Monday, July 31
How to Make Your Own Multitool
The post How to Make Your Own Multitool appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
State attorneys general team up to scare you from “content theft sites”
Fifteen state attorneys general have teamed up with a pro-Hollywood group to launch a campaign aimed at dissuading the public from visiting file sharing sites.
To be sure, it's true that ads and other content on piracy sites can infect unsuspecting visitors with malware. But these attorneys general, in conjunction the Digital Citizens Alliance (DCA), really want you to know that visiting pirate sites can ruin both your life and your family's life. The scary black-hooded hacker on their video messages says it all.
"Hackers use pirate websites to infect your computer and steal your ID and financial information, or even take over your computer's camera without you knowing it," the top cops from the states say in the PSAs. The PSAs are appearing on social media, radio, and television this summer.
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Can cellphones handle vehicle-to-vehicle comms better than radio networks?
Nexar
NEW YORK—Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication (aka V2V) sometimes feels like the automotive world's Duke Nukem Forever. The idea of vehicles communicating with each other over short distances to warn drivers of potential obstacles or dangers is compelling. But it may as well be vaporware. Nearly 20 years after the Federal Communications Commission allocated radio spectrum for it, we're still waiting. Today, it may be more than a decade before enough V2V-equipped cars are on our roads to make a difference. But we might all be walking around with the solution in our pocket—smartphones. At least, that's the impression I walked away after a demo of Nexar's technology one recent morning in Manhattan.
A V2V traffic jam?
Dedicated Short-range Radio Communications (DSRC) networks communicate with each other at ranges of up to 984 feet (300m), operating in a band around 5.9GHz. And so the FCC set aside radio spectrum for V2V communications way back in 1999. But it took another 11 years for a wireless protocol—802.11p—to get nailed down, finally happening in 2010. From that point, it was another four years before the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced that it was ready to start the rule-making process to get V2V approved for cars. NHTSA finally released a draft rule in December 2016, and we believe it to be a regulation that the current administration are keen to see implemented. Once on the books, it would give car makers two model years—plus a little extra leeway for older models—to make the technology standard across their fleets.
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Beautiful Rocketeer Jetpack Replica Boasts Impressive Metalwork
Fans of the Rocketeer comic book and movie franchise will be familiar with its hero’s 1930s-styled rocket backpack. It’s an intricate construction of complex streamlined curves, that has inspired many recreations over the years.
Most Rocketeer jetpacks are made from plastic, foam, and other lightweight materials that will be familiar to cosplayers and costumers. But [David Guyton]’s one is different, he’s made it from sheet steel.
The attraction in his video is not so much the finished pack, though that is an impressive build. Instead it’s the workmanship, nay, the craftsmanship, as he documents every stage of the metalwork involved. The panel beating tools of a sheet metalworker’s trade are surprisingly simple, and it’s tempting to think as you watch: “I could do that!”. But behind the short video clips and apparent speed of the build lies many hours of painstaking work and a huge amount of skill. Some of us will have tried this kind of sheet work, few of us will have taken it to this level.
The video is below the break, it takes us through the constituent parts of the build, including at the end some of the engine details which are cast in resin. Watch it with a sense of awe!
Filed under: wearable hacks
It’s a Drone That Spins and a Fidget Spinner That Flies — It’s a SpinnerDrone!
The post It’s a Drone That Spins and a Fidget Spinner That Flies — It’s a SpinnerDrone! appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
The complete history of the IBM PC, part two: The DOS empire strikes
Nota bene: This is the concluding part of the surprisingly interesting history of the IBM PC. You should probably read part one of the story if you haven't already.
In November 1979, Microsoft's frequent partner Seattle Computer Products released a standalone Intel 8086 motherboard for hardcore hobbyists and computer manufacturers looking to experiment with this new and very powerful CPU. The 8086 was closely related to the 8088 that IBM chose for the PC; the latter was a cost-reduced version of the former, an 8-bit/16-bit hybrid chip rather than a pure 16-bit like the 8086.
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Maker Spotlight: Steven Goodwin
The post Maker Spotlight: Steven Goodwin appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Worried About Running Out Of Filament Mid-Print? Join It!
