Adding LEDs to a project used to be enough to make it cool. But these days, you need arrays of addressable multi-color LEDs, and that typically means WS2812B or something similar. The problem is that while it was pretty easy to test garden-variety LEDs, these devices can be a bit harder to troubleshoot. [Gokux] has the answer, as you can see in the video below.

Testing these was especially important to [Gokux] because they usually swipe the modules from other modules or LED strips. The little fixture sends the correct pulses to push the LED through several colors when you hold it down to the pads.

However, what if the LED is blinking but not totally right? How can you tell? Easy, there’s a reference LED that changes colors in sync with the device under test. So, if the LEDs match, you have a winner. If not… well, it’s time to desolder another donor LED.

This is one of those projects that you probably should have thought of, but also probably didn’t. While the tester here uses a Xiao microcontroller, any processor that can drive the LEDs would be easy to use. We’d be tempted to breadboard the tester, but you’d need a way to make contact with the LED. Maybe some foil tape would do the trick. Or pogo pins.

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Le autorità di San Pietroburgo stanno introducendo una nuova funzionalità nel sistema “Città sicura”: le telecamere di videosorveglianza inizieranno a determinare l’etnia dei cittadini. Secondo il capo del Comitato per le relazioni interetniche Oleg Kapitanov, ciò contribuirà a “prevenire la formazione di enclave etniche” e a ridurre la tensione sociale.

Il nuovo algoritmo verrà lanciato su 8.000 delle 102.000 telecamere installate in città. È già stato concluso il contratto per l’acquisto della licenza per il riconoscimento dell’etnia delle persone; per questo sono stati stanziati 38,4 milioni di rubli. Si prevede che il sistema consentirà la raccolta automatica di report statistici.

Le autorità sono preoccupate per le dinamiche dell’opinione pubblica: nel 2024, solo il 43% dei residenti di San Pietroburgo valutava positivamente le relazioni interetniche, mentre le autorità si aspettavano il 62%. Anche il deputato Mikhail Romanov ha sottolineato i problemi legati ai corrieri migranti che violano le norme del codice stradale e rappresentano una minaccia per i pedoni.

Il Ministero degli Interni ha precedentemente riferito che in Russia vivono 6,2 milioni di cittadini stranieri, la maggior parte dei quali proviene da Uzbekistan, Tagikistan e Kirghizistan. Si stima che il numero di migranti illegali sia di 630.000.

Il Comitato per l’informatica e le comunicazioni dell’amministrazione di San Pietroburgo ha confermato che la licenza per l’utilizzo del software per il riconoscimento etnico è stata acquisita alla fine del 2024. Secondo loro, il nuovo sistema consentirà una previsione più accurata delle risorse necessarie per mantenere l’ordine durante gli eventi di massa, nonché di ottimizzare il coinvolgimento di volontari e agenti delle forze dell’ordine che parlano lingue diverse.

Tuttavia, diversi esperti hanno espresso dubbi sull’opportunità di questa iniziativa. Il capo del Consiglio presidenziale per i diritti umani, Valery Fadeyev, ha messo in dubbio la necessità di dotare 8.000 telecamere di un complesso pacchetto software per determinare l’ubicazione delle enclave etniche, poiché, a suo parere, le autorità dispongono già dei dati rilevanti.

Il vicedirettore dell’Istituto dei paesi della CSI, Aleksandr Dokuchaev, ha espresso dubbi sulla fattibilità tecnica di un simile sistema, chiedendosi come avrebbe potuto distinguere, ad esempio, i kazaki dagli jakuti. Ha definito l’iniziativa sbagliata, sottolineando che non fa altro che aumentare le tensioni e i conflitti etnici. Valery Fadeyev ha anche sottolineato che i tentativi di determinare l’identità etnica basandosi sulle immagini umiliano la dignità umana, ricordando che in Russia la nazionalità non è nemmeno indicata sui passaporti.

L'articolo Sotto Sorveglianza: San Pietroburgo usa l’IA per riconoscere l’etnia dei cittadini proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

There are many ways to hack the world. Graduate students at Parsons The New School for Design developed a guide for hacking the biggest piece of technology humans have developed – the city.

One of the things we love here at Hackaday is how hacking gives us a tool to make the world a better place for ourselves and those around us. Even if it’s a simple Arduino-based project, we’re (usually) trying to make something better or less painful.

Taking that same approach of identifying a problem, talking to the end user, and then going through design and execution can also apply to projects at a larger scale. Even if you live in an already great neighborhood, there’s likely some abandoned nook or epic vista that could use some love to bring people out from behind their screens to enjoy each other’s company. This guide walks us through the steps of improving public space, and some of the various ways to interact with and collate data from the people and organizations that makeup a community. This could work as a framework for growing any nascent hacker or makerspaces as well.

Hacking your neighborhood can include anything: a roving playground, a light up seesaw, or a recycling game. If you’ve seen any cool projects in this regard, send them to the tipsline!

