Friday, July 31

Florida teen arrested, charged with being “mastermind” of Twitter hack

Extreme close-up image of the Twitter logo on the screen of a smartphone.

Enlarge (credit: Tom Raftery / Flickr)

A Florida teen has been arrested and charged with 30 felony counts related to the high-profile hijacking of more than 100 Twitter accounts earlier this month.

Federal law enforcement arrested Graham Ivan Clark, 17, in Tampa earlier today, the Office of Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren said. The arrest followed an investigation spearheaded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department.

"These crimes were perpetrated using the names of famous people and celebrities, but they're not the primary victims here," said Warren. "This 'Bit-Con' was designed to steal money from regular Americans from all over the country, including here in Florida. This massive fraud was orchestrated right here in our backyard, and we will not stand for that."

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Human sperm swim more like otters than eels, study finds

For more than 300 years, most scientists have assumed that sperm "swim" through fluids by wriggling their tails back and forth like eels to propel themselves forward. But according to a new paper in Science Advances, this is actually an optical illusion—the result of viewing the creatures from above with 2D microscopes. New observations with 3D microscopy have revealed that human sperm actually roll as they swim, like otters, essentially corkscrewing themselves forward.

"With over half of infertility caused by male factors, understanding the human sperm tail is fundamental to developing future diagnostic tools to identify unhealthy sperm," said co-author Hermes Gadelha from the University of Bristol.

The honor of directly observing the first sperm rests with Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a 17th-century Dutch draper with a side interest in science—specifically, building microscopes and coming up with innovative manufacturing methods to make better lenses for said microscopes. Only a few of his microscopes have survived, but they are capable of magnifying small objects up to 275 times, and historians believe some of his instruments could have achieved magnifications as high as 500 times.

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Transform Kicad Design To Patchwork For Isolation Routing

Tuning a desktop router and your board designs for isolation routing can be a bit tricky, with thin traces usually being the first victim. For simple prototype boards you usually don’t need tightly packed traces, you just want to isolate the nets. To do this with a minimum amount of routing, [Michael Schembri] created kicad-laser-min, a command-line utility that takes a Kicad PCB design and expands all the tracks and pads to their maximum possible width.

Laser scribed PCB with maximum track widths

The software takes one layer of the PCB layout, converts it to black and white, and then runs a C++ Voronoi algorithm on it to dilate each track and pad until it meets another expanding region. Each region is colourised, and OpenCV edge detection is used to produce the contours that need to be milled or etched. A contour following algorithm is then used to create the G-code. The header image shows the output of each step.

Full source code is available on GitHub. [Michael] has had good results with his own boards, which are scribed using a laser cutter before etching, but welcomes testing and feedback from other users. He has found that OpenCV doesn’t always completely close all the contours, but the gaps are usually smaller than the engraving width of his laser, so no shorts are created.

This is basically “Scribble style” prototyping with CAD and CNC tools. If you prefer scribe and etch, you might consider building a simple PCB shaker for faster etching. If you have a router but want to avoid the dust, you can use a carbide scribe to scratch out the tracks without needing to etch.

PLAN C LIVE: Educational Kits

Kits enable making. They are especially good for beginners and young makers.  They are also a convenience for parents who want to encourage children to start making but don’t have time to track down tools and supplies. The number of kits and the different types of kits by and for […]

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GM teams up with EVgo to deploy more than 2,700 new DC fast chargers

Two masked, socially distanced people charge their electric cars.

Enlarge / The new EVgo stations will be available to drivers starting in early 2021 and located in cities and suburbs. The chargers will be powered 100 percent by renewable energy and located in highly visible areas. (credit: General Motors)

On Friday, General Motors and the electric vehicle charging company EVgo announced they are partnering to beef up the nation's DC fast charging infrastructure. The plan is to deploy more than 2,700 DC fast chargers, capable of charging at 100-350kW, with at least four chargers per station. The rollout will begin in 2021 and should be complete by 2025.

GM is about to put into production a new battery EV architecture called BEV3 and a new battery pack design called Ultium. The company also has plans for multiple new BEVs built on these flexible underpinnings.

