A couple of weeks back we featured a story (third item) about a chunk of space jetsam that tried to peacefully return to Earth, only to find a Florida family’s roof rudely in the way. The 700-gram cylinder of Inconel was all that was left of a 2,360-kg battery pack that was tossed overboard from the ISS back in 2021, the rest presumably turning into air pollution just as NASA had planned. But the surviving bit was a “Golden BB” that managed to slam through the roof and do a fair amount of damage. At the time it happened, the Otero family was just looking for NASA to cover the cost of repairs, but now they’re looking for a little more consideration. A lawsuit filed by their attorney seeks $80,000 to cover the cost of repairs as well as compensation for the “stress and impact” of the event. This also seems to be about setting a precedent, since the Space Liability Convention, an agreement to which the USA is party, would require the space agency to cover damages if the debris had done damage in another country. The Oteros think the SLC should apply to US properties as well, and while we can see their point, we’d advise them not to hold their breath. We suppose something like this had to happen eventually, and somehow we’re not surprised to see “Florida Man” in the headlines.

There was a little hubbub this week around the release of a study regarding the safety of autonomous vehicles relative to their meat-piloted counterparts. The headlines for the articles covering this varied widely and hilariously, ranging from autonomous vehicles only being able to drive in straight lines to AVs being safer than human-driven cars, full-stop. As always, one has to read past the headlines to get an idea of what’s really going on, or perhaps even brave reading the primary literature. From our reading of the abstract, it seems like the story is more nuanced. According to an analysis of crashes involving 35,000 human-driven vehicles and 2,100 vehicles with some level of automation, AVs with SAE Level 4 automation suffered fewer accidents across the board than those without any automation. Importantly, the accidents that Level 4 vehicles do suffer are more likely to occur when the vehicle is turning just before the accident, or during low-visibility conditions such as dawn or dusk. The study also compares Level 4 automation to Level 2, which has driver assistance features like lane-keeping and adaptive cruise control, and found that Level 2 actually beats Level 4 in clear driving conditions, but loses in rainy conditions and pretty much every other driving situation.

There’s a strange story coming out of New York regarding a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) enforcement action that seems a little shady. It regards a General Mobile Radio Service (GMRS) repeater system used by the New York State GMRS Alliance. GMRS is sort of a “ham radio lite” system — there’s no testing required for a license, you just pay a fee — that uses the UHF band. Repeaters are allowed, but only under specific rules, and that appears to be where things have gone wrong for the club. The repeater system they used was a linked system, which connected geographically remote repeaters stretching from the far western part of the state near Buffalo all the way to Utica. It’s the linking that seems to have raised the FCC’s hackles, and understandably so because it seems to run counter to the GMRS rules in section 95. But it’s the method of notification that seems hinky here, as the repeater custodian was contacted by email. That’s not typical behavior for the FCC, who generally send enforcement notices by certified snail mail, or just dispense with the paper altogether and knock on your door. People seem to think this is all fake news, and it may well be, but then again, the email could just have been an informal heads-up preceding a formal notice. Either way, it’s bad news for the GMRS fans in upstate New York who used this system to keep in touch along Interstate 90, a long and lonely stretch of road that we know all too well.

Third time’s a charm? We’ll see when sunspot region AR3723 (née AR3697 née AR3664) makes a historic third pass around the Sun and potentially puts Earth in its crosshairs yet again. The region kicked up quite a ruckus on its first pass across the solar disk back in May with a series of X-class flares that produced stunning aurorae across almost all of North America. Pass number two saw the renamed region pass more or less quietly by, although it did launch an M-class flare on June 23 that caused radio blackouts in most of the North Atlantic basin. When AR3723 does peek out from behind the eastern limb of the Sun it’ll be a much-diminished version of its former Carrington-level glory, and will likely be given multiple designations thanks to fragmentation while it was hanging out on the backside. But it could still pack a punch, and even if this particular region doesn’t have much juice left, it sure seems like the Sun has plenty of surprises in store for the balance of Solar Cycle 25.

Somebody made a version of Conway’s Game of Life using nothing but checkboxes, which is very cool and you should check it out.

