News

3418 Articles

“Click To Cancel” Coming Soon

October 22, 2024 by 31 Comments

If you’ve ever had to suffer through a call tree and a 9,000 hour wait on hold to cancel a subscription, we have good news for you if you live in the United States. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has just finalized a rule that will “make it as easy for consumers to cancel their enrollment as it was to sign up.”

The announcement of the proposed rule came in March 2023 and was followed up by 16,000 comments from the public. Complaints to the agency about negative option and recurring subscription services have been rising from 42 per day in 2021 to 70 per day in 2024.

Commission Chair Lina M. Khan says, “The FTC’s rule will end these tricks and traps, saving Americans time and money. Nobody should be stuck paying for a service they no longer want.”

The rule will take effect 180 days after entering the Federal Register. If you’re curious about other ways we can hold tech companies accountable, Cory Doctorow has some ideas.

Nuclear Tomb Must Survive

October 21, 2024 by 121 Comments

It is hard to imagine that much we built today will be used ten years from now, much less in a hundred. It is hard to make things that last through the ages, which is why we are fascinated with things like ancient pyramids in Mexico, Egypt, and China. However, even the oldest Egyptian pyramid is only about 5,000 years old. [Mark Piesing] at the BBC visited a site that is supposed to lock up nuclear waste for 100,000 years.

This particular project is in France, but there are apparently dozens of similar projects around the world. Locating these nuclear tombs is tricky. They need to be in a geologically stable area that won’t contaminate water. They also prefer areas already depleted of resources to lessen the chance someone will be digging nearby in the far future. You also need people to agree to have these facilities in their communities, which is probably the most difficult thing to find.

Continue reading “Nuclear Tomb Must Survive” →

2024 Supercon: Third Round Of Super Speakers

October 21, 2024 by 3 Comments

The third and final round of the 2024 Supercon talks announcements brings us to the end, and the full schedule is now up on Hackaday.io.

With Supercon just a couple weeks away, we hope you have your tickets already! Stay tuned tomorrow for a badge reveal.

Continue reading “2024 Supercon: Third Round Of Super Speakers” →

This Week In Security: Quantum RSA Break, Out Of Scope, And Spoofing Packets

October 18, 2024 by 13 Comments

Depending on who you ask, the big news this week is that quantum computing researchers out of China have broken RSA. (Here’s the PDF of their paper.) And that’s true… sort of. There are multiple caveats, like the fact that this proof of concept is only factoring a 22-bit key. The minimum RSA size in use these days is 1024 bits. The other important note is that this wasn’t done on a general purpose quantum computer, but on a D-Wave quantum annealing machine.

First off, what is the difference between a general purpose and annealing quantum computer? Practically speaking, a quantum annealer can’t run Shor’s algorithm, the quantum algorithm that can factor large numbers into primes in a much shorter time than classical computers. While it’s pretty certain that this algorithm works from a mathematical perspective, it’s not at all clear that it will ever be possible to build effective quantum computers that can actually run it for the large numbers that are used in cryptography.

We’re going to vastly oversimplify the problem, and say that the challenge with general purpose quantum computing is that each q-bit is error prone, and the more q-bits a system has, the more errors it has. This error rate has proved to be a hard problem. The D-wave quantum annealing machine side-steps the issue by building a different sort of q-bits, that interact differently than in a general purpose quantum computer. The errors become much less of a problem, but you get a much less powerful primitive. And this is why annealing machines can’t run Shor’s algorithm.

The news this week is that researchers actually demonstrated a different technique on a D-wave machine that did actually factor an RSA key. From a research and engineering perspective, it is excellent work. But it doesn’t necessarily demonstrate the exponential speedup that would be required to break real-world RSA keys. To put it into perspective, you can literally crack a 22 bit RSA key by hand.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: Quantum RSA Break, Out Of Scope, And Spoofing Packets” →

Redbox Is Dead, But The Machines Are Kind Of Hanging On

October 17, 2024 by 37 Comments

Redbox was a service for renting DVDs from automated kiosks. The business was going well until it wasn’t anymore, and then the company went bankrupt in July this year. And yet… the machines live on. At least, that’s according to YouTuber [Smokin’ Silicon], who spotted some remaining Redbox kiosks out and about. Including at his local Walmart!

