For those living in the continental US who, for whatever reason, don’t have access to an NTP server or a GPS device, the next best way to make sure the correct time is known is with the WWVB radio signal. Transmitting out of Colorado, the 60-bit 1 Hz signal reaches all 48 states in the low-frequency band and is a great way to get a clock within a few hundred nanoseconds of the official time. But in high noise situations, particularly on the coasts or in populated areas these radio-based clocks might miss some of the updates. To keep that from happening [Mike] built a repeater for this radio signal.

The repeater works by offloading most of the radio components to an Arduino. The microcontroller listens to the WWVB signal and re-transmits it at a lower power to the immediate area, in this case no further than a few inches away or enough to synchronize a few wristwatches. But it has a much better antenna for listening to WWVB so this eliminates the (admittedly uncommon) problem of [Mike]’s watches not synchronizing at least once per day. WWVB broadcasts a PWM signal which is easy for an Arduino to duplicate, but this one needed help from a DRV8833 amplifier to generate a meaningfully strong radio signal.

Although there have been other similar projects oriented around the WWVB signal, [Mike]’s goal for this was to improve the range of these projects so it could sync more than a single timekeeping device at a time as well as using parts which are more readily available and which have a higher ease of use. We’d say he’s done a pretty good job here, and his build instructions cover almost everything even the most beginner breadboarders would need to know to duplicate it on their own.

hackaday.com/2025/08/07/a-repe…

La complessa infrastruttura della rete pubblicitaria fraudolenta VexTrio Viper è tornata alla ribalta dopo che i ricercatori di Infoblox hanno rivelato i dettagli di un massiccio schema di app mobile false .

Sotto le mentite spoglie di servizi legittimi – dalle VPN alle utility di pulizia della RAM, dai filtri antispam alle app di incontri – i truffatori hanno inserito programmi dannosi negli store ufficiali di Apple e Google. Questi programmi sono stati distribuiti per conto di presunti sviluppatori diversi, tra cui HolaCode, LocoMind, Hugmi, Klover Group e AlphaScale Media. Il numero totale di download ammonta a milioni.

Una volta installate, queste applicazioni costringevano gli utenti ad accettare condizioni poco trasparenti, li inducevano a fornire dati personali, bombardavano il dispositivo con pubblicità aggressive e ne rendevano difficile la disinstallazione. Ad esempio, un’applicazione chiamata Spam Shield Block, mascherata da antispam, richiedeva immediatamente il pagamento e, se l’utente rifiutava, rendeva insopportabile l’utilizzo del dispositivo a causa di inserti pubblicitari . Gli utenti si lamentavano di prezzi di abbonamento inaffidabili, addebiti multipli e l’impossibilità di disinstallazione: azioni chiaramente mirate al prelievo occulto di fondi.

Tuttavia, le app mobili sono solo la punta dell’iceberg. VexTrio gestisce una rete di attività fraudolente, tra cui sistemi di distribuzione del traffico (TDS) che reindirizzano gli utenti da siti hackerati a pagine false. Questi TDS erano camuffati tramite i cosiddetti smartlink, link intelligenti che rivelano l’indirizzo finale solo all’ultimo momento e si adattano alla vittima: alla sua posizione geografica, al tipo di dispositivo e al browser. Questo consente loro di aggirare i filtri e complica l’analisi da parte degli specialisti.

Il traffico diretto a queste trappole viene inizialmente generato attraverso siti WordPress hackerati, contenenti codice dannoso. I truffatori utilizzano questi siti per distribuire annunci pubblicitari falsi, dalle lotterie alle truffe sulle criptovalute.

È interessante notare che l’organizzazione controlla non solo la parte pubblicitaria, ma anche l’intera catena di distribuzione: invio di e-mail, elaborazione dei dati di pagamento e convalida degli indirizzi postali. Ad esempio, il servizio DataSnap verifica la validità delle e-mail e Pay Salsa riscuote i pagamenti. Lo spam e-mail viene inviato tramite domini falsi che sembrano servizi legittimi come SendGrid e MailGun.