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Instant photography occupies a niche in film photography that has endured despite its relatively high cost and the ease of newer digital technologies. There are two main manufacturers, Polaroid and Fujifilm, as well as a few smaller boutique camera makers. Into this comes [Toast], with an entirely 3D printed instant camera, not a Polaroid as he calls it, but one for Fuji Instax Mini film.

Currently available instant film comes in cartridges in which each picture is a layered design with a sachet of developing chemicals at the end. Once the film part has been exposed it is developed by passing through a set of rollers which squeeze the chemicals evenly over the film, allowing it to develop. The camera in the video below the break is simple enough, a pinhole box camera design, but the huge challenge and the interesting part of the video comes in the developer attachment which has those rollers. It’s considerably more challenging than it might at first appear, and he goes through many iterations before getting it right with some steel rollers.

The 3D print files are available but only at a price, and despite that we think there’s enough in the video below for anyone who wants to experiment for themselves. For the rest of us it’s an insight into a technology we all know about, but maybe have never looked closely at.

Instax has appeared here before, usually as an instant back for older cameras, but sometimes for far tastier projects.

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One of the two stakes that make up the electrostatic precipitator system for atmospheric water harvesting. (Credit: Plasma Channel, YouTube)
Atmospheric water harvesting is a way to obtain fresh water in arid regions, as there is always some moisture in the air, especially in the form of morning fog. The trick lies in capturing this moisture as efficiently as possible, with a range of methods available that start at ancient low-tech methods involving passive fog droplet capture all the way to variants of what are effectively large dehumidifiers. A less common way involves high-voltage and found itself the subject of a recent Plasma Channel video on YouTube. The inspiration for the build was a 2018 paper by [Maher Damak] et al. (PDF) titled Electrostatically driven fog collection using space charge injection.

Rather than passively waiting for dew to collect on the collector, as with many of the methods detailed in this review article by [Xiaoyi Liu] et al., this electrostatic approach pretty much does what it says on the tin. It follows the principle of electrostatic precipitators with a high-voltage emitter electrode to ionize the air and grounded collector wires. In the video a small-scale version (see top image) was first constructed, demonstrating the effectiveness. Whereas the passive grid collected virtually none of the fog from an ultrasonic fog maker, with 35 kV applied the difference was night and day. No water was collected with the first test, but with power applied a significant 40 mL was collected in 5 minutes on the small mesh.

With this scale test complete, a larger version could be designed and tested. This simplifies the emitter to a single wire connected between two stakes, one of which contains the 20 kV HV generator and battery. The mesh is placed right below it and grounded (see image). With an extreme fog test inside a terrarium, it showed a very strong effect, resulting in a harvest of 14 mL/Wh for this prototype. With a larger scale version in a real-life environment (i.e. desert) planned, it’ll be interesting to see whether this method holds up in a more realistic scenario.

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Turning surplus LCD panels into stand-alone monitors with the help of a driver board is an established hack, and a search of eBay or AliExpress will turn up boards for almost any widely available panel. [Drygol] has a couple of old iPad screens, and has done exactly this with them. What makes these two projects stand aside from the crowd is their attention to detail, instead of creating a hacky monitor this is almost something you might buy as a product.

For a start, both screens sit in very smart 3D printed cases. Behind them is the LCD driver, and perhaps this is where many people might leave it. But the point of an iPad is portability, so the first one receives a suitably large lithium polymer battery and its associated electronics. As such a thing is of limited use without a battery level monitor, so one is mounted flush with the case on the outside. The final touch is a Bluetooth audio board and speaker, making an all-in-one peripheral we’d be happy to carry with us.

The second screen is a slimmer version of the first case, with a different board that has an onboard audio channel. It’s mounted in a stand with a MiSter FPGA emulator, for a very neat and compact desktop set-up.

This project shows what can be done with these screens, and raises the bar. All the files are included, so it should be possible to make your own. We expect someone might stick a Raspberry Pi in there, to make… something like an iPad.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen an iPad screen mod.

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Dopo che le autorità del Regno Unito hanno chiesto ad Apple di creare una backdoor che consentisse l’accesso ai dati cloud crittografati degli utenti, Apple ha deciso di disattivare del tutto la funzionalità Advanced Data Protection (ADP) nel Regno Unito.

Come riportato all’inizio di questo mese dal Washington Post, citando le proprie fonti, le autorità britanniche hanno emesso un ordine e hanno chiesto ad Apple di fornire l’accesso ai dati criptati degli utenti in tutto il mondo. Secondo la pubblicazione, l’ordine imponeva ad Apple di creare una backdoor che avrebbe consentito l’accesso a qualsiasi contenuto caricato sul cloud da qualsiasi utente.

