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Showing posts from July, 2021

An Epic Tale Of Reset Line Detective Work

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The Pine64 folks have given us so many tasty pieces of hardware over the last few years, but it’s fair to say that their products are for experimenters rather than consumers and can thus be a little rough around the edges at times. Their Clusterboard for example is a Mini-ITX PCB which takes up to seven of their SOPINE A64 compute modules, and networks them for use as a cluster by means of an onboard Gigabit Ethernet switch. It’s a veritable powerhouse, but it has an annoying bug in that it appears reluctant to restart when told. [Eric Draken] embarked upon a quest to fix this problem , and while he got there in the end his progress makes for a long and engrossing read. We journey through the guts of the board and along the way discover a lot about how reset signals are generated. The eventual culprit is a back-EMF generated through the reset distribution logic itself causing the low-pulled line to never quite descend into logic 0 territory once it has been pulled high, and the solut...

A Satellite Upconverter Need Not Be Impossible To Make

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Those readers whose interests don’t lie in the world of amateur radio might have missed one of its firsts, for the last year or two amateurs have had their own geostationary satellite transponder. Called Es’hail-2 / AMSAT Phase 4-A / Qatar-OSCAR 100, it lies in the geostationary orbit at 25.9° East and has a transponder with a 2.4 GHz uplink and a 10.489 GHz downlink. Receiving the downlink is possible with an LNB designed for satellite TV, but for many hams the uplink presents a problem. Along comes [PY1SAN] from Brazil with a practical and surprisingly simple solution using a mixture of odd the shelf modules and a few hand-soldered parts. An upconverter follows a simple enough principle, the radio signal is created at a lower frequency (in this case by a 435 MHz transmitter) and mixed with a signal from a local oscillator. A filter then picks out the mixer product — the sum of the two — and amplifies it for transmission. [PY1SAN]’s upconverter takes the output from the transmitter...

Retrotechtacular: Mechanical TV From The People Who Made It Happen

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If we have a television in 2021 the chances are that it will be a large LCD model, flat and widescreen, able to display HD images in stunning clarity. Before that we’d have had a CRT colour TV, them maybe our parents grew up with a monochrome model. Before those though came the first TVs of all, which were mechanical devices that relied on a spinning disk to both acquire and display the image. The BBC Archive recently shared a vintage clip from 1970 in which two of the assistants of [John Logie Baird], the inventor of the first demonstrable television system, demonstrated its various parts and revealed its inner workings . We’ve covered the Nipkow scanning disk in a previous article , with its characteristic spiral of holes. We see the original Baird Televisor, but the interesting part comes as we move to the studio. Using the original equipment they show a dot of light traversing the presenter’s face to scan a picture before taking us to a mock-up of the original studio. Here there’...

One Of The Largest Large Format Cameras You Will Ever Have Seen

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When fate lands a very high quality lens in front of you, what do you do with it? If you are [Tim Hamilton], the solution is obvious. Use it in a huge large-format camera . The lens came from a newspaper magnifier made redundant by digitalisation and used as a paperweight. It’s an extremely high quality piece of optical equipment so seeing it wasted in this way was a source of distress. So after characterising it an enormous scaled-up box and bellows was constructed, and set upon a suitably substantial wheeled tripod. Instead of a huge piece of film or some unobtainable giant electronic sensor, the image is projected onto a large screen at the rear of the camera. A modern digital camera is mounted inside the box just beneath the lens and photographs the screen, resulting in the feel of the largest of large format cameras with the convenience of a digital format. The resulting images have a special quality to them that recalls pictures from the past, and definitely makes the camera a...

British Big Rigs Are About To Go Green

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An increasing fact of life over the coming years will be the decarbonisation of our transport networks, for which a variety of competing solutions are being touted. Railways, trucks, cars, and planes will all be affected by this move away from fossil fuels, and while sectors such as passenger cars are making great strides towards electric drive, there remain some technical hurdles elsewhere such as with heavy road freight. To help inform the future of road transport policy in the UK then, the British government are financing a series of trials for transportation modes that don’t use internal combustion . These will include a battery-electric fleet for the National Health Service and a hydrogen-powered fleet in Scotland, as well as a trial of the same overhead-wire system previously given an outing in Germany, that will result in the electrification of a 12.4 mile section of the M180 motorway in Lincolnshire. We’ve written about the overhead electrification project in Germany in the p...

