Hackaday Links: September 16, 2018

September 16, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

Apple released a phone, the most phone in the history of phones. It’s incredible.

There are four machines that are the cornerstone of electronic music. The TR-808, the TR-909, the TB-303, and the SH-101 are the machines that created techno, house, and every other genre of electronic music. This week at KnobCon Behringer, the brand famous for cheap mixers, other audio paraphernalia of questionable quality, and a clone of the Minimoog, teased their clone of the 909. Unlike the Roland reissue, this is a full-sized 909, much like Behringer’s clone of the 808. Price is said to be under $400, and the best guess on the release is, ‘sometime in the next year’

Speaking of synths, [jan] has created a ton of electronic musical instruments based around single chips. There’s one that fits inside a MIDI plug, and another that also adds a keyboard. Now he has an ‘educational kit’ on IndieGoGo. It’s surprisingly cheap at $19.

Europe is outlawing memes (I’m 12 and what is this?).

The EU parliament adopted a proposal for a Copyright Directive, the most onerous proposal being Article 13, requiring platforms to adopt copyright filters to examine everything uploaded to a platform.

The takeaway analogy is that this proposal is opposite of the DMCA’s Safe Harbor provision that protects ISPs from consequences of user’s actions; If Article 13 is adopted, an image-hosting service could be sued by copyright holders because users uploaded copyrighted images.

Needless to say, this is dumb, and a massive opportunity for you to become a startup founder. Companies like Google and Facebook already have robots and databases crawling their servers looking for copyrighted content, but smaller sites (hackaday.io included) do not have the resources to build such a service themselves. You’re looking at a massive B2B startup opportunity when these copyright directives pass.

Hackaday Prize Entry: Memes

April 23, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

Snap, Inc., the company behind Snapchat, is branding itself as a hardware company. What hardware does Snap make? Spectacles, or a camera attached to a pair of sunglasses. Snap, Inc. has a market value of around $30 Billion USD.

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [William Glover] is building a device that’s easily worth $100 Billion. It’s called SnappCat, and it’s a machine learning, AI, augmented reality, buzzword-laden camera that adds memes to pictures of cats. Better get in on the Series A now because this is ????????????.

Here’s the use case for SnappCat. Place a small device containing a camera and some sort of WiFi chip. During the day, this device will take pictures. If the device recognizes your cat in a picture, it adds a meme (we assume this means text, probably using the Impact typeface), and sends it to your mobile device. Just imagine sitting in a meeting at work. Your phone buzzes, you look at the message, and you laugh uproariously. Yes, you can has fud Mr. Pibbles, you can has so much fud.

This is the height of technology. That’s not to say landing on the moon or building a civilization on Mars isn’t a superior technological achievement. SnappCat is simply the best technology humanity will every produce because it’s all downhill from here.

That said, this is a pretty interesting problem. A small, cheap device that does image recognition is hard, and adding memes is just the cherry on top. We can’t wait to see where this project goes, and it’s a great entry to the Best Product portion of the Hackaday Prize.

How To Hack Your Own Password

April 9, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

[Haseeb] failed the marshmallow test as a kid. He has no self-control. He wastes a lot of time on reddit. There is a solution to this problem — simply lock yourself out of your account. The process is simple, and all you need to do is change your password to something random, change the recovery email address, and click submit. In the blink of an eye, all your imaginary Internet points vanish.

That’s the one guaranteed way to quit reddit. However, [Haseeb] wanted to hold onto those magic Internet points in the event they become worth something. This led to a far more baroque solution. He found a service that would email him at a later date, send an email to himself containing a random password, and quit reddit temporarily. Until that email was delivered, he was officially off reddit. When that email was received, productivity would stop.

A few years pass, and [Haseeb] had some time to kill at his new job. He decided to scrounge up his old password, only to discover he locked himself out of his Reddit account until 2018. What followed is a security exploit of an ’email me in the future’ service, and a great example of how much effort one person will commit to a lifetime of instant gratification.

The email service in question is LetterMeLater, a site that will send an email at some arbitrary point in the future. You can hide the body of the email from yourself, making this a fairly good solution for what [Haseeb] is doing. He was still locked out of his email, though, and emailing the people running LetterMeLater seemed absurd. Dopamine is fun, though, and [Haseeb] eventually found a workaround. This site indexes the body of an email for search. This is great, because the body of the email this site would send [Haseeb] in 2018 contained his reddit password and only his reddit password. With a little bit of code, he can perform substring queries on an email he can’t read. Now, extracting the password is simply a first year CS homework problem.

At this point, the only thing [Haseeb] knows about his password is that it’s a long string of random characters that probably doesn’t include upper-case characters. That’s 26 possible characters, 10 possible numbers, and a character bank that can be determined by searching his email one character at a time. [Haseeb] is essentially playing Hangman against his former self here.

After figuring out an API for LetterMeLater, [Haseeb] whipped up a quick bit of code that finds the password by searching substrings. It’s beautiful and recursive, although he did break it down into finding a suffix of the password then determining the remainder of the password. It took 443 iterations of the code to find the password, and when that was complete he logged into reddit. Math works, although [Haseeb] will have to figure out a way to wean himself off the opiate of the millennials again.