In particolare, il governo voleva un accesso ai dati protetto dalla crittografia end-to-end mediante Advanced Data Protection, che garantisce che nemmeno Apple stessa possa vedere i dati degli utenti. ADP è stato introdotto nel 2022 ed è una funzionalità opzionale che gli utenti possono abilitare per i backup di iCloud, le foto, le note e altri dati. Nella loro pubblicazione, i giornalisti del Washington Post hanno ipotizzato che tali requisiti avrebbero costretto Apple a chiudere ADP, cosa che è accaduta alla fine della scorsa settimana.

“Apple non può più offrire la protezione avanzata dei dati (ADP) ai nuovi utenti nel Regno Unito e gli utenti esistenti nel Regno Unito dovranno presto disattivare questa funzione di sicurezza”, ha affermato Apple .

L’azienda riteneva che il rispetto dei requisiti delle autorità britanniche avrebbe potuto garantire l’accesso ai dati degli utenti non solo al governo, ma anche agli aggressori.

“Siamo profondamente delusi dal fatto che la protezione di ADP non sarà disponibile per i nostri clienti nel Regno Unito, dato il continuo aumento delle violazioni dei dati e di altre minacce alla privacy. Migliorare la sicurezza dell’archiviazione cloud con la crittografia end-to-end è più importante che mai”, ha affermato Apple.

Quindi per gli utenti Apple del Regno Unito alcuni dati rimangono crittografati. Pertanto, iCloud Keychain e Health, iMessage e FaceTime dispongono della crittografia end-to-end per impostazione predefinita. Tuttavia, altri servizi iCloud, tra cui iCloud Backup, iCloud Drive, Foto, Note, Promemoria, Segnalibri di Safari, Comandi rapidi di Siri e così via, non verranno crittografati.

Apple ha affermato che spera di ripristinare in futuro la protezione dei dati nel Regno Unito, ma si rifiuta di creare backdoor per i governi. “Come abbiamo affermato più volte, non abbiamo mai creato backdoor o chiavi master per i nostri prodotti e servizi. E non lo faremo mai”, hanno detto i rappresentanti di Apple ai media.

L'articolo Apple si rifiuta di creare una Backdoor per il governo del Regno Unito e disabilita ADP proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Okay, you have to see the gallery to appreciate it, but this keyboard was designed to resemble a red cedar tree with the green shell and wood bottom and the copper PCB showing through the tree cutouts on the sides.

Image by [WesternRedCdar] via redditBut you know why I chose this picture — those PS2 buttons. According to [WesternRedCdar] they are just for fun, although they do allow for pressing Ctrl and Alt at the same time with a single thumb.

Oh, and are those Nintendo Switch joysticks above the PS2 buttons? Those are for the mouse and vertical/horizontal scrolling. Honestly, this seems like a great amount of thumb controls. The basics are there (presumably), and there isn’t any thumb-extending excess, like keys on the insides by the mouse.

This bad mama jama runs on an RP2040 and has 50 hand-wired Cherry Brown switches plus the PS2 buttons. In the build guide, you can read all about [WesternRedCdar]’s troubles with integrating those. The Nintendo Switch joysticks weren’t terribly easy, either, since the ribbon connector can’t be soldered directly.

The final issue was one of weight. Since many of the switches stand quite tall, it sort of jostles the keyboard to actuate them. [WesternRedCdar] opined that that the ideal solution would have been to use metal base plates instead of wood, but took care of the issue by adding layers of 1/8″ steel flat bar inside the case.

Gone in 60 Seconds: the Micro Journal Rev. 7 From Tindie

Don’t know what took me so long to find r/writerDeck, but here we go! [WorkingAmbition7014] was quite excited to announce there that [Background_Ad_1810] aka [Un Kyu Lee]’s Micro Journal rev. 7 was up on Tindie. It’s already sold out, but that’s okay because previous versions are already open-source, and it’s just a matter of time before this new revision makes its way to the ole GitHub.

Nearly NSFW image by [Un Kyu Lee] via TindieYou may remember our coverage of the third iteration from about a year ago. Look how far it has come since then! Although the overall portability has kind of taken a dive, it sure does look great from where I’m sitting. Maybe it’s just that lovely color scheme, but to me it has sort of a softened-up mil-spec look.

This distraction-free machine is based on the ESP32-S3 microcontroller. It starts up right away, and you can start typing pretty much immediately on the ePaper screen. There are a pair of knobs that go a long way toward its typewriter looks; the left one wipes the screen and puts the machine to sleep, and the right knob clears the screen in the case of too much ghosting.

Files are saved on the SD card that sits behind the screen, or you can send them to Google Drive. Now, it doesn’t come with that cool clip light, but it doesn’t have a backlight, either, so you’ll probably want to bring your own. You will also have to source your own 18650. Be sure to check out the overview after the break.

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The Centerfold: Purple Paradise

Image by [Majestic-Fox-550] via redditIsn’t this cozy and fresh? Some might say it’s too cool-toned overall, but I think the peach parts help it strike a balance. Again, I don’t know much, but that keyboard is a Feker Galaxy 80, and the desk mat is from The Mousepad Company. I don’t think those cloud wrist rests are too hard to find; I’ve even seen them at Five Below before.