The first of these will be an SUV, the Cadillac Lyriq, which is being officially unveiled on August 7; next after that should be an electric GMC Hummer, which may well pack a 200kWh battery and an 800V architecture (which would therefore benefit from a 350kW charger).

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CampZone 2020 Badge Literally Speaks to Us

The pandemic has left my usual calendar of events in shambles this year. Where I’d have expected to have spent a significant portion of my summer mingling with our wonderful and diverse community worldwide, instead I’m sitting at home cracking open a solitary Club-Mate and listening to muffled techno music while trying to imagine myself in a field somewhere alongside several thousand hackers.

As a knock-on effect of the event cancellations there’s another thing missing this summer, the explosion of creativity in the world of electronic conference badges has faltered. Badges are thin on the ground this year, so the few that have made it to production are to be treasured as reminders that life goes on and there will be another golden summer of hacker camps in the future. This year, the CampZone 2020 badge was given its own voice and perform neat tricks like presenting a programming interface via WebUSB!

A Badge, That Isn’t Quite A Badge

All the parts laid out

CampZone is a European event mostly for the gaming community but incorporating the HackZone event within it. The in-person conference has been cancelled this year and gone online like so many others, but that hasn’t stopped its badge creator Tom Clement and team bringing out the CampZone 2020 badge anyway.

The result is the AerPane, pronounced “Ear-pain” in a reference to the 2019 i-Pane, and a design that continues the theme of CampZone badges by providing an in-your-face multimedia experience for musical experimenters with onboard speakers and a very bright LED-lit 16-key silicone keyboard. It runs the well-established badge.team firmware under the skin, so when I ordered my badge I was interested to see just how they had managed to incorporate a rich interface into such minimal UI hardware.

Inserting the flat ribbon cable is a little fiddly

In my package from the Netherlands was the badge kit, containing two PCBs, a bag of hardware, and the silicone keyboard overlay. The badge could be ordered with either of two versions of the keyboard, one with 12 mm tall keys and the other that I fitted with shorter ones about 8 mm. The main PCB is about 111 mm by 100 mm and has a row of touch buttons, the keypad button contacts, and the LEDs on the top with the rest of the components on the underside. The smaller PCB meanwhile is about 40 mm by 100 mm, holds the speakers, and is connected via a short flat ribbon cable. Assembly was fairly straightforward, with the silicone held in place by the plastic stand-offs that double as a stand for the badge, and the speaker board secured by a pair of clip-on 45 degree plastic angle brackets. The speakers themselves are secured with a self-adhesive ring, and have small PCB connectors. The fiddliest part of the assembly is fitting the ribbon cable, something in which I found a good pair of tweezers to be very useful.

The components on the rear of the PCB

Looking at the hardware on the underside of the board, there is an ESP32-WROVER-2 module that does the heavy lifting, and an Apex Microelectronics APM32F103C8 definitely-not-an-STM32 microcontroller that handles the USB interface. The ESP has a microSD card holder, one of the type with the flip-up lid rather than a slide-in. Further down there are a brace of LED driver chips and a Shenzhen Titan TM8211 i2s DAC with a pair of audio driver chips. Finally there is an unpopulated area for a battery charger and LiPo circuit. Connectivity comes via a USB-C port at the rear of the main board. Mentioning the unpopulated battery circuit area brings us to an important point about the badge, in a strict sense it’s not really a badge at all if you take a badge to be a wearable device. Instead it’s a standalone unit that’s best sitting on a flat surface.

Connecting the badge for the first time to USB-C power sends it into a one-off startup sequence, with flashing LEDs and impressive sounds, and then we gain our first experience of the badge interface as a synthesised voice tells us that a long press on a lit-up button reveals the app it launches, and a short press launches that app. It comes with five apps preinstalled: a simple polyphonic sine wave synthesiser, a four-in-a-row game, a MIDI controller app, a Dutch radio app, and an app that acts as a USB-HID keyboard and types “Cyber” to the host computer. This last one refers to a “CYBER” meme among European hackerspaces, and yes of course its occurrence in the previous sentence was typed using the app on my badge.