And finally, we’ve been doing an unexpected amount of automotive DIY repairs these days, meaning we spend a lot of time trolling around for parts. Here’s something we didn’t expect to see offered by a national retailer, but that we’d love to find a use for. If it ever comes back in stock we just might pick one up.

When a ransomware attack targets something like a hospital, it quickly becomes a high-profile event that understandably results in public outrage. Hospitals are supposed to be backstops for society, a place to go when it all goes wrong, and paralyzing their operations for monetary gain by taking over their information systems is just beyond the pale. Tactically, though, it makes sense; their unique position in society seems to make it more likely that they’ll pay up.

Which is why the ongoing cyberattack against car dealerships is a little perplexing — can you think of a less sympathetic victim apart from perhaps the Internal Revenue Service? Then again, we’re not in the ransomware business, so maybe this attack makes good financial sense. And really, judging by the business model of the primary target of these attacks, a company called CDK Global, it was probably a smart move. We had no idea that there was such a thing as a “Dealer Management System” that takes care of everything from financing to service, and that shutting down one company’s system could cripple an entire industry, but there it is.

Water may seem like the enemy for anyone who gets in trouble while swimming, but it’s really time that they’re fighting. Even a strong swimmer can quickly become exhausted fighting wind and waves; add in the hypothermia that’ll eventually set in even in water as warm as a bath, and the difference between life and death can come down to seconds. Getting help to a floundering swimmer isn’t easy, though, as lifeguards can only swim so fast.

But a new remotely operated rescue boat aims to change that, by getting to someone in trouble as fast as possible. Named EMILY, for “Emergency Integrated Lifesaving Lanyard,” the unit is a compact electrically powered rescue boat that can be rapidly deployed by lifeguards, who remotely pilot it to the victim. The boat’s deck is covered with what looks like survival gear, most of which would probably be of more use to the lifeguard upon their arrival than to the swimmer, who would likely just use the boat for flotation. As such, this makes way more sense than sending a drone out there, which at best could only drop a life ring. At $12,000 a piece, these boats aren’t cheap, but for the families who lost their kids in 2022 who donated them, they probably seem like quite a bargain. Here’s hoping they pay off.

We can’t be sure, but we’ve got a vague memory of playing a game called Lunar Landing way back in the day. It would likely have been on a TRS-80 in our local Radio Shack store, and if memory serves, we never got particularly good at the text-based simulator. Happily, though, we can now at least attempt to foist our lack of skills off on a 55-year-old bug in the software. Recently discovered by the excellently named Martin C. Martin while trying to optimize the fuel burn schedule to land softly with the most fuel remaining — the key to a high score, as we recall — the bug makes it so a tiny change in burn rate gives wildly different results. The post-mortem of his search and the analysis of the code, written by high school student Jim Storer only months after the real moon landing in 1969, is very interesting. We especially appreciated the insights into how Storer wrote it, revealed via personal communications. It’s a great look at a piece of computer history, and hats off to both Storer and Martin — although we haven’t seen a CVE posted for this yet.

We know that Minitel terminals are highly collectible, but this is ridiculous. Granted, the Minitel occupies a unique place in computer history, and the boxy design of the original CRT and keyboard terminal was not without its charms. But this particular terminal seems to have had a Very Bad Day in the recent past and is now on the chopping block for a mere €430. To be fair, the eBay user in France has listed the Dalí-esque Minitel as an objet d’art; at that price, we’d like to at least get some usable parts from it to fix other terminals, but that doesn’t seem likely. Somebody will probably buy it, though — no accounting for taste.

And finally, AnimaGraffs is back, this time with a deep dive into the Bell 407 helicopter. We’ve been big fans of his work for a while and have featured a few of his videos in this space, including his look inside the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane. The new video is richly detailed and includes not only the engineering that goes into rotorcraft but also the physics that makes them work and makes them so challenging to fly. Enjoy!

This week Jonathan Bennett and Simon Phipps chat with Matthew Hodgson and Josh Simmons about Matrix, the open source decentralized communications platform. How is Matrix a Git for Communications? Are the new EU and UK laws going to be a problem? And how is the Matrix project connected with the Element company?