I love these setup pictures, but I have to wonder, does anyone really keep their desk this clean and tidy? Of course not, it’s for the shot, you’re saying. But that’s my point. Why does everyone always tidy up so hard first? I want to see battle stations in their true forms sometimes. I feel like we got sorta close last week in the one with all the screens. So do I need to inspire centerfold submissions by showing my own battle station one of these times? I don’t know if y’all really want that.

Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad? Send me a picture along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!

Historical Clackers: the Ford Typewriter

Isn’t this machine a beauty? And no, inventor Eugene A. Ford bore no relation to Henry Ford the automobile maker. But wouldn’t this look grand while perched briefly on the running board of your Model T for a quick daguerreotype?
Image via The Martin Howard Collection
Lovely as she was, the 1895 Ford was no fun for the typist. The Space bar-placed Shifts required real pressure to properly operate, and the keys are evidently springy and wobbly. “Springy” sounds intriguing; “wobbly” does not.

Additionally, the advancing lever doesn’t allow going backwards or forwards a line at a time. But the one great thing about the Ford was that it’s a visible writer, whereas most machines of the time were blind writers, meaning you were unable to see what you were typing without stopping and doing something first. It wasn’t the first visible writer, but it might be the easiest to look at.

What it did do first is use aluminium in its construction, although there were two versions, one with an all-aluminium frame and carriage, and the other with a black, enameled cast iron frame and and an aluminium carriage. The cast iron went for $75, and the lighter-weight aluminium machine for $85. Both were lateral thrust machines, which means that the type bars are spread out like a fan and move horizontally to strike the platen.

Eugene Ford had quite the career. After putting his typewriter on the market in 1895, he worked with IBM for the rest of his life, and became chief development engineer of the New York laboratories in 1911. During his tenure, he developed improvements to various punched card accounting machines, sorters, and counters.

Finally, a Keyboard for Cat Lovers

Cats and keyboards go together like peanut butter and jelly. When they’re not straight up walking across it, they’re fluffing it up. Well, why not admit defeat and get this cozy cat-themed keyboard?

This is the Dry Studio Petbrick 65, which comes in calico and black, which is called the odd-eyed design, presumably because the kitty on the Escape key has heterochromia.
Image via Dry Studio
Now that’s just the keyboard itself that comes in calico and black; soon you’ll be able to get all kinds of fuzzy bezels, which attach with magnets and are hand-washable, thankfully.

The Petbrick 65 isn’t just some cutesy little thing. This is a serious mechanical keyboard with a sandblasted POM plate, a specially-tuned (what? how?) cotton poron switch pad, PET film for the sake of acoustics, and two layers of sound-dampening foam.

The switches are custom-made ‘crystal pinks’ that were developed in-house and look pretty slick. If you don’t like them, the PCB is hot-swappable. And they didn’t stop there — the keycaps have dye-sublimated legends for longevity.

Would I type on this? I would, at least until it became uncomfortable for my RSI situation. I’m interested to try these crystal pink switches and feel the fluffiness of the frame on the heels of my hands.

Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards? Help me out by sending in a link or two. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to email me directly.

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Normally, when you want a low DC voltage from the AC line, you think about using a transformer of some kind. [RCD66] noticed that an AC monitor meter must have some sort of power supply but had no transformers in sight. That led to an exploration of how those work and how you can use them, too. You can watch the work in the video below.

Sensibly, there is a transformer in the test setup — an isolation transformer to make it safe to probe the circuit. But there’s no transformer providing voltage changes. Isolation is important even if you are taking apart something commercial that might be trasformerless.

The circuit is simple enough: it uses a capacitor, a resistor, and a pair of diodes (one of them a zener diode). He uses this basic circuit to drive simple regulators with input and output filter capacitors. We’ve seen many variations on this design over the years.

You can’t draw a lot of power through this arrangement. But sometimes it is all you need. However, this is pretty dangerous, as we’ve discussed before. Be sure you understand exactly what the risks are before you decide to build something like this.

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In an ideal world, devoid of pesky details like contact resistance and manufacturing imperfections, you would be able to double the current that can be provided to a device by doubling the number of conductors without altering the device’s circuitry, as each conductor would carry the exact same amount of current as its neighbors. Since we do not actually live inside a simplified physics question’s scenario, multi-wire powering of devices comes with a range of headaches, succinctly summarized in the well-known rule that electricity always seeks the path of least resistance.

As recently shown by NVidia with their newly released RTX 50-series graphics cards, failure to provide current balancing between said different conductors will quickly turn it into a practical physics demonstration of this rule. Initially pinned down as an issue with the new-ish 12VHPWR connector that was supposed to replace the 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe power connectors, it turns out that a lack of current balancing is plaguing NVidia GPUs, with predictably melty results when combined with low safety margins.

