firehose

This is the first in our series of videos meant to spread the hacking goodness far and wide on the net. As you can see, it is a pretty silly video, hopefully you enjoyed the humor.  This wouldn’t be hackaday without an appropriate writeup though!

Initially the idea was to make this as a device that my boss could deploy from his Tesla Model S. Ultimately, we missed the release of SkyFall, so the whole 007 theme seemed a little flat. However, we did just happen to have a wonderful woman in the office that agreed to be an “overly attached girlfriend”. Here’s a link to the meme for those who are unfamiliar. Even though we made her look like a crazy person, she was a great sport about it (Thanks [Stephanie]!).

The Goal was to have a radio controlled device that would send live video and audio to someone and had the ability to plant a small GPS tracker on the undercarriage of a car.

My first thought was simply to pick up a spy Trakr since it already handles the audio/video portion and has a documented interface for adding your own attachments. Before I bought this, I did what I usually do when I need cheap radio controlled stuff, I went to Toys R Us. While I was there, I saw the Intruder.

This seemed like it could be much faster than the similarly priced Trakr and touted some of the same features. It would connect to your cell phone and allow you to drive it, switch between night vision and regular mode, turn the headlights on and off, and hear what its microphone picked up.  I immediately liked the feature of turning on/off the headlights as this would give me a channel I could devote to an external device without any modification.

When I got it out of the box and played with it for a while I was pretty let down by the “car” part. It sent live video just as it promised but the car itself was sluggish and horrible to steer. This is mainly because it uses a goofy system for its drive train. The front wheels are fake. They’re completely smooth and have no function in turning. All driving and turning is done by the rear wheels, acting like treads on a tank.  This was going to be the slowest spy car ever if I didn’t take another route.

Here are some pictures of the guts

I ultimately decided I would get a very fast and small radio controlled car to use as a platform, and I would use the guts of the Intruder as the spy portion. This worked very well. Then, I took a trip to one of the nicer hobby stores in town, Hobby Town. I explained my project and the guy there was excited to help me find something that could work. I really needed something fast and strong, but really short. At the point I was buying this, I was still planning on putting this underneath the tesla roadster and had to consider ground clearance. I found the Losi 1/24 scale micro truck, which was small, had 4 wheel drive, and independent suspension. No modifications were necessary to this. I simply made the spy part capable of snapping on where the stock body would attach.

To create the spy portion I started with a sheet of plexiglass and laid out the internals of the intruder in a neat and orderly fashion. I now needed to add my gps delivering arm. To make this happen, I used a Teensy attached to a standard servo. The teensy would watch for the headlights to turn off. When they did, it would rotate the servo 90 degrees. When the lights turned back on, the arm would drop. Simple as can be.

I’d like to take a second to talk about the teensy. It was pretty awesome. Small enough to not add much weight and still hand standard pin spacing and on board USB. The fact that it can be seen by a computer as an HID device is something that will be quite useful in the future. Unfortunately, I left mine in the office in California, so I’ll just order another for the next project.  It is hard to beat at $19.

The arm was constructed from scrap I had lying around. There is a light PCB from a cheapo piano, a slot cover from a computer case, and a magnet. The fake GPS (yeah, there was no need to buy a real one for 3 seconds in a video), is just a battery holder with some magnets on it. When it is lifted, the strong magnets on top stick to the frame of the automobile. They are stronger than the magnet that holds it to the arm, so when the arm is lowered, the tracker stays on the new location.

Here’s the sample video I sent to my director [Jay] so he could plan before we shot the video:

Ultimately, it was a success. I ran into some strange issues during filming where it would completely stop responding. I’m not sure if it was a distance issue, or crosstalk between it and something else. We ultimately made it work though. The only problem we had was when we told [Stephanie] to drive it right into the camera, she did exactly that and knocked the little pins off that hold the top to the bottom.  A zip tie fixed it and we were ready to continue.

If you would like to follow along and possibly help with future video projects, you can by subscribing to the email list in the right column, or by watching our forums. I’ve posted a few that I’m working on right now!