WebUSB Brings A New Convenience To Badges

The badge’s physical characteristics now described, it’s time to plug it into the computer and investigate its other features. It’s here that this badge really pushes the envelope in ease-of-use terms, because instead of requiring a toolchain or a terminal, it can be accessed directly for development via WebUSB. Simply point a WebUSB-capable browser at webusb.hackz.one, and immediately there is a list of available apps. Just like all the other badge.team badges, these are hosted on their app store referred to as the hatchery, and using MicroPython they are very easy to write without low-level knowledge of the hardware itself. Even better, the AerPane brings development into the browser via WebUSB with a code editor and a MicroPython prompt, allowing instant code hackery. I dove in and borrowed some code from one of the existing clock apps to combine with a project I wrote years ago, and within about half an hour I had my resistor colour code clock up on the hatchery.

This badge was designed for a gamer event at which many of the participants are not coders and are more likely to own a Windows machine than one running Linux or another OS. Thus the WebUSB approach makes excellent sense as a route to entice them into coding for it, but we can see it’s something that may be less welcome in some circles as WebUSB isn’t supported by all browsers. In particular Firefox users will have to find a Chrome-based browser, and I had to follow a few instructions to get it all working with Chromium on my Ubuntu box. Its design though is fresh and new, it’s a fun and engaging peripheral that you’ll want to play with, and its ease of coding is taken to new heights with the WebUSB interface. It’s all open-source, and we are really looking forward to seeing some of its ideas influencing the next crop of badges from the global #BadgeLife community.

Hackaday Podcast 078: Happy B-Day MP3, Eavesdropping on a Mars Probe, Shadowcasting 7-Segments, and a Spicy Commodore 64

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys go down the rabbit hole of hacky hacks. A talented group of radio amateurs have been recording and decoding the messages from Tianwen-1, the Mars probe launched by the Chinese National Space Administration on July 23rd. We don’t know exactly how magnets work, but know they do a great job of protecting your plasma cutter. You can’t beat the retro-chic look of a Commodore 64’s menu system, even if it’s tasked with something mundane like running a meat smoker. And take a walk with us down MP3’s memory lane.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (~65 MB)

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

Episode 078 Show Notes:

New This Week:

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

Quick Hacks:

Can’t-Miss Articles:

A number of good USB-C chargers and cables are on sale today

A number of good USB-C chargers and cables are on sale today

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is headlined by a handful of deals on worthwhile USB-C wall chargers, cables, and portable batteries over at Amazon. The retailer is running a one-day Gold Box sale on a variety of Anker chargers, for one, but we've also compiled a few other discounts on fast-charging USB-C accessories we've tested in the past.

These include Aukey's PB-Y13, a slim 18W portable battery with a USB-C Power Delivery port—which is powerful enough to charge all recent iPhones and many Android phones at maximum speeds—alongside two USB-A ports. We've recommended it in our guide to the best USB-C accessories; it's currently down to $19 from its usual $30 with the code "YHXP6UE6" at checkout. If you need a fast wall charger, meanwhile, the Dealmaster can vouch for Aukey's PA-D5, which includes two USB-C PD ports, one of which can charge some (thinner) laptops at up to 60W, and uses gallium nitride (GaN) tech to put them both in a more-compact-than-usual package. It's down to $25 from a typical street price of $40 when you clip the on-page coupon. Elsewhere, if you're willing to pay for a higher-quality fast-charging cable, Anker's six-foot PowerLine III and PowerLine+ II can reliably refill Android and iOS devices, respectively, and are both down to their lowest prices to date.

We have more recommended USB-C charger deals below, but first, a caveat: some smartphones are already capable of utilizing higher-power charging solutions than an 18W battery like the PB-Y13 can provide, and firms like Qualcomm are working on solutions that should reduce charging times even further. But for recent devices that can't make use of all that power today, the deals below should still provide good value. And if you don't need a new charger, we also have discounts on Lenovo ThinkPads, portable SSDs, and more. Have a look at the full rundown below.