If you’ve ever cringed over throwing away any printer filament you know wouldn’t cover your next small part — let alone an overnight print — you may appreciate [starlino]’s method for joining two spools of filament together.
While there are other methods to track how much filament you’re using, this method removes some of the guesswork. First, snip the ends of the filament on a diagonal — as close to the same angle as possible. Cover both ends with shrink wrap tubing — 2mm tubing for 1.75mm filament for example — ensuring that the two ends overlap inside the wrap. Tape the filament to a heat resistant mat with Kapton tape, leaving exposed the joint between the two filaments. A temperature sensor may help you to find your filament’s melting point, or you can experiment as necessary to get a feel for it.
Melt the filament inside the tubing with a hot air soldering station or heat gun and cool it down promptly with a few blasts from an air duster. All that’s left is to cut the filament free of the tape and shrink wrap, scraping away any excess so as to prevent printer jams. Done! Now, back to printing! Check out the tutorial video after the break.nning
Filed under: 3d Printer hacks
Listen To Your Fermentation To Monitor Its Progress
If you are a wine, beer, or cider maker, you’ll know the ritual of checking for fermentation. As the yeast does its work of turning sugar into alcohol, carbon dioxide bubbles froth on the surface of your developing brew, and if your fermentation container has an airlock, large bubbles pass through the water within it on a regular basis. Your ears become attuned to the regular “Plop… plop… plop” sound they make, and from their interval you can tell what stage you have reached.
[Chris] automated this listening for fermentation bubbles, placing a microphone next to his airlock and detecting amplitude spikes through two techniques: one using an FFT algorithm and the other a bandpass filter. Both techniques yielded similar graphs for fermentation activity over time.
He has a few ideas for improvement, but notes that his system is vulnerable to external noises. There is also an admission that using light to detect bubbles might be a more practical solution as we have shown you more than once with other projects, but as with so many projects on these pages, it is the joy of the tech as much as the practicality that matters.
Filed under: Beer Hacks, cooking hacks
Fishing for AirPods with Magnets
Note to self: if you’re going to hack at 4 in the morning, have a plan to deal with the inevitable foul ups. Like being able to whip up an impromptu electromagnetic crane to retrieve an AirPod dropped out a window.
Apartment dweller [Tyler Efird]’s tale of woe began with a wee-hours 3D print in need of sanding. Leaning out his third-story window to blow off some dust, he knocked one AirPod free and gravity did the rest. With little light to search by and a flight to catch, the wayward AirPod sat at the bottom of a 10-foot shaft below his window, keeping company with a squad of spiders for two weeks. Unwilling to fork over $69 and wait a month and a half for a replacement, [Tyler] set about building a recovery device. A little magnet wire wound onto a bolt, a trashed 100-foot long Ethernet cable, and a DC bench supply were all he needed to eventually fish up the AirPod. And no spiders were harmed in the making of this hack.
Need to lift something a little heavier than an AirPod? A beefy microwave oven transformer electromagnet might be the thing for you. And confused about how magnets even work in the first place? Check out our primer on magnetism.
Filed under: misc hacks
False Claims On Kickstarter: What’s New?
Kickstarter and its ilk seem like the Wild West when it comes to claims of being “The world’s most (Insert feature here) device!” It does add something special when you can truly say you have the world record for a device though, and [MellBell Electronics] are currently running a Kickstarter claiming the worlds smallest Arduino compatible board called Pico.
We don’t want to knock them too much, they seem like a legit Kickstarter campaign who have at time of writing doubled their goal, but after watching their promo video, checking out their Kickstarter, and around a couple of minutes research, their claim of being the world’s smallest Arduino-compatible board seems to have been debunked. The Pico measures in at an impressive 0.6 in. x 0.6 in. with a total area of 0.36 sq.in. which is nothing to be sniffed at, but the Nanite 85 which we wrote up back in 2014 measures up at around 0.4 in. x 0.7in. with a total area of around 0.28 sq.in.. In this post-fact, fake news world we live in, does it really matter? Are we splitting hairs? Or are the Pico team a little fast and loose with facts and the truth?
There may be smaller Arduino compatible boards out there, and this is just a case study between these two. We think when it comes to making bold claims like “worlds smallest” or something similar perhaps performing a simple Google search just to be sure may be an idea.
