You’re designing an oscilloscope with modest storage — only 15,000 samples per channel. However, the sample rate is at 5 Gs/s, and you have to store all four channels at that speed and depth. While there is a bit of a challenge implied, this is quite doable using today’s technology. But what about in the 1990s when the Tektronix TDS 684B appeared on the market? [Tom Verbure] wondered how it was able to do such a thing. He found out, and since he wrote it up, now you can find out, too.

Inside the scope, there are two PCBs. There’s a CPU board, of course. But there’s not enough memory there to account for the scope’s capability. That much high-speed memory would have been tough in those days, anyway. The memory is actually on the analog board along with the inputs and digitizers. That should be a clue.

The secret is the ADG286D from National Semiconductor. While we can’t find any info on the chip, it appears to be an analog shift register, something all the rage at the time. These chips often appeared in audio special effect units because they could delay an analog signal easily.

In practice, the device worked by charging a capacitor to an input signal and then, using a clock, dumping each capacitor into the next one until the last capacitor produced the delayed output. Like any delay line, you could feed the output to the input and have a working memory device.

The scope would push samples into the memory at high speed. Then the CPU could shift them back out on a much slower clock. A clever design and [Tom] gives us a great glimpse inside a state-of-the-art 1990s-era scope.

While we haven’t seen the ADG286D before, we have looked at analog shift registers, if you want to learn more.

hackaday.com/2025/05/09/oscill…

Cryptographic messaging has been in the news a lot recently. Like the formal audit of WhatsApp (the actual PDF). And the results are good. There are some minor potential problems that the audit highlights, but they are of questionable real-world impact. The most consequential is how easy it is to add additional members to a group chat. Or to put it another way, there are no cryptographic guarantees associated with adding a new user to a group.

The good news is that WhatsApp groups don’t allow new members to read previous messages. So a user getting added to a group doesn’t reveal historic messages. But a user added without being noticed can snoop on future messages. There’s an obvious question, as to how this is a weakness. Isn’t it redundant, since anyone with the permission to add someone to a group, can already read the messages from that group?

That’s where the lack of cryptography comes in. To put it simply, the WhatsApp servers could add users to groups, even if none of the existing users actually requested the addition. It’s not a vulnerability per se, but definitely a design choice to keep in mind. Keep an eye on the members in your groups, just in case.

The Signal We Have at Home

The TeleMessage app has been pulled from availability, after it was used to compromise Signal communications of US government officials. There’s political hay to be made out of the current administration’s use and potential misuse of Signal, but the political angle isn’t what we’re here for. The TeleMessage client is Signal compatible, but adds message archiving features. Government officials and financial companies were using this alternative client, likely in order to comply with message retention laws.

While it’s possible to do long term message retention securely, TeleMessage was not doing this particularly well. The messages are stripped of their end-to-end encryption in the client, before being sent to the archiving server. It’s not clear exactly how, but those messages were accessed by a hacker. This nicely demonstrates the inherent tension between the need for transparent archiving as required by the US government for internal communications, and the need for end-to-end encryption.

The NSO Judgement

WhatsApp is in the news for another reason, this time winning a legal judgement against NSO Group for their Pegasus spyware. The $167 Million in damages casts real doubt on the idea that NSO has immunity to develop and deploy malware, simply because it’s doing so for governments. This case is likely to be appealed, and higher courts may have a different opinion on this key legal question, so hold on. Regardless, the era of NSO’s nearly unrestricted actions is probably over. They aren’t the only group operating in this grey legal space, and the other “legal” spyware/malware vendors are sure to be paying attention to this ruling as well.

The $5 Wrench

In reality, the weak point of any cryptography scheme is the humans using it. We’re beginning to see real world re-enactments of the famous XKCD $5 wrench, that can defeat even 4096-bit RSA encryption. In this case, it’s the application of old crime techniques to new technology like cryptocurrency. To quote Ars Technica:

We have reached the “severed fingers and abductions” stage of the crypto revolution

The flashy stories involve kidnapping and torture, but let’s not forget that the most common low-tech approach is simple deception. Whether you call it the art of the con, or social engineering, this is still the most likely way to lose your savings, whether it’s conventional or a cryptocurrency.

