TechyMagThings

Usually the term ‘jailbreaking’ isn’t meant to be taken quite that literally, but in the case of the US prison tablet that [Hugh Jeffreys] got sent, it’s really quite apt. Unlike the typical transparent prison electronics, this tablet is hermetically sealed inside an opaque plastic case, with the Windows 10 install firmly locked-down and not allowing anything more to be done with it than access some prison-provided services via the browser in kiosk mode.

The first challenge was to see whether it could be booted at all, with just four metal pads visible on the side of the case. These turn out to correspond to USB pins, but the tablet only briefly tries to turn on with a charger connected. This means that a teardown is required, which ended up involving a hacksaw due to the sealed case.

Inside the case is the Windows tablet with the back cover removed, presumably for easy access to extend its USB port. All of this is embedded in foam and more gunk that makes disassembly rather messy. With the case opened it becomes clear that the likely reason why this tablet was junked was due to a bad third-party charger board, as using the tablet’s own USB port it charges happily and even turns on.

From there it’s a bit of a fight with the locked-down Windows installation, but as it’s just a Windows 10 Home installation, there’s no drive encryption or such to get in the way. This allows for the device to be fully jailbroken, revealing its specifications as an Iview Optimus-C-8001, powered by an Intel Atom Z8350 at 1.44 GHz with a blistering 2 GB of RAM. The Windows installation was from 2018, with apparently no updates since.

Despite the very high school arts-and-crafts appearance of the case itself, the tablet itself isn’t too shabby considering the limited hardware specifications. Although getting the case off is a bit of a pain, it’s not a bad catch if you can find one of these puppies in the e-waste bin.

The British government is in a headlong rush to ban under-16s from social media, and restrict the access of under-18s. And in typical form, the EFF is here with a warning about the dangers and futility of such legislation.

The proposed new law will involve an age restriction policed through online ID verification, something which will not be limited to the young, as every British adult will also have to show ID to access large parts of the Internet.

There is little in the way of information about how this unprecedented invasion of privacy will be implemented, however we expect that it will be left to the lax security measures of a range of lowest-bidder third party identity verification services. The resulting database will become a very rich target indeed.

The EFF pull no punches in warning of the harms these measures will bring upon those it seeks to protect. Far from “Giving under-16s their childhood back” as it is being promoted, they warn that it will deprive them of access to community, friends, and distant family, as well as educational content that could be vital for them.

If it works at all. Certainly he more technically minded youth will put their efforts into the world of computer networking. A VPN ban is reportedly in the works, so a whole generation of future software developers and IT specialists will get their start running software to get round this on their Raspberry Pi.

We’ve reported on the EFF’s concerns over UK ID laws before.

Header image: Diliff, CC BY-SA 2.5.

There are as almost as many kinds of coffee as there are of coffee drinkers, with each method for preparing the beverage appealing to a different kind of palate: moka pots, filter coffee, pour-over coffee, French presses, cold brews, espresso, and more produce their own unique flavours by extracting different compounds from the grounds to different degrees. Now, a new method has joined the throng: ultrasonic-assisted extraction, which can produce even an espresso at room temperature.

Espresso is normally made by forcing hot water through tightly-packed, finely-ground coffee beans, quickly producing a concentrated extraction. Its one of the hardest kinds of coffee to consistently make well, since the outcome is influenced by everything from grind size and packing density to temperature, pressure, and more. Ultrasonic agitation helps here by creating cavitation bubbles, which form shock waves as they collapse, breaking open the bean structure and producing small, strong jets of water. The experimental apparatus was built into a modified espresso machine. An ultrasonic transducer delivers vibrations to the basket containing the room-temperature slurry of coffee grounds for two or three minutes.

To quantify the results, the researchers analysed total dissolved solids, extraction yield, pH, colour, volatile components, and caffeine and chlorogenic acid contents. By varying ultrasonic power and grind size, the extraction yield and dissolved solids could be adjusted to closely match traditional espresso or cold-brew coffee. The other metrics had no significant differences, and a survey of 100 coffee drinkers found no preference between this and traditional espresso. When the drinkers tried the cold-brew coffees, they preferred the version made with ultrasonic assistance. The experiment succeeded in its goal of reducing energy consumption: the ultrasonic-assisted coffee took about a quarter as much power to make.