Filed under: Arduino Hacks, Crowd Funding
Hackaday Links: July 30, 2017
What are you doing next weekend? How about going to the Vintage Computer Festival West at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Hackaday is sponsoring, and there are always a ton of awesome builds. Last year, someone played Tron on a Commodore PET. Not a video game — the movie.
In case anyone forgot, I created the most desirable independent hardware badge this year at Def Con. It’s a hilarious joke, I got three from OSH Park, thirty more in different colors from Seeed, and something, somewhere, jumped a shark. [Drew Fustini] also shared these PCBs on OSH Park. There were four orders. This is hilarious.
‘Member Minecraft? Redstone was awesome, and people built computers out of red dust and torches. Now it’s not as cool with all the fancy redstone components, and simpler is always better. Here’s bitmap logic, or a complete computer made with pixels. There’s already an 8-bit computer for this thing.
Frag somebody and own their computer. [Justin] recently found an exploit in Valve’s Source engine (TF2, CSGO, Portal 2…) that allows for remote code execution on clients and servers by loading a custom ragdoll model.
High bandwith, low-power, and long range. If you’re doing RF, you may pick two. LoRa is the RF solution that picked low power and long range. There are quite a few companies behind it, but we really haven’t seen many products using LoRa here in the states yet (then again, products that would use LoRa shouldn’t be very visible…). Now there’s an Open Source LoRa backend server. This is somewhat significant; LoRa isn’t a completely Open protocol, and all licensing goes through Semtech and the LoRa Alliance.
Filed under: Hackaday Columns, Hackaday links
Sunday, July 30
Find Instructions Hidden In Your CPU
There was a time when owning computer meant you probably knew most or all of the instructions it could execute. Your modern PC, though, has a lot of instructions, many of them meant for specialized operating system, encryption, or digital signal processing features.
There are known undocumented instructions in a lot of x86-class CPUs, too. What’s more, these days your x86 CPU might really be a virtual machine running on a different processor, or your CPU could have a defect or a bug. Maybe you want to run sandsfilter–a program that searches for erroneous or undocumented instructions. Who knows what is lurking in your CPU?
If you don’t think your CPU has a lot of instructions in it, have a look at the list of what’s inside a modern Intel chip and compare it to the relatively tiny list of the original 8086 instruction set (which is still in there, too). According to the project’s website:
Sandsifter has uncovered secret processor instructions from every major vendor; ubiquitous software bugs in disassemblers, assemblers, and emulators; flaws in enterprise hypervisors; and both benign and security-critical hardware bugs in x86 chips.
You can read more in the project’s whitepaper. We were honestly surprised to read: “Typically, several million undocumented instructions on your processor will be found…” However, it appears that these millions of instructions will fall into one of only a few categories.
We aren’t sure if any end user is likely to discover new undocumented instructions in production silicon with this tool. But it could be handy for testing and especially for testing emulation code. If you want even more instructions per chip, you could always get a device with 1,000 CPUs onboard.
Filed under: software hacks
Looking Forward To SHA2017
We’re at the start of August, which can only mean one thing. Europe’s hackers and makers are about to converge in a field somewhere for a long weekend of sitting around drinking beer and Club-Mate, eating unhealthy street food, being assaulted by some of the most underground chiptune electronic dance music on the planet, sharing the fruits of their labours with their peers, and gazing lovingly upon other people’s hacks. This year it’s the turn of the Netherlands, for over the first full weekend in August that country will host the SHA2017 outdoor hacker camp in a scouting camp on the polders. It promises to be quite an event, with just short of 4000 attendees spread over several fields, arenas, and social areas, and we’re going to be there. Tent and power lead with Schuko plug sorted, massive pile of stickers secured, DECT phone charged, emergency supplies of PG Tips packed.
There is so much to take in at these events that it can sometimes be difficult to catch everything. One can do the rounds as diligently as possible and still miss some of the cool stuff, so this is where you come in. Are you going to SHA? Are you bringing anything you consider cool to the event? Tell us about it in the comments, we’d love to hear about it as would we’re sure the rest of our readers.