Filed under: Featured, security hacks, toy hacks

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A law signed by President Barack Obama in February 2012 directs the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to throw American airspace wide open to drones by September 30, 2015. […]

The U.S. has deployed more than 11,000 military drones, up from fewer than 200 in 2002. They carry out a wide variety of missions while saving money and American lives. Within a generation they could replace most manned military aircraft, says John Pike, a defense expert at the think tank GlobalSecurity.org. Pike suspects that the F-35 Lightning II, now under development by Lockheed Martin, might be “the last fighter with an ejector seat, and might get converted into a drone itself.”

The Drones Come Home

The MYO armband by Thalmic Labs allows users to control their electronic devices using simple hand and arm gestures. The one-size-fits-all bracelet uses six-axis and muscle activity sensors to track arm movement, and connects to Windows and OS X machines using Bluetooth 4.0. In their demonstration video, a man turns on music with a snap of his fingers and increases the volume by rotating his forearm. He also plays a video game and even pilots a Parrot AR Drone with Star Wars-like ability using the futuristic accessory.

The MYO currently only supports Windows and Mac OS, but Thalmic Labs promises that APIs for iOS and Android will soon be available to developers. Black and white versions of the MYO are available for pre-order now.

video via Thalmic Labs

via New Scientist, Medgadget

By Alec Meer on February 27th, 2013 at 11:00 am.

Because – haha – there are pirates in it. Hahah. But you thought – haha – that I was saying the next Assassin’s Creed game had leaked to Bittorrent. Haha. Hah. Heh. Huh.

I am neither funny or clever. You know it, I know it, the tiny baby Jesus knows it.

Let’s just talk about the leaked reveal of Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag instead.

As more officially revealed earlier this month, the series is apparently headed to a new time period with a new star. While nothing has been confirmed as yet, both evidence (in the form of a poster acquired by Kotaku) and rumour (a rather more spurious-seeming, and grammar crime-filled, post on Examiner) point to a piratical setting in what appears to be the Caribbean. Rumour has it the star will be one Edward Kenway, granddaddy of AC3′s Connor McNoPersonality, and daddy of the star of AC3′s interminable prologue, Haytham Kenway.

While it’s unusual for the AC series to head backwards rather than forwards in history, the fact that Haytham had a rather more winning manner than his dreary son, even if it was mired in the Infinite Tutorial Of Doom, hopefully bodes well for Edward. I guess it’s a shame that Connor apparently isn’t being given a chance to evolve into something other than a scowling plank of wood, but screw it: pirates!

Not sure how being at sea half the time will gel with the AC series’ urban free-running, but the naval battles were one on the more entertaining aspects of the bloated AC3. I hope the inherent playfulness of a pirate theme means this increasingly self-regarding series can get back on track, shed a little weight on focus on good times once more.

There’s all sorts of other stuff flying around but to be honest I’m going to wait until something official emerges for fear of wasting your time with info-scraps which prove only part-true.

By Nathan Grayson on February 27th, 2013 at 9:00 am.

Gabe Newell hasn’t been particularly sweet on Steam Greenlight as of late, but the fully open Steam of tomorrow hasn’t supplanted its “dictatorial” ways just yet. Instead, the mighty user-driven machine trundles on, streamlining the process where it can and rhythmically opening its jaw each month to crunch down whatever creative morsels we offer up. So then, what’s on the menu this time around? Well, semi-big-names certainly top the list, but it’s not without a couple enticing curiosities.

A total of ten games made it onto Steam’s hallowed virtual shelves this time around. But how will you ever figure out which ones? It’s probably impossible, but I recommend glancing down a couple millimeters.

• Anodyne
• Distance
• Evoland
• Huntsman: The Orphanage
• Kingdom Rush
• Legends of Dawn
• Organ Trail: Director’s Cut
• Receiver
• Surgeon Simulator 2013
• War Thunder

You will, of course, recognize Anodyne, Distance, Evoland, Kingdom Rush, Legends of Dawn, Organ Trail, Receiver, Surgeon Simulator, and even War Thunder from the folder in your photographic memory labeled “RPS” – which sits suffocatingly atop the one called “Precious Childhood Memories.” Huntsman, meanwhile, is apparently survival horror sans bloody violence. Instead, it focuses on “pro-actively” appeasing the wishes of evil orphans, which I think was the plot of Vin Diesel’s The Pacifier.

