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89 Articles

GPU Password Cracking Made Easy

June 1, 2011 by 37 Comments

The power that a Graphics Processing Unit presents can be harnessed to do some dirty work when trying to crack passwords. [Vijay] took a look at some of the options out there for cracking passwords and found that utilizing the GPU produces the correct password in a fraction of the time. On a Windows machine he pitted the Cain password recovery tool which uses the CPU for its calculations against ighashgpu which uses ATI or Nvidia graphics cards to do the deed. Hands down ighashgpu is the fastest; with Cain taking about one year to crack an eight character password while ighashgpu can do it in under nineteen hours.

We were very interested to see how easy it is to use this package. We looked in on GPU cracking in September but didn’t focus on the software packages that are out there. Now that you know how easily your password can be unearthed perhaps you will get some use out of this article discussing the usability and security of longer passwords which we ran across over on Reddit.

BAMF2011: ChipKIT Is Arduino To The Power Of 32

May 21, 2011 by 25 Comments

If you’ve been hungry for more power for your microcontroller projects, but reluctant to dump your investment in Arduino shields or the libraries and community knowledge that go with them all, Digilent has you covered. Their new chipKIT boards are built around the Microchip PIC32 MCU…a powerful 32-bit chip that until recently was left out of the cross-platform scene. A majority of code and quite a number of Arduino shields will work “out of the box” with the chipKIT, and the familiar development tools are available for all three major operating systems: Windows, Mac and Linux.

We first mentioned these a couple weeks ago, but the software was unavailable at the time. Seeing the development tools in action was quite unexpected…

Continue reading “BAMF2011: ChipKIT Is Arduino To The Power Of 32” →

Kinect To Get Windows Drivers Months After Open Source Drivers Were Developed

February 22, 2011 by 20 Comments

Microsoft is planning to release Windows drivers for the Kinect this spring, months after open source drivers were developed by a motivated hacking community. [Johnny Chung Lee], who worked with the Microsoft team when the hardware was developed, mentions that he had pushed for the giant to develop and release at least basic Windows drivers. That refusal led him to a position as top cheerleader and bounty contributor in Adafruit’s Open Kinect Contest which resulted (quickly we might add) in the availability of open source drivers. If you’ve been following Hackaday or any other tech blogs the last three months you’ll know that an explosion of projects using the Kinect followed, and [Johnny] figures Microsoft’s decision to release Windows drivers is an attempt to ride this wave on their own flagship OS rather than continue to watch from the sidelines.

PC Monitor Sleep Mode Using IPhone

November 17, 2010 by 31 Comments

[Mike Silverman] rigged up a way to make his monitor sleep from an iPhone. Working with a Windows system, he installed QuickPHP and NirCmd to add PHP and command line controls. Some quick PHP code writing and this has the effect of creating a sleep button toggled via a network address. He loads up the IP and port information in the Safari browser of his iPhone, creating a Home Screen short cut seen in the image above. Now he clicks on the button and puts the screen to sleep.

It’s not that we find this functionality useful since most monitors sleep after a few minutes of inactivity. But we like the methodology and you can bet we’re already planning uses for this. Any PHP server (like the copy of Apache running on this machine) will do as long as it’s on the same LAN as the iPhone’s WiFi connection.

C Sharp Development 101 – Part 2: Toolbox Controls

October 15, 2010 by 29 Comments
In this tutorial we are going to start finding out more about the toolbox we utilized in the previous tutorial.  The Controls available in the toolbox are quite extensive and allow users to simplify a variety of everyday tasks such as manually creating and instantiating a textbox on a windows form.  At the end of this tutorial you should be comfortable finding Controls in the Visual Studio Toolbox, alter or produce code to link tools together using event handlers and ultimately get a better sense of Visual Studio, it’s layout and how to easily navigate it.

PIC USB Host Shortcuts

April 8, 2010 by 11 Comments

[Simon Inns] is still hard at work making USB connectivity for PIC microcontrollers easier for the hobbiest. He’s released a framework for PIC based USB devices under Windows. It includes the firmware needed for USB compatible 18F PIC chips as well as a C# class library and example programs for the Windows side of things. This goes quite a bit further than his PIC-USB tutorial but with little added effort on your end of things.

We do our USB prototyping on a breadboard just like [Simon] did in this example. He’s got a nice little USB-B connector breakout that is easy to plug into the breadboard. If you prefer to have a more stable development area, check out the one he designed. It’s a single-sided PCB made for through-hole components with just a handful of jumper wires.

ExoPC Shows Off Some Guts

February 7, 2010 by 10 Comments

The folks over at Engadget have posted some pictures of the ExoPC’s insides. With the recent return of the tablet craze (remember xp tablet edition?) we’re seeing tablets everywhere. This one has some promise on the hardware side, sporting a 1.6GHz processor and 2GB of RAM.  Unfortunately we’ve heard using solely a tablet interface with windows7 is somewhat cumbersome even with the built in improvements. We’re not too worried though, a customized appliance style linux interface probably won’t be too far off.

The last couple times we mentioned tablet style computing, people have emailed us about the Touchbook. It also seems pretty cool, but seems like switching applications is visibly laggy in the demo video. Then again, a slimmed down interface might reduce some of that drag.