Meanwhile, if you think you’ve missed the boat, don’t panic! At the time of writing, there are about 180 tickets still unsold, but they’ll be going fast! Head over to the SHA2017 tickets site to get yours.
(The stripey header, in case you were wondering, is SHA2017’s branding using as you might have guessed, the SHA algorithm to generate HTML colours. What you see are the colours for “Hackaday”.)
Filed under: cons
Better Call Saul needed 3D printing and an Arduino to arm Mike Ehrmantraut
Learn a little about the tech behind Better Call Saul (video link)
Warning: This story contains mild spoilers for Breaking Bad and S3 of Better Call Saul.
Whether on Better Call Saul or Breaking Bad, Mike Ehrmantraut has proven himself handy within all sorts of situations. So when faced with quite the pickle on this recent season of Saul—the character discovers some shady organization has planted a GPS tracker of sorts within his car’s gas cap—he doesn’t panic. Of course, Mike Ehrmantraut has a plan. He even knows a guy who can get him a MILSPEC-like tracker of his own.
No spoilers, but neither Joseph Ulibarri nor Jason Delap turn out to be Ehrmantraut’s guy. Still, this duo is absolutely essential to putting the gear in Mike’s hands. That’s because this particular GPS tracker didn’t exist before S3 of Better Call Saul, and Ulibarri (special effects) and Delap (props) help lead the behind-the-scenes effort needed to change that. “We try to MacGyver stuff up when things that don’t exist need to,” Delap tells Ars.
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This Week in Making: Walking Mech Cosplay, SeaCharger’s Return Home, and More
The post This Week in Making: Walking Mech Cosplay, SeaCharger’s Return Home, and More appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Autonomous Boat Sails the High Seas
As the human population continues to rise and the amount of industry increases, almost no part of the globe feels the burdens of this activity more than the oceans. Whether it’s temperature change, oxygen or carbon dioxide content, or other characteristics, the study of the oceans will continue to be an ongoing scientific endeavor. The one main issue, though, is just how big the oceans really are. To study them in-depth will require robots, and for that reason [Mike] has created an autonomous boat.
This boat is designed to be 3D printed in sections, making it easily achievable for anyone with access to a normal-sized printer. The boat uses the uses the APM autopilot system and Rover firmware making it completely autonomous. Waypoints can be programmed in, and the boat will putter along to its next destination and perform whatever tasks it has been instructed. The computer is based on an ESP module, and the vessel has a generously sized payload bay.
While the size of the boat probably limits its ability to cross the Pacific anytime soon, it’s a good platform for other bodies of water and potentially a building block for larger ocean-worthy ships that might have an amateur community behind them in the future. In fact, non-powered vessels that sail the high seas are already a reality.
Filed under: robots hacks
Portable Stir-Fry Range
If you love a good stir-fry, you know that it can be a challenge to make on your stove at home. Engineer gourmet and Youtuber [Alex French Guy Cooking], in collaboration with [Make:], whipped up a portable range capable of making delectable stir-fry.
There are three major problems when it comes to cooking stir-fry: woks are typically unstable on normal burners, those burners don’t tend to heat from a center point out, and they usually aren’t hot enough. [Alex]’s 12,000BTU portable stove is great for regular applications, but doesn’t cut it when it comes to making an authentic stir-fry.
To focus the burner’s heat, he cut and bent a stainless steel baking ring into the shape of an exhaust nozzle — not unlike a jet engine — and lightly modified the range to accommodate the nozzle. He also added a larger baking ring with air flow holes for the wok to rest on. Two down, but there’s the issue of it not being hot enough.
So, why not use two butane canisters to double the output to 22,200 BTUs!
After a few modifications to the portable stove and it was able to accommodate a second burner neatly within the original. And, in the interest of making the stove as safe as possible, [Alex] insulated the second canister’s housing, made some modifications to the starter and added a suction cup to keep it from shifting during the spirited stir-fry cooking process.
[Alex] has also made a second video showing proper stir-fry cooking technique for those of you who have been salivating since you started reading. Just grab your tools and away you go. Or have your robo-cook take care of your meals for you.