The SonicWall N-day

WatchTowr is back with yet another reverse-engineered vulnerability. More precisely, it’s two CVEs that are being chained together to achieve pre-auth Remote Code Execution (RCE) on SonicWall appliances. This exploit chain has been patched, but not everyone has updated, and the vulnerabilities are being exploited in the wild.

The first vulnerability at play is actually from last year, and is in Apache’s mod_rewrite module. This module is widely used to map URLs to source files, and it has a filename confusion issue where a url-encoded question mark in the path can break the mapping to the final filesystem path. A second issue is that when DocumentRoot is specified, instances of RewriteRule take on a weird dual-meaning. The filesystem target refers to the location inside DocumentRoot, but it first checks for that location in the filesystem root itself. This was fixed in Apache nearly a year ago, but it takes time for patches to roll out.

SonicWall was using a rewrite rule to serve CSS files, and the regex used to match those files is just flexible enough to be abused for arbitrary file read. /mnt/ram/var/log/httpd.log%3f.1.1.1.1a-1.css matches that rule, but includes the url-encoded question mark, and matches a location on the root filesystem. There are other, more interesting files to access, like the temp.db SQLite database, which contains session keys for the currently logged in users.

The other half of this attack is a really clever command injection using one of the diagnostic tools included in the SonicWall interface. Traceroute6 is straightforward, running a traceroute6 command and returning the results. It’s also got good data sanitization, blocking all of the easy ways to break out of the traceroute command and execute some arbitrary code. The weakness is that while this sanitization adds backslashes to escape quotes and other special symbols, it stores the result in a fixed-length result buffer. If the result of this escaping process overflows the result buffer, it writes over the null terminator and into the buffer that holds the original command before it’s sanitized. This overflow is repeated when the command is run, and with some careful crafting, this results in escaping the sanitization and including arbitrary commands. Clever.

The AI CVE DDoS

[Daniel Stenberg], lead developer of curl, is putting his foot down. We’ve talked about this before, even chatting with Daniel about the issue when we had him on FLOSS Weekly. Curl’s bug bounty project has attracted quite a few ambitious people, that don’t actually have the skills to find vulnerabilities in the curl codebase. Instead, these amateur security researchers are using LLMs to “find vulnerabilities”. Spoiler, LLMs aren’t yet capable of this task. But LLMs are capable of writing fake vulnerability reports that look very convincing at first read. The game is usually revealed when the project asks a question, and the fake researcher feeds the LLM response back into the bug report.

This trend hasn’t slowed, and the curl project is now viewing the AI generated vulnerability reports as a form of DDoS. In response, the curl Hackerone bounty program will soon ask a question with every entry: “Did you use an AI to find the problem or generate this submission?” An affirmative answer won’t automatically disqualify the report, but it definitely puts the burden on the reporter to demonstrate that the flaw is real and wasn’t hallucinated. Additionally, “AI slop” reports will result in permanent bans for the reporter.

It’s good to see that not all AI content is completely disallowed, as it’s very likely that LLMs will be involved in finding and describing vulnerabilities before long. Just not in this naive way, where a single prompt results in a vulnerability find and generates a patch that doesn’t even apply. Ironically, one of the tells of an AI generated report is that it’s too perfect, particularly for someone’s first report. AI is still the hot new thing, so this issue likely isn’t going away any time soon.

Bits and Bytes

A supply chain attack has been triggered against several hundred Magento e-commerce sites, via at least three software vendors distributing malicious code. One of the very odd elements to this story is that it appears this malicious code has been incubating for six years, and only recently invoked for malicious behavior.

On the WordPress side of the fence, the Ottokit plugin was updated last month to fix a critical vulnerability. That update was force pushed to the majority of WordPress sites running that plugin, but that hasn’t stopped threat actors from attempting to use the exploit, with the first attempts coming just an hour and a half after disclosure.

It turns out it’s probably not a great idea to allow control codes as part of file names. Portswigger has a report of a couple ways VS Code can do the wrong thing with such filenames.

