Hackaday Newsletter 0x2F

What you learn on junk, you can apply when it counts. [HACKADAY]( Haber-Bosch and the Greening of Ammonia Production [Read Article Now»]( Hacking is Hacking By [Elliot Williams]( Tom Nardi and I had a good laugh this week [on the Podcast]( when he compared [the ECU hacks]( that enabled turning a VW with steering assist into a self-driver to a hack last week that [modified a water cooler]( to fill a particular cup. But it's actually no joke -- some of the very same techniques are used in both efforts, although the outcome of one is life-and-death, and the other is just some spilled ice-cold water. This reminded me of Travis Goodspeed's now-classic talk "[In Praise of Junk Hacking]( from way back in 2016. For background, this was a time when IoT devices and their security were in their relative infancy, and some members of the security community were throwing shade on the dissection of "mere" commercial crap. (Looked back on from today, where every other member of a Botnet is an IP camera, that argument didn't age well.) Travis' response was that hacking on junk lets us focus on the process -- the hack itself -- rather than getting distracted by the outcome. Emotions run high when a security flaw affects millions of individuals, but when it's a Tamagotchi or a pocket calculator it doesn't really matter, so you focus on the actual techniques. And as Travis points out, many of these techniques learned on junk will be useful when it counts. He learned about methods to defeat address-space randomization, for instance, from an old hack on the TI-85 calculator, which garbage-collected the variables that needed to be overwritten. So I had junk hacking in the back of my mind when I was re-watching [Hash Salehi's great talk on his work reverse engineering smart meters](. Funnily enough, he started off his reverse engineering journey eleven years ago with work on a robot vacuum cleaner's LIDAR module. Junk hacking, for sure, but the same techniques taught him to work on devices that are significantly more serious. And in the craziest of Hackaday synergies, he even hat-tipped Travis' talk in his video! Hacking is hacking! From the Blog --------------------------------------------------------------- [Remoticon 2021 // Hash Salehi Outsmarts His Smart Meter]( By [Matthew Carlson]( This great reverse engineering talk includes such nuggets as transmitting simultaneously on 240 radio frequencies with one SDR. Wait, what? [Read more »]( [Books You Should Read: The Perfectionists]( By [Joshua Vasquez]( The modern world is precision machines all the way down. How did it get that way? [Read more »]( [Four Wheel Steering, Always The Option, Never The Defining Feature]( By [Jenny List]( Preoccupied with whether or not they could steer with four wheels, but not with whether they should. [Read more »]( [Hackaday Podcast]( [Hackaday Podcast 151: The Hackiest VR Glove, Plotting Boba Fett with Shoelaces, ECU Hacking, and Where Does Ammonia Come From?]( By [Hackaday Editors]( What happened last week on Hackaday? The Podcast will get you up to speed. [Read more »]( If You Missed It --------------------------------------------------------------- [HitClips Custom Cartridge Hack Will Never Give Up, Let Down, Or Turn Around]( [Reusable Booster Rockets, Asian Roundup]( [Arduino IDE Creates Bootable x86 Floppy Disks]( [An Oil Diffusion Vacuum Pump from Thrift Store Junk]( [Low Cost Haptic VR Gloves Work With Hacked Steam Games]( [Hidden Shaft and Gears Make This Hollow Clock Go]( [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