– https://matrix.org/blog
– https://element.io/

Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right in the Hackaday Discord? Have someone you’d like use to interview? Let us know, or contact the guest and have them contact us! Take a look at the schedule here.

Direct Download in DRM-free MP3.

If you’d rather read along, here’s the transcript for this week’s episode.

Attention, slackers — if you do remote work for a financial institution, using a mouse jiggler might not be the best career move. That’s what a dozen people learned this week as they became former employees of Wells Fargo after allegedly being caught “simulating keyboard activity” while working remotely. Having now spent more than twice as many years working either hybrid or fully remote, we get it; sometimes, you’ve just got to step away from the keyboard for a bit. But we’ve never once felt the need to create the “impression of active work” during those absences. Perhaps that’s because we’ve never worked in a regulated environment like financial services.

For our part, we’re curious as to how the bank detected the use of a jiggler. The linked article mentions that regulators recently tightened rules that require employers to treat an employee’s home as a “non-branch location” subject to periodic inspection. More than enough reason to quit, in our opinion, but perhaps they sent someone snooping? More likely, the activity simulators were discovered by technical means. The article contains a helpful tip to avoid powering a jiggler from the computer’s USB, which implies detecting the device over the port. Our guess is that Wells tracks mouse and keyboard activity and compares it against a machine-learning model to look for signs of slacking.

Speaking of the intersection of soulless corporate giants and AI, what’s this world coming to when AI walks you right into an online scam? That’s what happened to a Canadian man recently when he tried to get help moving Facebook to his new phone. He searched for a customer service number for Facebook and found one listed, but thought it would be wise to verify the number. So he pulled up the “Meta AI”-powered search tool in Facebook Messenger and asked if the number was legit. “No problem,” came the reply, so he called the number and promptly got attacked by the scammers on the other end, who within minutes used his PayPal account to buy $500 worth of Apple gift cards. From the sound of it, the guy did everything he should have to protect himself, at least up to a point. But when a company’s chatbot system gives you bad information about their own customer support, things like this are going to happen.

Just a reminder that we’re deep into con season now. Open Sauce should be just about wrapped up by the time this gets published, and coming up the week after is Teardown 2024 in Portland. The schedule for that has been released, which includes a workshop on retrocomputing with the “Voja4” Supercon badge. A little further on into the summer and back on the East Coast will be HOPE XV, which still has some tickets left. The list of speakers for that one looks pretty good, as does the workshop roundup.

And finally, if you have some STL models in need of a little creative mutilation, try out this STL twister online tool. It’s by our friend [Andrew Sink], who has come up with a couple of other interesting 3D tools, like the Banana for Scale tool and the 3D Low-Poly Generator. The STL Twister does pretty much what it says and puts the screws to whatever STL model you drop on it. The MakerBot Gnome mascot that pops up by default is a particularly good model for screwifying. Enjoy!

We’ve been harping a lot lately about the effort by carmakers to kill off AM radio, ostensibly because making EVs that don’t emit enough electromagnetic interference to swamp broadcast signals is a practical impossibility. In the US, push-back from lawmakers — no doubt spurred by radio industry lobbyists — has put the brakes on the move a bit, on the understandable grounds that an entire emergency communication system largely centered around AM radio has been in place for the last seven decades or so. Not so in Japan, though, as thirteen of the nation’s 47 broadcasters have voluntarily shut down their AM transmitters in what’s billed as an “impact study” by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. The request for the study actually came from the broadcasters, with one being quoted in a hearing on the matter as “hop[ing] that AM broadcasting will be promptly discontinued.” So the writing is apparently on the wall for AM radio in Japan.

There was another close call this week with our increasingly active sun, which tried but didn’t quite launch a massive stream of plasma out into space. The M-class flare was captured in the act by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, which keeps an eye on what’s going on with our star. The video of the outburst is fascinating; it almost looks like a CGI render, but it’s real imaging and pretty spectacular. The active region on the sun’s surface suddenly belches out a few gigatons of plasma, which quickly get sucked right back down to the surface. You can actually see the material following ethereal lines of magnetic force, and the way it splashes when it hits the surface is just beautiful. Seeing this puts us in the mood for a feature on the SDO and how it gets these fascinating images, so stay tuned for that.