Filed under: cooking hacks
Spice Up Your Bench With 3D Printed Dancing Springs
Not all projects are made equal. Some are designed to solve a problem while others are just for fun. Entering the ranks of the most useless machines is a project by [Vladimir Mariano] who created the 3D Printed Dancing Springs. It is a step up from 3D printing a custom slinky and will make a fine edition to any maker bench.
The project uses 3D printed coils made of transparent material that is mounted atop geared platforms and attached to a fixed frame. The gears are driven by a servo motor. The motor rotates the gears and the result is a distortion in the spring. This distortion is what the dancing is all about. To add to the effect, [Vladimir Mariano] uses RGB LEDs controlled by an ATmega32u4.
You can’t dance without music. So [Vladimir] added a MEMs microphone to pick up noise levels which are used to control the servo and lights. The code, STL files and build instructions are available on the website for you to follow along. If lights and sound are your things, you must check out the LED Illuminated Isomorphic Keyboard from the past.
Filed under: musical hacks
Michael Ossmann Pulls DSSS Out of Nowhere
[Michael Ossmann] spoke on Friday to a packed house in the wireless hacking village at DEF CON 25. There’s still a day and a half of talks remaining but it will be hard for anything to unseat his Reverse Engineering Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) talk as my favorite of the con.
DSSS is a technique used to transmit reliable data where low signal strength and high noise are likely. It’s used in GPS communications where the signal received from a satellite is often far too small for you to detect visually on a waterfall display. Yet we know that data is being received and decoded by every cell phone on the planet. It is also used for WiFi management packets, ZigBee, and found in proprietary systems especially any dealing with satellite communications.
[Michael] really pulled a rabbit out of a hat with his demos which detected the DSSS signal parameters in what appeared to be nothing but noise. You can see below the signal with and without noise; the latter is completely indiscernible as a signal at all to the eye, but can be detected using his techniques.
Detecting DSSS with Simple Math
DSSS transmits binary values as a set called a chip. The chip for digital 1 might be 11100010010 with the digital 0 being the inverse of that. You can see this in the slide at the top of this article. Normal DSSS decoding compares the signal to expected values, using a correlation algorithm that multiplies the two and gives a score. If the score is high enough, 11 in this example, then a bit has been detected.
To reverse engineer this it is necessary to center on the correct frequency and then detect the chip encoding. GNU radio is the tool of choice for processing a DSSS capture from a SPOT Connect module designed to push simple messages to a satellite communication network. The first math trick is to multiply the signal by itself and then look at spectrum analysis to see if there is a noticeable spike indicating the center of the frequency. This can then be adjusted with an offset and smaller spikes on either side will be observed.
Detecting symbols within the chip is another math trick. Subtract each successive value in the signal from the last and you will mostly end up with zero (high signal minus high signal is zero, etc). But every time the signal spikes you’re looking at a transition point and the visualization begins to look like logic traced out on an oscilloscope. This technique can deal with small amounts of noise but becomes more robust with a bit of filtering.
This sort of exploration of the signal is both fun and interesting. But if you want to actually get some work done you need a tool. [Michael] built his own in the form of a python script that cobbles up a .cfile and spits out the frequency offset, chip rate, chip sequence length, and decoded chip sequence.
Running his sample file through with increasing levels of noise added, the script was rock solid on detecting the parameters of the signal. Interestingly, it is even measuring the 3 parts per million difference between the transmitter and receiver clocks in the detected chip rate value. What isn’t rock solid is the actual bit information, which begins to degrade as the noise is increased. But just establishing the parameters of the protocol being used is the biggest part of the battle and this is a dependable solution for doing that quickly and automatically.
You can give the script a try. It is part of [Michael’s] Clock Recovery repo. This talk was recorded and you should add it to your reminder list for after the con when talks begin to be published. To hold you over until then, we suggest you take a look at his RF Design workshop from the 2015 Hackaday Superconference.
Filed under: cons, wireless hacks
Injecting Code Into Mouse Firmware Should Be Your Next Hack
Here’s a DEF CON talk that uses tools you likely have and it should be your next hacking adventure. In their Saturday morning talk [Mark Williams] and [Rob Stanely] walked through the process of adding their own custom code to a gaming mouse. The process is a crash course in altering a stock firmware binary while still retaining the original functionality.
