Hackaday Newsletter 0x9B

History's Furthest Hack [HACKADAY]() Mining and Refining: Uranium and Plutonium [Read Article Now»]( Welcome Back, Voyager By [Elliot Williams]( In what is probably the longest-distance tech support operation in history, the Voyager mission team succeeded in [hacking their way around some defective memory and convincing their space probe to send sensor data back to earth again](. And for the record, Voyager is a 46-year old system at a distance of now 24 billion kilometers, 22.5 light-hours, from the earth. While the time delay that distance implies must have made for quite a tense couple days of waiting between sending the patch and finding out if it worked, the age of the computers onboard probably actually helped, in a strange way. Because the code is old-school machine language, one absolutely has to know all the memory addresses where each subroutine starts and ends. You don’t call a function like do_something(); but rather by loading an address in memory and jumping to it. This means that the ground crew, in principle, knows where every instruction lives. If they also knew where all of the busted memory cells were, it would be a “simple” programming exercise to jump around the bad bits, and re-write all of the subroutine calls accordingly if larger chunks had to be moved. By “simple”, I of course mean “incredibly high stakes, and you’d better make sure you’ve got it right the first time.” In a way, it’s a fantastic testament to simpler systems that they were able to patch their code around the memory holes. Think about trying to do this with a modern operating system that uses [address space layout randomization](, for instance. Of course, the purpose there is to make hacking directly on the memory harder, and that’s the opposite of what you’d want in a space probe. Nonetheless, it’s a testament to careful work and clever software hacking that they managed to get Voyager back online. May she send for another 46 years! From the Blog --------------------------------------------------------------- [Supercon 2023: Alex Lynd Explores MCUs in Infosec]( By [Tom Nardi]( You can do a lot of clever WiFi hacking on a fast-food-hamburger budget. [Read more »]( [Programming Ada: First Steps on the Desktop]( By [Maya Posch]( If you ever wanted to dip your toes into the super-safe Ada programming language, Maya will get you started. [Read more »]( [Slicing and Dicing the Bits: CPU Design the Old Fashioned Way]( By [Al Williams]( Al takes a look inside a trainer for an archaic CPU design, and tries to figure out how to program the darn thing. [Read more »]( [Hackaday Podcast]( [Hackaday Podcast Episode 268: RF Burns, Wireless Charging Sucks, and Barnacles Grow on Flaperons]( By [Hackaday Editors]() What happened last week on Hackaday? The Podcast will get you up to speed. [Read more »]( If You Missed It --------------------------------------------------------------- [NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth]( [Combadge Project Wants to Bring Trek Tech to Life]( [Reverse Engineering the Quansheng Hardware]( [An Elbow Joint That Can]( [Downloading Satellite Imagery With a Wi-Fi Antenna]( [Reverse Engineering A Fancy Disposable Vape]( [Hackaday]() NEVER MISS A HACK [Share]( [Share]( [Share]( [Terms of Use]( [Privacy Policy]( [Hackaday.io]( [Hackaday.com]( This email was sent to {EMAIL} [why did I get this?]( [unsubscribe from this list]( [update preferences]( Hackaday.com · 61 S Fair Oaks Ave Ste 200 · Pasadena, CA 91105-2270 · USA