And finally, this story comes with a disclaimer: Your author is part of Meshtastic Solutions and the Meshtastic project. We’ve talked about Meshtastic a few times here on Hackaday, and would be remiss not to point out CVE-2025-24797. This buffer overflow could theoretically result in RCE on the node itself. I’ve seen at least one suggestion that this is a wormable vulnerability, which may be technically true, but seems quite impractical in practice. Upgrade your nodes to at least release 2.6.2 to get the fix.

hackaday.com/2025/05/09/this-w…

Il maxi-blackout che ieri ha paralizzato per ore Spagna e Portogallo ha impressionato l’Europa intera e messo sotto stress non solo la capacità di reazione dei governi di Madrid e Lisbona, chiamati a gestire in condizioni d’incertezza i Paesi mentre le infrastrutture apparivano estremamente rallentate dall’interruzione dell’energia elettrica, ma anche l’elaborazione politica delle autorità di altri Paesi. Il blackout iberico mostra la necessità di sviluppare capacità di gestione delle infrastrutture critiche in grado di garantire sicurezza e resilienza anche in condizioni d’incertezza e mostrano la vulnerabilità delle reti alle operazioni asimmetriche e di guerra ibrida oggi sempre al centro del dibattito degli strateghi.

Di questi temi parliamo con l’ingegner Giuseppe Lucci, collaboratore di ricerca dell’Osservatorio per la Sicurezza del Sistema Industriale Strategico Nazionale (OSSISNa) costituito in seno al Centro Italiano di Strategia e Intelligence (Cisint) e specialista Grid Development di E-Distribuzione. Per OSSISNa e per Strategic Leadership Journal, la testata del Centro Altri Studi Difesa, Lucci ha di recente pubblicato interessanti studi sui temi di cui discute con InsideOver, centrali per la sicurezza strategica delle economie più avanzate in un’epoca incerta.

Cosa ci insegna la crisi del blackout iberico in materia di sicurezza e resilienza delle infrastrutture elettriche critiche?

“Il recente blackout che ha colpito la Penisola Iberica ci offre importanti spunti di riflessione sulla vulnerabilità dei nostri sistemi energetici, pur ricordando che le cause precise dell’evento non sono ancora state accertate. Osservando quanto accaduto, possiamo comunque trarre alcune considerazioni preliminari che meritano attenzione. Innanzitutto, l’isolamento energetico di Spagna e Portogallo si è rivelato un fattore critico. Questi Paesi, pur disponendo di capacità produttiva propria, quando si sono trovati in difficoltà non hanno potuto contare su sufficienti interconnessioni con il resto d’Europa. È come se vivessero in una casa ben riscaldata ma con pochissime porte e finestre: al primo problema interno, le vie d’uscita sono limitate. Inoltre, le reti di trasmissione ad alta tensione hanno mostrato la loro centralità strategica. Un sistema elettrico è forte quanto il suo anello più debole, e bastano criticità su poche linee principali per innescare effetti a catena su territori vastissimi. Immaginate un sistema stradale dove, bloccate poche autostrade chiave, tutto il traffico si paralizza senza alternative percorribili”.

Nelle crisi urge la possibilità di agire in maniera rapida e coordinata…

“Durante la crisi, la velocità di reazione e il coordinamento tra operatori si sono rivelati determinanti. Come in una squadra di emergenza ben addestrata, la capacità di agire rapidamente e in modo sincronizzato ha fatto la differenza, sebbene siano emerse anche difficoltà nel prendere decisioni tempestive in assenza di scenari preimpostati. Un altro aspetto emerso riguarda la nostra crescente dipendenza dai sistemi digitali per il controllo delle reti elettriche. Questi strumenti, fondamentali per la gestione quotidiana, potrebbero trasformarsi in punti di vulnerabilità in situazioni critiche, sia per malfunzionamenti tecnici che per possibili attacchi informatici”.

La generazione energetica di Spagna e Portogallo è fortemente basata sulle fondi rinnovabili. Che riflessioni impone questo dato di fatto?