Per nascondere i domini finali e aggirare i controlli, viene utilizzato il servizio IMKLO, che filtra il traffico in entrata e determina se mostrare una pagina ingannevole o nasconderla agli occhi dei controllori. Questa messa a punto rende la campagna praticamente impercettibile.

Gli autori del rapporto sottolineano che il successo di tali schemi è garantito non solo dalla sofisticatezza tecnica, ma anche da una zona grigia legale: i truffatori cercano di evitare virus diretti e azioni dannose, rimanendo nell’ambito dell’inganno e dell’ingegneria sociale, dove la responsabilità si verifica meno spesso.

Il problema principale di questa minaccia è la percezione di tali schemi come “meno pericolosi” delle infezioni da malware. Mentre l’attenzione pubblica è focalizzata su trojan ed exploit, le frodi di massa con abbonamenti, carte di credito e dati personali rimangono nell’ombra. Sviluppare la formazione nel campo dell’igiene digitale e riconsiderare l’atteggiamento nei confronti delle truffe “soft” è uno dei compiti chiave nella lotta contro crimini di questo tipo.

L'articolo Hai pagato per mesi una VPN che non ha fatto altro che spiarti proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Let’s say you want to build a Nixie clock. You could go out and find some tubes, source a good power supply design, start whipping up a PCB, and working on a custom enclosure. Or, you could skip all that, and just follow [Simon]’s example instead.

The trick to building a Nixie clock fast is quite simple — just get yourself a frequency counter that uses Nixie tubes for the display. [Simon] sourced a great example from American Machine and Foundry, also known as AMF, the company most commonly associated with America’s love of bowling.

The frequency counter does one thing, it counts the number of pulses in a second. Thus, if you squirt the right number of pulses to represent the time — say, 173118 pulses to represent 5:31 PM and 18 seconds — the frequency counter effectively becomes a clock. To achieve this, [Simon] just hooked an ESP32 up to the frequency counter and programmed it to get the current time from an NTP time server. It then spits out a certain number of pulses every second corresponding to the current time. The frequency counter displays the count… and there you have your Nixie clock!

It’s quick, dirty, and effective, and a sweet entry to our 2025 One Hertz Challenge. We’ve had some other great entries, too, like this nifty hexadecimal Unix clock, and even some non-horological projects, too!

youtube.com/embed/Wd4AiFQjkqA?…

hackaday.com/2025/08/07/2025-o…

These days the president of the United States files frivolous lawsuits at an alarming clip, including against news outlets that displease him. He’s far from the only prominent public figure abusing the federal court system in this way, steering scarce judicial resources away from meritorious lawsuits by ordinary people who have suffered serious damages.

And yet, Congress has not seen fit to pass a federal “anti-SLAPP” law to stop billionaires and politicians from pursuing strategic lawsuits against public participation. But powerless prisoners? That’s another story. If they want access to the federal courts they need to navigate the Prison Litigation Reform Act — a maze of onerous procedural requirements. It’s supposedly intended to stop the courts from being burdened by inmates’ frivolous lawsuits.

We held a webinar to discuss the PLRA’s impact on incarcerated journalists and the journalists on the outside who cover the prison system, featuring Jeremy Busby, a journalist and Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) columnist who is incarcerated in Texas, and American Civil Liberties Union attorneys Nina Patel and Corene Kendrick. Patel is senior policy counsel at the ACLU Justice Division and Kendrick is the deputy director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project.

As Kendrick explained, the PLRA originated as one of the Clinton administration’s “tough on crime” initiatives as it pivoted right in preparation for the 1996 presidential election. The law was enacted despite a lack of evidence that incarcerated people file baseless lawsuits any more frequently than anyone else, presidents or otherwise. She said the law “singles out one disfavored group of people and categorically denies them equal access to the courts.”

youtube.com/embed/wiGxxwp8byI?…

She described how the harm extends beyond the impacted litigants, as the kinds of court filings foreclosed by the PLRA are “oftentimes the best way that information about conditions in our nation’s prisons and jails reach the public and members of the media.”