Here’s the thing. There’s not one big switch at Redbox that turns all the machines off, and even if there was—nobody hit it the moment the company declared bankruptcy. Thus, when [Smokin’ Silicon] rocked up to Walmart, he was able to flick through the movies and even add one to cart for purchase. However, trying to complete the transaction failed—the kiosk eventually reported itself as out of service. That makes sense—you’d expect payment processing to be the first thing to go down.

However, other Redbox kiosks were different. A kiosk at a Food Lion location actually still worked—and [Smokin’ Silicon] was able to complete the transaction and walk away with a Black Adam disc! On a second trip, he was able to walk away with even more!

The rest of the video dives into Redbox lore and other posts online about the status of the company, software, and hardware. Apparently, someone on Reddit was claiming they had the Redbox kiosk OS available. Meanwhile, some users have had trouble returning their discs because the company is now defunct. However, [Smokin’ Silicon] was able to return his without issue. Ultimately, though, he recommends his viewers to go out and score as many DVDs and Blu Rays as possible from the machines since soon enough, they’ll be gone forever.

The fact is, businesses are big and Kafkaesque, the kiosks are scattered all over the country, and so it’s anybody’s guess if and when they stop working. Back when this website began, a redbox was something different entirely. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Redbox Is Dead, But The Machines Are Kind Of Hanging On” →

Mining And Refining: Mine Dewatering

October 17, 2024 by 8 Comments

From space, the most striking feature of our Pale Blue Dot is exactly what makes it blue: all that water. About three-quarters of the globe is covered with liquid water, and our atmosphere is a thick gaseous soup laden with water vapor. Almost everywhere you look there’s water, and even where there’s no obvious surface water, chances are good that more water than you could use in a lifetime lies just below your feet, and accessing it could be as easy as an afternoon’s work with a shovel.

And therein lies the rub for those who delve into the Earth’s depths for the minerals and other resources we need to function as a society — if you dig deep enough, water is going to become a problem. The Earth’s crust holds something like 44 million cubic kilometers of largely hidden water, and it doesn’t take much to release it from the geological structures holding it back and restricting its flow. One simple mineshaft chasing a coal seam or a shaft dug in the wrong place, and suddenly all the hard-won workings are nothing but flooded holes in the ground. Add to that the enormous open-pit mines dotting the surface of the planet that resemble nothing so much as empty lakes waiting to fill back up with water if given a chance, and the scale of the problem water presents to mining operations becomes clear.

Dewatering mines is a complex engineering problem, one that intersects and overlaps multiple fields of expertise. Geotechnical engineers work alongside mining engineers, hydrogeologists, and environmental engineers to devise cost-effective ways to control the flow of water into mines, redirect it when they can, and remove it when there’s no alternative.

Continue reading “Mining And Refining: Mine Dewatering” →

Read All About It: The 2024 Supercon Site Is Live

October 17, 2024 by 4 Comments

With the 2024 Hackaday Supercon just a couple weeks away, we’re pleased to announce that the official site for the three-day event is now live!

On the brand-new Supercon page, you can find a listing of all of our fantastic speakers, the hands-on workshops, and perhaps most importantly, the schedule of when everything is happening. As always, Supercon is jam-packed with incredible content, so you’ll want to consult with the schedule to navigate your way through it. Don’t worry if it ends up that two talks you want to see are scheduled for the same time — we’ll be recording all of the talks and releasing them on the Hackaday YouTube channel, so you won’t miss out.

If you’re still on the fence, we do have a few tickets left at the time of this writing. All of the workshops are full at this point, but you can still get on the waiting list for a few of them just in case a spot opens up.