An LED Projector as a Lighting Effect

If you had an array of high power addressable LEDs, how would you project them onto a wall? Perhaps you’d use a Fresnel lens, or maybe an individual lens on the top of each. [Joo] faced this problem when making a lighting effect using just such an array, and the solution they came up with used both.

The problem facing a would-be LED array projector is that should the lens be too good, it will project the individual points of light from the LEDs themselves, when a more diffuse point is required. Thus the Fresnel required the aid of a separate array of lenses, resin printed in one in clear plastic. From this we get some useful tips on how to do this for best lens quality, and while the result is not quite optically perfect, it’s certainly good enough for the job in hand.

The linked Printables page comes with all you need to make the parts, and you too can have your own projected LED effect. Now we want one, too! Perhaps we really need our own Wrencher signal instead.

hackaday.com/2025/11/07/an-led…

This Week in Security: Bogus Ransom, WordPress Plugins, and KASLR

There’s another ransomware story this week, but this one comes with a special twist. If you’ve followed this column for long, you’re aware that ransomware has evolved beyond just encrypting files. Perhaps we owe a tiny bit of gratitude to ransomware gangs for convincing everyone that backups are important. The downside to companies getting their backups in order is that these criminals are turning to other means to extort payment from victims. Namely, exfiltrating files and releasing them to the public if the victim doesn’t pay up. And this is the situation in which the Akira ransomware actors claim to have Apache’s OpenOffice project.

There’s just one catch. Akira is threatening to release 23 GB of stolen documents, which include employee information — and the Apache Software Foundation says those documents don’t exist. OpenOffice hasn’t received a demand and can’t find any evidence of a breach. It seems likely that Akira has hit some company, but not part of the Apache Software Foundation. Possibly someone that heavily uses OpenOffice, or even provides some level of support for that application. There is one more wrinkle here.

Since Apache OpenOffice is an open source software project, none of our contributors are paid employees for the project or the foundation…

First off, there are plenty of open source projects that have employee contributors, and it’s quite odd to imply otherwise. But second, for something as important as an office suite, this is a rather startling statement: there are no paid employees working on the OpenOffice code base.

NPM Typosquat Sophistication

There’s another NPM typosquatting campaign, which is barely news at this point. This one is newsworthy because these malicious packages use multiple layers of obfuscation, and lived on NPM for over four months. They use a clever bit of social engineering during package installation, in the form of a fake CAPTCHA prompt. The idea is that it makes the user less suspicious of the package, and also gives a legitimate reason for network access. But in reality, requiring user interaction defeats any automated analysis efforts.

The first layer of obfuscation consists of an eval() call with a bunch of decoder functions and an ugly encoded string. The result from that set of functions is URL-encoded and needed decoding, followed by an XOR with a key value. And finally, the executable function that finally emerges uses switch/case statements and hard-to-read values. It’s just a web to work through.

The payload behavior is boring in comparison, looking for any credentials on the system and uploading them to a remote server. It also checks for interesting browser cookies and passwords in the password manager, and any authentication tokens it can find.

WordPress Plugin Problems

[István Márton] at Wordfence has the story on a pair of WordPress plugins with severe vulnerabilities, effecting a whopping 500,000 sites combined. Up first is AI Engine, with 100,000 installs. This plugin has an unauthenticated URL endpoint that can expose a bearer token, which then allows access to the MCP endpoint, and arbitrary control of users. The good news here is that the plugin is not vulnerable by default, and requires the “No-Auth URL” setting to be configured to be vulnerable.

The other plugin is Post SMTP, with 400,000 installs. It replaces WordPress’s PHP email handling, and one of the features is the ability to view those emails from the logs. The problem was that before 3.6.1, viewing those email logs didn’t require any permissions. At first blush, that may seem like a medium severity problem, but WordPress is often configured to allow for password resets via emailed links, which means instant account takeover. Both issues have been fixed, and releases are available.

React Native CLI and Metro

A combination of the React Native CLI package and the Metro development server exposed React Native developers to a nasty 9.8 CVSS Remote Code Execution (RCE) CVE. The first element of this vulnerability is the fact that when Metro opens ports for hosting development work, it doesn’t bind to localhost, but listens on all interfaces by default.

When a new Reactive Native project is created without using a framework, some boilerplate code is run as part of the initialization. The end result is that /open-url handler is added to the project, and this handler calls open() with an outside string from the URL. It’s not hard to imagine how this can be abused for arbitrary code injection.

