2026-04-25 00:10:07
When Elliot Williams and Al Williams compare their notes on the week in Hackaday, you know you’ll get at least one or two bad puns. How bad? Tune in and find out.
This week, Tom Nardi visits several in-person events, and Elliot and Al talk about smart buttons, Itanium, ejecting things from a rocket, and the infinite pickle. Will Elliot build the coin flipper? Will Al use plasma at his next cookout? Hard to say.
For the can’t miss articles, this week, Al swept the category with a post on splices and another on what human junk is still sitting on the moon.
What do you think? Leave us a comment or record something and send it to our mailbag.
Download a copy of the podcast with an MP3 from our continuous audio pipeline.
2026-04-24 23:30:00
If you have a desktop 3D printer, you probably want something to hang filament spools on. [LVTRC] has a spool roller that fits the bill. It also incorporates a scale and a round touch screen. (Google Translate)
We’ve seen those round screens before, and now we wonder why we didn’t think of this. The GC9A01 display shows a progress ring and lets you save settings or calibrations to EEPROM. An Arduino Nano provides the brain, and the load cell connects to an HX711. The project is made to fit a specific printer, but it should be little trouble to adapt it to a different printer or to mount it in an external mount.
One of the calibration steps, of course, is to program the weight of an empty spool to subtract from the total weight. The device can store up to five specific profiles.
Not the biggest spool holder we’ve seen. We keep thinking that we don’t know why we want a circular screen, and then someone always drops in to show us another thing we didn’t think about.
2026-04-24 22:00:30
The author of the BlueHammer exploit, which was released earlier this month and addressed in the last Patch Tuesday, continues to be annoyed with the responses from the Microsoft security research and vulnerability response team, and has released another Windows zero-day attack against Windows Defender.
The RedSun exploit targets a logic and timing error in Windows Defender, convincing it to install the target file in the system, instead of quarantining the file and protecting the system. Not, generally, what you would hope would happen.
Since the RedSun attack requires local access in the first place, it seems unlikely Microsoft will release an out-of-sequence patch for it, however with public code available, we can probably expect to see malware leveraging it to establish higher permissions on an infected system.
Releasing exploits out of spite feels like a return to the late 1990s, and I almost don’t hate it.
Reported in Bleeping Computer, a group tracked as “Hazy Hawk” has been hijacking unmaintained DNS records of universities and government institutions to serve ad click spam.
The attack seems simple and doesn’t even require compromising the actual institution, using dangling DNS “CNAME” records. A “CNAME” entry in DNS acts essentially as an alias, pointing one domain name at another, which can be used to provide content from an official domain that is hosted on a cloud service where the IP address of the service might change.
A DNS “A” (or “AAAA” if you speak IPv6) record points a hostname – like “foo.example.com” – to an IP address – like “1.1.1.1”. A “CNAME” record points a hostname to another hostname, like “foo.some_cloud_host.com”. Scanning “high value” domains (like Ivy League universities) for “CNAME” records which point to expired domains (or domains on cloud hosted providers which no longer exist) lets anyone able to register that domain (or create an account with the proper naming scheme on the cloud host) to post any content they wish, and still appear to be the original name.
At least 30 educational institutions have been impacted, along with several government agencies including the CDC.
A recent patch set to the Linux kernel schedules 18 legacy network drivers for removal, citing an increased maintenance burden due to bugs found by AI and fuzzing tools. This seems to be in line with other recent Linux kernel efforts to deprecate particularly old devices, migrating single-core systems to the multi-core scheduler and flagging i486 support for removal.
All of the devices slated to go are from 2002 or earlier, and are all ISA or PCMCIA Ethernet devices. Ultimately, it probably makes sense to remove problematic drivers for devices which have been out of production for 25 years or more, but it’s personally a bit painful to see the 3COM 3c59x driver going away, which was the first Ethernet card I had in a Linux system.
Following the theme the past month of supply chain hacks, the latest high-profile casualty is the Bitwarden command line client. There are indications this is the same group responsible for several of the previous weeks of supply chain attacks on NPM, GitHub, and VS Code extensions.
Bitwarden is a password manager, with the option of self-hosting, similar to LastPass or OnePassword. The trojan version of the Bitwarden CLI contains malicious code to spread the supply-chain botnet, by stealing authentication tokens , SSH keys, and AI service tokens. Whenever GitHub tokens are found, the script will also attempt to modify the GitHub Actions –automatic scripts run for code validation or package building — to embed itself in any packaged repository it has write access to.
In many ways, what could have been an astoundingly serious incident – the compromise of the password manager vault – turned into a case of the dog catching the car. (If a dog chasing cars caught one, would he even know what to do with it?) A surprising turn of events from code designed to steal credentials.
Anthropic has admitted that there has been “unauthorized access” to the new Mythos model. The company has made copious announcements about the danger their new model brings for security and exploit development, humble-bragging that it is too dangerous for public use. Meanwhile it appears that enthusiasts on an AI-focused Discord were able to social engineer access from a third-party Anthropic contractor.
It is difficult to ascertain what risk Mythos will actually represent once it becomes generally available. Like any new bug discovery tool, the challenge is not only in finding a possible bug, but in validating that it can be triggered. When the concept of fuzzing — spamming programs with invalid or nearly-valid input — was popularized, thousands of bugs were found rapidly. OSS-Fuzz found almost 30,000 bugs in 360 projects, per this paper. That’s truly an intimidating quantity of issues to fix, but hardly heralded as apocalyptic.
The impact of new AI on bug finding will have to be assessed in retrospect, but it’s not exactly comforting that the same company making claims of world-changing danger in their models were still themselves victims to a social engineering campaign that exposed the model for weeks.