Also in space news, we’re saddened by the sudden loss of yet another of the Apollo astronauts. Bill Anders, lunar module pilot on Apollo 8, died Friday in a small plane crash off San Juan Island in Washington. Anders, 90, was piloting the Beechcraft T-34 Mentor, a single-engine military trainer aircraft from the 1950s. Anders’ only trip in space was Apollo 8, but what a trip it was. Along with Commander Frank Borman and pilot James Lovell, they were the first humans to leave Earth’s gravity well and visit another world, riding the mighty Saturn V rocket all the way to the Moon for a ten-orbit visit that paved the way for the landing on Apollo 11. He is also officially the luckiest photographer in history, having been in just the right place at just the right time to snap the famous “Earthrise” picture that gave us for the first time a Moon’s-eye-view of our fragile little world:

Godspeed, Major General Anders.

In more mundane news, a story from Maryland that should give anyone who depends on tools for a living a moment’s pause. Police cracked a massive tool-theft ring thanks to the actions of a carpenter who, sick of having his tools ripped off repeatedly, stashed a couple of AirTags among his stock in trade. When the inevitable occurred and his tools took a walk yet again, he tracked them to a storage facility and alerted police. They in turn conducted an investigation and got search warrants for twelve locations, where the scale of this criminal enterprise became apparent. Check out the photos in the story; mountains of cordless tools sorted by brand, DeWalt yellow here and Milwaukee red there. There’s a surprising amount of puke-green Ryobi, too; are people really trying to make money with those tools? Between the piles of cordless tools and the rows of air compressors, the total value of the haul is estimated to be from $3 to $5 million. Hats off to the carpenter for running his own mini-sting operation.

And finally, from the Genuinely Interesting Apps files we have ShadeMap, which does exactly what you think it does: plot shade and shadow on a map. It has controls for time and date, and zooms down to a pretty fine level of detail, even for the free version. Shadows from buildings, terrain, and trees are calculated and displayed, making it perfect for surveys of locations for solar power installations. There’s also supposed to be a way to virtually remove shadow-casting features, although we couldn’t find it; perhaps in a paid version? That would be a handy tool indeed to see which trees need to be cut down or which buildings demolished to improve your solar aspect. YMMV on that last one, of course.

Camera sliders are great creative tools, letting you get smooth controlled shots that can class up any production. [Anthony Kouttron] decided to build one for an engineering class, and he ended up mighty satisfied with what he and his team accomplished.

As an engineering class project, this wasn’t a build done on a whim. Instead, [Anthony] and his fellow students spent plenty of time hashing out what they needed this thing to do, and how it should be built. An Arduino was selected as the brains of the operation, as a capable and accessible microcontroller platform. Stepper motors and a toothed belt drive were used to move the slider in a controllable fashion. The slider’s control interface was an HD44780-based character LCD, along with a thumbstick and two pushbuttons. The slider relied on steel tubes for a frame, which was heavy, but cost-effective and easy to fabricate. Much of the parts were salvaged from legendary e-waste bins on the university grounds.

The final product was stout and practical. It may not have been light, but the steel frame and strong stepper motor meant the slider could easily handle even heavy DSLR cameras. That’s something that lighter builds can struggle with.

Ultimately, it was an excellent learning experience for [Anthony] and his team. As a bonus, he got some great timelapses out of it, too. Video after the break.

Don’t pack your bags for the trip to exoplanet K2-18b quite yet — it turns out that the James Webb Space Telescope may not have detected signs of life there after all. Last year, astronomers reported the possible presence of dimethyl sulfide there, a gas that (at least on Earth) is generally associated with phytoplankton in the ocean. Webb used its infrared spectrometer instruments to look at the light from the planet’s star, a red dwarf about 111 light-years away, as it passed through the hydrogen-rich atmosphere. The finding was sort of incidental to the discovery of much stronger signals for methane and carbon dioxide, but it turns out that the DMS signal might have just been overlap from the methane signal. It’s too bad, because K2-18b seems to be somewhat Earth-like, if you can get over the lack of oxygen and the average temperature just below freezing. So, maybe not a great place to visit, but it would be nice to see if life, uh, found a way anywhere else in the universe.

