Having a fully automated cotton candy vending machine in your possession is a great thing, but not if you do not have full access to its software. With [Block’s Retro Repairs] getting ghosted by the manufacturer on regaining account access to the machine he bought used for $300, there was little left but to try and break into the system.

We previously covered the journey in getting the vending machine back into a state where it’d actually reliably produce cotton candy again, a process which is quite tedious and temperamental. After a lot of fiddling with sensors and temperature settings this was fixed, but still left the issue that as a vending machine it should allow the owner to set prices and such. Sadly this could only be done remotely via a special account, which access to had been left with the previous owner.

Despite the very custom exterior, the vending machine runs what is effectively an Android system, consisting of an industrial computer board wired into a lot of stepper drivers and other control boards. To the extreme delight of everyone involved, it was possible to access the Ct Terminal application with adb and its product database on the device’s storage. Unfortunately writing back a changed database file didn’t change anything in the UI, so for a few months the project languished.

After nearly bricking the system and ending up factory resetting the control software including temperatures, it actually improved the performance of the machine and produced cotton candy, so that was one win. Ultimately the solution was to modify the original app, but a combination of weak coding skills and the app being in Chinese led him to use free LLM coding chatbots to assist here.

This resulted in a custom settings menu being added with the ability to modify pricing, no need for online access any more and a very nice cotton candy vending machine for the private arcade where presumably friends and family can enjoy cheap or even free cotton candy. Finally having the machine sealed against ant intrusion was also a major improvement.

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When the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant’s #4 reactor experienced an extreme criticality event on that infamous day in 1986, the resulting steam explosion and lack of any kind of containment building meant that parts of the core were scattered throughout the site. In an extensive update to the original 2023 video, the [Chornobyl Family] covers the mad scramble to design robots to perform on-the-ground measurements, and ultimately remove all this debris for safe disposal.
The TR-1A, an early debris removal robot. (Source: Chornobyl Family, YouTube)
This essentially took the form of a hackathon, involving teams from all over the USSR and allied nations, creating the most diverse range of robots that 1980s Soviet technology and later Western technology could muster.

Many of these robots didn’t perform very well, or at all, mostly due to the bypassing of any kind of testing before deployment. Especially at the beginning of the clean-up the robots were being pushed into the high-radiation zones as soon as they were finished, with not only mechanical issues being a problem, but also with e.g. inaccurate radiation measurements by the RR-1 robot, that overstated measurements by more than a factor of ten. Meanwhile the RR-2 and RR-3 were too top-heavy and after deployment by helicopter simply tipped over. Eventually manual measurements proved to be faster and safer.

Early debris removal robots like the TR-1A were rather simplistic, with successive generations of robots over the next weeks and months improving on it. The use of a combustion engine instead of batteries provided to be a boon, as combustion engines are far less affected by radiation.

The BAER Beloyarets used an airport cart as the basis, with its electronics relying on vacuum tube technology and relays, with an internal combustion engine. This proved to be one of the most reliable designs and it’s been largely preserved on display in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, with many others of these robots also being on display around the nuclear plant or in the city of Chornobyl.

Overall an absolutely dizzying number of robotic designs were invented on the spot, adapted from existing designs or repurposed for operation in a high-radiation zone. Eventually bulldozer designs like the STR-1 helped to push radioactive debris off the roofs into containers, massively reducing the radioactive contamination of the area.

The fact that following #4’s RUD the other three RBMK units were able to keep operating safely without risks to its operators, and with the zone now safe for tourists, is a real testament to the success of the worst hackathon imaginable. Many of the lessons learned are relevant today, including during the decommissioning of Fukushima Daiichi’s melted-down cores.

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This week’s Hackaday podcast is a European affair again, as Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List on a summer evening to review the week. And we have a feast of hacks for your delectation.

As the title above says, one of the stand-out hacks this week was a set of airless mountain bike tyres 3D printed in glorious fluorescent TPU. They look as though they shouldn’t work but in fact they showed real promise, and we discuss the process behind their design. Then we take a look at a hybrid of a UV printer and an SLA 3D printer, capable of making high-resolution and robust 3D prints. The prospect of new Amigas intrigues us for a while, then carbon-fibre fabric in 3D prints.

Finally we’re in awe of the tech behind the Las Vegas Sphere, and we’re there for some radio at the Danish BornHack hacker camp. Follow that one up and you’ll find a bonus, an unofficial extra Hackaday podcast.