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Amazon investing $10 billion to compete against SpaceX in satellite broadband

Illustration of Earth with lines connecting cities to represent a global network.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Yuichiro Chino)

Amazon has received US approval to launch 3,236 low-Earth orbit satellites for its planned "Project Kuiper" broadband service.

A Federal Communications Commission order granting Amazon's application was released Thursday. Amazon said in a blog post that it will invest more than $10 billion in the project.

"This investment will create jobs and infrastructure around the United States, build and scale our ground network, accelerate satellite testing and manufacturing, and let us deliver an affordable customer terminal that will make fast, reliable broadband accessible to communities around the world," Amazon said. Amazon will target areas without good Internet service and said that "Project Kuiper will deliver high-speed, low-latency broadband service to places beyond the reach of traditional fiber or wireless networks."

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Google suffers first revenue decline as ads hit by pandemic

Google logo seen during Google Developer Days (GDD) in Shanghai, China, September 2019.

Enlarge / Google logo seen during Google Developer Days (GDD) in Shanghai, China, September 2019. (credit: Lyu Liang | VCG | Getty Images)

Google has suffered its first recorded revenue decline, as the coronavirus crisis wiped 8 percent from advertising income in the latest quarter and depressed parent company Alphabet’s revenues by 2 percent from the year before.

Despite the unprecedented fall-off in its core business, however, Google executives said conditions had improved as the quarter progressed, and offered cautious optimism for a return to growth in the current period.

Sundar Pichai, chief executive, said Google had seen “the early signs of stabilization, as users returned to commercial activity online.”

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Retail listing points to “free-to-play multiplayer” for Halo Infinite

Halo Infinite may offer free access to its multiplayer modes, if some now-removed text from an online store listing out of the UK is to be believed.

The pre-registration page for Xbox Series X pre-orders at British retailer Smyths Toys included a section on Halo Infinite that, as of earlier this morning, mentioned the game will include "a groundbreaking free-to-play multiplayer experience," as well as "up to 120 fps" frame rates. That section has been removed from the current version of the page in recent hours but can still be seen in the latest Google Cache (and this Internet Archive snapshot).

A free-to-play multiplayer mode would be a big departure for the Halo games (and for all Xbox titles), which have required a paid Xbox Live subscription for online play since the days of the original Xbox. The wording could also suggest that the multiplayer portion could be an entirely separate free-to-play app akin to Activision's recent Call of Duty: Warzone.

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Huawei somehow becomes the #1 phone manufacturer, thanks to the coronavirus

Huawei's logo seen at a technology conference.

Enlarge / Huawei's logo at the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona in November 2019. (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images)

Despite aggressive sanctions from the US government, Huawei has become the number 1 smartphone manufacturer in the world, according to Canalys. The company's 55.8 million smartphone shipments in Q2 2020 put it at the top of Canalys' charts for the quarter, marking the first time the company has passed Samsung for the top spot.

Huawei's top spot isn't really due to it defeating US sanctions. Huawei's sales are actually down slightly compared to last year, but in the age of the coronavirus, sales being down only "slightly" is a major win. Huawei sales are down 5 percent from Q2 last year, but Samsung sales have been tanking and are down 30 percent year over year. Samsung's dramatic drop was enough to give Huawei the top spot at 55.8 million, compared to Samsung's 53.7 million.

Canalys shows smartphone sales are down nearly across the board this year, with overall shipments falling 14 percent compared to Q2 2019. The one company with growth is Apple, in the #3 spot, which is up a whopping 25 percent. Canalys credits the new iPhone SE for a lot of that success, saying that "[i]ts new iPhone SE was critical in the quarter, accounting for around 28% of its global volume, while iPhone 11 remained a strong best-seller at nearly 40%."

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The Internet of Bubble Machines

Everyone loves a good bubble machine. These oddly satisfying novelty items have brought children and adults mindless entertainment since their inception. [8BitsAndAByte] had the same thought, but wanted to give their bubble machine a taste of the IoT-age.

First, they modified an off-the-shelf bubble machine with a Raspberry Pi and relay module. The Pi can easily trigger the bubbling mechanism by controlling power to the machine using the relay. Seems simple enough. The part of this project that might be a bit more unfamiliar to you is controlling the robot over the internet using remo.tv.