“L’alta percentuale di energia rinnovabile nel mix iberico solleva interrogativi sulla gestione di queste fonti intermittenti in situazioni di emergenza. La transizione verde, pur necessaria, richiede adeguati sistemi di accumulo e backup per garantire stabilità anche nei momenti critici. Il blackout iberico ci ricorda che la resilienza energetica non si misura solo in megawatt disponibili, ma nella robustezza dell’intero ecosistema: qualità delle reti, prontezza operativa, integrazione sicura delle rinnovabili e capacità di risposta alle emergenze. È un campanello d’allarme per tutta l’Europa: anche sistemi apparentemente solidi possono rivelare fragilità inaspettate quando sottoposti a stress. Mentre aspettiamo di conoscere le cause precise dell’incidente, questa crisi ci invita già a ripensare i nostri paradigmi di sicurezza energetica con uno sguardo più integrato e previdente”.

In che misura questo problema è proprio del sistema di Spagna e Portogallo e quanto invece è potenzialmente estendibile anche al resto dell’Europa occidentale?

“La Penisola Iberica si trova attualmente in una condizione particolare di limitata integrazione energetica con il resto dell’Europa, una situazione che merita un’analisi approfondita. Spagna e Portogallo presentano una capacità di interconnessione con la rete elettrica continentale significativamente inferiore rispetto agli obiettivi stabiliti dall’Unione Europea, circostanza che comporta ripercussioni sia in termini di sicurezza energetica che di efficienza economica. La conformazione geografica, con i Pirenei che costituiscono una barriera naturale, rappresenta un fattore oggettivo che ha limitato lo sviluppo di adeguate infrastrutture di connessione con la Francia. Questo aspetto, unito alla notevole penetrazione di energie rinnovabili non programmabili nel mix energetico iberico, genera una situazione in cui la gestione dei flussi energetici risulta particolarmente complessa, con conseguenti differenziali di prezzo rispetto al mercato continentale”.

Il problema è esclusivamente iberico o ci sono altri casi simili?

“È opportuno considerare come alcune di queste problematiche, sebbene con intensità differente, si manifestino anche in altre aree dell’Europa occidentale. Le reti di trasmissione di diversi Paesi europei mostrano crescenti segni di congestione, mentre l’evoluzione del panorama produttivo legato alla transizione energetica sta introducendo nuove sfide infrastrutturali. Regioni come l’Italia meridionale e insulare, così come l’Irlanda, presentano già situazioni di parziale isolamento energetico su scala regionale. La questione iberica può pertanto essere interpretata come un caso di studio rilevante per comprendere le potenziali criticità che potrebbero interessare altre aree europee qualora lo sviluppo delle infrastrutture di rete non procedesse di pari passo con la trasformazione del mix energetico. Il fenomeno suggerisce l’importanza di un approccio coordinato a livello continentale per garantire un’efficace integrazione dei mercati energetici europei, requisito essenziale per il successo della transizione verso un sistema energetico più sostenibile”.

Le cause restano da chiarire. Non ci sono prove della possibilità di un attacco ostile ma chiaramente casi del genere sarebbero le conseguenze di qualsiasi offensiva cybernetica. Chi studia operazioni di guerra asimmetrica contro le reti prende appunti da queste vulnerabilità?

“Il blackout che ha colpito la Penisola Iberica ci offre uno spaccato illuminante sulle fragilità dei nostri sistemi energetici moderni. Sebbene le cause precise dell’evento restino ancora da chiarire, ciò che emerge con evidenza è il potenziale che simili situazioni rappresentano per chi studia le operazioni di guerra asimmetrica. Immaginate le nostre reti elettriche come il sistema nervoso della società contemporanea. Un tempo robuste e relativamente semplici, oggi sono diventate incredibilmente sofisticate ma, paradossalmente, anche più vulnerabili. La digitalizzazione che le rende efficienti le trasforma simultaneamente in bersagli ideali per attori che cercano di colpire un avversario “di lato” anziché frontalmente”.

Perché le reti elettriche attirano così tanto l’attenzione degli strateghi militari non convenzionali?