All the usual links are below, but before you head on down to have a listen, don’t forget we’ve got a mailbag for the podcast and we’d love to hear from you!

Download your own non-volatile MP3 here.

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Episode 381 Show Notes:

News:

• Congratulations To The Frikkin Laser Winners!

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Get A Remote Terminal With One Binary, One URL, And Zero Config
• 3D Printing A Usable Airless Tire
• UV Printer? 3D Printer? HeyGears Says “Why Not Both”?
• Could Camera Hardware Be The Physical Equivalent To USB-C?
• Strengthening 3D Prints With A Carbon-Fiber Epidermis
• Amiga And Commodore, Back Together (Sort Of)

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  
  • Reading A Thermocouple With Mercury And A Potentiometer
  • Addressable LEDs Make Giant 16×2 Character Display
  • Tiny Desktop Robot Has Radar
  • Stewart Platform Walker Gains Feeling In Legs From Resistors

  
  

• Jenny’s Picks:
  
  • The Seven Sensors And Breakout Boards To Avoid In A Product
  • Easy Theremin Uses ESP32
  • Building A Reproduction PlayStation Motherboard

  
  

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• The 16K Display That Ate Las Vegas
• BornHack Radio 102.8 FM, Playing Radio At A Hacker Camp

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Given that the no doubt totally sustainable build-out of data centers has sent both solid state and magnetic hard drive prices soaring, though, [WNY Over The Air] decided to take a look back at optical disks — specifically the high-density BDXL disks — and see how they do hosting the music library for his Plex server, among other things.

Price wise, well, it’s going to vary depending where you are in the world and exactly when you look. But Blu-ray pricing is looking competitive to hard drives again, and that even goes for the long-lasting, archival-quality “M-disks” that are supposed to last 1000 years in ideal conditions. Of course if you’re playing with LLM Agents, having your precious data on a Write Once Read Many medium like Blu-ray also has the advantage of keeping the agent from wiping it out, which [WNY] takes pains to point out.

That might be obvious, but what’s less obvious is that once the disk has had its metadata queued by his media-streaming Plex server the M-disk is plenty fast enough for streaming music with no noticeable lag. That load time does happen every time you load in a fresh disk, but how often would you be swapping out 100 GB of songs? Even with lossless formats like FLAC, that’s a few thousand tracks. If you’ve already got a Blu-ray drive and are hard up for storage, it might make sense right now to move your music to an optical disk while waiting for drive pries to normalize.

The window where this makes financial sense might not last long, and we’ll be back to wondering where to store our data. All we can say is that’s probably not going to be audio tape, as cool as a reel-to-reel would look in the server room.

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kMaybe feeling left out from the questionable hype train of “Our AI models can’t be trusted”, Anthropic has released reports that their Claude model has “reached the Internet” and accessed the systems of other companies on at least three occasions during testing.

It appears that the model was restricted from accessing the Internet because (and wait for it) the prompt told it that it didn’t have Internet access, and was inside a simulation. It seems like Anthropic counted on the same trick that users try to convince a model that Grandma really wanted to pass on her life-long love of hacking services, it’s all pretend. Like the OpenAI incident, the models were tasked with completing a capture-the-flag style challenge, a common hacker challenge format where vulnerable systems are provided and contestants try to hack them the fastest. Anthropic says that a misconfiguration of the test environment left the models with Internet access, so the model succeeded in accessing the Internet at large once it ignored the prompt.

In some instances, Anthropic says the model proceeded under the “misconception” that it was still in a simulation, listening selectively to some of the prompt, while in others it continued regardless. In once incident, the test model generated malicious PyPI packages, which were uploaded to the public PyPI repository and downloaded 15 times. Further clouding the issue, one of the downloads of the malicious PyPI module was by a security auditing company that was then infected by the package during analysis, allowing the Claude agent to access credentials of the security company via a poorly designed malware analysis pipeline. The company essentially deliberately infected itself with a malicious package, while lacking protections against malicious packages!

Anthropic promises tighter controls in the future, but stops short of ensuring that models under test will be prevented from accessing the Internet, and categorizes it as a test gone wrong. “These facts give us cautious optimism that with tighter monitoring and controls around evaluation infrastructure, as well as continued investment in alignment, this type of risk can be overcome.”

It remains to be seen why allowing automatic code to hack the production environments of other companies is considered acceptable. If any of us had done the same we’d be facing serious legal questions.