Remo.tv is a robot controller platform that’s both free and open-source, and we’ve seen [8BitsAndAByte] take advantage of this web controller before. Seems like they’re really getting the hang of it. Their writeup links to a detailed setup guide for configuring the Pi, so hopefully, that’s not too much trouble.

Couple the IoT setup with a Pi camera and you’ve got a live stream that’s admittedly oddly satisfying to watch with or without the bubbles.

Microcontrollers, Meet MicroBlocks

Physical Computing Software For Education That Runs Live, On The Microcontroller

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This Week in Security: Twilio, PogoTV, and BootHole

Twilio, the cloud provider for all things telecom, had an embarrassing security fail a couple weeks ago. The problem was the Amazon S3 bucket that Twilio was using to host part of their public facing content. The bucket was configured for public read-write access. Anyone could use the Amazon S3 API to make changes to the files stored there.

The files in question were protected behind Cloudflare’s CDN, but there’s a catch to Cloudflare’s service. If you know the details of the service behind Cloudflare, it can often be interacted with directly. In many cases, knowing the IP address of the server being protected is enough to totally bypass Cloudflare altogether. In this case, the service behind the CDN is Amazon’s S3. Any changes made to the files there are picked up by the CDN.

Someone discovered the insecure bucket, and modified a Javascript file that is distributed as part of the Twilio JS SDK. That modification was initially described as “non-malicious”, but in the official incident report, Twilio states that the injected code is part of an ongoing magecart campaign carried out against misconfigured S3 buckets.

IPTV

We received a story on the Hackaday tip line this week about a Swedish IPTV service, Pongo IPTV. This report is unsubstantiated, but there seems to be something going on. At the very least, pongotv.com is currently returning a Cloudflare error, “This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks.”

A pair of Youtube videos seem to show access to the Pongotv backend, with exposed customer records and all. At this point, I have to stress that this is unconfirmed report. Based on the details provided, it sounds like the tipster is actually pretty closely involved with this story, maybe even part of the group that is behind the attack.

Espressif

[Lukas Bachschwell] discovered a flaw in the Espressif SDK, tracked as CVE-2020-12638. The vulnerability affects devices running firmware built using the vulnerable SDK. In short, it allows a WiFi authentication downgrade attack. An attacker can inject WiFi traffic, and cause the device to connect to a network under the attacker’s control. For devices used for home automation and other similar applications, this could have serious consequences. Patches are available for most of the devices the SDK covers, and the rest are in progress.

D-Link Patches EOL Device

In response to a series of flaws discovered by researchers at Loginsoft, D-Link has released firmware for an End Of Life device, and strongly recommends taking other affected devices out of use. The devices in question are the DAP-1520, DAP-1522, and DIR-816L.

These aren’t sophisticated vulnerabilities, either. The first one, CVE-2020-15892, can be triggered as simply as sending 256 characters as the password when trying to log in. The login page limits this value to 15 characters, but that limit is imposed on the client side, so an attacker can easily manipulate the raw response to bypass that restriction. The longer than expected password overflows the buffer and crashes the device. A proper exploit would take it over instead.

Another rather trivial vulnerability, CVE-2020-15893, affects the DIR-816L. A shell command can be injected in a UPnP request, as simply as including a semicolon in the packet data. When the UPnP request is parsed, part of it is used as a command line option. Including a semicolon breaks out of that command, and allows executing arbitrary commands.

Sharepoint

CVE-2020-1147 is a vulnerability in Microsoft Sharepoint, found by multiple researchers independently. [Steven] at Source Insight wrote up an explainer on the bug, and concludes that at its heart it’s a deserialization issue. In this case, it seems that functions of a DataSet object, like parse() and Deserialize() can be overwritten by the data being deserialized.

The write-up includes a full PoC, so consider this vulnerability to fully weaponized already. Patches are available, so be sure to go take care of your Sharepoint servers. [Steven] also suggests that we’ll see this same bug show up in other .net applications, as the DataSet object has been considered safe for outside data.