The Man-Machine

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This week we saw a couple DIY tools for small-run manufacturing at home that help make your life easier if you’re climbing out of the happy bucket and into the pit of despair — when you’re making enough of the item that it’s not fun any more, but you still don’t have the volume to leave the manufacturing to someone else. The first was an automatic through-hole soldering machine made from a 3D printer . This actually makes sense even if you’re getting boards assembled for you, because through-hole pads are a lot more expensive than SMT parts, and they usually charge per pin. Put a 2×20 pin header on your project, and it can end up costing a lot. Or you can robotificate the solution. This week’s second solution really caught my eye. PnPassist is machine that turns your PCB around, locates a laser crosshair over the next SMT piece that you need to place, and even has an OLED screen that tells you what to put there. There are many great mechanical design choices here, but what really ...

A LiPo Cell Makes A 4AA Pack For A GameBoy

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Electronic toys of yesteryear were fantastic objects of desire, but came with the fatal flaw of requiring batteries. Batteries that cost more than the average youngster’s pocket money and for which the pestered parent were usually unwilling to fork out every couple of days to support an incessant playing habit. It’s something [Sen] has addressed for the Nintendo Game Boy, and rather than cutting the device up and soldering wires, the result is a unit that neatly slots into the existing 4AA battery enclosure . Much more convenient than Nintendo’s own effort! Electrically it’s a simple case of wiring up an Adafruit module and a pouch cell, but that’s not the essence of the job in this case. Instead a huge quantity of work and iteration has gone into CAD design to the perfect-fitting pack. It’s sure to be a boon for today’s Game Boy player, but much more than that it should be of interest to owners of far more devices that take four AA cells. Most of us probably keep a few packs of A...

Developing The First ICs In Orbit

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Over six decades of integrated circuit production we’ve become used to their extreme reliability and performance for a very reasonable price. But what about those first integrated circuits from the early 1960s? Commercial integrated circuits appeared in 1961, and recently Texas Instruments published a fascinating retrospective on the development of their first few digital ICs . TI’s original IC product on the market was the SN502 , a transistor flip-flop that debuted at $450 (about $4100 today), which caught the interest of NASA engineers who asked for logic functions with a higher performance level. The response was the development of the 51 series of logic chips, whose innovation included on-chip interconnects replacing the hand interconnects of the SN502. Their RCTL logic gave enough performance and reliability for NASA to use, and in late 1963 the Explorer 18 craft carried a telemetry system using the SN510 and SN514 chips into orbit. 52 and 53 series chips quickly followed, the...

Build That Catan Board You Designed

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A couple of months ago, we posted about the one day design [Sam March] did of an electronic Settlers of Catan board. Now he’s released a video with the second half. His first video was about the design of the game, specifically the electronic components. In this video, [Sam] takes us through the physical build of the board. A couple of visits to his local maker space allows him to cut both the wooden parts of the board, as well as the acrylic hexes that go on top of each piece. Even with a CNC machine, there’s still some clean-up that needs to be done. After cleaning up the edges of the wood with a chisel and staining it, it’s time to put the circuit boards in, wire them up and program them. The build includes a dice roller – pushing a button shows the number rolled by lighting up the tiles in the form of the rolled number. The final touch is having some friends over to actually play the game. Between the design process in the last article and the build process in this one, we get...

Rare Radio Receiver Teardown

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We’ll admit we haven’t heard of the AGS-38, it reminds us of the shortwave receivers of our youth, and it looks like many that were made “white label” by more established (and often Japanese) companies. [Jeff] found a nice example of this Canadian radio and takes it apart for our viewing pleasure. He also found it was very similar to a Layfayette receiver, also made in Japan, confirming our suspicions. The radio looks very similar to an Eico of the same era — around the 1960s. With seven tubes, radios like this would soon be replaced by transistorized versions. [Jeff] gives us a look at the inside and the always interesting hand wiring under the covers. As is often the case with radios this old, it appears this one had a repair done to its power switch and it didn’t mean [Jeff’s] approval so he redid the repair. He also had to replace the filter caps, another common failure on these old radios. Otherwise, the radio still seemed serviceable after all these years. There isn’t much...

