Posted Oct 27th 2007 9:25PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: misc hacks
[Nathan] sent in his
speaker microphone project. Speakers and microphones are physically similar - usually mics are much smaller to allow decent high frequency response. In this case, [Nathan] wanted something to pick up kick drums or bass guitars, without the cost of a commercial version like the
subkick. It's build around a dual coil 6.5 inch subwoofer. The passive circuit design allows the coils in the speaker to be configured for differing impedance, phase and isolation.
Posted Oct 26th 2007 10:22PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: misc hacks, pcs hacks, peripherals hacks
[sprite_tm] sent in one of his
latest little adventures - and I love it. To create his
stroboscope fan clock, he put a couple of red and green clock hands onto a standard PC fan(I love Panaflo fans), then he built a circuit to strobe a RGB LED to create a set of virtual clock hands on the spinning fan. An ATTiny2313 does all the work, with the help of some transistors to drive the LEDs.
Posted Oct 26th 2007 11:00AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: how-to
It's been a while since we've had a fresh How-To on the Hack-A-Day, and frankly we've missed them. To get things rolling, [Eliot] and I wanted to build a good knowledge base to help you hack your own stuff. I know that soldering won't be new to many of our readers, but everyone has to start sometime. Our hope is simple: that this new series of How-To's will help inspire new and experienced hackers alike.
Continue reading How-To: Introduction to soldering
Posted Oct 25th 2007 11:01PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home entertainment hacks
[Ladyada]'s been busy lately. [bladdo] wrote in to tell me that she put together an extra powerful
kit version of the TVBgone. This one's supposed to be good for over 100 feet. If you really, really want to get your ass kicked during the super bowl, this baby in a sports bar should do the trick. There's an optional programming header, so you could program it to turn every TV onto the SciFi channel.
Remember, I want to hear about your hacks! Use the
tips line to send 'em in.
Posted Oct 24th 2007 10:10PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home hacks
For some reason, computer controllable thermostats are
pretty freakin' expensive. I found a reference to a 1-wire thermostat in
this(
mirror) sample senior project on home automation. It turns out that Dallas Semiconductor put one together a while back as an application for their
TINI platform. (web-application server on a chip). The write-up has since vanished from their site, but I
found it thatnks to archive.org. The thermostat used to run about $50, and a
similar model still seems to be produced. The 1-wire
interface is pretty simple - Maxim's TINI board to control it: not so much. Just using the 1-wire interface with an inexpensive thermostat and controlling from a PC seems pretty viable to me. Just in case, I mirrored the 1-wire interface schematics
here.
Posted Oct 23rd 2007 10:52PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: cellphones hacks
I'm not going to reccomend it, but [cameron]
modded his Sony Ericsson k800i to tase people as well as take pictures. Apparently, the k800i has a xenon flash - meaning that it's got a high voltage potential available to drive the flash. He added a pair of 16uf caps and scored a good 300 volts to share with the unlucky.
Posted Oct 23rd 2007 8:45PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: wireless hacks
[Vivek Ramachandran]'s Cafe Latte attack was one of the last talks we caught at ToorCon. I've found quite a few articles about it, but none really get it right. It's fairly simple and deals with cracking WEP keys from unassociated laptops. First your WEP honeypot tells the client that it has successfully associated. The next thing the client does is broadcast a WEP encrypted ARP packet. By flipping the bits in the ARP packet you can replay the WEP packet and it will appear to the client to be coming from an IP MAC combo of another host on the network. All of the replies will have unique IVs and once you get ~60K you can crack it using
PTW. The bit flipping is the same technique used in the
fragmentation attack we covered earlier, but Cafe Latte requires generation of far fewer packets. You can read about the
Cafe Latte attack on AirTight Networks.