If you still prefer a more traditional approach, we’ve covered some beautiful espresso machines before, including one made out of motorcycle engine parts.

Today marks the summer solstice, the longest day of the year and the start of astronomical summer in the Northern Hemisphere. This doesn’t really have much to do with hacking hardware or building gadgets other than the fact that from this point on you’ll have progressively less daylight hours to do it in each day. Of course, if you do your best work in the middle of the night this won’t impact things much.

If you’re as likely to find a controller in your hand as a soldering iron in the evenings, you might be interested in a recent filing against Sony. Lawyers representing a group of four gamers allege that the entertainment giant is violating a California law that says digital storefronts need to make it clear that buyers don’t technically own the games in question but are merely licensing them — a license which, as we’ve seen in the past, can be revoked or modified at any time with no restitution made to the purchaser.

Now while we agree conceptually that selling gamers a license rather than an actual copy of the game is clearly a one-sided deal, we’re still not sure this case has a lot of merit. As far as we can tell, Sony does make it clear in the fine print that you’re not really going to own anything once they take your money. Or, at the very least, they make it equally as clear as any other company that’s selling digital downloads these days. Should the court actually find that said fine print is a little too fine, it could conceivably have ramifications throughout the entertainment industry. This is certainly a case to keep an eye on.

If you want to be sure none of your games can be removed from your digital grasp without warning, perhaps your best bet is to stick to the classics. Fans of 1989’s F-15 Strike Eagle II on PC will be excited to hear that there’s an ongoing effort by Neuvieme Porte to reverse engineer the flight sim and re-implement the whole thing in portable C.

This would open up all sorts of possibilities, such as ports to other platforms and the addition of new features and content. But before the project can get to that point however, Neuvieme is looking to recruit some virtual test pilots. Just keep in mind that the goal, at least for now, is to recreate the game exactly. That means bugs present in the original release are to be preserved. As such, it would help to have logged enough hours back in the DOS days to recognize what’s an OG bug and what’s been newly introduced.

From working on virtual jet fighters to the real deal, IEEE Spectrum recently ran an article about a startup called Phoenix Semiconductor that’s looking to produce bespoke pin-compatible replacements of critical chips for the military. They reason that the Air Force won’t mind paying $1,000 for a chip that cost them a buck back in 1975 when the alternative is grounding a $70+ million F-18 that needs the thing to take off. The goal isn’t really to recreate the old parts as they were, but instead to build drop-in replacements that are tailored for specific applications. In other words, Uncle Sam doesn’t care of the IC actually looks like the original, so long as it fits and it gets the jet up in the air again.

Finally, on the subject of aerospace technology, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory published a blog post earlier this week detailing their work on the Exploration Rover for Navigating Extreme Sloped Terrain (ERNEST). While NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers have done some incredible work on Mars, they’re slow and have to be operated with the utmost caution to make sure they don’t get stuck. In comparison, ERNEST is several times faster and is designed with an active suspension system that lets it lift each wheel up off the ground independently if needed.

The prototype rover also features improved autonomy that may allow future rovers make more decisions on their own. That may not be a huge time saver on the Moon, but given the communication delays with the Red Planet, a Mars rover that doesn’t have to stop and ask Earth for directions so often will be able to get more useful work done at the end of the day.

See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear about it.

So you have a project that you love, and everyone else loves too. People start saying “you should sell this” but where? Well, there’s a new marketplace you might want to consider called called SmallRun, aiming at makers and their, well, small production runs.

SmallRun will absolutely host your custom PCBs, on-demand 3D prints, and other traditional maker products — but they’ll also happily sell your merch, too. Along with electronics and hardware, they aim to allow you to sell products in categories like tabletop gaming, sciences, and yes, accessories/apparel.

For sellers, they offer automatic payouts and promise to take care of the taxes by integrating with Stripe. That said, they’re still working on getting the whole VAT thing set up for products imported to the EU. EU to EU sales are apparently OK. They’ll host build logs, which may drive engagement with your product. There’s even a handy tool to import your existing listings from eBay, Tindie, Lectronz, Etsy, Shopify, or Crowd Supply if you’re already in the biz. They make their money by taking a cut of your sales: eight percent, plus forty cents per listing.

