The results are in from the national elections in the Czech Republic — and while the overall outcome is troubling, there are important victories to celebrate.

The Czech Pirate Party scored just about 9% in the elections, securing 18 seats in parliament, confirming their position as one of the strongest opposition forces in the country. In a challenging political climate, they succeeded in surpassing the extremist far right and saw the far left fail to enter parliament entirely.

“Although the overall result for the country is not good, there are also positive outcomes. We outran the extremist far right as wanted, and the far left did not make it at all.”
— Zdeněk Hřib, party leader of the Czech Pirates

However, the general election result also marks a concerning shift, with Andrej Babiš and his ANO movement returning to power — a development that underscores the vital role the Pirates will now play in defending democracy, transparency, and fundamental rights as a strong and principled opposition.

“Today’s result is a reminder that democracy can never be taken for granted. We congratulate our Czech colleagues for their resilience, their brilliant campaign, and their determination to stand as a democratic alternative against populism and extremism.”
— Florian Roussel, Chair of the European Pirate Party

The European Pirate Party stands firmly behind the Czech Pirates in their continued fight for a free, open, and democratic society.

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The Component Abuse Challenge is dragging all sorts of old, half-forgotten hacks out of the woodwork, but this has got to be the most vintage: [KenS] started using a transformer as a variable choke on his speakers 55 years ago.

The hack is pretty bone-dead simple. A choke is an inductor in an audio (or any other) circuit designed to, well, choke off higher-than-desired frequencies. We featured a deep dive a few years back if you’re interested. An inductor is a coil of wire, usually (but not necessarily) wound around a core of iron or ferrite. A transformer? Well, that’s also a coil of wire around a core… plus an extra coil of wire. So when [KenS], back in his salad days, had a tweeter that a was a little too tweety, and no proper choke, he grabbed a transformer instead.

This is where inspiration hit: sure, if you leave the second winding open, the transformer acts like a standard choke. What happens if you short that second winding? Well, you dampen the response of the first winding, and it stops choking, to the point that it acts more like a straight wire. What happens if you don’t short the second winding, but don’t leave it wide open? [KenS] stuck a potentiometer on there, and found it made a handy-dandy variable choke with which to perfectly tune the tone response of his speakers. Changing the resistance changes the rate at which high frequencies are choked off, allowing [KenS] to get the perfect frequency response with which to rock out to Simon & Garfunkel, The Carpenters and The Guess Who. (According to the Billboard Top 100 for 1970, those are who you’d be listening to if you had conventional tastes.)

While we can’t say the transformer is really being tortured in this unusual mode, it’s certainly not how it was designed, so would qualify for the “Junk Box Substitutions” category of the Component Abuse Challenge. If you’ve made similar substitutions you’d like to share, don’t wait another 55 years to write them up– the contest closes November 11th.

Transformer image: Hannes Grobe, CC BY-SA 4.0.

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When you think anemometer, you probably don’t think “load cell” — but (statistically speaking) you probably don’t live in Hurricane Country, which is hard on wind-speed-measuring-whirligigs. When [BLANCHARD Jordan] got tired of replacing professionally-made meteorological eggbeaters, he decided he needed something without moving parts. Whatever he came up with would probably qualify for the Component Abuse Challenge, but the choice of load cells of all things to measure wind speed? Yeah, that’s not what the manufacturer intended them for.

In retrospect, it’s actually a fairly obvious solution: take a plate of known area, and you’re going to get a specific force at a given air speed. The math isn’t hard, it’s just not how we normally see this particular measurement done. Of course, a single plate would have to be pivoted to face the wind for an accurate reading, which means moving parts– something specifically excluded from the design brief. [Jordan] instead uses a pair of load cells, mounted 90 degrees to one another, for his anemometer. One measures the force in a north-south axis, and the other east-west, allowing him to easily calculate both wind speed and direction. In theory, that is. Unfortunately, he vibe coded the math with ChatGPT, and it looks like it doesn’t track direction all that well. The vibe code runs on an ESP32 is responsible for polling data, tossing outliers, and zeroing out the load cells on the regular.

The red lines are from the load-cell equipped weather station; the blue is from a commercial model by Davis. Everything but direction tracks pretty well.
If you’re feeling forgiving towards abominable intelligence, the problem might not be code, but could potentially be related to the geometry of the wind-catchers. To catch the wind coming from any angle, instead of a flat plate, a series of angled circular vanes are used, as you can see from the image.

Given that arrangement is notably not symmetrical, that might be what throws off the direction reading. Still, the wind speed measurements are in very good agreement with known-good readings. The usual rotating bird perch doesn’t measure direction either, so this solid-state replacement should be just as good.

If you like the idea of hacking components to do something the designer never intended, the 2025 Component Abuse Challenge runs until November 11th — just don’t wait until the 11th hour, because entries close at 10 AM Pacific.

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Dal 6 al 9 ottobre 2025, Varsavia è stata teatro della 11ª edizione della European Cybersecurity Challenge (ECSC). In un confronto serrato tra 39 team provenienti da Stati membri UE, Paesi EFTA, candidati e delegazioni ospiti, l’Italia ha conquistato il primo posto, seguita da Danimarca (secondo) e Germania (terza). Questo risultato segna un momento di orgoglio nazionale nell’ambito della formazione e competitività nel settore della cybersecurity europea.

