Full disclosure: ham radio isn’t for everyone, and there are many different facets to it. What appeals to one person might bore another to death. One area of ham radio that has changed a lot in the last few years is more or less local and typically mobile operation on VHF or UHF. Not long ago, hams used HTs (walky-talkies or handi-talkies) or mobile radios via repeaters to talk to each other and — the golden prize back then — make phone calls from their cars. Cell phones have made that much less interesting, but there is still an active community of operators talking on repeaters. However, the traffic has gone digital, the Internet is involved, and people with inexpensive, low-powered radios can talk to each other across the globe. This is nothing new, of course. However, having digital services means that operators with special interests can congregate in what amounts to radio chat rooms organized by region or topic.

There’s a long history of people listening to ham radio conversations with shortwave radios, SDRs, and scanners. But with so much activity now carried on the Internet, you can listen in using nothing more than your web browser or a phone app. I’ll show you how. If you get interested enough, it is easy enough to get your license. You don’t need any Morse code anymore, and a simple Technician class license in the United States is all you need to get going.

A Quick DMR Primer

There are several digital ham networks around and like real networks, you can have different physical transport layers and then build on top of that. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to focus on DMR (digital mobile radio) on the Brandmeister network which is very large and popular ham network. You won’t need a license nor will you need to sign up for anything as long as you are content to just listen.

Here’s how it works: Brandmeister operates a large number of servers worldwide that communicate with each other and provide calling services, including group calls. So, if we set up a Hackaday talk group (fictitious, by the way) on group 1337, interested people could connect to that talk group and have a conversation.

Since we are just going to listen, I’m going to skip some of the details, but the trick is how people get to talk to these networks. In general, there are three ways. The classic way is to use a digital radio to talk to a repeater that is connected to the network. The repeater may have one or more talk groups on all the time, or you might request access to one.

However, another way to connect your radio to a “hotspot” connected to the Internet. That is, more or less, a special form of repeater that is very low power, and you have complete control over it compared to a repeater on some faraway hill. However, if you don’t mind operating using just a computer, you don’t need a radio at all. You simply talk directly to the nearest server, and you are on the network. Some of your audio will go to other computers, and it may go over the airwaves via someone else’s hotspot or repeater.

Talk Groups

Just a few of the 1,600+ talkgroups available on the network
The Brandmeister website has a lot of info and you don’t need to be logged in to see it. Head over to their site and you’ll see a lot of info including a network map and statistics about repeaters and hotspots. You can get an idea of who has been talking lately by clicking Last Heard link. While this is interesting, it isn’t as interesting as you’d think, because you really want to focus on talk groups, not individual users.

To see a list of all the talk groups on the system, you can click Information and then Talkgroups. You can filter the list and you can also download the dataset in different formats if you want to browse it in a different format.
The hoseline shows you all the activity across the network and lets you listen in, too.
There are three buttons on each row of the database. The LH button shows you the last heard stations for that group. The Wiki button takes you to a Wiki page that, for some groups, has more information about it. But the really interesting button is the one marked Hoseline. You can also open the Hoseline directly which is what I usually do.

What’s the Hoseline? It shows activity across the network as a bunch of boxes indicating recently active talk groups. Boxes with red lines around them have people actively talking on them. The others have been recently active. It is visually interesting, yes, but that’s not the big selling point.

If you click on a box, you will hear the activity on that talk group. That’s all there is to it.

Overwhelming

There are a lot of talk groups. You can filter at the top left part of the page where it says “Everything.” You’ll have to drop the list down and unselect Everything. Then, you can select any countries or areas you want to follow. If you are brave, you can click RegEx mode and enter regular expressions to match talk group numbers (e.g. ^310.*).

The “Player” button at the top right gives you more control. You can add multiple groups from a list, see information about who is talking, and stop or start the audio.
The hose is available on Android, too.
If you prefer to do your listening mobile, you can also get the hoseline on your Android device. Just install the app, and you’ll find it works the same way.

Finding Something Interesting

Lord Nelson once said, “The greatest difficulty in war is not to win the battle, but to find the enemy.” That’s accurate here, too. Finding an interesting conversation out of all those talk groups is somewhat a needle in a haystack. A quick look around at the talk group lists might help.

