Hands-On: The Pandemic DEF CON Badge is an Audio Cassette

My DEF CON Safe Mode badge just arrived in the mail this afternoon. The Vegas-based conference which normally hosts around 30,000 attendees every year has moved offline in response to the global pandemic, and the virtual event spins up August 6-9. Known for creative badges, North America’s most well-known infosec …read more

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Hackaday Podcast 077: Secret Life of SD Cards, Mining Minecraft’s Secret Seed, BadPower is Bad, and Sailing a Sea of Neon

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams are deep in the hacks this week. What if making your own display matrix meant a microcontroller board for every pixel? That’s the gist of this incredible neon display. There’s a lot of dark art poured into the slivers of microSD cards and …read more

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Stay at Home, HOPE and DEF CON Will Come to You

We’ve often heard conferences like HOPE and DEF CON called Hacker Summer Camp (although there are certainly more camp-like camps that also fit the bill). As we get into the hot parts of the summer, heading indoors for security talks, workshops, and untold shenanigans sounds like a good idea… if …read more

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Hackaday Podcast 076: Grinding Compression Screws, Scratching PCBs, and Melting Foam

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys are enamored by this week’s fabrication hacks. There’s a PCB mill that isolates traces by scratching rather than cutting. You won’t believe how awesome this angle-cutter jig is at creating tapered augers for injection molding/extruding plastic. And you may not need an interactive …read more

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Ljusmaskinen Takes the Rave to the Streets (Eventually)

When humanity comes out the other side of this pandemic there will be a mountain of awesome projects to show off in person. For instance, this backpack mounted DMX lighting was built to be worn as a mobile rave rig by Swedish hacker [Tim Gremalm]. In-person raves aren’t happening right …read more

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Today’s Twitter Hack is New Take on “Nigerian Prince” Scam

Don’t send bitcoin to celebrities… or to random people for that matter. This afternoon a number of high profile Twitter accounts were taken over, including Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Apple, Jeff Bezos, and Kanye West, and the event appears to be ongoing. Each displayed a message saying they …read more

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Roboticist Grant Imahara of Mythbusters Fame Dies of Aneurysm at Age 49

We awake this morning to sad news of the premature passing of Grant Imahara at the age of 49 due to a brain aneurysm. Grant was best known for his role on the wildly popular Mythbusters television show on which he starred and built test apparatus for seasons three through …read more

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1975 Circuit Board Was a Masterpiece Hidden On Your Wrist

There has been an argument raging for years over whether you should design circuit boards with 45-degree corners or 90-degree corners. Why make them with corners at all? This breathtaking circuit board art is from a digital watch circa 1975.

The Pulsar Calculator Watch was the first of its kind …read more

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Mergers and Acquisitions: Analog Devices Snaps Up Maxim Integrated for $21 B

Analog Devices will acquire Maxim Integrated for $20.9 billion dollars in stock, as reported by Bloomberg this morning.

Perhaps the confusing part of the news is that the Bloomberg article mentions the acquisition will let Analog Devices better compete with Texas Instruments. Wait, didn’t Texas Instruments acquire Maxim back in …read more

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Dream Team Members Announced for the 2020 Hackaday Prize

The Dream Team program is an exciting new element of the 2020 Hackaday Prize, with twelve people accepted to work full-time on a specific problem for each of our non-profit partners this summer. Each team of three is already deep into an engineering sprint to pull together a design, and …read more

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