Docker and other containerization applications have changed a lot about the way that developers create new software as well as how they maintain virtual machines. Not only does containerization reduce the system resources needed for something that might otherwise be done in a virtual machine, but it standardizes the development environment for software and dramatically reduces the complexity of deploying on different computers. There are some other tricks up the sleeves as well, and this project called PI-CI uses Docker to containerize an entire Raspberry Pi.

The Pi container emulates an entire Raspberry Pi from the ground up, allowing anyone that wants to deploy software on one to test it out without needing to do so on actual hardware. All of the configuration can be done from inside the container. When all the setup is completed and the desired software installed in the container, the container can be converted to an .img file that can be put on a microSD card and installed on real hardware, with support for the Pi models 3, 4, and 5. There’s also support for using Ansible, a Docker automation system that makes administering a cluster or array of computers easier.

Docker can be an incredibly powerful tool for developing and deploying software, and tools like this can make the process as straightforward as possible. It does have a bit of a learning curve, though, since sharing operating system tools instead of virtualizing hardware can take a bit of time to wrap one’s mind around. If you’re new to the game take a look at this guide to setting up your first Docker container.

hackaday.com/2024/08/30/puttin…

Russians who still share Western values are being told to choose sides and support their warring homeland or risk being victimised by the West, in the same way that Telegram boss Pavel Durov was supposedly victimised by being arrested in France.

euractiv.com/section/global-eu…

Brazil's telecommunications regulator said on Friday (30 August) it was suspending access to Elon Musk's X social network in the country to comply with an order from a judge who has been locked in a months-long feud with the billionaire entrepreneur.

euractiv.com/section/disinform…

Here’s a novel ratchet mechanism developed by researchers that demonstrates how a single object — in this case a gear shaped like a six-pointed star — can rectify the disordered energy of its environment into one-way motion.

The Feynman–Smoluchowski ratchet has alternating surface treatments on the sides of its points, accomplished by applying a thin film layer to create alternating smooth/rough faces. This difference in surface wettability is used to turn agitation of surrounding water into a ratcheting action, or one-way spin.

This kind of mechanism is known as an active Brownian ratchet, but unlike other designs, this one doesn’t depend on the gear having asymmetrical geometry. Instead of an asymmetry in shape, there’s an asymmetry in the gear tooth surface treatments. You may be familiar with the terms hydrophobic and hydrophilic, which come down to a difference in surface wettability. The gear’s teeth having one side of each is what rectifies the chaotic agitation of the surrounding water into a one-way spin. Scaled down far enough, these could conceivably act as energy-harvesting micromotors.

Want more detail? The published paper is here, and if you think you might want to play with this idea yourself there are a few different ways to modify the surface wettability of an object. High voltage discharge (for example from a Tesla coil) can alter surface wettability, and there are off-the-shelf hydrophobic coatings we’ve seen used in art. We’ve even seen an unusual clock that relied on the effect.

hackaday.com/2024/08/30/symmet…

Making microcontrollers produce video has long been a staple of hardware hacking, but as the resolution goes up, it becomes a struggle for less capable silicon. To get higher resolution VGA from an Arduino, [Marcin Chwedczuk] has produced perhaps the most bulletproof solution, to create dual-port RAM with the help of a static RAM chip and a set of 74-series bus transceivers, and let a hardware VGA interface take care of the display. Yes, it’s not a microcontroller doing VGA, but standalone VGA for microcontrollers.

Dual-port memory is a special type of memory with two interfaces than can independently be used to access the contents. It’s not cheap when bought in integrated form, so seeing someone making a substitute with off-the-shelf parts is certainly worth a second look. The bus transceivers are in effect bus-width latches, and each one hangs on to the state while the RAM chip services each in turn. The video card part is relatively straightforward, a set of 74 chips which produce the timings and step through the addresses, and a shift register to push out simple black or white pixel data as a rudimentary video stream. We remember these types of circuits being used back in the days of home made video terminals, and here in 2024 they still work fine.

The display this thing produces isn’t the most impressive picture, but it is VGA, and it does work. We can see this circuit being of interest to plenty of other projects having less capable processing power, in fact we’d say the challenge should lie in how low you can go if all you need is the capacity to talk 74-series logic levels.

