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Category Archives: news
GPS III Launching Today But You Can’t Use it Until 2022
Imagine if you bought a new car but they keys were not going to be shipped to you until a few years later. That’s analogous to the situation the U.S. Air Force finds itself in. The first GPS III satellite is finally ready to launch today, December 18, 2018 — a little over 2 years beyond the original schedule. However, most of the unique GPS III features won’t be available until at least 2022, according to a 2017 Government Accounting Office (GAO) report to Congress.
GPS III is a project to launch 32 new satellites that will — for military …read more
Posted in Current Events, Featured, gps, gps iii, news, satellite, space
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RISC-V Will Stop Hackers Dead From Getting Into Your Computer
The greatest hardware hacks of all time were simply the result of finding software keys in memory. The AACS encryption debacle — the 09 F9 key that allowed us to decrypt HD DVDs — was the result of encryption keys just sitting in main memory, where it could be read by any other program. DeCSS, the hack that gave us all access to DVDs was again the result of encryption keys sitting out in the open.
Because encryption doesn’t work if your keys are just sitting out in the open, system designers have come up with ingenious solutions to prevent …read more
Posted in computer hacks, enclave, encryption, Featured, Interest, news, Original Art, RISC-V, secure enclave, SEP, SGX, silicon design
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Furby Plus Borges Equals Borgy
What do you get if you cross a Furby with a master of 20th Century literature? The Borgy. Argentinian hacker [Roni Bandini] found an old Furby and decided to hack it by altering its personality. His inspiration was the Argentinian writer Jorge Louis Borges, one of the pioneers of surrealist writing. The idea is that, at random times during the day, the Borgy will share a bit of wisdom from Borges to inspire and enlighten.
[Roni] hacked the Furby to replace the speaker with a more powerful one, and built a base to hold the larger speaker and a switch …read more
Posted in Borges, furby, Magical Reality, news
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5G Cellphone’s Location Privacy Broken Before It’s Even Implemented
Although hard to believe in the age of cheap IMSI-catchers, “subscriber location privacy” is supposed to be protected by mobile phone protocols. The Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocol provides location privacy for 3G, 4G, and 5G connections, and it’s been broken at a basic enough level that three successive generations of a technology have had some of their secrets laid bare in one fell swoop.
When 3G was developed, long ago now, spoofing cell towers was expensive and difficult enough that the phone’s International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) was transmitted unencrypted. For 5G, a more secure version based on …read more
Posted in 3g, 4g, 5g, cellular phone, encryption, mobile phone, news, phone hacks
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Mini Vectrex Prototype Restored By National Videogame Museum
The crash of the videogame market in 1983 struck down a slew of victims, and unique products such as the Vectrex were not immune to its destructive ways. The all-in-one console featured a monochromatic vector display and offered an arcade-like experience at home complete with an analog joystick controller. It sadly never made it to its second birthday before being axed in early 1984, however, thanks to the [National Videogame Museum] we now how a glimpse of an alternate history for the Vectrex. They posted some photos of an unreleased Vectrex prototype that was restored to working order.
Little was …read more
Posted in news, prototype, vectrex, videogames
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Amazon Creates Distributed Satellite Ground Stations
Here’s an interesting thought: it’s possible to build a cubesat for perhaps ten thousand dollars, and hitch a ride on a launch for free thanks to a NASA outreach program. Tracking that satellite along its entire orbit would require dozens or hundreds of ground stations, all equipped with antennas and a connection to the Internet. Getting your data down from a cubesat actually costs more than building a satellite.
This is the observation someone at Amazon must have made. They’ve developed the AWS Ground Station, a system designed to downlink data from cubesats and other satellites across an entire orbit. …read more
Posted in amazon, news, satellite, satellite tracking, SatNOGS
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Hackaday Assembling At 35C3
Hackaday is going to be at the 35th annual Chaos Communication Congress (35C3), December 27th – 31st, and we’re putting together an assembly. If you’re coming to 35C3, come join us!
If you’ve never been to a Congress before, it’s an amazing scene. This year over 15,000 hackers will take over the Leipzig Congress Hall, bringing whatever they’re working on with them, and showing off their last-minute dazzlers. Congress is awesome in both senses of the word: simultaneously incredible and a little bit intimidating.
With the scale of the Congress approaching absurd proportions, it’s nice to have a home base. …read more
Posted in 35C3, ccc, chaos communication congress, cons, Leipzig, news
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FCC Gets Complaint: Proposed Ham Radio Rules Hurt National Security
On November 10th, [Theodore Rappaport] sent the FCC an ex parte filing regarding a proposed rule change that would remove the limit on baud rate of high frequency (HF) digital transmissions. According to [Rappaport] there are already encoded messages that can’t be read on the ham radio airwaves and this would make the problem worse.
[Rappaport] is a professor at NYU and the founding director of NYU Wireless. His concern seems to relate mostly to SCS who have some proprietary schemes for compressing PACTOR as part of Winlink — used in some cases to send e-mail from onboard ships.
The …read more
Posted in encryption, fcc, ham radio, news
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Linux as a Library: Unikernels are Coming
If you think about it, an operating system kernel is really just a very powerful shared library that offers services to many programs. Of course, it is a very powerful library, but still — its main purpose is to provide services to programs. Your program probably doesn’t use all of the myriad services the kernel provides. Even a typical system might not fully use all the things that are in a typical kernel. Red Hat has a new initiative to bring a technology called unikernels to the forefront. A unikernel is a single application linked with just enough of the …read more
Posted in linux, linux hacks, news, redhat, unikernel
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Restoring An Apollo Guidance Computer
The Apollo Guidance Computer is a remarkably important piece of computing history. It’s the computer that guided the Apollo lander to land on the moon. We’ve seen a few replica builds over the years, but [CuriousMarc] got a closer look at one of the real things. In this video, [Marc] gets a look inside as his colleagues take apart one of the original AGCs and get a closer look at the insides of this piece of computer history.
Thanks to collector [Jimmie Loocke], they got to take apart AGO#14, one of the original flight computers from a Lunar Excursion Module …read more
Posted in apollo, Apollo AGC, news, restoration
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