So what exactly changed that caused what seems to be a new problem, and why do you want multi-wire, multi-phase current balancing in your life when pumping hundreds of watts through copper wiring inside your PC?

Resistance Is Not Futile

Smoke coming off a 12VHPWR connector on NVidia RTX 4090 Founders Edition GPU. (Credit: Gamers Nexus, YouTube)
In the absence of cheap room-temperature superconducting wires, we have to treat each conductor as a combination of a resistor, inductor and capacitor. These parameters set limitations on properties such as how much current a conductor can carry without changing phase from solid to gaseous. The contact resistance between the conductors of both sides in a connector adds another variable here, especially when a connector wears out or the contacts become corroded.

In the case of the 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe power connector, these are based on the Molex Mini-Fit series, with the commonly used Mini-Fit Plus HCS (high current system) rated for 100 mating cycles in tin plating or 250 cycles in gold, and a current rating of 8.5 A to 10 A per pin depending on whether 18 AWG or 16 AWG wire is used. The much smaller connector of the 12-pin 12VHPWR, and equivalent 12V-2×6, standard is rated for only 30 mating cycles, and 9.5 A per pin. It is based on the Molex Micro-Fit+ connector.
Hot spot of a 12VHPWR connector on NVidia RTX 4090 Founders Edition GPU. (Credit: Gamers Nexus, YouTube)
The smaller pin size and lower endurance increases the possibility of poor contact, as first demonstrated with the 12VHPWR connector back in 2022 when NVidia RTX 40-series cards experienced run-away thermal events where this power connector on the GPU side melted. Subsequent research by the team at Gamers Nexusshowed this to be due to poor contact within the connector with resulting high resistance and thus a massive thermal hot spot. Following this event, the 12V-2×6 update to 12VHPWR increased the length of the power pins and decreased that of the four sense pins.

The idea behind this change is that by extending the length of the power and ground pins by 0.25 mm and shortening the sense pins by 1.5 mm there’s a higher chance of there being an actual good contact on the ground and power pins when the sense lines signal the GPU that it can start drawing hundreds of watts.

This change did only affect the male side of the connector, and not the cable itself. This made it very surprising to some when after the much higher wattage RTX 5090 GPUs were released and suddenly cables began burning up,with clear melting visible on the GPU and power supply side. What was going on here?

Multi-Phase Balance

Melted RTX 5090, PSU and cable power connectors. (Credit: der8auer, YouTube)
Shortly after the first melting cable event involving an RTX 5090 Founders Edition (FE) GPU popped up on the internet, Roman [Der8auer] Hartung reached out to this lucky person and – since both live quite close – borrowed the damaged GPU, PSU and cable for an investigative video. Involved were not only an RTX 5090 FE GPU, but also the PSU with its 12VHPWR connector. On each side the plastic around one pin was completely melted, with the cable having to be forcibly removed.
Shunt resistor comparison of NVidia GPUs. (Credit: Buildzoid, YouTube)
During Roman’s testing with another RTX 9050 FE and 12VHPWR cable he found that two of the six 12V wires were significantly warmer than the rest, courtesy of these carrying over 22 A versus around 2 A for the others while the PSU-side connector side hit a blistering 150 °C. This result was replicated by some and seems to be fully due to how the NVidia RTX 9050 FE card handles the incoming power, by tying all incoming power lines together. This a practice that began with the RTX 4090, but the RTX 5090 is the first to pull close to the rated 600 watts of the 12VHPWR/12V-2×6 connector. This was explained quite comprehensively in a comparison video by Buildzoid.

Because with the RTX 4090 and 5090 FE GPUs – as well as some GPUs by third-party manufacturers – these 12V lines are treated as a singular line, it is essential that the resistance on these lines is matched quite closely. If this is not the case, then physics does what it’s supposed to and the wires with the lowest resistance carry the most current. Because the 12V-2×6 connector on the GPU side sees only happy sense pins, it assumes that everything is fine and will pull 575 watts, or more, through a single 16 AWG wire if need be.

Meanwhile the Asus RTX 5090 Astral GPU does have individual shunt resistors to measure the current on the individual 12V lines, but no features to balance current or throttle/shutdown the GPU to prevent damage. This is actually a feature that used to be quite common, as demonstrated by this EVGA RTX 3090 Ti GPU:
EVGA RTX 3090 Ti GPU with triple phase distribution marked. Yellow is PCIe slot power. (Credit: taka, TechPowerUp forums)
On the top right the triple sense resistors (shunts) are visible, each of which is followed by its own filter coil and feeding its own set of power phases, marked in either red, green or blue. The yellow phases are for the RAM, and are fed from the PCIe slot’s 75 Watt. The bottom right controller controls the phases and based on the measured currents can balance the current per channel by shifting the load between parts of the phases.