“La risposta è nella loro architettura interconnessa. Un sistema elettrico moderno funziona come un delicato gioco di equilibri: quando questa armonia viene disturbata in punti strategici, l’effetto può propagarsi come onde in uno stagno, amplificandosi ben oltre il punto d’impatto iniziale. Gli esperti che analizzano questi scenari non sono necessariamente interessati alla distruzione fisica delle infrastrutture. Ciò che studiamo nel rapporto OSSISNa 2025 è la possibilità di provocare una “disfunzione sistemica” – un’incapacità temporanea ma estesa del sistema di svolgere le sue funzioni essenziali. Il caos sociale che ne consegue e la pressione politica sui governi possono ottenere risultati strategici significativi senza sparare un colpo”.

Quali sono i profili di minaccia da osservare con maggiore attenzione?

“Particolarmente preoccupante è la nuova frontiera delle vulnerabilità digitali. I sistemi di controllo computerizzati che gestiscono le reti elettriche sono come porte che, se forzate, permettono di manipolare l’intero edificio energetico. Un singolo malware ben posizionato può compromettere centri nevralgici di distribuzione o sistemi di monitoraggio remoto. Non serve più abbattere fisicamente i tralicci quando si può “sussurrare” istruzioni dannose ai computer che li controllano. Ciò che rende questi scenari ancora più inquietanti è l’effetto domino che può scaturirne. Il blackout iberico, qualunque ne sia la causa, ha mostrato come un problema inizialmente circoscritto possa propagarsi attraverso reti insufficientemente compartimentate. Per uno stratega di guerra asimmetrica, questa è una leva formidabile: investire risorse limitate per ottenere effetti sproporzionati”.

Quali sono le principali lezioni da trarre da questa situazione?

“La lezione più importante che possiamo trarre da questa vicenda è che la resilienza energetica è ormai una questione di sicurezza nazionale, non solo di efficienza tecnica. Le moderne strategie di conflitto non mirano necessariamente alla distruzione, ma alla destabilizzazione attraverso la disarticolare dei servizi essenziali. Mentre attendiamo di comprendere le reali cause del blackout iberico, una cosa è certa: gli strateghi di guerra asimmetrica stanno prendendo appunti, e le nostre società farebbero bene a fare lo stesso, ripensando profondamente come proteggere le arterie energetiche da cui dipende la nostra vita quotidiana”.

L'articolo Giuseppe Lucci: “Le lezioni sulla sicurezza dal black out in Spagna e Portogallo” proviene da InsideOver.

HERE'S A BONUS DIGITAL POLITICS to finish your week. I'm Mark Scott, and you find me on a train to York (in the north of England) on my way to a workshop to discuss social media data access. Oh, what a glamorous life.

Below are two analyses that I wrote for Tech Policy Press where I am a contributing editor. They build on this week's newsletter to drill down on different aspects of the transatlantic tech relationship.

Taken together, they offer dueling perspectives on what is going on in Washington and Brussels. The first places Donald Trump's administration in the global context. The second explains the European Union's vibe shift on tech.

Let's get started:

digitalpolitics.co/newsletter0…

Every year lightning strikes cause a lot of damage — with the high-voltage discharges being a major risk to buildings, infrastructure, and the continued existence of squishy bags of mostly salty water. While some ways exist to reduce their impact such as lightning rods, these passive systems can only be deployed in select locations and cannot prevent the build-up of the charge that leads up to the plasma discharge event. But the drone-based system recently tested by Japan’s NTT, the world’s fourth largest telecommunications company, could provide a more proactive solution.

The idea is pretty simple: fly a drone that is protected by a specially designed metal cage close to a thundercloud with a conductive tether leading back to the ground. By providing a very short path to ground, the built-up charge in said cloud will readily discharge into this cage and from there back to the ground.

To test this idea, NTT researchers took commercial drones fitted with such a protective cage and exposed them to artificial lightning. The drones turned out to be fine up to 150 kA which is five times more than natural lightning. Afterwards the full system was tested with a real thunderstorm, during which the drone took a hit and kept flying, although the protective cage partially melted.

Expanding on this experiment, NTT imagines that a system like this could protect cities and sensitive areas, and possibly even use and store the thus captured energy rather than just leading it to ground. While this latter idea would need some seriously effective charging technologies, the idea of proactively discharging thunderclouds is perhaps not so crazy. We would need to see someone run the numbers on the potential effectiveness, of course, but we are all in favor of (safe) lightning experiments like this.