Hotel WiFi Pushes Malware

A threat group associated with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (APT29, Cozy Bear, Storm-2945, and/or Midnight Blizzard) has been identified behind an attack to push fake updates over hotel WiFi networks.

It appears that the attackers compromised the captive portal and gateway systems of the impacted hotels. The captive portal system is the typical gatekeeping system that requires you to pay for Internet access, or at least input your hotel room and name. By hijacking the DNS, users were redirected to additional fake “verification” pages that served a menu of malware using a variety of techniques.

Like previously reported activity attempting to capture Microsoft365 logins via spoofed pages, most these attacks seem very loud and obvious, counting on the end user to ignore warnings about invalid SSL certificates or run commands in the shell. Using a variant of the “click-to-fix” attacks, the user is presented with a fake request for additional verification by copying and pasting a string of text into a command shell, which then decodes to a standard malware installation script. More subtle attacks attempt to trick the user into adding a new device to their Microsoft accounts. The user is redirected to a page claiming to require a Microsoft login to access the Internet, often hosted on a copycat domain similar to a legitimate Microsoft resource. The fake login then prompts the victim to copy and paste an authentication URL, adding a new logged-in device to the Microsoft account.

Obviously, running arbitrary shell commands, accepting invalid SSL certificates, or pasting arbitrary URLs after signing in are all something nobody should be doing, and it’s unclear how many users were actually impacted by the campaign. For corporate users, the answers are relatively simple: user training, and an always-on corporate VPN that routes all traffic and DNS through the company servers.

For home users, the solution may be more nuanced. Every third video on YouTube tells you that you need to install a commercial VPN, but in many ways this simply shifts the problem. A commercial (or even worse, a free public VPN) service can also intercept DNS requests and traffic, by design. While some services are legitimately privacy protecting and respecting, many hide the true owners of the service. A better tool is Tailscale, designed for implementing personal VPN services, where your traffic stays on your own devices.

Tailscale, OpenAI, and Hugging Face

Speaking of the Tailscale VPN, we jump to their role (or non-role) in the recent Open AI “incident” with Hugging Face.

Tailscale is a zero-trust framework for connecting systems using the WireGuard VPN protocol. For end users, this is an excellent way to set up a VPN where your traffic never leaves your own systems unencrypted. For enterprises, it is often used to connect services Internet-wide, which is how it was used in the Hugging Face infrastructure. Once the Open AI agent had selected Hugging Face as a target, it found a vulnerability in a package manager, accessed a worker machine at Hugging Face, escalated to root on the Kubernetes cluster, and extracted the production key and authentication storage. This allowed the Open AI model to authenticate against the Tailscale system and directly connect to the network.

This, rightly, is not Tailscale’s problem. Once the authentication keys are available, it’s working as designed to allow new devices to register on the network. This is a pervasive problem with stored authentication tokens, and is one of the root goals, and causes, of the supply chain attacks suffered by NPM, PyPI, GitHub, VSCode plugin repositories, and more. Once an attacker is able to extract the authentication tokens, they are able to impersonate that account or system with equal privileges for as long as that authentication remains valid. Typically these tokens are not time limited, and the window of opportunity lasts until the owners of the account become aware of the compromise and are able to reset all of the impacted authentications!

Solutions to the permanent authentication token already exist, but are not widely used. Many package repositories already support restricted and dynamic authentication via OpenID Connect, where a token grants specific resources, not system-wide access. On some platforms, keys can be protected in a hardware-backed key store like a TPM or the Apple Secure Enclave chip, though this doesn’t solve the problem for most servers.

Tailscale, obviously, is looking to lean on the publicity generated from the Open AI incident, but the message is a good one: Anything that can be done to automatically and painlessly reduce the risks associated with long-lived authentication tokens will benefit everyone on the Internet. Even if you don’t run an integration pipeline, you most definitely run software built by one.

Another Set of NPM Package Compromises

The NPM package repository has suffered yet another incident where a large number of packages have been compromised.

Investigators have tracked over 400 packages infected with another variant of the same “Mini Shai-Halud” worm that ran rampant through package repositories in the Spring of 2026. While efforts have been made to reduce the attack surface of packages, few have implemented them, partly because they are not mandatory, and partly because they can greatly impact, or completely break, the build process. The packages this time include high-profile, commonly used tools, with several billion (yes, with a “b”) monthly installs during builds of other software.