This is a design that is completely omitted in the RTX 5090 FE design, which – as Igor Wallossek at Igor’s Lab describes it – has been minimized to the point where crucial parts have begun to be omitted. He also covers an MSI RTX 3090 Ti Suprim card which does a similar kind of phase balancing before the RTX 4090 and RTX 5090 versions of MSI’s GPUs begin to shed such features as well. It would seem that even as power demands by GPUs have increased, crucial safety features such as current balancing have been sacrificed. As it turns out, safety margins have also been sacrificed along with these features.

Safety Margins

The ugly truth about the switch from 8-pin PCIe connectors to 12-pin 12VHPWR connectors is that while the former is rated officially for 150 watts, this power level would be hit easily even by the cheapest implementation using crummy 18 AWG wiring. With the HCS connectors and 16 AWG wiring, you are looking at 10 A × 12 V × 3 = 360 watts, or a safety margin of 2.4. With cheaper connectors and a maximum of 7 A per wire it would still be a safety margin of 1.68.

Meanwhile, the 12VHPWR/12V-2×6 with the required 16 AWG wiring is rated for 9.5 A × 12 V × 6 = 684 watts, or a safety margin of 1.14. In a situation where one or more wires suddenly decide to become higher-resistance paths this means that the remaining wires have to pick up the slack, which in the case of a 575 watt RTX 5090 GPU means overloading these wires.

Meanwhile a 8-pin PCIe connector would be somewhat unhappy in this case and show elevated temperatures, but worst case even a single wire could carry 150 watts and be happier than the case demonstrated by [Der8auer] where two 12V-2×6 connector wires were forced to carry 260 watts each for the exact same wire gauge.

This is also the reason why [Der8auer]’s Corsair PSU 12V-2×6 cable is provided with two 8-pin PCIe-style connectors on the PSU side. Each of these is rated at 300 watts by Corsair, with Corsair PSU designer Jon Gerow, of JonnyGuru PSU review fame, going over the details on his personal site for the HCS connectors. As it turns out, two 8-pin PCIe connectors are an easy match for a ‘600 watt’ 12VHPWR connector, with over 680 watt available within margins.

There’s a good chance that this was the reason why [Der8auer]’s PSU and cable did not melt, even though it clearly really wanted to do so.

Balance Is Everything

Although it is doubtful that we have seen the last of this GPU power connector saga, it is telling that so far only GPUs with NVidia chips have gone full-in on the 12VHPWR/12V-2×6 connectors, no doubt also because the reference boards provided to board partners come with these connectors. Over in the Intel and AMD GPU camps there’s not even a tepid push for a change from PCIe power connectors, with so far just one still-to-be-released AMD GPU featuring the connector.

That said, the connector itself is not terrible by itself, with Jon Gerow making the case here quite clearly too. It’s simply a very fiddly and somewhat fragile connector that’s being pushed far beyond its specifications by PCI-SIG. Along the way it has also made it painfully clear that current balancing features which used to exist on GPUs have been quietly dropped for a few years now.

Obviously, adding multiple shunts and associated monitoring and phase balancing is not the easiest task, and will eat up a chunk of board real-estate while boosting BOM size. But as we can see, it can also prevent a lot of bad publicity and melting parts. Even if things should work fine without it – and they usually will – eating into safety margins and cutting components tends to be one of those things that will absolutely backfire in a spectacular fashion that should surprise absolutely nobody.

Featured image: [ivan6953]’s burnt cables.

hackaday.com/2025/02/24/the-im…

Google è da tempo lo strumento di ricerca principale per milioni di utenti, ma sempre più persone notano che i suoi risultati di ricerca stanno peggiorando. Giornalisti, esperti SEO e utenti comuni lamentano che la ricerca sta diventando meno utile e che Google promuove sempre più i propri servizi e materiali pubblicitari anziché informazioni oggettive.

Secondo WalletHub, solo il 36% delle ricerche negli Stati Uniti indirizza gli utenti a siti che non sono di proprietà di Google o che non pagano Google per la pubblicità. Inoltre, il 66% degli intervistati ritiene che ci siano troppi annunci nelle pagine di ricerca e il 35% nota che i risultati sono diventati meno pertinenti. Nel settore finanziario, Google fornisce spesso link a grandi marchi, anche se le loro informazioni sono inferiori a quelle di risorse meno note ma di qualità più elevata.

Il problema non riguarda solo la pubblicità. Ad esempio, gli utenti notano la predominanza di discussioni obsolete nei forum di Reddit nei risultati di ricerca. Google ha stipulato un accordo con la piattaforma per accedere ai suoi contenuti, il che comporta la comparsa di argomenti vecchi e irrilevanti in cima ai risultati di ricerca. Secondo un sondaggio, il 55% degli utenti ritiene che Google presti troppa attenzione a Reddit.