Posted Oct 22nd 2007 10:38PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: portable audio hacks
[Alex] sent in
his clone of [Crispin Jones]' tengu. The tengu is essentially a funky visual sound meter that looks like it's lip syncing. [Alex]'s version is built around an ATMega48 microcontroller, an electric mic with a LM386 audio circuit and the required LED matrix display. There's an example tengu video
here - but I'm not sure what to say about the song in the demo. It's not dependent on USB - it actually works better with the clean power provided by batteries anyway.
Posted Oct 21st 2007 11:06PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: digital cameras hacks
Ring lights that surround the lens are generally used for macro photography - they're not cheap, but they're one of the few ways to get shadowless photos.
This fiber optic flash diffuser is based on the same ideas of
this one. Rather than use a few large optic strands, [Joris] is using many, many more to decrease shadows as much as possible. His previous efforts are even more interesting. He built a
LED version - with serial connected LEDs and a step up switching power supply to drive them. Then he moved on to
cold cathode fluorescent before moving onto the
fiber optics.
Posted Oct 21st 2007 8:50PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: misc hacks
[Nathan McFeters] and [Rob Carter] gave a presentation on the problems with URI handling. URIs are used to send commands to external applications from a web browser. itms:// for iTunes for example. Any application that registers a URI has the potential to be abused through this route. For their first example they showed a stack overflow in Trillian's AIM handling. The next demo created a "Critical Update Available" button on Picasa's interface. When the user clicked it, their photos would be uploaded to the attacker's server. They even display a "download progress" bar to encourage the user to keep the connection open. You can read about the attack on
cocontributor Billy Rios's blog.
Posted Oct 21st 2007 6:30PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: misc hacks
[Alexander Lash] gave a short overview of what you need to unlock a CDMA phone. He strongly recommended
Howard Forums for finding most of the info you need. You'll probably need
BitPim and the Qualcomm PST (product support tools). Using the PST you can flash your new carrier's firmware and then activate the phone on their network.
Verizon offers two ways to get unlimited EVDO data. $59 for a data plan or $15 for VCast. You're not supposed to be able to use your VCast phone as an EVDO modem and it sends a different network access identifier (NAI) if you tether the phone. Using the PST you can change the NAI and use the cheaper VCast plan for data access. Here is a
forum post detailing the process.
Posted Oct 20th 2007 1:36PM by Eliot Phillips
We dropped in on [Charlie Miller]'s
fuzzing seminar at the end of the day yesterday. Fuzzing become a fairly popular topic in the last year and essentially involves giving a program garbage input, hoping that it will break. If it can't handle the fake data and fails in a non-graceful fashion, you could have found a potentially exploitable bug. Fuzzing is a fairly simple idea, but as Charlie points out, without some thinking while you're doing it it's unlikely to be very productive.
Continue reading ToorCon 9: Real world fuzzing
Posted Oct 19th 2007 7:59PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: pcs hacks
[Rodney Thayer] gave a 2 hour seminar on cryptographic technology. It was designed to give the audience a working knowledge for dealing with vendors. He gave some rules of thumb for choosing encryption. In order of preference, when doing symmetric key crypto: use
AES with a minimum 128bit key, if not that 3-key Triple-DES, or last RC4 with 128bit key. For hashing:
SHA 256 preferred, SHA 1 if you can't do any better, and MD5 if you can't SHA. For public key:
RSA using at least a 2048bit key. The top choices in these lists were picked because they've stood up to years of scrutiny. One major theme of talk was to never roll your own crypto algorithm or buy someone elses. Proprietary algorithms get broken all the time, like the
GSM A5 crypto we talked about earlier this year.
Posted Oct 19th 2007 1:41PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: misc hacks, portable audio hacks
It looks like
this one's been out there for a while, but it doesn't make it any less awesome. [Andrija] built this combination portable DAC/headphone amp. It takes optical audio input, feeds it through an analog devices AD1866 16bit/96khz decoder. After that, the audio is brought up to volume by an op-amp style headphone amp circuit.
Side note: I wrote up a few short notes on the
Sidekick LX I got today, if you dig that sort of thing.
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