Category Archives: 34C3

You Can Learn a Lot From a Blinkenrocket

Posted on by

At this year’s Chaos Communication Congress, we caught up with [muzy] and [overflo], who were there with a badge and soldering project they designed to teach young folks how to solder and program. Blinkenrocket is a basically a 64-LED matrix display and just enough support hardware to store and display animations, and judging by the number of blinking rockets we saw around the necks of attendees, it was a success.

Their talk at 34C3 mostly concerns the production details, design refinements, and the pitfalls of producing thousands of a thing. If you’re thinking of building a hardware kit or badge …read more

Continue reading You Can Learn a Lot From a Blinkenrocket→

34C3: Reverse Engineering FPGAs

Posted on by

We once knew a guy who used to tell us that the first ten times he flew in an airplane, he jumped out of it. It was his eleventh flight before he walked off the plane. [Mathias Lasser] has a similar story. Despite being one of the pair who decoded the iCE40 bitstream format a few years ago, he admits in his 34C3 talk that he never learned how to use FPGAs. His talk covers how he reverse engineered the iCE40 and the Xilinx 7 series devices. You can see the video, below.

If you are used to FPGAs in …read more

Continue reading 34C3: Reverse Engineering FPGAs→

Great People and Culture at 34th Chaos Communications Congress

Posted on by

If you’ve been to a Chaos Communication Congress, you know the feeling — the strange realization after it’s all over that you’re back in the “real world”. It’s somehow alienating and unfriendly in comparison to being surrounded by computer freaks, artists, hackers, activists, coders, and other like-minded individuals over the four days of the Congress. A hand-written poster by the podcasting center read “Endlich, normale Leute” — “At last, normal people” — which is irony piled on irony but the sentiment is still right for certain strange values of “normal”. Normal hackers? You’d probably fit right in.

We cover a …read more

Continue reading Great People and Culture at 34th Chaos Communications Congress→

34C3: Roll Your Own Network Driver In Four Simple Steps

Posted on by

Writing your own drivers is a special discipline. Drivers on the one hand work closely with external hardware and at the same time are deeply ingrained into the operating system. That’s two kinds of specialization in one problem. In recent years a lot of dedicated networking hardware is being replaced by software. [Paul Emmerich] is a researcher who works on improving the performance of these systems.

Making software act like network hardware requires drivers that can swiftly handle a lot of small packets, something that the standard APIs where not designed for. In his talk at this year’s Chaos Commnication …read more

Continue reading 34C3: Roll Your Own Network Driver In Four Simple Steps→

34C3: Microphone Bugs

Posted on by

Inspiration can come from many places. When [Veronica Valeros] and [Sebastian Garcia] from the MatesLab Hackerspace in Argentina learned that it took [Ai Weiwei] four years to discover his home had been bugged, they decided to have a closer look into some standard audio surveillance devices. Feeling there’s a shortage of research on the subject inside the community, they took matters in their own hands, and presented the outcome in their Spy vs. Spy: A modern study of microphone bugs operation and detection talk at 34C3. You can find the slides here, and their white paper here.

Focusing their research …read more

Continue reading 34C3: Microphone Bugs→

34C3: North Korea’s Consumer Technology

Posted on by

[Will Scott] and [Gabe Edwards] shed some light on the current state of consumer computing technology at 34C3 in their talk DPRK Consumer Technology. The pair has also created a website to act as a clearinghouse for this information — including smartphone OS images up at koreaComputerCenter.org.

Not a whole lot is known about what technology North Korean citizens have available to them. We have seen Red Star OS, the Mac-like Linux based operating system used on PC based desktops. But what about other systems like smartphones?

[Will] and [Gabe] found that cell phones in North Korea are typically manufactured …read more

Continue reading 34C3: North Korea’s Consumer Technology→

34C3: Hacking the Nintendo Switch

Posted on by

There’s a natural order to the world of game console hacking: every time a manufacturer releases a new game console they work in security measures that prevent the end user from running anything but commercially released games, and in turn every hacker worth his or her salt tries to break through. The end goal, despite what the manufacturers may have you believe, is not to run “bootleg” games, but rather to enable what is colloquially referred to as “homebrew”. That is to say, enabling the novel concept of actually running software of your choice on the hardware you paid for. …read more

Continue reading 34C3: Hacking the Nintendo Switch→

34C3: Fitbit Sniffing and Firmware Hacking

Posted on by

If you walked into a gym and asked to sniff exercise equipment you would get some mighty strange looks. If you tell hackers you’ve sniffed a Fitbit, you might be asked to give a presentation. [Jiska] and [DanielAW] were not only able to sniff Bluetooth data from a run-of-the-mill Fitbit fitness tracker, they were also able to connect to the hardware with data lines using test points etched right on the board. Their Fitbit sniffing talk at 34C3 can be seen after the break. We appreciate their warning that opening a Fitbit will undoubtedly void your warranty since Fitbits don’t …read more

Continue reading 34C3: Fitbit Sniffing and Firmware Hacking→

34C3: Ultimate Apollo Guidance Computer Talk

Posted on by

While it might not be as exciting as the Saturn V rocket itself, the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) was one of the most important developments of the entire Apollo program. While comically underwhelming compared to modern hardware, the AGC was nothing short of revolutionary when it was developed in the 1960’s. Before the AGC, the smallest computers were about the size of a refrigerator and consumed hundreds of watts; both big problems if you’re trying to pack them into a relatively tiny space capsule with limited resources. Not only did the AGC get humanity to the Moon and back, but …read more

Continue reading 34C3: Ultimate Apollo Guidance Computer Talk→

34C3: The First Day is a Doozy

Posted on by

It’s 5 pm, the sun is slowly setting on the Leipzig conference center, and although we’re only halfway through the first day, there’s a ton that you should see. We’ll report some more on the culture of the con later — for now here’s just the hacks.

Electric Car Charging Stations: Spoofing and Reflashing

Electric autos are the future, right? Well, for now we need to figure out how to charge them. All across Germany, charging stations are popping up like dandelions. How do they work? Are they secure? [Mathias Dalheimer] bought a couple loading stations, built himself a car …read more

Continue reading 34C3: The First Day is a Doozy→