Depending on your perspective, you might wonder if we need another marketplace, To that we can only say: “Let a thousand flowers bloom!” Competition should drive these marketplaces to continuously improve and we all win.

If you’re selling online, even packaging can become a project. If you’re not, but are interested in starting, our “From Project to Kit” series from ten years back remains surprisingly relevant.

Thanks to [Aron] for the tip!

The Bernoulli disk was a wild piece of 1980s hardware. Take a big floppy. Spin the platter at 1500 RPM just a micron or so from a read head. The airflow around that rapidly-spinning disk actually stabilizes the disk that close to the read-head via the Bernoulli effect, hence the name. Once upon a time, everybody wanted a Bernoulli Box to put under their Macintosh 512, but [Will It Work?] wanted to see how well these old drives held up to the 21st century… by using it to load games onto a WiiU. 

It’s not as crazy at is it seems. The WiiU is happy to read and write anything that looks like a USB mass storage device. The Bernoulli Box is of course pre-USB– even the later model 5 1/4″ drive [Will] is using from 1987. That means it uses SCSI, the USB of the 1980s. He’s got a 90 MB disk, though IOmega did make disks of higher capacity in that format, all the way up to 230 MB. Yes, the same iOmega of Zip-drive fame and infamy— but don’t worry, the peculiar pneumatic nature of the Bernoulli disks makes them immune to the click of death.

You might think it’s going to take a great deal of hacking and homebrew to get the WiiU talking to a SCSI drive from the 80s, but as we said in the introduction, Nintendo made this thing respect USB conventions, so all that’s needed is an SCSI-to-USB cable. Well, plus a passive SCSI 1 to SCSI 2 adapter to get the USB adapter to fit. Daisy-chaining adapters isn’t the most advanced hack, but the point isn’t how hard it was to pull off– it’s that we’re amazed it worked at all.

It doesn’t seem like the drive slows down the WiiU nearly as much as we’d expect, but then it’s not a console known for fast load times. The other suprizing detail is how much space the WiiU’s formatting sucked up, knocking the 90 MB disk down to only 68 MB– combine that with the WiiU’s firmware wanting to pad space for save files, and not much fits. Thus we don’t expect this odd tower of power to take off like the original did– still, if you had one of these back in the day, it might be a nice nostalgia hit to hear the drive whirring away.

If you think a disk drive is something Nintendo would never imagine for their consoles, think again! The Japanese version of the NES had the Famicon disk drive, which turns out to be essential if you want to run UNIX on that system.

With the advent of affordable 2.5 Gbit, 5 Gbit, and 10 Gbit consumer networking gear, more and more people are taking advantage of these higher networking speeds, with [This Does Not Compute] having used 10 Gbit SFP+ modules over regular Cat-5e copper to connect to a NAS in the next room. Only problem was that after a while these SFP+ modules began to start dropping frames. On taking a closer look at these modules, he found that they were running pretty hot: 40°C while idle. A teardown of one of these modules showed severe discoloration due to heat.

Inside these 10Gbit modules is the Marvell-branded Alaska X 88X3310/40P PHY, which despite the ‘low-power’ claims have a metal heatsink glued onto the actual IC and thermally coupled to the module’s metal enclosure. The other side of the PCB was quite discolored, further indicating how hot these modules run in operation. Some digging revealed that this can go up to around 2.5 watts.

Perhaps the most fascinating part of this teardown is the discovery of an 8051-based MCU that’s responsible for telling the switch the module is put into that it is a 30-meter multi-mode fiber module, presumably for compatibility purposes. It’s definitely an interesting feature of these FS-branded SFP+ modules.

These old modules were replaced with Wiitek-branded modules that are supposed to use only up to around 1.5 watts in operation courtesy of a newer chipset, in the hope that these wouldn’t fry themselves. At idle these do however still run at 30 °C. As noted in the comments, it might be a good idea to have active airflow over high-speed networking gear like this, as they generally can get pretty hot and sometimes crispy.

The final solution for the video’s networking problem was to just run single-mode fiber to the room and use appropriate SFP+ modules for that, also because these run noticeably cooler. If you still have room in your cable ducts, that would seem to be the optimal solution.