minimal astronauts, as Blue Origin’s New Shepard made a successful suborbital flight this week. Everything seemed to go according to plan, at least until right at the end, when an “unexpected foliage contingency” made astronaut egress a little more complicated than usual. The New Shepard capsule had the bad taste to touch down with a bit of West Texas shrubbery directly aligned with the hatch, making it difficult to find good footing for the platform used by the astronauts for the obligatory “smile and wave” upon exiting. The Blue Origin ground crew, clad in their stylish black and blue outfits that must be murderously impractical in the West Texas desert, stamped down the brush to place the stairway, but had a lot of trouble getting it to sit straight. Even with the impromptu landscaping, the terrain made it tough to get good footing without adding random bits of stuff to prop up one leg, an important task considering that one of the new astronauts was a 90-year-old man. It seems pretty short-sighted not to have adjustable legs on the stairway, but there it is.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: May 26, 2024” →

Retrotechtacular: Putting Pictures On The Wire In The 1930s

April 25, 2023 by Dan Maloney 52 Comments

Remember fax machines? They used to be all the rage, and to be honest it was pretty cool to be able to send images back and forth over telephone lines. By the early 2000s, pretty much everyone had some kind of fax capability, whether thanks to a dedicated fax machine, a fax modem, or an all-in-one printer. But then along came the smartphone that allowed you to snap a picture of a document and send it by email or text, and along with the decrease in landline subscriptions, facsimile has pretty much become a technological dead end.

But long before fax machines became commonplace, there was a period during which sending images by wire was a very big deal indeed. So much so that General Motors produced “Spot News,” a short film to demonstrate how newspapers leveraged telephone technology to send photographs from the field. The film is very much of the “March of Progress” genre, and seems to be something that would have been included along with the newsreels and Looney Tunes between the double feature films. It shows a fictional newsroom in The Big City, where a cub reporter gets a hot tip about an airplane stunt about to be attempted out in the sticks. The editor doesn’t want to miss out on a scoop, so he sends a photographer and a reporter to the remote location to cover the stunt, along with a technology-packed photographic field car. Continue reading “Retrotechtacular: Putting Pictures On The Wire In The 1930s” →

Will The Fax Machine Ever Stop Singing?

November 16, 2022 by Kristina Panos 43 Comments

Throughout the 80s and 90s, you couldn’t swing a stapler around any size office without hitting a fax machine. But what is it about the fax machine that makes it the subject of so much derision? Is it the beep-boops? The junk faxes? Or do they just seem horribly outdated in the world of cloud storage and thumb drives? Perhaps all of the above is true. While I may be Hackaday’s resident old school office worker et cetera, it may surprise you to learn that I don’t have a fax machine. In fact, the last time I had to fax something, I recall having to give my email address to some website in order to send a single fax for free.

Over across the pond, the UK government has decided to nix the requirement for fax services under something called the Universal Service Order (USO) legislation, which essentially ensures that residents all across the UK have access to phone services at a price they can afford. The UK’s Office of Communications, aka Ofcom, have announced recently that they are in agreement with the government. Since the industry is moving away from the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to IP telephony, the fax machine won’t work the same way.

Continue reading “Will The Fax Machine Ever Stop Singing?” →

Floppy Disk Sings: I’m Big In Japan

September 13, 2022 by Al Williams 66 Comments

The other day, a medical office needed my insurance card. I asked them where to e-mail it and they acted like I had offered them human flesh as an appetizer. “We don’t have e-mail! You have to bring it to us in person!” They finally admitted that they could take a fax and I then had to go figure out how to get a free one page fax sent over the Internet. Keep in mind, that I live in the fourth largest city in the United States — firmly in the top 100 largest cities in the world. I’m not out in the wilderness dealing with a country doctor.

I understand HIPAA and other legal and regulatory concerns probably inhibit them from taking e-mail, but other doctors and health care providers have apparently figured it out. But it turns out that the more regulations are involved in something, the more behind-the-times it is likely to be.

Continue reading “Floppy Disk Sings: I’m Big In Japan” →

Faxsploit – Exploiting A Fax With A Picture

May 4, 2019 by Pedro Umbelino 26 Comments

Security researchers have found a way to remotely execute code on a fax machine by sending a specially crafted document to it. So… who cares about fax? Well apparently a lot of persons are still using it in many institutions, governments and industries, including the healthcare industry, legal, banking and commercial. Bureaucracy and old procedures tend to die hard.

This is one of those exploits that deserve proper attention, for many reasons. It is well documented and is a great piece of proper old school hacking and reverse engineering. [Eyal Itkin], [Yannay Livneh] and [Yaniv Balmas] show us their process in a nicely done article that you can read here. If you are into security hacks, it’s really worth reading and also worth watching the DEFCON video. They focused their attention in a all-in-one printer/scanner/fax and the results were as good as it gets.

Our research set out to ask what would happen if an attacker, with merely a phone line at his disposal and equipped with nothing more than his target`s fax number, was able to attack an all-in-one printer by sending a malicious fax to it.

In fact, we found several critical vulnerabilities in all-in-one printers which allowed us to ‘faxploit’ the all-in-one printer and take complete control over it by sending a maliciously crafted fax.

As the researchers note, once an all-in-one printer has been compromised, it could be used to a wide array of malicious activity, from infiltrating the internal network, to stealing printed documents even to mining Bitcoin. In theory they could even produce a fax worm, replicating via the phone line.

The attack summary video is bellow, demonstrating an exploit that allows an attacker to pivot into an internal network and taking over a Windows machine using Eternal Blue NSA exploit.

Continue reading “Faxsploit – Exploiting A Fax With A Picture” →

Old Modem, New Internet.

February 26, 2018 by James Hobson 37 Comments

Do you remember the screeching of a dial-up modem as it connected to the internet? Do you miss it? Probably not, but [Erick Truter] — inspired by a forum post and a few suggestions later — turned a classic modem into a 3G Wi-Fi hotspot with the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi Zero.

Sourcing an old USRobotics USB modem — allegedly in ‘working’ condition — he proceeded to strip the modem board of many of its components to make room for the new electronic guts. [Truter] found that for him the Raspberry Pi Zero W struggled to maintain a reliable network, and so went with a standard Pi Zero and a USB Wi-Fi dongle dongle. He also dismantled a USB hub to compensate for the Zero’s single port. Now, to rebuild the modem — better, faster, and for the 21st century.

Continue reading “Old Modem, New Internet.” →

Retrotechtacular: FAX As A Service In 1984

November 4, 2016 by Al Williams 28 Comments

If you tell someone these days to send you something via FAX, you are likely to get a look similar to the one you’d get if you asked them to park your horse. But in 1984, FAX was a mysterious new technology (well, actually, it wasn’t, but it wasn’t yet common to most people).

FedEx–the people who got famous delivering packages overnight–made a bold move to seize a new market: Zapmail (not to be confused with the modern mass mailing service). The idea was simple (you can see a commercial for it in grainy VHS splendor below): Overnight is great, but sometimes you need something sent across the country now. A FedEx driver picks up your documents, carries them to a FedEx office. There the documents FAX to another FedEx office where another driver delivers the printed copy. The process took two hours to get a paper document from one side of the continent to another.