Like the worms impacting the package repositories previously, packages are infected by added scripts to the pre-install commands which are executed automatically before the package is installed. The latest infection appears to have spread from a single developer of two widely used packages, keyv and cacheable. Once triggered, the worm will infect and upload new versions of all packages it can access, using stolen NPM authentication tokens. Like other variants of the “Mini Shai-Halud” family, the worm steals authentication tokens for NPM, PyPI, AWS, Kubernetes, and GitHub, the contents of env files which typically contain additional authentication keys, SSH keys, VPN configurations, and over 200 other types of credentials. These newer variants of the worms have increased the list of stolen credentials, begun modifying the instructions for AI coding assistants, added cryptocurrency theft, and added poisoned configurations for VSCode and AI tools to infect projects once the initial infection has been resolved.

Given the scope of the latest outbreak, the number of impacted packages will only increase: no effective countermeasures exist in the NPM community to prevent another wide supply chain event.

Mythos Knocks Out Post-Quantum Candidate

The Anthropic Mythos model found flaws in a candidate post-quantum encryption algorithm, HAWK. Multiple encryption algorithms have been under testing for years as part of the standardization process at NIST, with selected algorithms becoming part of the Federal Information Processing Standard requirements for systems handling secure data for government systems. Cryptographers fear that future advancements in quantum computing could break current encryption and signature methods, driving the search for new standards that will survive.

Anthropic reports that after 60 hours and approximately $100,000 in compute resources, the Mythos model was able to discover a flaw in the HAWK post-quantum signature algorithm. HAWK had previously survived multiple rounds of validation testing, but following the attacks generated by Mythos, the developer has withdrawn it from consideration. Mythos was not able to completely break HAWK, but combined multiple methods to reduce the key space by half.

Ultimately this is a case of the system working fully as designed. The proper time to find flaws in new algorithms is before they’re selected as standards!

Backdooring an Entire Linux Distribution

In 1984, Ken Thompson, one of the creators of Unix, gave the lecture “Reflections on Trusting Trust” in which he outlines the difficulties of establishing trust in tools. Thompson proposed the issue of a compiler modified to insert an invisible back door in any binary it compiled, including future versions of itself, ultimately showing the near impossibility of establishing a guaranteed clean tool chain, ultimately existing in all compiled tools and compilers without any evidence of the original code or modifications. Even if you inspect the source code, a compromised compiler could still be your undoing.

This week, a coalition of researchers published a paper demonstrating the “trusting trust” attack against a modern Linux distribution. Starting with a modified copy of the strip tool that removes debugging and other extraneous information to generate a smaller binary, the researchers demonstrated that the entire build of a NixOS Linux distribution could have a modification injected in every binary, including future builds of strip itself. While the attack starts with a source code modification of strip, after the first generation the modification exists in binary form only, built into each generation of the tool. This demonstrates that the “trusting trust” attack extends to any tool involved in the build process, not only the compiler, since the strip binary never reads source code, only the compiled results.

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When you think about it, time is all we’ve really got. Where to go from there is ultimately up to you. Maybe you use an app to track every task, or just go with the onboard timer. But that can be a lot of steps to begin with, and then the phone screen goes dark again. For some people, the whole out of sight, out of mind thing will kick in. At worst, you get distracted, start doing something else, and then feel guilty and frustrated when the timer starts going off.

But there’s hope for us visual simpletons, and the purveyor of that hope is [Edris] of Ponderly Robotics. You see, [Edris] created an extremely easy-to-use timer that looks like something you’d find on Captain Picard’s desk as a token of defeating the Borg. But the affably-named FlipBuddy is far more useful than that description implies.

[Edris] uses the open-source FlipBuddy every day, and swears by its simplicity. The point is accessibility, and respect for privacy. That said, there’s a companion app to provide insight.

Basically, you assign a task to each cube face. Choose one, and place the cube with that side facing up. FlipBuddy wakes up, connects to WiFi, and then pushes your session to the cloud, bypassing the need for your phone.

Time to switch tasks? Just put the new side face up. When you’re done for the day, use the stop face, which we’re hoping means to set it on the knocked-off corner.

You don’t need much to make FlipBuddy come to life. [Edris] used an ESP32 (an S3 SuperMini or similar will work), an MPU6050, six WS2812B LEDs, and a 3.7 V Li-Po cell. The beautiful, 3D printed origami mesh enclosure prints as a single, flat piece, and you get to fold it up around the internals and make your new buddy come to life.

Part of the point of FlipBuddy is that it can become as intuitive as punching a chess clock. So if it’s buttons you’re after, check out this simple Pomodoro timer.

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