For The Fun Of It

January 10, 2026 by Elliot Williams 12 Comments

I was off at the Chaos Communication Congress last weekend, and one of the big attractions for one who is nerdily inclined is seeing all of the personal projects that everyone brings along with them. Inevitably, someone would ask me what my favorite is. Maybe it’s my decision paralysis, maybe it’s being forced to pick a favorite child on the spot, or maybe it’s just that I’m not walking around ranking them, but that question always left me drawing a blank.

But after a week of thinking about it, I’m pretty sure I know why: I don’t actually care what I think of other peoples’ projects! I’m simply stoked to talk to everyone who brought anything, and bathe in the success and failure, hearing about the challenges that they saw coming, and then the new challenges they met along the way. I want to know what the hacker thinks of their project, what their intention was, and how their story went. I’m just a spectator, so I collected stories.

The overwhelming, entirely non-surprising result of listening to a couple hundred hackers talk about their projects? They’re all doing it for the fun of it. Simply for the grins. And that held equally well for the supremely planned-out and technical projects as well as their simpler I-bought-these-surplus-on-eBay-one-night relatives. “We were sitting around and thought, wouldn’t it be fun…” was the start of nearly every story.

That’s what I absolutely love about our community: that people are hacking because it makes them happy, and that the amazing variety of projects suggests an endless possibility for hacker happiness. It’s hard to come away from an event like that without being energized. Some of that comes from the sharing of ideas and brainstorming and hanging out with like-minded folks, but what I find most important is simply the celebration of the joy of the project for its own sake.

Happy hacking!

39C3: Hacking Washing Machines

December 29, 2025 by Elliot Williams 18 Comments

Many of us have them, few of us really hack on them: well, here we’re talking about large home appliances. [Severin von Wnuck-Lipinski] and [Hajo Noerenberg] were both working on washing machines, found each other, and formed a glorious cooperation that ended in the unholy union of German super-brands Miele and B/S/H — a Miele washer remote controlled by Siemens’ web app.

This talk, given at the 39th Chaos Communication Congress (39C3), is about much more than the stunt hack, however. In fact, we covered [Severin]’s work on the very clever, but proprietary, Miele Diagnostic Interface a little while ago. But now, he’s got it fully integrated into his home automation system. It’s a great hack, and you can implement it without even opening the box.

About halfway through the talk, [Hajo] takes over, dissecting the internal D-Bus communication protocol. Here, you have to open up the box, but then you get easy access to everything about the internal state of the machine. And D-Bus seems to be used in a wide range of B/S/H/ home appliances, so this overview should give you footing for your own experimentation on coffee machines or dishwashers as well. Of course, he wires up an ESP32 to the bus, and connects everything, at the lowest level, to his home automation system, but he also went the extra mile and wrote up a software stack to support it.

It’s a great talk, with equal parts humor and heroic hacking. If you’re thinking about expanding out your own home automation setup, or are even just curious about what goes on inside those machines these days, you should absolutely give it a watch.

Editor Note: The “S” is Siemens, which is Hackaday’s parent company’s parent company. Needless to say, they had nothing to do with this work or our reporting on it.

Hackaday Links: September 21, 2025

September 21, 2025 by Dan Maloney 7 Comments

Remember AOL? For a lot of folks, America Online was their first ISP, the place where they got their first exposure to the Internet, or at least a highly curated version of it. Remembered by the cool kids mainly as the place that the normies used as their ISP and for the mark of shame an “@aol.com” email address bore, the company nevertheless became a media juggernaut, to the point that “AOL Time Warner” was a thing in the early 2000s. We’d have thought the company was long gone by now, but it turns out it’s still around and powerful enough of a brand that it’s being shopped around for $1.5 billion. We’d imagine a large part of that value comes from Yahoo!, which previous owner Verizon merged with AOL before selling most of the combined entity off in 2021, but either way, it’s not chump change.

For our part, the most memorable aspect of AOL was the endless number of CDs they stuffed into mailboxes in the 90s. There was barely a day that went by that one of those things didn’t cross your path, either through the mail or in free bins at store checkouts, or even inside magazines. They were everywhere, and unless you were tempted by the whole “You’ve got mail!” kitsch, they were utterly useless; they didn’t even make good coasters thanks to the hole in the middle. So most of the estimated 2 billion CDs just ended up in the trash, which got us thinking: How much plastic was that? A bit of poking around indicates that a CD contains about 15 grams of polycarbonate, so that’s something like 30,000 metric tonnes! To put that into perspective, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is said to contain “only” around 80,000 metric tonnes of plastic. Clearly the patch isn’t 37% AOL CDs, but it still gives one pause to consider how many resources AOL put into marketing.

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A Robust Guide To The Xbox 360 Glitch Hack

October 19, 2024 by Lewin Day 15 Comments

The Xbox 360 was a difficult console to jailbreak. Microsoft didn’t want anyone running unsigned code, and darn if they didn’t make it difficult to do so. However, some nifty out of the box thinking and tricky techniques cracked it open like a coconut with a crack in it. For the low down, [15432] has a great in-depth article on how it was achieved. The article is in Russian, so you’ll want to be armed with Google Translate for this one.

The article gets right into the juice of how glitch attacks work—in general, and with regards to the Xbox 360. In the specific case of the console, it was all down to the processor’s RESET line. Flicker it quickly enough, and the processor doesn’t actually reset, but nonetheless its behavior changes. If you time the glitch right, you can get the processor to continue running through the bootloader’s instructions even if a hash check instruction failed. Of course, timing it right was hard, so it helps to temporarily slow down the processor.

From there, the article continues to explore the many and varied ways this hack played out against Microsoft’s copy protection across multiple models and revisions of the Xbox 360. The bit with the BGA ball connections is particularly inspired. [15432] also goes even deeper into a look at how the battle around the Xb0x 360’s DVD-ROM drive got heated.

We seldom talk about the Xbox 360 these days, but they used to grace these pages on the regular. Video after the break.

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