If you’re wondering why channeling lightning away from critical infrastructure is such a big deal, you may want to read up on Apollo 12.

hackaday.com/2025/05/09/trigge…

We’ve certainly seen people take a photo of a part, bring it into CAD, and then scale it until some dimension on the screen is the same as a known dimension of the part. We like what [Scale Addition] shows in the video below. In addition to a picture of the part, he also takes a picture of a vernier caliper gripping the part. Now your scale is built into the picture, and you can edit out the caliper later.

He uses SketchUp, but this would work on any software that can import an image. Given the image with the correct scale, it is usually trivial to sketch over the image or even use an automatic tracing function. You still need some measurements, of course. The part in question has a vertical portion that doesn’t show up in a flat photograph. We’ve had good luck using a flatbed scanner before, and there’s no reason you couldn’t scan a part with a caliper for scale.

This is one case where a digital caliper probably isn’t as handy as an old-school one. But it would be possible to do the same trick with any measurement device. You could even take your picture on a grid of known dimensions. This would also allow you to check that the distances at the top and bottom are the same as the distances on the right and left.

Of course, you can get 3D scanners, but they have their own challenges.

youtube.com/embed/XSrSXhhsehk?…

hackaday.com/2025/05/09/scan-y…

La cifra che metterà a disposizione è pari al 99 per cento del suo patrimonio

Gates, che ha 69 anni, ha motivato il cambio di programmi dicendo che il mondo si trova ad affrontare molti problemi urgenti e che lui vuole finanziare, e incoraggiare altri a farlo, nuovi strumenti per cercare di risolverli: «Ci sono troppi problemi urgenti da risolvere perché io trattenga risorse che potrebbero essere usate per aiutare le persone»

Gates ha indicato tre priorità della sua fondazione per il futuro: la mortalità infantile, le malattie infettive, principalmente poliomielite, morbillo e malaria, e iniziative legate all’istruzione

In un’intervista al Financial Times Gates ha esplicitamente attaccato Musk dicendo che «non è una bella immagine quella dell’uomo più ricco del mondo che sta uccidendo i bambini più poveri del mondo», spiegando che lo smantellamento di USAID potrebbe portare a una nuova ondata di morti e che va «ben oltre qualsiasi eliminazione degli sprechi»

ilpost.it/2025/05/09/bill-gate…

The 1970s saw a veritable goldrush to corner the home computer market, with Tandy’s Z80-powered TRS-80 probably one of the most (in)famous entries. Designed from the ground up to be as cheap as possible, the original (Model I) TRS-80 cut all corners management could get away with. The story of the TRS-80 Model I is the subject of a recent video by the [Little Car] YouTube channel.

Having the TRS-80 sold as an assembled computer was not a given, as kits were rather common back then, especially since Tandy’s Radio Shack stores had their roots in selling radio kits and the like, not computer systems. Ultimately the system was built around the lower-end 1.78 MHz Z80 MPU with the rudimentary Level I BASIC (later updated to Level II), though with a memory layout that made running the likes of CP/M impossible. The Model II would be sold later as a dedicated business machine, with the Model III being the actual upgrade to the Model I. You could also absolutely access online services like those of Compuserve on your TRS-80.

While it was appreciated that the TRS-80 (lovingly called the ‘Trash-80’ by some) had a real keyboard instead of a cheap membrane keyboard, the rest of the Model I hardware had plenty of issues, and new FCC regulations meant that the Model III was required as the Model I produced enough EMI to drown out nearby radios. Despite this, the Model I put Tandy on the map of home computers, opened the world of computing to many children and adults, with subsequent Tandy TRS-80 computers being released until 1991 with the Model 4.

youtube.com/embed/Z0Ckj6wZ2dQ?…

hackaday.com/2025/05/08/hacky-…

Although [Vitor Fróis] is explaining linear regression because it relates to machine learning, the post and, indeed, the topic have wide applications in many things that we do with electronics and computers. It is one way to use independent variables to predict dependent variables, and, in its simplest form, it is based on nothing more than a straight line.