Step ‘n Snack Fanny Pack Motivates with M&Ms

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[Sam March] has made a lot of different kinds of things, many of which have appeared on these very pages. Nowadays he wants to get the viewers more involved in his projects, so he started doing a monthly collaboration with YT viewers. Basically, he gives a prompt, and people comment with their wild and crazy ideas on the topic. Whoever has the winning idea gets the finished build. The maiden prompt was ‘fanny pack’, and you can check out the result in the build video (embedded below). Someone suggested a Reese’s cup-dispensing fanny pack that gives you one cup for every 10,000 steps you take. We like what [Sam] did with that idea, because it’s way more practical — M&Ms are the original travel candy , and this way, you get to eat chocolate way more often. Depending on your sweet tooth, Reese’s Pieces would be a good compromise. [Sam] figured out that the average human burns one calorie for every 25 steps, and that the average plain M&M is worth four calories, so he built a f...

Charger Caddy Shows What 3D Printers Were Meant For

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As computers became more popular in the late 80s and into the 90s, they vastly changed their environments. Of course the technological changes were obvious, but plenty of other things changed to accommodate this new technology as well. For example, furniture started to include design elements to accommodate the desktop computer, with pass-through ports in the back of the desks to facilitate cable management. While these are less common features now there are plenty of desks still have them, this 3D printed design modernizes them in a simple yet revolutionary way . While these ports may have originally hosted thick VGA cables, parallel printer cables (if they would fit), and other now-obsolete wiring, modern technology uses simpler, smaller solutions. This doesn’t mean that they aren’t any less in need of management, though. This print was designed to hold these smaller wires such as laptop chargers, phone chargers, and other USB cables inside the port. A cap on the top of the print k...

Build A Barebones 68000

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The 68000 chip was ubiquitous in the computing world well past its heyday in the 1980s. It was used as the basis for many PCs and video game consoles, and even in embedded microcontrollers. Now, one of its niche applications is learning about the internal functions of computers. 68000 builds are fairly common when building homebrew computers from scratch, but projects like these can be complicated and quickly get out of hand. This 68000 project, on the other hand, gets the job done with the absolute minimum of parts and really dives into the assembly language programming on these chips. ( Google Translate from Spanish ) [osbox68] built this computer by first simulating its operation. Once he was satisfied with that, the next step was to actually build the device. Along with the MC68008 it only uses two other TTL chips, a respectable 32 kilobytes of ram, and additionally supports a serial port and an expansion bus. A few 74-series chips round out the build including a 74HC574 used fo...

Hackaday Podcast 129: Super Clever 3D Printing, Jigs and Registration Things, 90s Car Audio, and Smooth LED Fades

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Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams have found a critical mass of projects this week that wouldn’t be possible without 3D printers. There’s an absolutely astounding model roller coaster that is true to the mechanisms and physics of the original (and beholden to hours of sanding and painting). Adding sheet material to the printing process is a novel way to build durable hinges and foldable mechanisms. Elliot picks out not one, but two quadruped robot projects that leverage 3D-printed parts in interesting ways. And for the electronics geeks there’s a server rack stuffed with Raspberry Pi, and analog electronic wizardry to improve the resolution of the WS2811 LED controller. We wrap it all up with discussions of flying boats, and adding Bluetooth audio to old car head units. Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments! Direct download (60 MB or so.) Places to follow Hackaday podcast...