Attention Fortran fans: your favorite language isn’t quite dead yet. In fact, it cracked the top ten on one recent survey, perhaps on the strength of its numerical and scientific applications. The “Programming Community Index” is perhaps a bit subjective, since it’s based on things like Google searches for references to particular languages. It’s no surprise then that Python tops such a list, but it’s still interesting that there’s enough interest in a 67-year-old programming language to make it onto the list. We’d probably not advise building a career around Fortran, but you never know.

If your experience with Bluetooth is anything like ours, you’ll probably be skeptical of reports of a successful Bluetooth connection with a satellite 600 km in space. But according to Hubble Network, a startup seeking to build a global Bluetooth network, they managed to do it using off-the-shelf hardware. The feat apparently required a firmware update to account for the Doppler shift and a phased-array antenna on the satellite for beam steering, but other than that, direct Bluetooth connections from your phone to a satellite could be coming soon. For some reason.

If you’ve ever wondered why it costs $20 billion to build a semiconductor fab, wonder no more. This is a long article, but it has to be since it covers everything from the structure of semiconductor chips to the processes used to make them, and just about everything you ever wanted to know about fab construction. Our revelation was just how little of a fab’s vertical space is devoted to the cleanroom space, which is sandwiched between sub-fab and utility layers below and a huge interstitial space above for air handling. It’s eye-opening stuff.

And finally, it turns out that “WarGames” was actually pretty accurate, at least in terms of the missile launch bunker set during the film’s cold open. Judging by this virtual tour of a US Minuteman ICBM launch control center (LCC), that is. The 360 tour features detailed — but not too detailed — photos of what appears to be an actual LCC and good explanations of all the equipment. Our biggest surprise was the pair of pink fuzzy bunny slippers in the commander’s kit bag. Hey, if you’re going to be responsible for potentially initiating the apocalypse, you might as well be comfortable.

It may be hard to believe, but BASIC turned 60 this week. Opinions about the computer language vary, of course, but one thing everyone can agree on is that Professors Kemeny and Kurtz really stretched things with the acronym: “Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code” is pretty tortured, after all. BASIC seems to be the one language it’s universally cool to hate, at least in its current incarnations like Visual Basic and VBA. But back in 1964, the idea that you could plunk someone down in front of a terminal, or more likely a teletype, and have them bang out a working “Hello, world!” program with just a few minutes of instruction was pretty revolutionary. Yeah, line numbers and GOTO statements encouraged spaghetti code and engrained bad programming habits, but at least it got people coding. And perhaps most importantly, it served as a “gateway drug” into the culture for a lot of us. Many of us would have chosen other paths in life had it not been for those dopamine hits provided by getting that first BASIC program working. So happy birthday BASIC!

Speaking of gateways, we’ve been eagerly following the “65 in 24” project, an homage to the “65 in 1” kits sold by Radio Shack back in the day. These were the hardware equivalent of as BASIC to a lot of us, and just as formative. Tom Thoen has been lovingly recreating the breadboard kit, rendering it in PCBs rather than cardboard and making some updates in terms of components choices, but staying as true to the original as possible. One thing that the original had was the “lab manual,” a book containing all 65 circuits with schematics and build instructions, plus crude but charming cartoons to illustrate the principles of the circuit design. Tom obviously needs to replicate that to make the project complete, and while schematics are a breeze in the age of EDA, the cartoons are another matter. He’s making progress on that front, though, with the help of an art student who is really nailing the assignment. Watch out, Joe Kim!

Last week we mentioned HOPE XV is coming in July. This week, a partial list of talks was released, and there’s already a lot of interesting stuff scheduled. Supercon keynote alums Mitch Altman and Cory Doctorow are both scheduled to appear, along with a ton of others. Check out the list, get your proposals in, or just get your tickets.

If an entire forest is composed of a single tree, does it make a sound? Yes it does, and it’s kind of weird. The tree is called Pando, which is also weird, and it’s the largest living individual organism by biomass on Earth. The quaking aspen has 47,000 stems covering 100 acres (40 hectares) of Utah, and though it does a pretty good job of looking like a forest, the stems are genetically identical so it counts as a single organism. Quaking aspens are known to be a noisy tree, with leaves that rattle together in the slightest breeze. That pleasant sound isn’t just for us to enjoy, however, as sound artist Jeff Rice discovered by sticking a hydrophone down into one of Pando’s many hollow stems. The sound of the leaves banging together apparently gets transmitted down the stems and into the interconnected root system. At least that’s the thought; more rigorous experiments would be needed to confirm that the sound isn’t being mechanically coupled through the soil.