Another week, another project ending their bug bounty program. This week it’s Nextcloud, a self-hostable file hosting platform – basically an open source Dropbox analogue.
Like other projects, Dropbox puts the blame on a flood of low-quality but time consuming AI generated bug reports. As of April 22, 2026, Nextcloud will no longer offer rewards for bug reports, regardless of the severity of the bug.
Apple has released iOS 26.4.2 which fixes a notification issue used recently to expose Signal messages.
A recent court case demonstrated that it was possible to extract the content of Signal messages on an iPhone, even if the app and notifications had been deleted. This is not a flaw in Signal itself, or even limited to iOS devices: when Signal is configured to show the content of a message in a notification, it’s no longer under the control of the Signal app itself. For devices which have the option to show notifications on the lock screen, the content of messages is also no longer protected by user authentication!
Investigators were able to extract the notifications database from the phone, and from there, extract previous Signal notifications containing message content thought to have been deleted.
Wrapping up, Newswire reports that Sri Lankan officials have confirmed that $2.5 million in funds were stolen from their Ministry of Finance by redirecting a foreign debt repayment. Few details are available, but such attacks typically take advantage of a compromised email account, using existing email threads to continue a conversation and change payment details.
Similar attacks happen on a smaller scale, often targeting real estate agencies and small banks – institutions likely to have little to no information security processes but who handle large lump sums of money. Having it occur on a national level is certainly a little unusual.
2026-04-24 19:00:30
As part of the effort to push Large Language Model (LLM) ‘AI’ into more and more places, Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) has been adopted as the standard to connect LLMs with various external tools and systems in a client-server model. A light oversight with the architecture of this protocol is that remote command execution (RCE) of arbitrary commands is effectively an essential part of its design, as covered in a recent article by [OX Security].
The details of this flaw are found in a detailed breakdown article, which applies to all implementations regardless of the programming language. Essentially the StdioServerParameters that are passed to the remote server to create a new local instance on said server can contain any command and arguments, which are executed in a server-side shell.
Essentially the issue is a lack of input sanitization, which is only the most common source of exploited CVEs. Across multiple real-world exploitation attempts on the software of LettaAI, LangFlow, Flowise and Windsurf it was possible to perform RCEs or perform local RCE in the case of the Windsurf IDE. Although Flowise had implemented some input sanitization by limiting allowed commands and the stripping of special characters, this was bypassed by using standard flags of the npx command.
After contacting Anthropic to inform them of these issues with MCP, the researchers were told that there was no design flaw and essentially had a ‘no-fix, works as designed’ hurled at them. According to Anthropic it’s the responsibility of the developer to perform input sanitization, which is interesting since they provide a range of implementations.
2026-04-24 16:00:41
There’s retrogaming, and then there’s retro gaming. This next project falls into the second category, as [Callan] of 74XX Arcade Repair digs into the original Wild Gunman, first released by Nintendo way, way back in 1974 — on 16 mm film. Yes, it was a film-based arcade machine, but how else were you going to get realistic graphics just two years after PONG?
The game had two 16 mm projectors, with four different sets of film reels available, each depicting five gunmen. Unfortunately for [Callan], the film is all he has, so he’s not so much repairing as re-creating the historic game. Luckily, he had the manuals, so at least he knew how it was supposed to come together.
One projector did most of the work, showing the gunmen and a hidden timing signal for the game to know when the user could shoot; the other only activated if the user pulled the trigger at the correct time. Interestingly the ‘gun’ has an IR illuminator that bounced infrared light off the screen to a detector in the cabinet — much like later TV remotes. That makes for a rather large circular hitbox around the enemy gunslinger, which is perhaps not a bad thing for a game likely to be found in a bar.
His recreation is all-digital as he didn’t want to risk completely wearing out the vintage film. Instead there’s a PC, a digital projector, and a pico-based light-gun running the OpenFire firmware. [Callan] did go to some lengths to match the original appearance, with a combination of 3D printing, woodworking and fabric arts. Plus his recreation is authentic to the behavior of the original, so what more could you ask for?
As far as we know, this is the only playable version of the 1970s game in existence. [Callan] will have it available to play at the Ontario Pinfest 2026, in Stayner, Ontario on May 30-31, 2026. Happily enough, that’s 50 years since the game first arrived in North America in 1976. Worth a trip? Well, that depends on your location.
This reminds us of the time someone 3D printed a Computer Space cabinet, which only predates Wild Gunman by a few years. Speaking of 3D printing, you can also print your own 16 mm film camera, if you want to make an indie version this now-vanished style of arcade game.
2026-04-24 13:00:11
Considering that Windows NT has the concept of so-called ‘subsystems’ whereby you can run different systems side-by-side, starting with the POSIX subsystem and later the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), it was probably only a matter of time before someone figured that doing this with Windows 9x was also completely reasonable. Ergo we now got [Hailey Somerville]’s Linux Subsystem for Windows.
To make running Linux inside Windows 9x work, it was necessary to heavily patch a Linux kernel, as normally there are no provisions for such a subsystems in Windows 9x’s kernel unlike the NT kernel. Correspondingly, the Linux kernel is based on user-mode Linux and hacked to call Windows 9x kernel APIs instead of the POSIX ones.
In order to use WSL9x you thus need to build said modified Linux kernel – currently at version 6.19 – along with a disk image containing an installed copy of Windows 9x. From there WSL9x can be loaded with the wsl command and you’re then free to cooperatively run the Win9x and Linux kernel side-by-side. This is reminiscent of Cooperative Linux (coLinux), which did something similar except with Windows NT and Linux kernels running side-by-side, and of course we have WSL2 with Windows 10+.
Thanks to [adistuder] for the tip.