“The PLRA has, in practice, served as a real barrier for journalists to get any sort of information” about facilities that “get billions and billions of dollars a year to lock up human beings,” Kendrick said. “The ability to communicate with the outside world is so circumscribed and is monitored and recorded. And you know, once something gets to a federal court and it’s filed on the docket, it is out there.”

But when the court dismisses a case for procedural reasons without any consideration of whether the claims are true, all journalists are left with are untested allegations that they rarely have the resources to corroborate. “That happens all the time, and unfortunately, and it adversely affects journalists greatly,” Kendrick said.

Lawsuits are also the only recourse available to incarcerated journalists, who often report relentless retaliation when their work upsets prison officials. That’s what happened to Busby when he helped expose deplorable conditions inside the prison where he was housed when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. Busby said he was transferred to four prisons, each overcrowded with people sick with COVID, before landing in a cell without a mattress or sheets, where he was kept for six weeks. His property was damaged or seized, and he was written bogus disciplinary charges that were later overturned.

He brought a federal lawsuit, but because he was retaliated against in four different prisons, the judge said the PLRA required four separate lawsuits in four different courts. “I wasn’t able to successfully keep up with four active litigations in four different courts in four different counties, from the solitary confinement cell that I was being held in,” Busby explained, resulting in his lawsuits each being dismissed on procedural grounds before the merits of his claims could be adjudicated.

Busby is a college graduate and accomplished writer — if he can’t navigate the PLRA, it is all the more difficult for an average member of the prison population to do so. Even the experienced lawyers on the webinar acknowledged how challenging it can be to comply with the PLRA when representing their incarcerated clients. Incarcerated litigants, Busby noted, must also pay court fees — in his case, a $400 fee became $1,600 when his lawsuit was split into four.

“You don’t get paid for work here in Texas, and so most guys, they don’t even want the $400 thing against their account because their family members can maybe send $20 for toothpaste and deodorant every month or so, or every two or three months, and they don’t want to sacrifice their deodorant and toothpaste money to pursue this lawsuit,” he said.

So what’s the point of the PLRA? As Patel noted, “The courts are well equipped to throw out lawsuits that are frivolous,” and do so every day in cases involving non-incarcerated people. Patel believes the real problem the PLRA is meant to address isn’t that incarcerated people file so many invalid claims — it’s that they file so many valid ones.

With around two million people incarcerated in the United States, “a functional system where someone can go to the courts and have their constitutional violations in prison litigated and then compensated would break most prison systems in this country,” Patel explained. “That is the dirty truth of the PLRA.”

She added, “Everyone knows, and it’s not a secret, that it would bankrupt the system, and it would break it, and that we couldn’t do what we do in this country, which is lead the world in mass incarceration.”

Watch the full webinar here, and subscribe to our newsletters to get notice of future events.

Note: FPF Advocacy Director Seth Stern, who authored this article and moderated the webinar, is on the board of Busby’s nonprofit organization, JoinJeremy.

freedom.press/issues/federal-l…

Many of us have boiled an egg at some point or another in our lives. The conventional technique is relatively straightforward—get the water boiling, drop the egg in, and leave it for a certain period of time based on the desired consistency. If you want the yolk soft, only leave it in for a few minutes, and if you want it hard, go longer.

Ultimately, though, this is a relatively crude system for controlling the consistency of the final product. If you instead study the makeup of the egg, and understand how it works, you can elicit far greater control over the texture and behavior of your egg with great culinary benefits.

Knockin’ On 64

Traditional boiled eggs cooked for 4 minutes, 7 minutes, and 9 minutes. When cooking in boiling water, temperatures are high enough to create a fully firm white in just a few minutes. Credit: Wikisearcher, CC BY-SA 3.0
It all comes down to the physical basics of what goes on when we cook an egg. Whether frying, poaching, or simply boiling, one thing is the same—the liquid contents of the egg turn more solid with heat. This is because the heat causes the proteins in the egg white and egg yolk to denature—they untangle and unravel from their original folded structure into a new form which is the one we prefer to eat.