Inoltre, i documenti del caso antitrust USA contro Google dimostrano che l’azienda ha deliberatamente peggiorato la qualità della ricerca per aumentare i ricavi pubblicitari. Nel 2020, il responsabile della divisione pubblicitaria è stato nominato responsabile della ricerca e, da allora, la priorità si è spostata dalla comodità dell’utente all’aumento dei ricavi pubblicitari. Da allora, Alphabet, la società madre di Google, ha aumentato il suo valore di mercato del 160%, mentre l’indice S&P 500 è cresciuto solo del 100%.

WalletHub ritiene che Google voglia intenzionalmente rendere più difficile la ricerca di informazioni di qualità, costringendo gli utenti a effettuare ricerche più spesso e a visualizzare più annunci pubblicitari. Incoraggia le persone a utilizzare motori di ricerca alternativi come DuckDuckGo, Bing, Kagi e Brave.

Gli esempi del deterioramento della ricerca sono chiari. Nelle ricerche finanziarie, Google privilegia i marchi più grandi rispetto ai prodotti migliori. Ad esempio, Mastercard si classifica al primo posto per il termine di ricerca “migliori carte di credito per chi ha un cattivo credito”, nonostante la sua pagina non offra confronti indipendenti.

Una situazione simile si osserva con le raccomandazioni sui prodotti bancari: la ricerca dimostra che i risultati irrilevanti possono costare agli utenti una media di 202 dollari e, in alcuni casi, fino a 1.347 dollari.

Nonostante le crescenti critiche, Google non ha mostrato alcun segno di voler cambiare strategia. In assenza di concorrenti forti, un’azienda può permettersi di promuovere i propri interessi a scapito della qualità della ricerca. Ciò rende sempre più urgente la necessità di trovare strumenti di ricerca alternativi.

L'articolo Google si è rotto? Gli utenti denunciano scarsi risultati di ricerca e più pubblicità! proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

GUTEN TAG! WELCOME BACK TO DIGITAL POLITICS. I'm Mark Scott, and Feb 24 marks the three-year anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Roughly 150,000 people have died so far. For more on what the ongoing war has done to Ukraine, Russia and global relations, read here, here, here and here.

— Germany's federal election will now lead to haggling over a new coalition government. In the aftermath of the Feb 23 vote, social media's impact on voting remains unclear as ever.

— Don't expect the first transatlantic spat over digital regulation to come from social media rules. You should focus on digital competition, data protection and digital services taxes.

— The world almost got a new global tax regime, primarily focused on new levies on Big Tech, over the line. It would have generated $100 billion in additional government revenue a year. It's now kaput.

Let's get started:

digitalpolitics.co/newsletter0…

While we’re still waiting for ET to give us a ring, many worlds might not have life that’s discovered the joys of radio yet. Scientists ran a two-pronged study to see how bacteria might fare on other worlds.

We currently define the Habitable Zone (HZ) of a planet by the likelihood that particular planet can host liquid water due to its peculiar blend of atmosphere and distance from its star. While this doesn’t guarantee the presence of life, its a good first place to start. Trying to expand on this, the scientists used a climate model to refine the boundaries of the HZ for atmosphere’s dominated by H₂ and CO₂ gases.

Once they determined these limits, they then mixed up some example atmospheres and subjected E. coli to the environments. Their findings “indicate that atmospheric composition significantly affects bacterial growth patterns, highlighting the importance of considering diverse atmospheres in evaluating exoplanet habitability and advancing the search for life beyond Earth.”

If you want to look more into what might be out there, how about analyzing the WOW Signal or looking at what the Drake Equation is all about.

hackaday.com/2025/02/24/where-…

Il Segretario alla Difesa degli Stati Uniti, Pete Hegseth, ha ordinato al Cyber ​​Command degli Stati Uniti (USCYBERCOM) di accelerare i preparativi per un importante sforzo di modernizzazione noto come “Cyber ​​Command 2.0”. Invece dei 180 giorni previsti per elaborare un piano per attuare la riforma, il comando ora dato solo 45 giorni, il che gli impone di presentare il documento finale entro e non oltre il 22 marzo. Questa inaspettata riduzione dei tempi rappresenta una sfida significativa per la dirigenza dell’USCYBERCOM, in quanto richiede di riconsiderare una serie di processi chiave in un lasso di tempo ridotto.

Motivi per accelerare la riforma

Il piano “Cyber ​​​​Command 2.0” era stato originariamente approvato alla fine dell’anno scorso dall’ex Segretario alla Difesa Lloyd Austin. Tuttavia, da quando è salita al potere la nuova amministrazione di Donald Trump, le priorità della politica informatica degli Stati Uniti sono cambiate in modo significativo. Il nuovo team della Casa Bianca sta spingendo per un’azione più decisa e aggressiva nel cyberspazio, soprattutto in seguito ai recenti attacchi e alle operazioni di spionaggio da parte della Cina.