La competizione si è articolata in due giornate con modalità differenti: il primo giorno ha seguito il modello Jeopardy, con problemi in vari ambiti (crittografia, forense, exploit, reverse engineering ecc.), mentre il secondo giorno ha visto uno scenario Attack/Defense in cui i team dovevano simultaneamente difendere la propria infrastruttura e attaccare quelle avversarie.
Questa combinazione richiede non solo abilità tecniche, ma anche rapidità decisionale, creatività e cooperazione in tempo reale.

La manifestazione è stata aperta con un intervento del Vice Primo Ministro e Ministro del Digitale della Polonia, Krzysztof Gawkowski, insieme al Direttore di NASK, Radosław Nielek.
Gawkowski ha sottolineato come la cybersecurity sia ormai un pilastro della sicurezza nazionale, ricordando che viviamo in un’epoca in cui gli attacchi informatici possono avere impatti comparabili a conflitti convenzionali. Nielek, da parte sua, ha evidenziato l’intensità della competizione e l’importanza del confronto tra i migliori talenti europei.

Juhan Lepassaar, direttore esecutivo di ENISA, ha esaltato l’evento come “un’opportunità unica per i giovani talenti europei”, affermando che la sfida consente di mettere alla prova competenze tecniche, pensiero critico, lavoro di squadra sotto pressione e capacità comunicative.
Allo stesso modo, Luca Tagliaretti, direttore del Centro Europeo per la Competenza nella Cybersecurity, ha ricordato che l’ECSC è più di una gara: è una piattaforma per costruire relazioni, crescita e valori condivisi.

Insieme, queste dichiarazioni segnalano che l’Europa punta a far emergere e sostenere la prossima generazione di esperti in sicurezza informatica, essenziali in un contesto digitale sempre più complesso. Durante la competizione, i partecipanti si sono confrontati con task in molteplici aree: sicurezza hardware, sicurezza web e mobile, crittografia, reverse engineering, binary exploitation e attività forensi.

Non è bastato avere competenze avanzate: le squadre migliori hanno saputo gestire lo stress, coordinarsi, reagire rapidamente ai problemi imprevisti e bilanciare attacco e difesa. Ciò rende l’ECSC un banco di prova molto realistico per il mondo professionale della cybersecurity.

Subito dopo l’evento, il 10 e 11 ottobre, si è svolto al NASK di Varsavia un Female+ Bootcamp riservato alle partecipanti femminili delle varie nazionali. L’obiettivo è valorizzare la presenza delle donne nella cybersecurity, offrendo formazione tecnica, mentoring e networking. Da questa iniziativa nascerà un “Female Team Europe”, che rappresenterà l’Europa in una competizione femminile internazionale a Dublino nel 2026.

Il successo italiano all’ECSC 2025 ha molteplici valenze. In primo luogo, rafforza l’immagine dell’Italia come Paese capace di formare esperti all’altezza del panorama europeo e ci permette di dire “noi ci siamo”. In secondo luogo, stimola i percorsi formativi universitari, le scuole tecniche, le iniziative pubbliche e private nel settore della cybersecurity, puntando a colmare il gap di competenze che molti Stati affrontano. Infine, una vittoria del genere può attirare investimenti e collaborazioni internazionali, favorire la mobilità dei giovani talenti e consolidare l’integrazione europea in ambito digitale e di sicurezza.

L’ECSC 2025 dimostra che il livello tecnico e competitivo in Europa continua a salire, e che il modello “gara + formazione + networking” è efficace per stimolare il talento. La sfida per le future edizioni sarà mantenere equilibrio tra complessità, accessibilità, diversità e innovazione.
Inoltre, con l’istituzione del team femminile europeo e l’attenzione alle competenze trasversali, l’ECSC evolve in una piattaforma che non valuta solo “chi è più bravo sul codice”, ma mira a formare professionisti completi, resilienti e collaborativi. In definitiva, il trionfo dell’Italia non è soltanto un momento di gloria, ma un segnale che l’Europa punta in alto nel rendere la cybersecurity una priorità strategica condivisa.

L'articolo Gli hacker etici italiani primi sul podio all’European Cybersecurity Challenge 2025 proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

If you have a fear of heights and find yourself falling out of an airplane, you probably don’t want to look up to find your parachute full of holes. However, if the designer took inspiration from kirigami in the same way researchers have, you may be in better shape than you would think. This is because properly designed kirigami can function as a simple and effective parachute.

Kirigami, for those unfamiliar, is a cousin of origami where, instead of folding, you cut slits into paper. In this case, the paper effectively folds itself after being dropped, which allows the structure to create drag in ways similar to traditional parachute designs. Importantly, however, the stereotypical designs of parachutes have some more severe drawbacks than they appear. Some major issues include more obvious things, such as having to fold and unpack before and after dropping. What may be less obvious are the large eddies that traditional parachutes create or their ease at being disturbed by the surrounding wind.

The kirigami chutes fix these issues while being easier to manufacture and apply. While these are not likely to be quite as effective for human skydiving, more durable applications may benefit. Quoted applications, including drone delivery or disaster relief, worry more about accuracy and scalability rather than the fragile bones of its passenger.

Clever and simple designs are always fun to try to apply to your own projects, so if you want to have your own hand, make sure to check out the paper itself here. For those more interested in clever drone design to take inspiration from, look no further than this maple seed-inspired drone.

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