Interested in 74-series VGA cards? This isn’t the first we’ve seen.

hackaday.com/2024/08/30/dual-p…

For racing games, flight simulators, and a few other simulation-style games, a simple controller just won’t do. You want something that looks and feels closer to the real thing. The major downsides to these more elaborate input methods is that they take up a large amount of space, requiring extra time for setup, and can be quite expensive as well. To solve both of these problems [Rahel zahir Ali] created a miniature steering wheel controller for some of his favorite games.

While there are some commercial offerings of small steering wheels integrated into an otherwise standard video game controller and a few 3D printed homebrew options, nothing really felt like a true substitute. The main design goal with this controller was to maintain the 900-degree rotation of a standard car steering wheel in a smaller size. It uses a 600P/R rotary encoder attached to a knob inside of a printed case, with two spring-loaded levers to act as a throttle and brake, as well as a standard joystick to adjust camera angle and four additional buttons. Everything is wired together with an Arduino Leonardo that sends the inputs along to the computer.

Now he’s ready to play some of his favorite games and includes some gameplay footage using this controller in the video linked below. If you’re racing vehicles other than cars and trucks, though, you might want a different type of controller for your games instead.

youtube.com/embed/7g6O4G1OXd4?…

hackaday.com/2024/08/30/realis…

Even when the boss is away, the show must go on, so Dan slid back behind the guest mic and teamed up with Tom to hunt down the freshest of this week’s hacks. It was a bit of a chore, with a couple of computer crashes and some side-quests down a few weird rabbit holes, but we managed to get things together in the end.

Tune in and you’ll hear us bemoan HOAs and celebrate one ham’s endless battle to outwit them, no matter what the golf cart people say about his antennas. Are you ready to say goodbye to the magnetic stripe on your credit card? We sure are, but we’re not holding our breath yet. Would you 3D print a 55-gallon drum? Probably not, but you almost can with a unique Cartesian-polar hybrid printer. And, if you think running MS-DOS on a modern laptop is hard, guess again — or, maybe you just have to get really lucky.

We also took a look at a digital watch with a beautiful display, a hacked multimeter, modern wardriving tools, switchable magnets, and debate the eternal question of v-slot wheels versus linear bearings. And finally, you won’t want to miss our look at what’s new with 3D scanning, and the first installment of Kristina’s new “Boss Byproducts” series, which delves into the beauty of Fordite.

html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/…
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

• iTunes
• Spotify
• Stitcher
• RSS
• YouTube
• Check out our Libsyn landing page

Download the DRM-free MP3.

Episode 286 Show Notes:

News:

• Supercon 2024: May The Best Badge Add-ons Win

What’s that Sound?

• Congratulations to bmgxyz for guessing a hand-crank generator.

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Nice Retro Displays Set This Watch On Edge
  
  • Supercon 2024: Show Off Your Unique Display Tech
  • Motorola MicroTAC – Wikipedia

  
  

• Fast 3D Printing With A Polar, Four Quadrant Custom Machine
• 3D Printed Electronics Breadboard
  
  • Hackaday Prize 2023: Jumperless, The Jumperless Jumperboard
  • The Mind-Blowing Machines that Stamp Millions of Metal Parts – Smarter Every Day 288

  
  

• Farewell Magnetic Stripe
  
  • Barcodes Enter The Matrix In 2027
  • The Barcode Revolution: Welcome To Our Automated World

  
  

• Running Stock MS-DOS On A Modern ThinkPad
• Hidden Gutter Antenna Keeps HOA Happy

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks
  
  • Using A 2D Scanner To Make 3D Things
  • V-Slot Wheels Or Linear Rails?
  • Wardriving Tools In The Modern Era

  
  

• Dan’s Picks:
  
  • Backlight Switch For A Better Multimeter
  • It Turns Out, A PCB Makes A Nice Watch Dial
  • You Can 3D Print Yourself Some Simple Magnetic Switches
    
    • Shop-Built Fixtures Reveal The Magic Of Switchable Permanent Magnets

    
    

  
  

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• What’s New In 3D Scanning? All-In-One Scanning Is Nice
• Boss Byproducts: Fordites Are Pieces Of American History
  
  • Dan’s prized fordite key fob

  
  

hackaday.com/2024/08/30/hackad…

The Hackaday comments section is generally a lively place. At its best, it’s an endless wellspring of the combined engineering wisdom of millions of readers which serves to advance the state of the art in hardware hacking for all. At its worst — well, let’s just say that at least it’s not the YouTube comments section.

