today's leftovers

• Free RPG Day: Create maps for your Dungeons & Dragons game with Mipui | Opensource.com

  It's Free RPG Day again, and there's no better to play a free roleplaying game than with free and open source software. In this digital era of pen-and-paper gaming, it's still relatively unusual for adventures to include digital maps. In fact, it's also unusual for paper adventures to include maps that are sized correctly for miniatures, and many that do have colourful and richly textured maps that look great in a glossy book but look murky when photocopied and enlarged for the tabletop. Long story short: a tabletop gamer is often in need of a quick and convenient way to produce maps. Mipui is an open source web app that enables you to create grid-based maps for role-playing games, and it works great for virtual and physical tabletops alike.

• Holybros unveils Pixhawk 6X and Pixhawk 6C flight controllers

  Holybro has revealed two new models of the popular Pixhawk flight controller for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The Pixhawk 6X and the Pixhawk 6C use a Cortex-M7 as Flight Management Unit (FMU) and a Cortex-M3 as an I/O processor. The Pixhawk 6X is based on the Pixhawk FMUv6x Open Standard and the Pixhawk Autopilot Bus Standard. Both versions 6X/6C feature H7 microcontroller which consists of a Arm Cortex-M7 core (up to 480 MHz) and a single core Arm Cortex-M3 (up to 72MHz).

• Hackaday Podcast 174: Breaking Into The Nest, The Cheapest 3D Printer, A Spy In Your HDMI, And AI All Over The Place

  Fresh from vacation, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams makes his triumphant return to the Hackaday Podcast! He’s joined this week by Managing Editor Tom Nardi, who’s just happy he didn’t have to do the whole thing by himself again. In this episode we’ll talk about tackling BGA components in your custom PCBs, a particularly well executed hack against Google’s Nest Hub, and why you probably don’t really want the world’s cheapest 3D printer. We’ll also take a look at an incredible project to turn the Nokia 1680 into a Linux-powered handheld computer, a first of its kind HDMI firewall, and a robot that’s pretty good at making tacos. Listeners who are into artificial intelligence will be in for quite a treat as well, as is anyone who dreams of elevating the lowly automotive alternator to a more prominent position in the hacker world.

Arti 0.5.0 is released: Robustness and API improvements

Arti is our ongoing project to create a working embeddable Tor client in Rust. It’s not ready to replace the main Tor implementation in C, but we believe that it’s the future.

Right now, our focus is on making Arti production-quality, by stress-testing the code, hunting for likely bugs, and adding missing features that we know from experience that users will need. We're going to try not to break backward compatibility too much, but we'll do so when we think it's a good idea.

Programming Leftovers

• [RFC] Zstandard as a second compression method to LLVM

  The LLVM project currently has support for zlib as a compression algorithm. Usage of it varies from compression of ELF debug sections, to serialization of performance stats and AST data structures. We would like to add Zstandard (A.K.A. Zstd) as an alternative to zlib, which tends to achieve higher compression rates while being faster across the board. Using those for internal tooling could lead to speed improvements in places where we compress AST’s etc, without sacrificing the compressed size of them.

• Porting KCM modules from QtWidgets to QtQuick/Kirigami for GSOC 2022

  I’ve been selected for GSOC this year. My task is to redesign and port the KCMs currently in Qt Widgets to QtQuick/Kirigami Thanks, Nate and David for agreeing to mentor me.

• Rant: One day either JavaScript or AutoComplete will start ww3

• Takedown Notice Wipes Game Boy Advance Emulator From GitHub

  A popular browser-based Game Boy Advance emulator with nearly 100 working games was removed from GitHub this week. The takedown request was sent by the ESA, which acts on behalf of Nintendo and other game companies. The problem hasn't been sorted out completely, however, as nostalgic games can easily find alternatives, even on GitHub.

• Russia’s Conti working on exploits for Intel ME BMC AMT IPMI – Intel ME the biggest security fuck up in computing history – sue Intel

  “The biggest network security threat today is a remote code execution exploit for Intel’s Management Engine.” “Every computer with an Intel chipset produced in the last decade would be vulnerable to this exploit, and RCE would give an attacker full control over every aspect of a system. If you want a metaphor, we are dinosaurs and an Intel ME exploit is an asteroid hurtling towards the Yucatán peninsula.” (https://hackaday.com/tag/intel-me/) Intel might have installed – over the course of at least a decade (to this day?) a closed source backdoor in your computer’s firmware, that might never receive updates and is hard to remove. Once this backdoor is fully cracked, everyone (Russia, China and North Korea) can use it. Having remote control over a server down to the BIOS is a neat feature. [...] another dramatic way to put it: “The biggest network security threat today is a remote code execution exploit for Intel’s Management Engine.” “Every computer with an Intel chipset produced in the last decade would be vulnerable to this exploit, and RCE would give an attacker full control over every aspect of a system.