Collaborate Disseminate
Back in 2012, technology websites were abuzz with news of the Lytro: a camera that was going to revolutionize photography thanks to its innovative light field technology. An array of …read more Continue reading Unlocking Hidden Features of an Unusual Camera
It’s a fact of life that electronic devices become obsolete after a few years. Sometimes this is because technology has moved on, but it can also happen that a perfectly …read more Continue reading Decompiling Software to Fix an Old Solar Inverter
The regular Hackaday reader might remember the iClicker from our previous coverage of the classroom quiz device, or perhaps you even had some first hand experience with it during your university days. A number of hackers have worked to reverse engineer the devices over the years, and on the whole, …read more
Continue reading Solving The Final Part Of The iClicker Puzzle
Nothing says friendship like a reverse engineering challenge on unknown terrain as a birthday present. When [Rikaard] turned 25 earlier this year, his friend [Veydh] put together a Capture the Flag challenge on an ESP8266 for him. As a software guy with no electronics background, [Rikaard] had no idea what he was presented with, but was eager to find out and to document his journey.
Left without guidance or instructions, [Rikaard] went on to learn more about the ESP8266, with the goal to dump its flash content, hoping to find some clues in it. Discovering the board is running NodeMCU …read more
Continue reading Capture the Flag Challenge is the Perfect Gift
Opening up things, see how they work, and make them do what you want are just the basic needs of the average hacker. In some cases, a screwdriver and multimeter will do the job, but in other cases a binary blob of random software is all we have to work with. Trying to understand an unknown binary executable is an exciting way to discover a system’s internal functionality.
While the basic principles of software reverse engineering are universal across most platforms, the details can naturally vary for different architectures. In the case of the x86 architecture, [Leo Tindall] felt that …read more
We’re not sure what to make of this one. With the variety of smartwatches and fitness trackers out there, we can’t be surprised by what sort of hardware ends up strapped to wrists these days. So a watch with an RPN calculator isn’t too much of a stretch. But adding a hex editor? And a disassembler? Oh, and while you’re at it, a transceiver for the 70cm ham band? Now that’s something you don’t see every day.
The mind boggles at not only the technical prowess needed to pull off what [Travis Goodspeed (KK4VCZ)] calls the GoodWatch, but at the …read more
What do you do when a ten-year-old video game has a bug in it? If you are [ExileLord] you fix it, even if you don’t have the source code. Want to know how? Luckily, he produced a video showing all the details of how he tracked the bug down and fixed it. You can see the video below. You may or may not care about Guitar Hero, but the exercise of reverse engineering and patching the game is a great example of the tools and logic required to reverse engineer any binary software, especially a Windows binary.
The tool of …read more
If you really want to hack software, you are going to face a time when you have to take apart someone’s machine code. If you aren’t very organized, it might even be your own — source code does get lost. If you want to impress everyone, you’ll just read through the hex code (well, the really tough old birds will read it in binary). That was hard to do even when CPUs only had a handful of instructions.
A more practical approach is to use a tool called a disassembler. This is nothing more than a program that converts numeric …read more