And finally, we’re in no position to cast stones at anyone for keeping a lot of browser tabs open, but keeping almost 7,500 Firefox tabs going seems a bit extreme. And yet a software engineer going by the handle Hazel just can’t bring herself to close any tabs, resulting in an epic restore session when her browser finally gave up the ghost. Panic set in at first when Firefox refused to reload all the tabs, accumulated over the last two years, but eventually the browser figured it all out and Hazel was back in business. Interestingly, Firefox doesn’t really use up too much memory to keep al those tabs open — only 70 MB. Compare that to Chrome, which needs 2 GB to keep a measly 10 tabs open.

Well, it’s official — AI is ruining everything. That’s not exactly news, but learning that LLMs are apparently being used to write scientific papers is a bit alarming, and Andrew Gray, a librarian at University College London, has the receipts. He looked at a cross-section of scholarly papers from 2023 in search of certain words known to show up more often in LLM-generated text, like “commendable”, “intricate”, or “meticulous”. Most of the words seem to have a generally positive tone and feel a little fancier than everyday speech; one rarely uses “lucidly” or “noteworthy” unless you’re trying to sound smart, after all. He found increases in the frequency of appearance of these and other keywords in 2023 compared to 2022, when ChatGPT wasn’t widely available.

It doesn’t always take a statistical analysis of word distributions to detect the footprints of an LLM, though. The article includes examples of text copied and pasted directly from the chatbot, without any attempt at editing or even basic proofreading. How not only the authors of the papers but also the journal editors and reviewers managed not to pick up an obvious chatbot error message that had been copy-pasted is hard to imagine. And let’s not even get started on the Midjourney-generated diagram of a monstrously well-endowed rat that was used to illustrate an article (since retracted) on spermatogenesis, complete with nonsensical captions and callouts to non-existent body parts. This is why we can’t have nice things.

Speaking of nice things, did you know that the largest manufacturer of vintage lamps in history is a little company called “Underwriter’s Laboratory”? At least it seems that way looking at eBay, where sellers listing old lamps often claim the manufacturer is the storied safety standards organization. We suppose it makes sense if the only label on an old lamp is the UL listing label and you had no idea what UL is. But really, that’s the least of the problems with some of these listings. “Vintage” is a stretch for a green banker’s lamp with a polarized plug that was clearly made sometime in the last 30 years.

Switching gears a bit, it’s one thing to know that everything you do online is tracked, but it’s quite another thing to find out exactly how much information is shooting back and forth between your computer and the Hive Mind. That’s what Bert Hubert built Tracker Beeper to do, and it’s a little terrifying. The tool emits a short beep every time your computer sends off a bit of data to a tracker. It started just monitoring data going to Google, which was alarming enough. The tool was later modified to include most of the trackers we’re likely to come across in our daily travels, and wow! It sounds like a Geiger counter when the tube gets saturated by a highly active source. Probably just as dangerous, too.

Heads up — the HOPE conference is gearing up. Hackers on Planet Earth XV will be held July 12-14 on the campus of St. John’s University in Queens, New York. The “Call for Participation” is now open; it’s always nice to see a big Hackaday contingent at HOPE, so make sure you get your proposals for talks, workshops, or panels together soon.

And finally, what should you do if the FCC comes knocking at your door? It’s not just an academic question; the US Federal Communications Commission does a lot of field investigation, and if you do any kind of RF experimentation, there’s a non-zero chance that you’ll make some kind of spurious emission that gets their attention. Josh from Ham Radio Crash Course dropped a video that addresses the dreaded knock. TL;DW — come back with a warrant. But it’s more complicated than that, as illustrated by a hilarious IRL account of one such encounter. We won’t spoil the surprise, but suffice it to say that if your house is under the approach to a major international airport, you probably want to be extra careful with anything radio-related.