Unfortunately, there’s also a space between the best and the worst where things can be a bit confusing. A case in point is [Bryan Cockfield]’s recent article on a stealth antenna designed to skirt restrictions placed upon an amateur radio operator by the homeowners’ association (HOA) governing his neighborhood.
Hiding an antenna in plain sight.
Putting aside the general griping about the legal and moral hazards of living under an HOA, as well as the weirdly irrelevant side-quest into the relative combustibility of EVs and ICE cars, there appeared to be a persistent misapprehension about the reality of the US Federal Communications Commission’s “Over-the-Air Reception Devices” rules. Reader [Gamma Raymond] beseeched us to clarify the rules, lest misinformation lead any of our readers into the unforgiving clutches of the “golf cart people” who seem to run many HOAs.

According to the FCC’s own OTARD explainer, the rules of 47 CFR § 1.400 are intended only to prevent “governmental and nongovernmental restrictions on viewers’ ability to receive video programming signals” (emphasis added) from three distinct classes of service: direct satellite broadcasters, broadband radio service providers, and television broadcast services.

Specifically, OTARD prevents restrictions on the installation, maintenance, or use of antennas for these services within limits, such as dish antennas having to be less than a meter in diameter (except in Alaska, where dishes can be any size, because it’s Alaska) and restrictions on where antennas can be placed, for example common areas (such as condominium roofs) versus patios and balconies which are designated as for the exclusive use of a tenant or owner. But importantly, that’s it. There are no carve-outs, either explicit or implied, for any other kind of antennas — amateur radio, scanners, CB, WiFi, Meshtastic, whatever. If it’s not about getting TV into your house in some way, shape, or form, it’s not covered by OTARD.

It goes without saying that we are not lawyers, and this is not to be construed as legal advice. If you want to put a 40′ tower with a giant beam antenna on your condo balcony and take on your HOA by stretching the rules and claiming that slow-scan TV is a “video service,” you’re on your own. But a plain reading of OTARD makes it clear to us what is and is not allowed, and we’re sorry to say there’s no quarter for radio hobbyists in the rules. This just means you’re going to need to be clever about your antennas. Or, you know — move.

hackaday.com/2024/08/30/is-tha…

Durex India, la filiale indiana di un noto marchio, ha accidentalmente divulgato i dati personali dei suoi clienti, inclusi nomi completi, numeri di telefono e dati degli ordini.

Il ricercatore di sicurezza informatica Sorajit Majumder ha dichiarato a TechCrunch della fuga di notizie involontaria. La colpa di tutto è il sito ufficiale di Durex India, i cui amministratori non hanno protetto sufficientemente le informazioni riservate dei clienti.

Di conseguenza, nomi, numeri di telefono, indirizzi e-mail, articoli ordinati e importi spesi sono stati resi pubblici. Il numero esatto dei clienti interessati dalla fuga di notizie non è stato ancora annunciato.

Secondo Majumder, centinaia di persone sono state colpite da un’autenticazione configurata in modo errato nella pagina di conferma dell’ordine.

“Per le aziende che vendono articoli intimi, la protezione dei dati dei clienti dovrebbe essere una questione fondamentale”, afferma lo specialista.

Lo staff di TechCrunch ha verificato le affermazioni di Majumder e ha concluso che i dati sensibili sono effettivamente facili da raccogliere per terze parti. I dettagli tecnici non sono ancora stati resi noti, per non fornire un servizio ai criminali informatici.

L'articolo Fuoriuscita… di dati dal sito ufficiale di Durex India. Numeri, indirizzi ed email esposti dei clienti proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Blink and you could have missed it, but a viral sensation for a few weeks this summer was One Million Checkboxes, a web page with as you might expect, a million checkboxes. The cool thing about it was that it was interactive, so if you checked a box on your web browser, everyone else seeing that box also saw it being checked. You could do pixel art with it, and have some fun. While maintaining it, its author [eieio] noticed something weird, a URL was appearing in the raw pixel data. Had he been hacked? Investigation revealed something rather more awesome.