The jumping off point for their work is the esports industry. The scope of esporting events has blown up in recent years. The International 2016 tournament drew 17,000 attendees with 5 million watching online. The prize pool of $20 million ($19 million of that crowdfunded through in-game purchases) is a big incentive to gain a competitive edge to win. Contestants are allowed to bring their own peripherals which begs the questions: can you alter a stock gaming mouse to do interesting things?
Perhaps the biggest leap in this project is that the firmware wasn’t read-protected. Once the data, clock, and ground pads on the underside of the board were connected to the Discovery board the firmware was easy to dump and the real fun began.
There are a few useful skills that make taking on this project a worthwhile learning experience. To compile your custom code correctly you need to choose the correct offset address for where it will end up once pasted into the firmware binary. The vector table of the original code must be rewritten to jump to the injected code first, and it will need to jump back to the mouse execution once it has run. The program flow on the left shows this. Both of these jumps require the program counter and registers to be saved and restored. The ARM stack is subtractive and the address will need to be updated to work with the added code.
The talk ended with a live demo that worked like a charm. You can check out the code in the MDHomeBrew repo. In this case the PowerShell script adds keyboard shortcuts for DOOM cheats. But like we said before, the experience of getting under the hood with the firmware binary is where the value will be for most people. With this success under your belt you can take on more difficult challenges like [Sprite_TM’s] gaming keyboard hack where the firmware couldn’t easily be dumped and an update binary was quite obsfucated.
Filed under: cons, Microcontrollers, peripherals hacks
Saturday, July 29
Everything You Need To Know About Logic Probes
We just spent the last hour watching a video, embedded below, that is the most comprehensive treasure trove of information regarding a subject that we should all know more about — sniffing logic signals. Sure, it’s a long video, but [Joel] of [OpenTechLab] leaves no stone unturned.
[Joel] knows a thing or two about sigrok because he started the incredibly slick PulseView GUI project for it, but that doesn’t stop him from walking you through the command-line interface, which is really useful for automated data capture and analysis, if that’s your sort of thing. Both are worth knowing.
But it’s actually the hardware details where this video shines. He breaks down all of the logic probes on his bench, points out their design pros and cons, and uses that basis to explain just what kind of performance you can expect for $20 or so. You’ll walk away with an in-depth understanding of the whole toolchain, from grabber probes to GUIs.
Indeed, toward the end, [Joel] simulates the parasitic inductance of using flying-lead connectors and demonstrates how it destroys high-frequency signals. Even if the logic analyzer were able to sample fast enough, no signal makes it that far. But he doesn’t wave his hands around the problem — he shows you. And then he mentions hard-core-hacker-friendly tricks to get up into the hundreds of megahertz, with a hat-tip to [Bunnie Huang].
In our opinion sigrok, and the el cheapo hardware logic probes that it supports deserve a place in every hacker’s toolbox. This video is the best introduction to the software, and the topic in general, that we’ve ever seen.
We’ve featured two other videos from the [OpenTechLab], one on the ICE40 FPGA and one on high-frequency synthesis, that you might also like. So put away whatever brain-rotting Hollywood blockbuster you have on the shelf, and make some popcorn for quality nerd time.
Filed under: hardware
Staged body cam footage gets dozens of criminals set free—and more likely
Maryland prosecutors have tossed 34 criminal cases and are re-examining dozens more in the aftermath of recent revelations that a Baltimore police officer accidentally recorded himself planting drugs in a trash-strewn alley.
Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby said that, in all, 123 cases are under review in the wake of a scandal in which one officer has been suspended and two others put on administrative duty. Body cam footage revealed nearly two weeks ago showed one of the officers planting drugs when he didn't realize his body cam was recording. The Baltimore Police Department's body cams, like many across the nation, capture footage 30 seconds before an officer presses the record button. The footage was turned over to defense attorneys as part of a drug prosecution—and that's when the misdeed was uncovered.
"We are dismissing those cases which relied exclusively on the credibility of these officers," Mosby told a news conference Friday. She said the dismissed cases, some of which have already been prosecuted, involved weapons and drugs. Another dozen cases will stand because of "independent corroborative evidence," she said.
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