Physical chemist Hervé This is widely credited as revolutionizing the way we think about cooking eggs, through his careful study of how temperature affected the cooking process of a “boiled” egg. He invented the idea of the “6X °C egg”—a method of cooking eggs to generate a pleasant, smooth consistency by carefully controlling how the proteins denature. His work has since been expanded upon by many other researchers eager to untangle the mysteries of how egg proteins behave with heat.

Different purveyors of these theories each have their own ideals—but it’s common to hear talk of the “64-degree egg” or “65-degree egg.” To create such an egg, one typically uses a sous vide water bath set at a very precise temperature, in order to cook the egg in as controlled a manner as possible. The process is a relationship between time and temperature, and so the cooking times used are a lot longer than with boiling water at 100 C—immersing the eggs for 60 minutes or more is typical. This also helps to ensure the eggs are safe to eat, with the lower temperature needing a longer time to quash potentially harmful bacteria.

Sous Vide Eggs
byu/passswordistaco insousvide

Enthusiasts share cooking times and temperatures along with qualitative results, ever searching for the ideal egg.

The results of such a process? Eggs cooked in this manner are prized for their tender yolks and an overall consistency not dissimilar to custard. The process denatures the yolk and white proteins just enough to create an incredibly smooth egg with luxurious mouthfeel, and they’re often cited as melting in the mouth.
The onsen egg from Japan is a traditional egg dish cooked at approximately 70 C for 30 to 40 minutes, similarly creating an egg with a luxurious consistency. Credit: Blue Lotus, CC BY 2.0
The only real drawback? It’s typical to get some runny whites left over, since the low cooking temperature isn’t enough to fully denature the proteins in that part of the egg. These eggs were once a neat science experiment from the world of molecular gastronomy, with the cooking method since becoming widespread with restaurants and sous vide enthusiasts around the world.

There are even more advanced techniques for those committed to egg perfection. A research team from the University of Naples, Italy, determined that cycling an egg between two pans—one with boiling water, the other at 30 C—allowed both the yolk and the white to each reach target doneness. To get the whites to around 85 C while holding the yolk at 65 C, the team used the technique of swapping between pans to get both to their ideal temperature by modelling heat transfer through the egg. This controls the amount of heat transferred to the yolk deeper inside the egg, ensuring that it’s not overcooked in the effort to get the whites to set. Ultimately, though, this process requires a great deal of work swapping the egg back and forth for a full 30 minutes.

Few make that sort of commitment to eggcellence.

Featured image, the imaginatively named “Selective Photography of Breakfast in Plate” by [Krisztina Papp].

hackaday.com/2025/08/07/the-64…

Ahoy Pirates,

Our next PPI board meeting will take place on 26.08.2025 at 14:00 UTC / 16:00 CEST.

All official PPI proceedings, Board meetings included, are open to the public. Feel free to stop by. We’ll be happy to have you.

Where:jitsi.pirati.cz/PPI-Board

Minutes of the meeting: wiki.pp-international.net/wiki…

Agenda: Pad: etherpad.pp-international.net/…

All of our meetings are posted to our calendar: pp-international.net/calendar/

We look forward to seeing visitors.

Thank you for your support,

The Board of PPI

pp-international.net/2025/08/n…

Ora... ognuno può pensarla come vuole e in molti penseranno che quest'uomo è un pazzo.

Ma metti che domani 'sto mostro esce dall'acqua e si fa un giretto sulla terraferma a favore di fotografi.

Steve Feltham potrà sparare un "VE L'AVEVO DETTO, STRONZI!" da cento megatoni.

😁😁😁

L’uomo che da 30 anni cerca il mostro di Loch Ness: ilpost.it/2022/11/10/uomo-cerc…

L’uomo che da 30 anni cerca il mostro di Loch Ness

Steve Feltham è arrivato sul lago scozzese nel 1991 e da allora passa le sue giornate scrutando l'acqua, invano

^{Il Post}