The display of checkboxes was responsive rather than fixed-width, on purpose to stop people leaving objectionable content. Any pixel arrangement would only appear as you made it to someone viewing with exactly the same width of checkboxes. But still, the boxes represented a binary bitfield, so of course people saw it and had fun hacking. The URLs appeared because they were ASCII encoded in the binary, and were left on purpose as a message to the developer inviting him to a forum.

On it he found a disparate group of teen hackers who’d formed a community having fun turning the game into their own version of a Pixelflut. If you’ve not seen the game previously, imagine a screen on which all pixels are individually addressable over the internet. Place it in a hackerspace or in the bar at a hacker camp, and of course the coders present indulge in a bit of competitive pixel-spamming to create a colorful and anarchic collaborative artwork. In this case as well as artwork they’d encoded the forum link in several ways, and had grown a thriving underground community of younger hackers honing their craft. As [eieio] did, we think this is excellent, and if any of the checkbox pixelflutters are reading this, we salute you!

Before he eventually took the site down he removed the rate limit for a while to let them really go to town, and predictably, they never gave up on the opportunity, and didn’t let him down.

Some people would call the activity discussed here antisocial, but in particular we agree with the final point in the piece. Young hackers like this don’t need admonishment, they need encouragement, and he’s done exactly the right thing. If you want to read more about Pixelflut meanwhile, we’ve been there before.

hackaday.com/2024/08/30/online…

Un ex ingegnere delle infrastrutture IT di un’anonima società del New Jersey è stato arrestato dopo aver bloccato l’accesso agli amministratori a 254 server e aver tentato di estorcere un riscatto al suo datore di lavoro. A causa di questo fallito tentativo di estorsione rischia fino a 35 anni di carcere.

Secondo i documenti del tribunale , il 25 novembre 2023, i dipendenti dell’azienda interessata hanno ricevuto un’e-mail con il titolo “La tua rete è stata penetrata”. La lettera affermava che tutti gli amministratori IT avevano perso l’accesso ai propri account e che i backup dei server erano stati distrutti per rendere impossibile il recupero dei dati.

Il messaggio conteneva anche una minaccia: l’aggressore prometteva di chiudere ogni giorno 40 server a caso nella rete dell’azienda per 10 giorni a meno che non gli fosse stato pagato un riscatto di 20 bitcoin (al tasso di cambio di allora – circa 750.000 dollari).

L’indagine, coordinata dall’FBI, ha rivelato che Daniel Rhyne, 57 anni, che lavorava come ingegnere delle infrastrutture IT dell’azienda del New Jersey colpita dall’attacco, il quale aveva accesso remoto non autorizzato ai sistemi dell’azienda dal 9 al 25 novembre utilizzando un account di amministrazione.

Tramite il controller di dominio, Rhyne ha pianificato un’attività per modificare le password per l’account amministratore, nonché 13 account amministratore di dominio e 301 account utente di dominio, modificandoli nella stringa di testo “TheFr0zenCrew!”

I documenti affermano che Rhyne ha anche pianificato attività per modificare le password per due account di amministratore locale, interessando un totale di 254 server, e per altri due account di amministratore locale, interessando 3.284 workstation sulla rete del suo datore di lavorob. Ha inoltre pianificato una serie di attività per spegnere server e workstation in giorni diversi nel dicembre 2023.

Secondo quanto riferito, Rhyne ha utilizzato Windows Net User e lo strumento PsPasswd di Sysinternals Utilities per questo sabotaggio.

Come ha scoperto l’indagine, mentre pianificava il suo attacco di estorsione, Rhyne avrebbe utilizzato una macchina virtuale nascosta per cercare in Internet il 22 novembre informazioni su come cancellare account, cancellare i registri di Windows e modificare le password per gli utenti del dominio utilizzando la riga di comando.

Il 15 novembre, Rhyne ha eseguito ricerche simili, tra cui “riga di comando per modificare la password dell’amministratore locale” e “riga di comando per modificare la password dell’amministratore locale da remoto”.

Rhyne è stato arrestato il 27 agosto e rilasciato dopo essere comparso in tribunale a Kansas City. È accusato di estorsione, danneggiamento intenzionale di computer e frode. Queste accuse comportano una pena massima fino a 35 anni di carcere e una multa di 750.000 dollari.