Apple Research Device

Apple has announced the Security Research Device, a modified iPhone that is essentially rooted from the factory. The program is run in typical Apple fashion, as the device is only loaned out 12 months at a time, and comes with a list of do’s and don’ts. I have to wonder if this is a response to Google Project Zero’s debuggable iPhone work from last year. Either way, Project Zero’s [Ben Hawkes] has already issued a statement that the program is likely a non-starter for them, as their strict 90 day disclosure policy is incompatible with the sign-up agreement.

BootHole

And finally, a vulnerability in Grub2 was released this week, BootHole. This vulnerability is a rather simple buffer overflow bug that can be triggered by a malicious grub.cfg file. You might point out that if an attacker can modify grub.cfg, isn’t the system hopelessly compromised anyway? This is a fair question, and the answer is yes, usually. What makes BootHole novel is that taking control of Grub in this way can allow a Secure Boot bypass. This will obviously be more important in specific use cases where Secure Boot is a key part of security.

This vulnerability was found by [eclypsium], who privately disclosed the bug to the Grub developers and other upstream projects. Patches are available, so make sure to get those updates installed. If your curious about the in-depth details, the writeup and PDF on BootHole are quite detailed, go check them out.

COVID-19 hospital data is a hot mess after feds take control

Members of the medical staff treat a patient in the COVID-19 intensive care unit at the United Memorial Medical Center on July 28, 2020 in Houston, Texas. COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations have spiked since Texas reopened, pushing intensive-care units to full capacity and sparking concerns about a surge in fatalities as the virus spreads.

Enlarge / Members of the medical staff treat a patient in the COVID-19 intensive care unit at the United Memorial Medical Center on July 28, 2020 in Houston, Texas. COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations have spiked since Texas reopened, pushing intensive-care units to full capacity and sparking concerns about a surge in fatalities as the virus spreads. (credit: Getty | Go Nakamura)

As COVID-19 hospitalizations in the US approach the highest levels seen in the pandemic so far, national efforts to track patients and hospital resources remain in shambles after the federal government abruptly seized control of data collection earlier this month.

The Trump administration issued a directive to hospitals and states July 10, instructing them to stop submitting their daily COVID-19 hospital data to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—which has historically handled such public health data—and instead submit it to a new database in the hands of the Department of Health and Human Services. The change was ostensibly made to streamline federal data collection, which is critical for assessing the state of the pandemic and distributing needed resources, such as personal protective equipment and remdesivir, an antiviral drug shown to shorten COVID-19 recovery times.

Watchdogs and public health experts were immediately aghast by the switch to the HHS database, fearing the data would be manipulated for political reasons or hidden from public view all together. However, the real threat so far has been the administrative chaos. The switch took effect July 15, giving hospitals and states just days to adjust to the new data collection and submission process.

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Patent Law And The Legality Of Making Something Similar

When [Erich Styger] recently got featured on Hackaday with his meta-clock project, he probably was not expecting to get featured again so soon, this time regarding a copyright claim on the ‘meta-clock’ design. This particular case ended with [Erich] removing the original blog article and associated PCB design files, leaving just the summaries, such as the original Hackaday article on the project.

Obviously, this raises the question of whether any of this is correct; if one sees a clock design, or other mechanisms that appeals and tries to replicate its looks and functioning in some fashion, is this automatically a breach of copyright? In the case of [Erich]’s project, one could argue that at first glance both devices look remarkably similar. One might also argue that this is rather unavoidable, considering the uncomplicated design of the original.

Not copyright, but patent law

An inherent property of copyright law in most jurisdictions is that the act of creating a work automatically grants one the copyright to that work. In most jurisdictions (e.g. the EU), signing away one’s copyright is even forbidden by law. Not so with patent law. Here we have two distinct forms, one being patents as we all know and love them, for the patenting of ideas and inventions. The other form concerns itself with what a product looks like: its design.

In the US this is referred to as a ‘design patent‘, while elsewhere it is referred to as a ‘registered design’, which effectively comes down to the same thing. It means that one can patent for example the shape of a Coca-Cola bottle, or in the case of the folk at Humans Since 1982 (‘HS1982’) the look of their meta-clocks, in not one, but two EU registered designs.