You might remember from school that a straight line can be described by: y=mx+b. Here, m is the slope of the line and b is the y-intercept. Another way to think about it is that m is how fast the line goes up (or down, if m is negative), and b is where the line “starts” at x=0.

[Vitor] starts out with a great example: home prices (the dependent variable) and area (the independent variable). As you would guess, bigger houses tend to sell for more than smaller houses. But it isn’t an exact formula, because there are a lot of reasons a house might sell for more or less. If you plot it, you don’t get a nice line; you get a cloud of points that sort of group around some imaginary line.

There are mathematical ways to figure out what line you should imagine, but you can often eyeball it, too. The real trick is evaluating the quality of that imaginary line.

To do that, you need an error measure. If you didn’t know better, you’d probably think expressing the error in terms of absolute value would be best. You know, “this is 10 off” or whatever. But, as [Vitor] explains, the standard way to do this is with a squared error term R². Why? Read the post and find out.

For electronics, linear regression has many applications, including interpreting sensor data. You might also use it to generalize a batch of unknown components, for example. Think of a batch of transistors with different Beta values at different frequencies. A linear regression will help you predict the Beta and the error term will tell you if it is worth using the prediction or not. Or, maybe you just want to make the perfect cup of coffee.

hackaday.com/2025/05/08/unders…

In the driving simulator community, setups can quickly grow ever more complicated and expensive, all in the quest for fidelity. For [CNCDan], rather than buy pedals off the shelf, he opted to build his own.

[Dan] has been using some commercial pedals alongside his own DIY steering wheel and the experience is rather lackluster in comparison. The build starts with some custom brackets. To save on cost, they are flat with tabs to let you know where to bend it in a vise. Additionally, rather than three sets of unique brackets, [Dan] made them all the same to save on cost. The clutch and throttle are a simple hall effect sensor with a spring to provide feedback. However, each bracket provides a set of spring mounting holes to adjust the curve. Change up the angle of the spring and you have a different curve. The brake pedal is different as rather than measure position, it measures force. A load cell is perfect for this. The HX711 load cell sensor board that [Dan] bought was only polling at 10hz. Lifting a pin from ground and bodging it to VDD puts the chip in 80hz, which is much more usable for a driving sim setup.

[Dan] also cleverly uses a 3d printed bushing without any walls as resistance for the pedal. Since the bushing is just the infill, the bushing stiffness is controlled by the infill percentage. Aluminum extrusion forms the base so [Dan] can adjust the exact pedal positions. To finish it off, a bog standard Arduino communicates to the PC as a game controller.

The project is on GitHub. Perhaps the next version will have active feedback, like this DIY pedal setup.

youtube.com/embed/44LWekyILmk?…

hackaday.com/2025/05/08/diy-dr…

You might be old enough to remember record platters, but you probably aren’t old enough to remember when records were cylinders. The Edison Blue Amberol records came out in 1912 and were far superior to the earlier wax cylinders. If you had one today, how could you play it? Easy. Just build [Palingenesis’] record player. You can even hear it do its thing in the video below.

The cylinders are made of plaster with a celluloid wrapper tinted with the namesake blue color. They were more durable than the old wax records and could hold well over four minutes of sound.

The player is mostly made from wood cut with a mill or a laser. There are some bearings, fasteners, and — of course — electronics. The stylus requires some care. Conventional records use a lateral-cut groove, but these old records use a vertical-cut. That means the pickup moves up and down and has a rounder tip than a conventional needle.

Rather than try to control the motor to an exact speed, you get to set the speed with a potentiometer and see the resulting RPM on a small display. Overall, an involved but worthwhile project.

We recently looked at some players that would have been new about the same time as the blue record in the video. We don’t think you could modify one of these to play stereo, but if you do, let us know immediately!

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If you have seen Star Wars, you know what is being referenced here. Holochess appeared as a diversion built into the Millennium Falcon in the very first movie, way back in 1977. While not quite as iconic a use of simulated holograms as tiny Princess Leia begging for hope, it evidently struck a chord with [Maker Mac70], given the impressive effort he’s evidently gone through to re-create the game table from the film.