Mobile Sauna for On-The-Go Relaxation

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While it might be nice to imagine owning a cabin in the woods to escape from society, complete with an outdoor sauna to take in the scenic views of nature, most of us will be satisfied with the occasional vacation to a cabin like that. For those trips, or even for long-term camping trips, [Schitzu] and a group of friends thought it would be nice to be able to ensure access to a sauna. For that, they created this mobile, timber-framed sauna that he can tow behind his car . The sauna is built out of a combination of spruce and Douglas fir, two types of lumber with weather-resistant properties. For an additional layer of protection, the frame was varnished after assembly. The walls are filled with baked cork for insulation, and heat is provided by a small wood-fired oven placed in the corner of the sauna with a stove pipe plumbed through the roof. Performance of the sauna shows good design too, as it can heat up quickly and performs well in all of the tests so far. The final touch on th...

Pi-Hole Remove Commands Linux Privilege Escalation

Pi-Hole versions 3.0 through 5.3 allows for command line input to the removecustomcname, removecustomdns, and removestaticdhcp functions without properly validating the parameters before passing to sed. When executed as the www-data user, this allows for a privilege escalation to root since www-data is in the sudoers.d/pihole file with no password. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3fd99T8

Panasonic Sanyo CCTV Network Camera 2.03-0x Cross Site Request Forgery

Panasonic Sanyo CCTV Network Camera version 2.03-0x allows users to perform certain actions via HTTP requests without performing any validity checks to verify the requests. These actions can be exploited to perform authentication detriment and account password change with administrative privileges if a logged-in user visits a malicious web site. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3yek0DP

Red Hat Security Advisory 2021-2965-01

Red Hat Security Advisory 2021-2965-01 - Red Hat Single Sign-On 7.4 is a standalone server, based on the Keycloak project, that provides authentication and standards-based single sign-on capabilities for web and mobile applications. This release of Red Hat Single Sign-On 7.4.8 serves as a replacement for Red Hat Single Sign-On 7.4.7, and includes bug fixes and enhancements, which are documented in the Release Notes document linked to in the References. Issues addressed include a cross site scripting vulnerability. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/37a0jkS

Ubuntu Security Notice USN-5026-1

Ubuntu Security Notice 5026-1 - It was discovered that QPDF incorrectly handled certain malformed PDF files. A remote attacker could use this issue to cause QPDF to consume resources, resulting in a denial of service. This issue only affected Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. It was discovered that QPDF incorrectly handled certain malformed PDF files. A remote attacker could use this issue to cause QPDF to crash, resulting in a denial of service, or possibly execute arbitrary code. Various other issues were also addressed. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3zS03Dw

Ubuntu Security Notice USN-5027-1

Ubuntu Security Notice 5027-1 - It was discovered that PEAR incorrectly handled symbolic links in archives. A remote attacker could possibly use this issue to execute arbitrary code. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3zQmoBh

ObjectPlanet Opinio 7.13 Shell Upload

ObjectPlanet Opinio version 7.13 suffers from a remote shell upload vulnerability. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3BVFebX

ObjectPlanet Opinio 7.13 Expression Language Injection

ObjectPlanet Opinio version 7.13 suffers from an expression language injection vulnerability. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3xeZHVM

ObjectPlanet Opinio 7.13 / 7.14 XML Injection

ObjectPlanet Opinio versions 7.13 and 7.14 suffer from an XML external entity injection vulnerability. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3zWPFuf

Demystifying Nmap Scans At The Packet Level

This paper contains a step by step detailed walk-through of different nmap scanning techniques and how the nmap traffic looks like in wireshark for each scan. The objective of documenting the paper is to get a better understanding of packets while initiating any nmap scan so that it can help in bypassing firewalls or debugging what went wrong between the source and destination. It can also help in writing basic firewall rules. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3ydyqo0

This Week in Security: Fail2RCE, TPM Sniffing, Fishy Leaks, and Decompiling

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Fail2ban is a great tool for dynamically blocking IP addresses that show bad behavior, like making repeated login attempts. It was just announced that a vulnerability could allow an attacker to take over a machine by being blocked by Fail2ban. The problem is in the mail-whois action, where an email is sent to the administrator containing the whois information. Whois information is potentially attacker controlled data, and Fail2ban doesn’t properly sterilize the input before piping it into the mail binary. Mailutils has a feature that uses the tilde key as an escape sequence, allowing commands to be run while composing a message. Fail2ban doesn’t sanitize those tilde commands, so malicious whois data can trivially run commands on the system. Whois is one of the old-school unix protocols that runs in the clear, so a MItM attack makes this particularly easy. If you use Fail2ban, make sure to update to 0.10.7 or 0.11.3, or purge any use of mail-whois from your active configs. Break...