L'articolo Un ingegnere Blocca 254 Server per Estorcere la Sua Azienda, ma una Ricerca tramite Proxy lo Tradisce proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Come Steve Jobs sta a Steve Wozniak, Pavel Durov sta a suo fratello Nikolai Durov.

Nikolai Durov, nato il 21 novembre 1980 a Leningrado, è una delle figure più misteriose e talentuose nel mondo della tecnologia moderna. Fratello maggiore del famoso imprenditore Pavel Durov, Nikolai ha svolto un ruolo chiave nella creazione e nello sviluppo di progetti di successo come VKontakte e Telegram.

Fin dalla prima infanzia, Nikolai ha mostrato abilità eccezionali in matematica. Secondo suo fratello Pavel, già all’età di tre anni Nikolai leggeva come un adulto, e all’età di otto anni risolveva equazioni cubiche. All’età di dieci anni venne presentato dalla televisione italiana come un prodigio, capace di risolvere complessi problemi matematici in tempo reale.

La formazione di Nikolai era legata alla matematica e all’informatica:

• Al liceo ha vinto tre volte le Olimpiadi internazionali della matematica (1996, 1997, 1998).
• È diventato più volte il vincitore del premio delle Olimpiadi internazionali di informatica.
• Nel 2000, come studente del secondo anno presso la Facoltà di Matematica e Meccanica dell’Università Statale di San Pietroburgo, come parte di una squadra ha vinto il prestigioso campionato di programmazione ACM ICPC.
• Nel 2005 ha difeso la sua tesi presso l’Università statale di San Pietroburgo sul tema “Un nuovo approccio alla geometria di Arakelov”.
• Nel 2007 ha difeso la sua seconda tesi presso l’Università di Bonn sul tema “Geometria singolare di Arakelov”.
• Ha lavorato presso l’Istituto Max Planck per la matematica in Germania.
• Era un ricercatore senior presso il laboratorio di algebra e teoria dei numeri presso la filiale di San Pietroburgo dell’Istituto di Matematica. V. A. Steklova RAS.

Carriere nella tecnologia

All’inizio degli anni 2000, Nikolai si è unito a suo fratello Pavel nella creazione del social network VKontakte:

• Ha assunto il ruolo di direttore tecnico del progetto.
• Ha sviluppato un’architettura che garantisse stabilità e scalabilità della rete.
• Secondo le sue stesse parole, nella fase iniziale ha aiutato con consulenza generale ed è stato il primo amministratore di sistema dell’azienda.
• Successivamente, insieme ad Andrey Lopatin, ha sviluppato sistemi specializzati di archiviazione dei dati.

Dopo aver lasciato VKontakte nel 2014, i fratelli Durov si sono concentrati sullo sviluppo del messenger Telegram:

• Nikolay ha sviluppato il protocollo MTProto, che garantisce un elevato grado di protezione dei dati degli utenti e velocità di trasmissione dei messaggi.
• Ha creato i principi di base della crittografia che sono ancora utilizzati oggi in Telegram.
• Ha partecipato allo sviluppo del progetto blockchain TON nel 2018.

Vita personale e opinioni

Nikolai è noto per la sua reticenza e raramente rilascia commenti ai media. Secondo le fonti, ha “obiezioni ultra-liberali”. Dal 2013 utilizza una fotografia dell’anarchico e rivoluzionario ucraino Nestor Makhno come avatar su VKontakte.

Nell’agosto 2024 si è saputo che le autorità francesi avevano emesso un mandato di arresto per Nikolai Durov insieme a suo fratello Pavel. I mandati furono emessi nel marzo dello stesso anno come parte di un caso riguardante accuse di insufficiente moderazione dei contenuti su Telegram. Secondo fonti aperte, Nikolai Durov ha la cittadinanza di diversi paesi:

• Russia
• Saint Kitts e Nevis
• Presumibilmente Lettonia (non confermato ufficialmente)

Nonostante tutti i suoi successi e contributi allo sviluppo della tecnologia moderna, Nikolai Durov rimane una figura misteriosa, che preferisce lavorare dietro le quinte ed evitare la pubblicità. La sua combinazione unica di genio matematico e innovazione tecnologica continua ad avere un impatto significativo sullo sviluppo delle comunicazioni digitali su scala globale.

