Great news! That massive, roughly 7 million people-strong data breach from late last year is your fault, not the 23andMe's. You know your genetic lineage and racial makeup information is in good hands when the company in charge of it immediately lays the blame on the victim. — Read the rest

A judge has ruled that Prince Harry was hacked by Mirror Group Newspapers and awarded him £140,600 (~$180,000) in damages. Moreover, the court found that Piers Morgan, former editor of the Daily Mirror newspaper, knew about the illegal hacking used to extract stories from celebrities' devices and was personally involved in it.15 stories, all told, were found to be based on information taken from Harry's phone. — Read the rest

Amateur astronomers captured incredible video (example below) of a fireball smashing into Jupiter on August 28. According to Kyoto University astronomer Ko Arimatsu—who leads a program in which backyard astronomers contribute to the scientific study the solar system—this particular impact was comparable to the 1908 Tunguska impact in Siberia that devastated 800 square miles of forest. — Read the rest

The ice cream machines at McDonald's restaurants are famously frustrating. At any given time, about 10% of them are broken. The damn things almost never work, for reasons that should be within the company's control.

Now, the right-to-repair activists at iFixIt have gotten their hands on one of the Taylor-manufactured machines and figured out precisely how it works—and why it keeps causing problems. — Read the rest

As entertainment goes most of us will find it a bit dry, but Mike Damm's brute.force is enormously satisfying to a certain crowd.

These are real time attempts to break into my servers by attackers trying to guess usernames and passwords.

With so many businesses and organizations being run online today, it's no wonder there's tons of opportunity in cyber security. But not many aspiring professionals can successfully get past a password, let alone protect an entire company online, so learning this stuff can really give you the chance to stand out when applying for cyber security jobs, applying for raises in the industry, and more. — Read the rest

Pop singer Claire "Grimes" Boucher admitted to hacking, DDOSing and taking down Hipster Runoff, a popular early-2010s site which had posted a photograph of her at a party, and "basically blackmailing" the site's operators. The photo had already been published elsewhere; the site never recovered from the attack. — Read the rest

Ian Charnas has figured out a way to override Nintendo's controller to throw punches in real life and have them work inside the video game, "Punch-Out!" Because, of course he has!

My latest project is a real-life version of Nintendo Punch-Out (boxing game) where I've hacked the game so you control it with actual punches instead of a controller.

Secondary custom keyboards are terrific if you're doing something technical — like editing music or video, or even playing a video game. You can assign a key to run a command or a macro you use repetitively.

Over at Reddit, "RonaldMcWhisky" describes how he took a USB cash-register keyboard — the Wincor Nixdorf TA85P, bought for 30 euros on Ebay — then plugged it into his computer and found he could easily read the keypresses using Python. — Read the rest

In this clip below from an episode of NCIS, hackers have already burned through the NCIS public firewall. They're moving so fast that they determined the only conceivable way to stop them is for two people to type on the same keyboard. — Read the rest

The city of Fullerton, California sued two bloggers it claimed had hacked the city's Dropbox folder. — Read the rest

If you're a fan of games based around techno-hackers running amok like Cyberpunk 2077 or Watch Dogs: Legion, you might think you're already halfway to being a professional hacker yourself. Unfortunately, a professional ethical hacker can tell you that learning to hack from playing these games is about as likely as learning to fly by watching Superman: The Movie. — Read the rest

Guy Dupont gutted his 2004 iPod Classic and transformed it into a Spotify player powered by a Raspberry Pi. Yes, the haptic click wheel works too!

sPot: Spotify in a 4th-gen iPod (2004) (Hackaday)

Prominent U.S. cybersecurity firm FireEye disclosed on its corporate blog Tuesday it was hacked, possibly by a foreign nation, and the breach included the theft of internal hacking tools the firm normally uses to privately test the network defenses of their own clients. — Read the rest

Spoken Word with Electronics is an audio series delivering to you a two side recording of unusual stories paired with vintage modular electronic sounds

Hi everyone, welcome back to the show. This week is about loud noises made by computers. — Read the rest

It turns out you can hack into a robot vacuum cleaner and use it sensors to eavesdrop.

How? With lasers! Spy agencies since the 1940s have eavesdropped on people using "laser microphones": You shine a laser at the window of a house, which vibrates every so faintly from the sound of whoever's inside, talking. — Read the rest

In this reprinted piece from Popular Mechanics, 2015, the late, great Eddie Van Halen talks about how he modified his early guitars and amps to help create the unique guitar sounds for which he became famous.

My playing style really grew from the fact that I couldn't afford a distortion pedal.

The Justice Department announced charges against three Iranian nationals over the hacking of aerospace and satellite tech firms.

Here's the news release from the Department of Justice U.S. Attorney's Office, Eastern District of Virginia, published early Thursday:

Iranian Hackers Indicted for Stealing Data from Aerospace and Satellite Tracking Companies

ALEXANDRIA, Va.

RADVAC, the Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative, is a group of scientists who first got together in early March to experiment with potential coronavirus solutions … on their own bodies. From their website:

Beginning early in the 2020 pandemic, we designed, produced, and self-administered several progressive generations of nasal vaccines against SARS-CoV-2.

“Prepared by a CIA task force, the report was introduced as evidence in the trial of Joshua Schulte, a former employee of an agency hacking unit”