Secondo fonti a conoscenza della situazione, Hegseth, dopo aver preso conoscenza della bozza il 5 febbraio, ha chiesto al comando non solo di accelerare lo sviluppo della riforma, ma anche di preparare un elenco di poteri necessari per migliorare l’efficacia delle operazioni. Inoltre, il Pentagono ha ordinato l’identificazione delle limitazioni normative che impediscono alle forze informatiche statunitensi di operare in modo più rapido ed efficace.

Cosa cambia allo US Cyber ​​Command?

Gli ambiti chiave della riforma erano:

• Istituzione di un centro di innovazione per la guerra informatica che garantisca una stretta cooperazione tra l’esercito e le aziende tecnologiche private.
• Sviluppo di un nuovo centro di eccellenza per la formazione informatica al fine di ampliare la formazione in tutto il sistema militare.
• Introduzione di un nuovo modello per la formazione di unità informatiche in vari rami delle forze armate.
• Sviluppare una strategia di gestione dei talenti che includa un sistema unificato di pagamenti, bonus e fidelizzazione dei dipendenti.

Queste misure sono progettate non solo per modernizzare il Cyber ​​Command, ma anche per creare un sistema di difesa informatica statunitense più flessibile e reattivo, in grado di adattarsi ai rapidi cambiamenti delle minacce.

Revisione dei poteri e nuove regole del gioco

Sebbene i dettagli esatti della riforma non siano ancora stati resi noti, la Commissione per i servizi armati della Camera sarebbe stata informata sul progetto e i senatori e i loro assistenti avrebbero ricevuto presentazioni preliminari. Nell’ambito della riforma, il Cyber ​​Command degli Stati Uniti sta anche sviluppando un’analisi delle potenziali nuove autorità che potrebbero essere necessarie per l’azione operativa.

Le fonti sottolineano che la richiesta di ampliare l’autorità del Cyber ​​Command non è nuova. Un processo simile si era già verificato nel 2017 sotto la prima amministrazione Trump. Sempre nel 2020 è stato condotto uno studio completo di tutti i comandi combattenti degli Stati Uniti, che ha portato all’ampliamento del Cyber ​​Command con l’inclusione di altri 14 comandi.

La sfida principale è la mancanza di tempo

Nonostante l’alto livello di sostegno alla riforma, alcuni esperti temono che scadenze così ravvicinate possano complicare il processo di coordinamento della modernizzazione tra i diversi rami delle forze armate.

Un funzionario ha affermato che i tempi sono troppo stretti perché i servizi militari e il Cyber ​​Command degli Stati Uniti raggiungano un accordo sulla condivisione delle risorse. Molto probabilmente il comando preparerà un piano, che verrà prima presentato al Pentagono e poi sottoposto all’approvazione dell’esercito.

Altri esperti ritengono che i principali disaccordi siano già noti e che il compito di Hegseth sia quello di contribuire a risolverli. In caso di questioni controverse, potrà proporre soluzioni specifiche e accelerare il processo di riforma.

“Coinvolgimento continuo” invece di transazioni una tantum

Un altro aspetto importante della riforma sarà il passaggio da operazioni informatiche una tantum a campagne strategiche a lungo termine. Questo concetto si basa sulla strategia Defend Forward, sancita per la prima volta nella dottrina informatica del Pentagono nel 2018. Si tratta di contrastare attivamente le minacce il più vicino possibile alla fonte, anziché limitarsi a proteggere i sistemi che sono già stati attaccati.

La nuova strategia privilegia l’impegno continuo con il nemico piuttosto che operazioni mirate occasionali. Ciò consentirà a Cyber ​​Command di gestire le risorse in modo più flessibile, rispondere più rapidamente alle minacce ed evitare lungaggini burocratiche.

In particolare, si sta discutendo sulla possibilità di semplificare la procedura di approvazione degli attacchi digitali, il che consentirà ai comandanti di prendere decisioni più rapidamente, anziché attendere un’approvazione in più fasi. Un approccio simile era già stato utilizzato nel 2018, quando l’amministrazione Trump aveva reso più facile lanciare attacchi informatici contro le campagne di disinformazione russe.

Prospettive per la riforma del “Cyber ​​​​Command 2.0”

Resta aperta la questione su quale sarà il documento finale che USCYBERCOM presenterà al Pentagono. Secondo gli esperti, con ogni probabilità includerà sia indicatori di performance specifici sia obiettivi flessibili a lungo termine che consentiranno al team di adattarsi alle nuove sfide.

Se implementato, il nuovo approccio cambierebbe in modo significativo il modo in cui opera il Cyber ​​Command degli Stati Uniti. Si creerà un sistema di guerra digitale efficace e autonomo, in grado non solo di rispondere agli attacchi, ma anche di prevenire attivamente le minacce in una fase iniziale.

Il cyberspazio sta sempre di più diventando la nuova arena di scontro globale e gli Stati Uniti cercano non solo di mantenere, ma anche di rafforzare il loro predominio in questo ambito.

L'articolo Cyber Command 2.0: Gli USA accelerano la guerra digitale contro Cina e Russia proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.