L'articolo Non solo Pavel Durov. Dietro Telegram e VKontakte c’è un vero Genio. Il fratello Nikolai proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

We finally have some answers about the Windows IPv6 vulnerability — and a Proof of Concept! The patch was a single change in the Windows TCP/IP driver’s Ipv6pProcessOptions(), now calling IppSendError() instead of IppSendErrorList(). That’s not very helpful on its own, which is why [Marcus Hutchins]’s analysis is so helpful here. And it’s not an easy task, since decompiling source code like this doesn’t give us variable names.

The first question that needs answered is what is the list in question? This code is handling the option field in incoming IPv6 packets. The object being manipulated is a linked list of packet structs. And that linked list is almost always a single member list. When calling IppSendErrorList() on a list with a single member, it’s functionally equivalent to the IppSendError() in the fixed code. The flaw must be in the handling of this list with multiple members. The only way to achieve that criteria is to send a lot of traffic at the machine in question, so it can’t quite keep up with processing packets one at a time. To handle the high throughput, Windows will assemble incoming packets into a linked list and process them in batch.

So what’s next? IppSendErrorList(), takes a boolean and passes it on to each call of IppSendError(). We don’t know what Microsoft’s variable name is, but [Marcus] is calling it always_send_icmp, because setting it to true means that each packet processed will generate an ICMP packet. The important detail is that IppSendError() can have side effects. There is a codepath where the packet gets reverted, and the processing pointer is set back to the beginning of the packet. That’s fine for the first packet in the list, but because the function processes errors on the entire list of packets, the state of the rest of those packets is now much different from what is expected.

This unexpected but of weirdness can be further abused through IPv6 packet fragmentation. With a bit of careful setup, the reversion can cause a length counter to underflow, resulting in data structure corruption, and finally jumping code execution into the packet data. That’s the Remote Code Execution (RCE). And the good news, beyond the IPv6-only nature of the flaw, is that so far it’s been difficult to actually pull the attack off, as it relies on this somewhat non-deterministic “packet coalescing” technique to trigger the flaw.

CVE Hunting Made Easy

[Eddie Zhang] wanted to take the easy road to finding CVEs. To his immense credit, he did not ask ChatGPT to hallucinate vulnerabilities for him, but instead built an automation chain to find possible vulns. The idea is simple: Download as many WordPress plugins as he could, run Semgrep over the corpus, throw the results in a SQL database, and take a closer look at the most promising findings.

That starts by writing a SQL query, naturally. The interesting flaws were SELECTed, and then the different plugins run in a test bench setup to try to trigger actual vulnerable code. And it’s not a bad approach, judging by the 14 CVEs found in 3 afternoons of work.

Moodle

RedTeam Pentesting got to have a field day with the Moodle platform. Moodle is a web-based distance learning solution written in PHP. And to get the flavor of how this went, the test grading logic is written in PHP — and eval()‘d on the server during grading. Now it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. There is sanitization done, and the set of symbols, characters, and functions are rather limited.

PHP has a pretty interesting type system. Something like acos(2), inverse of the cosine of 2, returns a result of Not a Number, or NAN. The dot . symbol does string concatenation in PHP, and putting those together, acos(2) . acos(2) results in a string, NANNAN. It gets better, as it’s then possible to do bitwise manipulation of those strings, eventually unlocking the entire alphabet. A few more tricks like PHP’s variable functions, variable variables, and other fun language contortions. Eventually we get to system() and escape into the system.

Hacking the TSA

[Ian Carroll] and [Sam Curry] bring an unfortunate tale of clever hacking, cover ups, and incompetence. The actual hack is pretty straightforward, a SQL injection in a login system. The real problem is that this login is in the official airline security systems that controls the Known CrewMember and Cockpit Access Security System. That’s the list of people that get to skip TSA checkpoints altogether, and that get access to airplane cockpits in flight. Not good.

The good news is that after disclosure, the Department of Homeland Security quickly secured the vulnerable site. The takes a turn for the worse, when it came time for disclosure. TSA issues a factually incorrect statement about what is required to use the KCM system. [Ian] and [Sam] reached out again to try to set the record straight about the severity of the finding. In response, the TSA quietly deleted the FAQ that spells out how bad the vulnerability could be. Not a great look.