Comparative analysis

We can compare the two designs side by side to see how similar they are.

The top design is [Erich]’s, while the lower design is HS1982’s clock (black version). Both have the same 8×3 hole pattern, similar color scheme, and so on. That the HS1982’s version is in a mineral composite housing and [Erich]’s in a wooden enclosure is hereby not relevant as it does not change the design. To the casual observer it might indeed appear as if both follow the same design.

Since design registrations are meant to deter companies from for example selling their own soft drink in a bottle that looks exactly like a Coca-Cola one, down to the label design, it makes sense that HS1982 came down on [Erich] and others with similar clock designs like the proverbial sack of bricks.

Naturally, the next question which one should ask here is whether it makes any difference that this was a freely available, open project. Meaning that there was no intention to sell such clocks, or even provide all of the necessary information to assemble a clock from scratch, including the software.

Consistency is key

Although with patents and design registrations there is no need to actively pursue infringement cases to keep the patent as is the case with trademarks, it’s likely that to HS1982 there was no question of tolerating any form of infringement. Their audience appears to be those interested in exclusive art pieces, with the device described by them as ‘both a kinetic sculpture and a functioning clock’.

The manufacturing costs of a single ClockClock24 device is unlikely to be even half the asking price of $6,000 to $10,700, even taking into the account that each version is a limited edition. Yet this asking price remains only ‘legitimate’ if the product remains as exclusive as possible. This provides HS1982 with enough incentive to actively seek out and destroy any similar products. In the end we are talking about sculptures, i.e. art, here.

This isn’t just like one smartphone manufacturer accusing the other manufacturer of also making their smartphone into a black, rounded rectangular slab with glass covering. The ironic thing is probably that any number of small changes to [Erich]’s project could likely have made the registered design not apply, such as through the addition of a colon between the hours and minutes, adding seconds, making the box into an oval, or changing the number of rotating elements.

Not all is lost

As [Erich] also notes in his blog post, there are still certain ‘fair use’ provisions with registered designs. Nobody is going to bust down the doors of a kindergarten when one of the preschoolers clumsily draws a Coca-Cola bottle without explicit permission from Coca-Cola’s lawyers. Similarly, anyone can in theory make their own copy of HS1982’s ClockClock24 clock so long as they do not sell it or otherwise make it publicly available.

This knowledge should give anyone who sets out to copy a design which they saw somewhere and liked at least some idea of how far they can take it. Publishing the project on a blog and making the design files available is the part where things can get dicey. Even making small alterations to the original design are not guaranteed to keep one from getting harassed by a company’s irate lawyers.

While there is a small chance of victory if [Erich] or someone else were to take a case like this to court, to argue that small-fry open-hardware projects are unlikely to harm the profits or sales of a company like HS1982, it would essentially be asking the law makers to add a major exception to patent law that would no doubt come with its own set of headaches.

In the meantime it seems that we can do little but get a chuckle out of the ClockClock24 clones available on Chinese stores for peanuts.

Rocket Report: SpaceX seeks 20km hop license, Why Rocket Lab funder left

Rocket leaves a trail a of flame as it pierces the sky.

Enlarge / The mighty "Dominator" Atlas V 541 goes supersonic with our newest Mars rover. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

Welcome to Edition 3.10 of the Rocket Report! Now that Mars Perseverance is safely on its way to the red planet, we're happy to congratulate space agencies in the UAE, China, and the United States on successful launches to Mars this summer. It's great to go three-for-three in the 2020 launch window. In February, we'll see how many safely reach their final destination.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below. Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, perhaps a little snark, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Virgin Galactic unveils look of interior cabin. Virgin Galactic has released the first images of what the interior of its VSS Unity spacecraft will look like. The design shows a seating capacity for up to six passengers who will fly on board the rocket-powered space plane, crest at an altitude above 80km, and experience a few minutes of weightlessness. The company says it plans for one or two more powered tests, followed by final test flights from New Mexico, before commencing a full commercial service for passengers.

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