The 91 and 93 groups stay busy but generally with short exchanges since they cover a wide area. The USA bridge at 3100 sometimes has traffic, too.
Talk group 31484 (SE Texas) has 66 devices attached, some of which you can see here.
If you look at the group’s listing on the Web, you can click the group number and see what stations are connected to it. Keep in mind, some of these may be repeaters or gateways that could have no one on the other side, or could have dozens of people on the other side. But it can give you an idea if the talkgroup has any users at all.

You can also search the Internet for DMR nets and repeaters. Sometimes, it is interesting to listen to local repeaters. Sometimes, it is fun to listen to repeaters in other places. Want to find out what’s going on at your next vacation spot? Practice your French?

You can find many DMR repeaters using the RepeaterBook search page. There are also man lists of DMR nets.

Next Steps

There are many other similar networks, but they may not have a way to listen that doesn’t require some software, registration, or licenses. There’s plenty on Brandmeister to keep you busy. If you worry about people listening in, that’s no different than regular radio has been since the beginning.

You can always get your ham license and join in. Even without a radio, there are ways to talk on the network. [Dan Maloney] has advice for getting your “ticket.” It is easier than you think, and you can do a lot more with a license, including talking through satellites, sending TV signals over the air, and bouncing signals of meteors or the moon. If you want to listen to more traditional ham radio in your browser, try a Web-based SDR.

hackaday.com/2025/01/15/no-ham…

I ricercatori hanno scoperto una nuova versione dell’infostealer Banshee progettato per macOS. Il malware non controlla più se sui sistemi infetti è installata la lingua russa ed elude il rilevamento utilizzando la crittografia delle stringhe di Apple XProtect.

Ricordiamo che Banshee è un infostealer rivolto ai sistemi che eseguono macOS. È stato avvistato per la prima volta a metà del 2024. Quindi ha funzionato secondo lo schema stealer-as-a-service, e poteva raccogliere dati da browser, portafogli di criptovaluta e file che soddisfacevano determinati criteri. Il malware veniva venduto sulla darknet per 3.000 dollari al mese.

Nel novembre 2024, il codice sorgente del ladro è stato pubblicato sui forum di hacking, dopodiché il progetto è stato chiuso, ma altri criminali hanno avuto l’opportunità di creare il proprio malware basato su Banshee.

Come riferiscono ora gli esperti di Check Point , hanno scoperto una nuova variante di Banshee che è ancora attiva oggi e utilizza un nuovo metodo di crittografia che gli consente di eludere meglio il rilevamento. Inoltre, questa versione dello stealer non evita più i sistemi degli utenti russi, il che significa che gli aggressori cercano di ampliare la gamma dei possibili bersagli degli attacchi.

Apple XProtect è una tecnologia di rilevamento malware integrata in macOS. Utilizza una serie di regole, simili alle firme antivirus, per identificare e bloccare le minacce conosciute. La variante Banshee osservata dai ricercatori utilizza l’algoritmo di crittografia delle stringhe utilizzato da XProtect per proteggere i propri dati. Crittografando le stringhe e decrittografandole solo in fase di esecuzione, Banshee evita i metodi di rilevamento statico standard. Inoltre, gli esperti ritengono che anche macOS stesso e gli strumenti di sicurezza di terze parti trattino questo metodo di crittografia con meno sospetto, il che consente al ladro di rimanere inosservato più a lungo.

I ricercatori notano che questa versione di Banshee è distribuita principalmente attraverso repository fraudolenti su GitHub, che presumibilmente offrono vari software. Allo stesso tempo, gli operatori di malware attaccano anche gli utenti Windows, ma utilizzando lo stealer Lumma.

L'articolo Nuova Variante di Banshee per Apple macOS: Il Malware che Elude Apple XProtect proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

As a general concept, fault injection is a technique that studies how a system reacts to unusual or unexpected external forces. The idea is that, if you can trigger a glitch at the precise moment, you might be able to use that to your advantage in disabling security features or otherwise gaining further access to the device in question. In the hardware world, this could be achieved by fiddling with the power going into the device, or subjecting it to extreme temperatures.