Bits and Bytes

For your data and packet capture needs, Wireshark 4.4 is out. Among the normal improvements, there’s better VoIP support, a handful of new protocols, and some IPv6 tweaks to make life easier.

Ever wondered how to do effective sandboxing in Linux? Hardened Linux has you covered. There are some obvious things like limited filesystem access, but it might be more useful to read about seccomp to limit the available system calls to your sandboxed program. The article is an overview of the individual techniques, and then some of the more popular all-in-one solutions like firejail, bubblewrap, and landlock.

Volt Typhoon, a collection of hackers believed to be working on behalf of the Chinese government has begun using a vulnerability in Versa Director to attack businesses. Version 22.1.4 of the network management platform fixes the vulnerability, which allowed for executable java filew to be disguised as PNGs and uploaded to the platform.

And finally, one of the sneakier ways to stay on a Linux system is to use udev. For attackers, it’s always a challenge to make sure the malware starts up on each boot, and yet doesn’t attract any attention. There are plenty of places to hide a startup hook, but this one creates a udev rule to automatically run early in boot when the /dev/random device is created. How often do you audit your udev files? Sneaky!

hackaday.com/2024/08/30/this-w…

If you think about it, even difficult mazes on paper are pretty easy. You can see all the places you can and can’t go, and if you use a pencil instead of a pen, well, that’s almost like cheating.

However, using a pencil is pretty much a necessity to play [penumbriel]’s Blind Maze. In this game, you can’t even see the maze, or where you are. Well, that’s not exactly true — you can “touch” the wall (or lack thereof) in front of you and to the sides, but that’s it. So you’re going to need that pencil to draw out a map as you go along.

This game runs on an Arduino Nano and a 18650 cell. There are three LEDs deep within the enclosure, which is meant to give the depth of walls. But, even the vision-impaired can play the Blind Maze, because there’s haptic feedback thanks to a small vibration motor.

If you want to play in hard mode, there’s a hidden paperclip-accessible switch that turns off the LEDs. This way, you have to rely on hitting the walls with your head. Be sure to check out the video below.

youtube.com/embed/rd01wIHwtz8?…

hackaday.com/2024/08/29/2024-t…

The Bus Pirate multi-tool has held a place of honor in many a hardware hacker’s toolbox for years, and the latest generation of the gadget powered by the Raspberry Pi RP2040/RP2350 offers significantly enhanced capabilities over the original PIC versions. We took a look at the new Bus Pirate when it started shipping back in February, and while the firmware was still in the early stages back then, it was already clear that creator [Ian Lesnet] and his team had put together a compelling product.

Over the last several months, the Bus Pirate software has improved dramatically. New features have started showing off the hardware’s capabilities, and the user experience is far improved over where it was at release. Following the firmware development is a roller coaster ride, with [Ian] sometimes pushing out several updates a day. Luckily, like the Pi Pico itself, updating the new Bus Pirate only takes a second.

But as impressive and important as those software updates have been, that’s not what we’re talking about today. In this post, we’ll take a look at one of the most exciting aspects of the new Bus Pirate — the ability to easily develop add-on modules for it.

Bus Pirate Versions

Before we get too far, I should mention that there are now a couple of new Bus Pirate versions on the market, which makes talking about the product a little confusing.
The new Bus Pirate 6
The Bus Pirate 5, which started shipping in February and remains available, is powered by the RP2040. It is the first major version of the hardware to see a wide release since the Bus Pirate 3. Since the team got early access to the RP2350 chip, they were also able to produce two new variants: the 5XL and the 6.

What are the differences between them all? The 5XL uses the RP2350A and is essentially just a faster version of the 5 thanks to the more powerful cores and additional RAM offered by the new Raspberry Pi silicon. The 6 is based on the RP2350B and takes advantage of the additional GPIO pins by deleting some of the I/O expander chips that were necessary on the 5 and 5XL. This not only makes I/O faster but frees up space on the board to implement a “follow along” logic analyzer that automatically records everything that’s happening on the bus.

All that being said, for the purposes of this article, it doesn’t actually matter.

