“Maker Andreas Spiess talks about the Open Source that really goes into a RISC-V chip and the ESP32-C3,” writes
Slashdot reader nickwinlund77 — sharing a link to this article from Hackaday: It’s an exciting time in the world of microprocessors, as the long-held promise of devices with open-source RISC-V cores is coming to fruition. Finally we might be about to see open-source…
Tag: Hackaday
German Institute Develops ‘Powerpaste’ That Stores Hydrogen Energy At 10x the Density of a Lithium Battery
A German research organization has developed a magnesium-based “Powerpaste” with an energy density ten times more than current battery technology. Hackaday reports: We’ve been promised hydrogen-powered engines for some time now. One downside though is the need for hydrogen vehicles to have heavy high-pressure tanks. While a 700 bar tank and the accompanying fuel cell is acceptable for a city bus…
Urban Explorers Discover A Treasure Trove Of Soviet Computing Power
“The building did not stand out. Unremarkable industrial building, which was built in hundreds of Soviet cities,” explains a web site called Russian Urban Exploration. Hackaday describes what happened next:
It’s probably a dream most of us share, to stumble upon a dusty hall full of fascinating abandoned tech frozen in time as though its operators walked away one day and simply…
Raspberry Pi 4 Can Be Safely Overclocked To 2.15 GHz
szczys writes: When the Raspberry Pi 400 (a keyboard form-factor single board computer) was released last week, the company hinted at overclocking. Testing has now shown that the heat spreader used in that design does an excellent job. The chip was already clocked at 1.8 GHz, versus the stock 1.5 GHz in the original Raspberry Pi 4 Model B board. But…
The Verdict After Hackaday’s Teardown of a Raspberry Pi 400: ‘Very, Very Slick’
“You can’t send Hackaday a piece of gear without us taking it apart,” warns an article shared by Slashdot reader beggarwoman. Hackady’s verdict? The new Raspberry Pi 400 “is very, very slick.” Inside, there’s a flat-flex that connects the keyboard, and you see that big aluminum heat sink. It’s almost the full size of the keyboard, and it’s thick and heat-taped…
‘Will 2020 Be The Year Of Rust In The Linux Kernel?’
An intriguing exchange happened on the Linux Kernel Mailing List after a post by Nick Desaulniers, a Google software engineer working on compiling the Linux Kernel with Clang (and LLVM). Hackaday reports:
Nick simply tested the waters for a possible future of Rust within the Linux kernel code base, which is something he’s planning to bring up for discussion in this year’s…
After 37 Years Microsoft Open Sources GW-BASIC
“Having re-open-sourced MS-DOS on GitHub in 2018, Microsoft has now released the source code for GW-BASIC, Microsoft’s 1983 BASIC interpreter,” reports ZDNet, adding that GW-BASIC “can trace its roots back to Bill Gates’ and Paul Allen’s implementation of Microsoft’s first product, the BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 computer.” “Interested to look at thousands of lines of glorious 8088 assembly code…
Python 2’s Core Devs Say ‘Fond Farewell’ While Releasing Its Final Version
This week Python’s core developer blog announced the very last production release of Python 2.7. Hackaday reports:
The intention was for it to coincide with PyCon 2020, but just like so many of the events planned for the first half of the year, the in-person conference had to be canceled in favor of a virtual one due to the COVID-19 epidemic. That…
OpenPower Foundation Releases a Friendly EULA For IBM’s Power ISA RISC
Long-time Slashdot reader lkcl writes: Michael Larabel, of Phoronix, writes that the OpenPower Foundation has released a license agreement for Hardware Vendors to implement the Power ISA RISC instruction set in their processors. Hugh Blemings, the Director of OpenPower, was responsible for ensuring that the EULA is favourable and friendly towards Libre and Open Hardware projects and businesses. Of particular interest…
OpenBSD Mail Server Bug Allowed Remotely Executing Shell Commands As Root
This week a remotely-exploitable vulnerability (granting root privileges) was discovered in OpenSMTPD (OpenBSD’s implementation of server-side SMTP). ZDNet notes that the library’s “portable” version “has also been incorporated into other OSes, such as FreeBSD, NetBSD, and some Linux distros, such as Debian, Fedora, Alpine Linux, and more.”
To exploit this issue, an attacker must craft and send malformed SMTP messages to a…