The key component of this unit is a plate from Japanese firm ASKA3D that scatters light from displays inside the table in just such a way that the diverging rays are focused at a point above its surface, creating the illusion of an image hovering in space. Or in this case, hovering at the surface of a acrylic chessboard. Granted, this technique only works from one viewing angle, and so is not a perfect recreation of a sci-fi holoprojector. But from the right angle, it looks really good, as you can see in the video below.

There are actually six SPI displays, driven by an Arduino GIGA, positioned and angled to project each character in the game. Placing two of the displays on 3D printed gantries allows them to move, allowing two creatures to battle in the center of the table. As [Maker Mac70] admits, this is quite a bit simpler than the Holochess game seen in the film, but it’s quite impressive for real world hardware.

If this all seems a little bit familiar, we covered an earlier floating display by [Maker Mac70] last year. This works on similar principles, but uses more common components which makes the technique more accessible. If chess isn’t your forte, why not a volumetric display that plays DOOM? If you’re interested in real holograms, not Sci-Fi, our own [Maya Posch] did a deep dive you may find interesting.

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Uno studio su larga scala condotto da Rubrik Zero Labs ha confermato che quasi il 90% dei responsabili IT e della sicurezza informatica in tutto il mondo dovrà affrontare attacchi informatici nel 2024. Il rapporto, intitolato “The State of Data Security 2025: A Distributed Crisis”, documenta una tendenza preoccupante: gli ambienti IT ibridi, diventati la norma per le aziende, stanno creando nuove vulnerabilità per le quali le aziende non sono preparate.

Gli esperti sottolineano che il passaggio al cloud è spesso accompagnato da un falso senso di sicurezza. Come ha sottolineato Joe Hladik, CEO di Rubrik Zero Labs, molti si affidano ai fornitori di servizi cloud per la sicurezza. In realtà, gli aggressori sfruttano attivamente le falle nelle architetture ibride e continuano ad attaccare utilizzandoransomware e furto di credenziali.

Gli attacchi stanno diventando sempre più frequenti. I principali vettori sono le fughe di dati, l’infezione dei dispositivi con malware, la compromissione delle piattaforme cloud, il phishing e gli attacchi dall’interno. Le conseguenze sono tangibili: aumento dei costi per la sicurezza informatica (40%), perdite di reputazione (37%) e persino un cambio di management in un terzo dei casi.

La situazione è complicata dal forte aumento dei volumi di dati e dalla diffusione dei sistemi di intelligenza artificiale. Il 90% degli intervistati ha dichiarato di gestire un ambiente cloud ibrido e che oltre la metà dei propri carichi di lavoro si sta già spostando sul cloud. Un terzo degli intervistati ha indicato la protezione dei dati come un problema importante in tali condizioni, mentre un terzo ha sottolineato la mancanza di gestione centralizzata e di trasparenza.

Secondo la telemetria di Rubrik, il 36% dei file sensibili nel cloud sono dati ad alto rischio. Tra questi rientrano dati personali, codici sorgente, numeri di previdenza sociale, numeri di telefono, nonché chiavi API e account. Si tratta del tipo di informazioni che interessa agli aggressori che cercano di rubare identità e penetrare nei sistemi critici.

Particolarmente preoccupante è lo stato dei backup: tra coloro che sono sopravvissuti a un attacco ransomware, l’86% ha pagato il riscatto e il 74% ha ammesso una parziale compromissione dei propri sistemi di ripristino. Nel 35% dei casi i sistemi di backup erano completamente compromessi.

La flessibilità dell’architettura ibrida è diventata anche il suo tallone d’Achille: il 92% delle aziende utilizza da due a cinque piattaforme cloud o SaaS, il che crea difficoltà nella gestione degli accessi. Secondo il 28% degli intervistati, gli attacchi che sfruttano account rubati e privilegi interni stanno diventando sempre più comuni.

In definitiva, Rubrik auspica un passaggio a un modello di sicurezza incentrato sui dati anziché sulle infrastrutture. Visibilità, controllo, classificazione e capacità di recupero rapido diventano priorità. Senza questo, i paesaggi ibridi continueranno a rappresentare un bersaglio appetibile per gli attacchi.

L'articolo Cybersecurity: l’86% delle aziende soccombe agli attacchi informatici per colpa del Cloud proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.