One Port To Rule Them All

Regardless of which version of the Bus Pirate you get (5/5XL/6), they all feature the same 10-pin connector on the side. This is where you’d normally connect up your probes, and thanks to the display on the top of the Bus Pirate, you don’t even have to remember the pinout — when you switch modes on the device, the screen will be updated to show which pin does what.

This is where things start to get interesting. Since the connector on the side is nothing more exotic than a male 2.54 mm pitch header, interfacing with it through custom hardware is incredibly simple. You don’t need to hunt down some special connector — making a board that can plug into the BP5 (or beyond) can be as easy as soldering a female header onto a scrap of perfboard. Even better, since you don’t have to worry about creating a custom footprint, developing your own add-on PCBs is a breeze.

Designing Custom Expansions

Creating your own piece of hardware that plugs into the Bus Pirate is as easy as adding a right-angle 2.54 mm female header to the edge of your PCB. You might think the fact that the pinout changing depending on what mode the device is in would be a problem, but in practice, your add-on is likely going to require the user to set a corresponding mode anyway (I2C, SPI, UART, etc).

Over on the Bus Pirate forums, user [grymoire] is responsible for coming up with the idea of calling these expansions “planks” after drawing comparisons with the “hats” and “shields” used by other development boards. Why a plank? Well, for one, it fits the pirate theme. When plugged into the Bus Pirate, the expansions also look a bit like a plank hanging out over the side of a pirate ship.

As an example, I recently put together the SAO Plank: a small adapter that lets me connect three Simple Add-Ons to the Bus Pirate. This is not only a convenient way of powering the badge expansions and monitoring their current consumption using the Bus Pirate’s onboard display, but it also provides a way to debug and test I2C communications between several SAOs — a capability that will become more useful as we get closer to Supercon 2024.

There’s really not much going on in the SAO Plank, and frankly, I could have wired the thing up on a perfboard. Even the power LED I added is technically superfluous, as the technicolor lights produced by the Bus Pirate leave no question as to whether or not it’s turned on. But it was so cheap and easy to turn this into its own board, so why not?

I’m eager to see what the community comes up with when presented with such a low-friction path to coming up with custom Bus Pirate expansions.

Collect Em’ All

Bus Pirate planks aren’t just limited to DIY. Since releasing the Bus Pirate 5, a number of official planks have been introduced. Some of these are still in development, such as the “IR Toy” that [Ian] has been documenting in a thread on the forums. Others are already available for purchase, such as an assortment of adapters that make it easier to work with SPI flash chips and one for interfacing with SLE4442 Secure Memory Cards.

One of the advantages of the official planks is that the firmware is likely to get baked-in support for any special functions they may have. Even though the IR Toy hasn’t officially been released, last week a new mode was added to the stable build of the firmware that can interface with it and send NEC IR codes. Then again, as the firmware is open source, even DIY planks could get their own modes should somebody be so inclined to write the code for them.

Whether they’re an official product or a homebrew project from the community, the Bus Pirate Planks are a very exciting addition to an already fantastic tool. If you happen to see an interesting Plank in the wild, or end up making one yourself, be sure to let us know.

It may be the last gasp of summer here in the Northern Hemisphere, but it’s always cold somewhere, whether it’s outdoors or inside. If you suffer from cold, stiff hands, you know how difficult it can be to work comfortably on a computer all day. Somehow, all that typing and mousing does little to warm things up. What you need are hand warmers, obviously, and they might as well be smart and made to fit your hands.

Fifteen-year-old [Printerforge] created these bad boys in an effort to learn how to code LCDs and control heat like Magneto controls ferrous metals. Thanks to digital control, they can heat up to specific temperatures, and they happen to run for a long time.

Power-wise, these warmers use a 18650 cell and a TP4056 charging module. Everything is controlled by an Arduino Nano, which reads from both a thermistor and a potentiometer to control the output.

[Printerforge] really thought this project through, as you’ll see in the Instructable. There’s everything from a table of design requirements to quick but thorough explanations of nichrome wire and basic electronic theory.

And then there’s the material consideration. [Printerforge] decided that polymer clay offers the best balance of heat conductivity and durability. They ended up with two styles — flat, and joystick grip. The best part is, everything can fit in a generous pocket.

Clay is good for a lot of things, like making the perfect custom mouse.

hackaday.com/2024/08/30/adjust…