This excellent content from the Hackaday writing crew highlights recurring topics and popular series like Linux-Fu, 3D-Printering, Hackaday Links, This Week in Security, Inputs of Interest, Profiles in Science, Retrotechtacular, Ask Hackaday, Teardowns, Reviews, and many more.
This week Jonathan and Aaron chat with Ben Meadors and Garth Vander Houwen about Meshtastic! What’s changed since we talked to them last, where is the project going, and what’s coming next? Listen to find out!
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 835: Beeps And Boops With Meshtastic”
When purchasing high-end gear, it’s not uncommon for manufacturers to include a little swag in the box. It makes the customer feel a bit better about the amount of money that just left their wallet, and it’s a great way for the manufacturer to build some brand loyalty and perhaps even get their logo out into the public. What’s not expected, though, is for the swag to be the only thing in the box. That’s what a Redditor reported after a recent purchase of an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090, a GPU that lists for $1,999 but is so in-demand that it’s unobtainium at anything south of $2,600. When the factory-sealed box was opened, the Redditor found it stuffed with two cheap backpacks instead of the card. To add insult to injury, the bags didn’t even sport an Nvidia logo.
The purchase was made at a Micro Center in Santa Clara, California, and an investigation by the store revealed 31 other cards had been similarly tampered with, although no word on what they contained in lieu of the intended hardware. The fact that the boxes were apparently sealed at the factory with authentic anti-tamper tape seems to suggest the substitutions happened very high in the supply chain, possibly even at the end of the assembly line. It’s a little hard to imagine how a factory worker was able to smuggle 32 high-end graphics cards out of the building, so maybe the crime occurred lower down in the supply chain by someone with access to factory seals. Either way, the thief or thieves ended up with almost $100,000 worth of hardware, and with that kind of incentive, this kind of thing will likely happen again. Keep your wits about you when you make a purchase like this.
This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos joined forces to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week.
In Hackaday news, the 2025 Pet Hacks Contest rolls on, but only for a short time longer. You have until Tuesday, June 10th to show us what you’ve got, so head over to Hackaday.IO and get started now! In other news, check out what adaptive optics can do when it comes to capturing pictures of the Sun. In other, other news, there won’t be a Podcast next week as Elliot is on vacation.
On What’s That Sound, Kristina failed once again, but four of you guessed correctly. Congratulations to [ToyoKogyo12aTurbo] who fared better and wins a limited edition Hackaday Podcast t-shirt!
After that, it’s on to the hacks and such, beginning with a largely-printed 6-DOF robot arm. We take a look at a bunch of awesome 3D prints like guitars and skateboards, take a look at some pet hacks, and discuss brick layers in orcaslicer. Finally, we talk a lot about keyboards, especially the quickly-evaporating Blackberry keyboards and why they’re disappearing.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Download in DRM-free MP3 and savor at your leisure.
Up first, if you’re running a Roundcube install prior to 1.5.10 or 1.6.11, it’s time to update. We have an authenticated Remote Code Execution (RCE) in the Roundcube Webmail client. And while that’s not quite the level of chaos that an unauthenticated RCE would cause, it’s still to be taken seriously. Mainly because for the majority of the 53 million Roundcube installs out there, the users aren’t entirely trusted.
The magic at play in this vulnerability is the Roundcube user session code, and specifically the session deserialization scheme. There’s a weird code snippet in the unserialize function:
if ($str[$p] == '!') {
$p++;
$has_value = false;
The exclamation mark makes the code skip a character, and then assume that what comes next has no value. But if it does actually have a value, well then you’ve got a slightly corrupted deserialization, resulting in a slightly corrupted session. This really comes into force when combined with the file upload function, as the uploaded filename serves as a payload delivery mechanism. Use the errant exclamation mark handling to throw off deserialization, and the filename can contain arbitrary session key/value pairs. A GPG class from the PEAR library allows running an arbitrary command, and this can be hijacked with the session manipulation. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Roundcube, Unified Threat Naming, And AI Chat Logs”
Many engineers graduate from their studies and head out into the workforce, seeking a paycheck and a project at some existing company or other. Often, it’s not long before an experienced engineer begins to contemplate striking out on their own, working as a skilled gun-for-hire that makes their own money and their own hours.
It’s a daunting leap, but with the promise of rich rewards for those that stick the landing. That very leap is one that our own Dave Rowntree made. He came to Supercon 2024 to tell us what the journey was like, and how he wound up working on some very special shoes.
Continue reading “Supercon 2024: From Consultant To Prototyper On A Shoestring Budget”
What could happen when you open-source a hardware project?
No, seriously. I hold a fair few radical opinions – one is that projects should be open-source to the highest extent possible. I’ve seen this make miracles happen, make hackerdom stronger, and nourish our communities. I think we should be publishing all the projects, even if incomplete, as much as your opsec allows. I would make ritual sacrifices if they resulted in more KiCad projects getting published, and some days I even believe that gently bullying people into open-sourcing their projects can be justified. My ideal universe is one where companies are unable to restrict schematics from people getting their hardware, no human should ever hold an electronics black box, by force if necessary.
Why such a strong bias? I’ve seen this world change for the better with each open-source project, and worse with closed-source ones, it’s pretty simple for me. Trust me here – let me tell you a story of how a couple reverse-engineering efforts and a series of open-source PCBs have grown a tree of an ecosystem.
Continue reading “The Blackberry Keyboard: How An Open-Source Ecosystem Sprouts”
