Hackaday Berlin Was Bonkers

March 27, 2023 by Elliot Williams 11 Comments

In celebration of the tenth running of the Hackaday Prize, we had a fantastic weekend event in Berlin. This was a great opportunity for all of the European Hackaday community to get together for a few days of great talks, fun show-and-tells, and above all good old fashioned sitting together and brainstorming. Of course there was the badge, and the location – a gigantic hackerspace in Berlin called MotionLab – even had a monstrous laser-eye octopus suspended from a gantry overhead. Everyone who came brought something to share or to show. You couldn’t ask for more.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to record the talks, so we’ll run down the highlights for you here. [Jenny List] is writing up a bunch of the badge hacks as we speak, so we’ll skip that for now. For the full experience, you just had to be there, but we’ll share with you what pictures we got. Enjoy!

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New Contest: Beautiful Hardware

July 2, 2019 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

We all have awesome hardware projects to show off. Great photos of them are how you unlock the excitement others see in your work. Whether you’re using a DSLR or the camera in your smartphone, it’s not difficult to capture an amazing picture of the project you pour so much effort into. We want you to unleash your photography skills for the Beautiful Hardware contest. Show us your epic hardware photos and win prizes.

The Skeleton Watch by Mile is a great example of superb photography. Excellent framing, focus, and color make it great.

The only real barrier between us and superb hardware photos is having an eye for framing your shots, and a few simple tricks to get everything else right. Think about good lighting, shooting with an interesting background, framing off to the side and at an angle (as just one example) for more interest, and spending a few moments with an image editor to complement what the camera captured. With this contest, we want you to take those tricks for a spin on your own workbench.

Lee Wilkins put together a simple guide to get you going with spectacular hardware photography. From the basics of photography and the tricks used for making product hype photos, to capturing great images of LEDs and getting the colors just right, this is a comprehensive quickstart. There’s even a collection of great examples to strive for.

There are three top prizes of $100 cash waiting for you. Just start a new project on Hackaday.io and upload the finest photos you can take of some fun hardware. In the left sidebar of that project use the “Submit project to…” menu to enter it in the Beautiful Hardware contest.

Exposing Private Facebook Photos With A Malicious App

March 20, 2015 by Rick Osgood 21 Comments

[Laxman] is back again with another hack related to Facebook photos. This hack revolves around the Facebook mobile application’s “sync photos” function. This feature automatically uploads every photo taken on your mobile device to your Facebook account. These photos are automatically marked as private so that only the user can see them. The user would have to manually update the privacy settings on each photo later in order to make them available to friends or the public.

[Laxman] wanted to put these privacy restrictions to the test, so he started poking around the Facebook mobile application. He found that the Facebook app would make an HTTP GET request to a specific URL in order to retrieve the synced photos. This request was performed using a top-level access token. The Facebook server checked this token before sending down the private images. It sounds secure, but [Laxman] found a fatal flaw.

The Facebook server only checked the owner of the token. It did not bother to check which Facebook application was making the request. As long as the app had the “user_photos” permission, it was able to pull down the private photos. This permission is required by many applications as it allows the apps to access the user’s public photos. This vulnerability could have allowed an attacker access to the victim’s private photos by building a malicious application and then tricking victims into installing the app.

At least, that could have been the case if Facebook wasn’t so good about fixing their vulnerabilities. [Laxman] disclosed his finding to Facebook. They had patched the vulnerability less than an hour after acknowledging the disclosure. They also found this vulnerability severe enough to warrant a $10,000 bounty payout to [Laxman]. This is in addition to the $12,500 [Laxman] received last month for a different Facebook photo-related vulnerability.

BlackBerry Storm 2 Teardown

August 25, 2009 by Matt Schulz 4 Comments

blackberry_storm_2

Photos of the BlackBerry Storm 2, both inside and out, have been leaked. Engadget provides us with the specifics, going into detail about the four large piezoelectric pressure sensors that sit underneath the screen. It looks as though the screen will still function as a button, just without the physical movement of the previous model that received mixed reviews. For a better explanation of the technology behind the phone’s innovative screen, here’s a video describing it in more detail and a writeup over at the CrackBerry forums.

Hack Cameras With The Image Fulgurator

June 29, 2008 by Will O'Brien 26 Comments

[Wallace] sent in this awesome project built by [Julius Von Bismarck]. The “Image Fulgurator” is the result of mating an optical slave flash with a camera body turned projector. The result is the ability to project ghost images onto a picture being taken by anyone using a camera with their flash. Check out the demo video after the break or hit the project site for more.

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