Speaking personally, I’m pretty thrilled to see Receiver – the almost comically realistic gun game – and Evoland get the Greenlight spotlight, but Huntsman definitely has my eye. Any new horror game that’s not a Slender clone or whatever Dead Space 3 was is well worth some cursory attention, if nothing else.

What’s your take, though? Are any of these standouts particularly strong? And of course, plenty of games continue to vie for Greenlight voters’ mental bandwidth, but which ones do you think deserve more attention?

By Alec Meer on February 26th, 2013 at 8:00 pm.

I’m not sure how amazeballs this really is in practice, as PC Tomb Raider code is being witheld until the end of the week because reasons, but I dig the concept. Game hair’s not great, by and large – some engines certainly do OK by it, but the hair-helmet approach very much remains the norm. AMD’s come up with some tech to try and make locks more lustrous. Instead of taking anti-aliasing systems into the shower, they’ve devised TressFX (oof), intended to make hair flow and change more cionvcingly. This will apparently first be seen in the impending Tomb Raider re-reboot, which has “the world’s first real-time hair rendering technology in a playable game”, it says here.

What we get, in theory, is the appearance of individual strands, rather than one fixed hair-hat or movable clumps. It can also change appearance if it’s wet or wind-swept. My hair does that too, only the outcome of both is that it looks like I’m wearing a giant, fuzzy mushroom on my head.

Anyway, enough about what I shouldn’t really but often do refer to as my Jewfro. What about that Lara? Well, here are some screenshots, and there’s a bit more guff on how it was done here

As far as I can tell it will work on any GPU with sufficient grunt, rather than being locked to ATI cards, but we’ll find out about that when PC TR code lands in a few days.

Following this, what I want to see is the world’s first real-time beard and twirly moustache rendering technology in a playable game. That dude in the Witcher has a beard in the third game, you know. Just imagine the hairy, scratchy possibilities!

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from a blog post by Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, founder of corporate watchdog SumOfUs.org and partner of the late Aaron Swartz: "The DOJ has told Congressional investigators that Aaron's prosecution was motivated by his political views on copyright. I was going to start that last paragraph with 'In a stunning turn of events,' but I realized that would be inaccurate — because it's really not that surprising. Many people speculated throughout the whole ordeal that this was a political prosecution, motivated by anything/everything from Aaron's effective campaigning against SOPA to his run-ins with the FBI over the PACER database. But Aaron actually didn't believe it was — he thought it was overreach by some local prosecutors who didn't really understand the internet and just saw him as a high-profile scalp they could claim, facilitated by a criminal justice system and computer crime laws specifically designed to give prosecutors, however incompetent or malicious, all the wrong incentives and all the power they could ever want. But this HuffPo article, and what I’m hearing from sources on the Hill, suggest that that’s not true. That Ortiz and Heymann knew exactly what they were doing: Shutting up, and hopefully locking up, an extremely effective activist whose political views, including those on copyright, threatened the Powers That Be."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I did not make these gifs. I only edited them because of this post. The original post is located here and another here.

adammuto:

No. 39

— Hubert Selby Jr.

An anonymous reader writes "Symantec researchers have discovered an older version of the infamous Stuxnet worm that caused the disruption at Iran's nuclear facility in Natanz: Stuxnet 0.5. According to a whitepaper released by the researchers at RSA Conference 2013, Stuxnet 0.5 has first been detected in the wild in 2007 when someone submitted it to the VirusTotal malware scanning service, but has been in development as early as November 2005. Unlike Stuxnet versions 1.x that disrupted the functioning of the uranium enrichment plant by making centrifuges spin too fast or too slow, this one was meant to do so by closing valves."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I think this is a great idea. Armstrong Brewing has a cheap membership requirement to support their small batch brewing.

