When Elliot and I record the raw audio for the weekly podcast, it’s not unusual for us to spend the better part of two hours meandering from topic to topic. During one of these extended gab sessions, we wondered if it would be possible to embed a digital signal into the podcast in such a…
Read More “Unraveling The Hackaday Podcast Hidden Message” »
There’s a problem in the unrar utility, and as a result, the Zimbra mail server was vulnerable to Remote Code Execution by simply sending an email. So first, unrar is a source-available command-line application made by RarLab, the same folks behind WinRAR. CVE-2022-30333 is the vulnerability there, and it’s a classic path traversal on archive…
An Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) is at its core a straight-forward device: by measuring an analog voltage within a set range and converting the measured level to a digital value we can use this measurement value in our code. Through the use of embedded ADCs in microcontrollers we can address many essential use cases,…
Read More “Bare-Metal STM32: Adding An Analog Touch With ADCs” »
In antiquity, we see examples of magnifying crystals formed into a biconvex shape as early as the 7th century BC. Whether the people of that period used them either for fire-starting purposes or vision is unclear. Still, it is famously said that Emperor Nero of Rome watched gladiator games through an emerald. Needless to say,…
Read More “Lenses: From Fire Starters To Smart Phones And VR” »
At the risk of dating myself, I will tell you that grew up in the 80s – that decade of excess that was half drab and half brightly colored, depending on where you looked, and how much money you had for stuff like Memphis design. Technology seemed to move quickly in almost every aspect of…
Read More “Teardown: KC Bearifone Could Talk Circles Around Teddy Ruxpin” »
It’s fair to say that there’s really no phase of spaceflight that could be considered easy. But the case could be made that the most difficult part of a spacecraft’s journey is right at the very beginning, within the first few minutes of flight. At this point the vehicle’s booster rocket will be fighting with…
Read More “SpinLaunch And The History Of Hurling Stuff Into Space” »
[Eaton Zveare] purchased a Jacuzzi hot tub, and splurged for the SmartTub add-on, which connects the whirlpool to the internet so you can control temperature, lights, etc from afar. He didn’t realize he was about to discover a nightmare of security problems. Because as we all know, in IoT, the S stands for security. In…
Read More “This Week In Security: IoT In The Hot Tub, App Double Fail, And FreeBSD BadBeacon” »
The war in Ukraine has upset the global food market, and the surprising reason is not that Ukrainian wheat isn’t being harvested, but rather that it can’t leave the country. With Russia blockading sea ports, the only way out for Ukrainian grain is by train. And this exposes the long-hidden patchwork of railway tracks and…
Read More “Grain Stuck In Ukraine: The Fragmented Nature Of Modern-Day Railways” »
We are often struck by how often we spend time trying to optimize something when we would be better off just picking a better algorithm. There is the old story about the mathematician Gauss who, when in school, was given busy work to add the integers from 1 to 100. While the other students laboriously…
When Astra’s diminutive Rocket 3.3 lifted off from its pad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on June 12th, everything seemed to be going well. In fact, the mission was progressing exactly to plan right up until the end – the booster’s second stage Aether engine appeared to be operating normally until it abruptly…
Read More “NASA Mission Off To Rough Start After Astra Failure” »