We’ve covered voltage glitching attacks on these pages in the past, but most of the tools used are fairly expensive if you’re not doing this kind of thing professionally. Luckily for us, [Aditya Patil] has developed a fault injection tool that can run on a standard ESP8266 development board. Obviously it’s not as capable as a bespoke device costing hundreds of dollars, but if you just want to experiment with the concept, it’s a fantastic way to wrap your head around it all.

Now to be clear, the ESP8266 alone isn’t able to generate the sort of high-voltage spikes that are often used to glitch out a chip. The idea with this project is that the ESP would serve as the programmable timer used to trigger a high voltage generator or other nefarious piece of kit. That said, if you’ve got something low power enough that could get confused by rapidly having ~3 V applied to its power rails, in theory you could use the dev board without any additional hardware — though we’d strongly recommend at least throwing a MOSFET between the ESP and whatever you’re harassing.

With the firmware flashed to the ESP8266, plugging the board into your computer will provide you with a serial interface through which the software can be configured and attacks can be launched. While this interactive menu system is nice, and reminds us a bit of the Bus Pirate, [Aditya] also provides an example Python script that will let you fire commands at the system far faster than you could type them out.

If you’re looking for more capability, something like the PicoGlitcher would probably be the next step up, but if you want to really dive into the deep-end, the ChipWhisperer line of devices from [Colin O’Flynn] are really where it’s at. Check out the fascinating talk he gave about voltage glitching during the 2021 Remoticon if you’d like to learn more about the technique.

hackaday.com/2025/01/15/using-…

DOOM is a classic game to implement on a variety of platforms, but doompdf by [ading2210] is one we didn’t see coming. It runs a bit slow and controls are a little awkward but it does run. Entirely within a PDF file, at that.

How is this possible? PDFs are technically capable of much more than just displaying static content, and support JavaScript with their own library of functions. Adobe Acrobat implements the full spec, but modern web browsers implement at least a subset of the functionality in a sandboxed JavaScript runtime environment. Input and output are limited to things one might expect from a fancy PDF form (text input boxes, clickable buttons, things of that nature) but computation-wise, just about anything goes.

The playable DOOM PDF therefore implements keyboard input by reading characters typed into a text entry box, or has the user click buttons with the mouse. It’s not the smoothest of input methods but it’s gloriously hacky. What’s even better is the video output, which is essentially ASCII-art video frames. Zoom in and you’ll see for yourself! It’s not the fastest frame rate, but it’s fantastic all the same.
As shown by zooming in, video frames are rendered as rows of ASCII. It’s enough to implement 6-color monochrome and make in-game text legible.
This project was partly inspired by Tetris in a PDF which demonstrated a lot of the concepts used, and if you like electronic document related shenanigans, be sure to check out playing chess against your printer with PostScript. PostScript is actually a fully functional interpreted language, but unlike JavaScript it was never intended to be used directly by humans.

Thanks to everyone who sent this to our tips line!

hackaday.com/2025/01/15/nice-p…

Un nuovo strumento per tracciare e sequestrare i proventi illeciti delle organizzazioni criminali transnazionali, la prima Silver Notice è stata richiesta dalle autorità italiane.

La Silver Notice ha lo scopo di intercettare e recuperare beni illeciti, principalmente in Asia e Sud America, relativi a un programma di riciclaggio di denaro del valore di oltre 500 milioni di euro.

Il progetto Silver Notice è stato proposto dall'Italia all'Assemblea Generale dell'INTERPOL del 2022 ed è stato istituito un gruppo di lavoro guidato da un colonnello della Guardia di Finanza italiana per definirne la portata e il funzionamento. - Si tratta dell’ultima aggiunta alla suite di avvisi e diffusioni codificati a colori dell’Organizzazione, che consente ai paesi di condividere avvisi e richieste di informazioni in tutto il mondo. Viene lanciato come parte di una fase pilota che coinvolge 52 paesi e territori, che durerà almeno fino a novembre 2025.

La Silver Notice sarà utilizzata per condividere informazioni a supporto di vari tipi di recupero dei beni, compresa la confisca basata su condanna e non basata su condanna, e può includere richieste di esecuzione di ordini di sequestro o confisca.

L'iniziativa rientra nel “Modello” italiano di prevenzione e contrasto alla criminalità organizzata transnazionale attraverso il targeting dei patrimoni illeciti, come sottolineato dal Dipartimento di Pubblica Sicurezza italiano.