"What we wanted to do was have a side of the business that was much like a boutique vineyard," says Armstrong. "We want to be able to cater to a specific group of people. The model is already there, we're just doing it with beer." With an entry-level membership beginning at just $30 a year, there is a smaller barrier to entry than typically found at a winery or other "mug clubs."

Weezul writes "The Ada Initiative's Valerie Aurora got Violet Blue's Hackers As A High-Risk Population (29c3 abstract) talk on harm reduction methodology pulled from the Security BSides meeting in San Francisco by claiming it contained rape triggers [ed note: you might not want to visit the main page of the weblog as it contains a few pictures that might be considered NSFW in more conservative places]. It's frankly asinine to object to work around hacker ethics as 'off topic' at such broad hacker conference. Is Appelbaum's 29c3 keynote 'off topic' for asking hackers to work for the 'good guys' rather than military, police, their contractors, Facebook, etc.? Yes, obviously harm reduction is a psychological hack that need not involve a computer, but this holds for 'social engineering' as well. It's simply that hacking isn't nearly as specialized or inaccessible as say theoretical physics. Worse, there is no shortage of terrible technology laws like the CFAA, DMCA, etc. that exist partially because early hackers failed to communicate an ethics that seemed coherent and reasoned to outsiders." The Ada Initiative responds that such talks do more harm than good. It could also be argued that "not working for the bad guys" type talks aren't off-topic, since the hacker community has traditionally cared about things like information freedom.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

makemestfu:

So relatable blog :)

Fans who have been hoping to see Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk in a Disney theme park ever since the entertainment giant purchased Marvel in 2009 will finally get their wish — in Hong Kong.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Hong Kong Financial Secretary John Tsang announced the seven-year-old Hong Kong Disneyland will add a Marvel superheroes area as part of its expansion program. Jointly owned by the government and Disney, the resort now has six themed areas: Main Street, U.S.A., Fantasyland, Adventureland, Tomorrowland, Grizzly Gulch and Toy Story Land.

Hong Kong Disneyland, which just last week reported its first annual profits, has been struggling to attract tourists from mainland China, and hopes the box-office success of Marvel’s superheroes will translate into more older, and affluent, visitors to the park.

Disney CEO Bob Iger said nearly a year ago that the company had begun work on concepts that would allow the superheroes to appear at “a few places around the world,” and there’s been talk since at least 2010 that Disneyland Paris could get its own Marvel area. However, Disney’s options are limited in the United States, as Universal Studios’ Islands of Adventure holds the exclusive rights to Marvel characters in Florida.

So that happened. Ang Lee stopped off at In-N-Out.

I hate when that happens

O artigo Mariochete faz parte do conteúdo do Byte Que Eu Gosto! - Nerd, Geek, Dicas, Cinema, Games e mais!.

Agora a porra ficou séria, amigos. Danny Trejo de Mario é putaria.

O artigo Mariochete faz parte do conteúdo do Byte Que Eu Gosto! - Nerd, Geek, Dicas, Cinema, Games e mais!.

Leave it to the Dutch to figure out a way to integrate function into the concept of tiling. "We love tiles so much that we do not want to interrupt that grid for any reason," say the designers.

Dutch designers Peter van der Jagt, Erik Jan Kwakkel, and Arnout Visser invented DTile, a versatile tile system featuring built-in items for every day use. The functional tiles come with integrated fixtures, such as ceramic hooks, plugholes, and drawers. For more information and a list of dealers, go to DTile.

Above: A built-in tiled drawer.

Above: Have we found the perfect toilet paper holder? We think so. For another option, see Crisis in the Commode: Powder Room Edition.

Above: A tile square made into a vent.

Above: Tiled cubes that function as shelves.

Above: A Red Cross-tiled drawer.

Above: A 60-minute timer.

N.B. Looking for more tile inspiration? See 805 photos of tiled bathrooms in our Gallery.

Frozach Submitted

tomatosfernweh:

backtobass:

dizzzynoodles:

SAKUN cat sweater with zipper mouth - $25

probably gonna buy this

I want this in Murdoc

I WANT IT! :C IN BLUE.

thepandahouse:

oh thats dope.

spectrecaelum:

NINTENDIUM MOTHERF&*KERS