Cisco Researchers Spotlight Solarmarker Malware

from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3rKtCUo

Security Team Finds Crimea Manifesto Buried In VBA Rat

from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3id7OxF

Inside The Bitcoin Mine With Its Own Power Plant

from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3j8FBHJ

Vultur Bank Malware Infests Thousands Of Devices

from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/2V3OwlH

Streaming Video From a Mouse

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The first optical mice had to be used on a specially printed mousepad with a printed grid that the four-quadrant infrared sensor could detect. Later, mice swapped the infrared sensor for an optoelectric module (essentially a tiny, very low-resolution camera) and a powerful image processing. [8051enthusiast] was lying in bed one day when they decided to crack the firmware in their gaming mouse and eventually start streaming frames from the camera inside . Step one was to analyze the protocol between the mouse and the host machine . Booting up a Windows VM and Wireshark allowed him to capture all the control transfers to the USB controller. Since it was a “programmable” gaming mouse that allowed a user to set macros, [8051enthusiast] could use the control transfers that would normally query that macro that had been set to return the memory at an arbitrary location. A little bit of tinkering later, and he now had a dump of the firmware. Looking at the most abundant bytes, it seems to ma...

Here’s How to Sniff Out an LCD Protocol, But How Do You Look Up the Controller?

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Nothing feels better than getting a salvaged component to do your bidding. But in the land of electronic displays, the process can quickly become a quagmire. For more complex displays, the secret incantation necessary just to get the things to turn on can be a non-starter. Today’s exercise targets a much simpler character display and has the added benefit of being able to sniff the data from a functioning radio unit . When [Amen] upgraded his DAB radio he eyed the 16×2 character display for salvage. With three traces between the display and the controller it didn’t take long to trace out the two data lines using an oscilloscope. Turing on the scope’s decoding function verified his hunch that it was using I2C, and gave him plenty of data to work from. This included a device address, initialization string, and that each character was drawn on screen using two bytes on the data bus. He says that some searching turned up the most likely hardware: a Winstar WO1602I-TFH- AT derived from a...

Cloud-Based Atari Gaming

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While the Google Stadia may be the latest and greatest in the realm of cloud gaming, there are plenty of other ways to experience this new style of gameplay, especially if you’re willing to go a little retro. This project, for example, takes the Atari 2600 into the cloud for a nearly-complete gaming experience that is fully hosted in a server, including the video rendering. [Michael Kohn] created this project mostly as a way to get more familiar with Kubernetes, a piece of open-source software which helps automate and deploy container-based applications. The setup runs on two Raspberry Pi 4s which can be accessed by pointing a browser at the correct IP address on his network, or by connecting to them via VNC. From there, the emulator runs a specific game called Space Revenge, chosen for its memory requirements and its lack of encumbrance of copyrights. There are some limitations in that the emulator he’s using doesn’t implement all of the Atari controls, and that the sound isn’t ava...

3D Printed Material Might Replace Kevlar

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Prior to 1970, bulletproof vests were pretty iffy, with a history extending as far as the 1500s when there were attempts to make metal armor that was bulletproof. By the 20th century there was ballistic nylon, but it took kevlar to produce garments with real protection against projectile impact. Now a 3D printed nanomaterial might replace kevlar. A group of scientists have published a paper that interconnected tetrakaidecahedrons made up of carbon struts that are arranged via two-photon lithography. We know that tetrakaidecahedrons sound like a modern invention, but, in fact, they were proposed by Lord Kelvin in the 19th century as a shape that would allow things to be packed together with minimum surface area. Sometimes known as a Kelvin cell, the shape is used to model foam, among other things. The 3D printing, in this case, is a form of lithography using precise lasers, so you probably won’t be making any of this on your Ender 3. However, the shape might have some other uses w...