KASLR

Let’s talk about address randomization. Specifically, Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR). It’s one of the defenses against turning an arbitrary memory write into a working exploit. If an attacker can’t predict where kernel objects will be in memory, twiddling bits is more likely to crash the system than result in code execution. It’s great in theory. The problem is that it doesn’t necessarily exist in reality.

That’s the story from [Seth Jenkins] at Google’s Project Zero, who was looking for ways to crack Pixel phones. It turns out that memory hotplugging is supported by Linux on Android, and that potential hotplug memory needs a lot of room in the linear memory map. So much room that it’s impractical to also randomize that layout. So while we still technically have KASLR protecting the kernel from attacks, there’s a really big gotcha in the form of the linear memory map.

Bits and Bytes

If you want a really deep dive into how BLE works, and how to investigate an existing BLE connection with an SDR, [Clément Ballabriga] from Lexfo has the scoop. It is significantly more complicated than you might expect, particularly since BLE uses frequency hopping, and a wide enough range of frequencies that your SDR almost certainly can’t capture them all at once. That means breaking a tiny part of the signal security, in order to accurately predict the frequency hops.

Cisco’s Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX) has several vulnerabilities that allows an attacker to run code as root. One vulnerability is in handling arbitrary file uploads by the Java Remote Method Invocation system. Another is an authentication bypass that can be exploited by coercing the target system to use a malicious remote server as part of the authentication process. Fixes are available, and so far it doesn’t look like these flaws have been used in the wild.

And finally, there’s the November Android security bulletin, that fixes CVE-2025-48593, a logic error in security updates in apexd.cpp that can lead to escalation of privilege.

I’ve seen this flaw conflated with CVE-2025-38593, a Bluetooth vulnerability recently fixed in the Linux kernel. This is a medium severity race condition in the kernel that can lead to a double-free and a system crash. There doesn’t seem to be a way to turn this into an RCE, as is reflected by its CVSS of 4.7.

hackaday.com/2025/11/07/this-w…

Pi-Powered Camera Turns Heads and Lenses In Equal Measure

Have you ever seen photos of retro movie sets where the cameras seem to be bedazzled with lenses? Of course you can only film via one lens at a time, but mounting multiple lenses on a turret as was done in those days has certain advantages –particularly when working with tiny M12 lenses, like our own [Jenny List] recently did with this three-lens, Pi-zero based camera.

Given that it’s [Jenny], the hardware is truly open source, with not just the Python code to drive the Pi but the OpenSCAD code used to generate the STLs for the turret and the camera body all available via GitHub under a generous CC-BY-SA-4.0 license. Even using a cheap sensor and lenses from AliExpress, [Jenny] gets good results, as you can see from the demo video embedded below. (Jump to 1:20 if you just want to see images from the camera.)

The lenses are mounted to a 3D printed ring with detents to lock each quickly in place, held in place by a self-tapping screw, proving we at Hackaday practice what we preach. (Or that [Jenny] does, at least when it comes to fasteners.) Swapping lenses becomes a moment’s twist, as opposed to fiddling with tiny lenses hoping you don’t drop one. We imagine the same convenience is what drove turret cameras to be used in the movie industry, once upon a time.

youtube.com/embed/UntZmKj_IJE?…

hackaday.com/2025/11/07/pi-pow…

Artsy and Durable Recycling from a Heat Press

Plastic recycling is something that many of us strive to accomplish, but we often get caught up in the many hurdles along the way. [Brothers Make] are experienced in the world of plastic recycling and graced us with a look into a simple and reliable way to get consistent thin sheets of durable plastic. Using a common T-shirt press and a mixture of plastic scraps, you can get the process down quickly.

Summarizing the process is pretty easy due to its simplicity. You take a T-shirt press, put some Teflon baking sheets on both sides of some plastic scraps, and then press. Repeating this a couple of times with different colored plastic will get you a nice looking sheet of usable sheets for any purpose you could dream of. Thicker pieces can have some life changing applications, or as simple as guitar picks, as shown by [Brothers Make].

Make sure to try out this technique yourself if you have access to a press! Overuse of plastic is a widely known issue, and yet it feels like almost no one attempts to solve it. If you want a different kind of application, try making your own 3D printing filament out of recycled plastic!

youtube.com/embed/xPGunwTUMSE?…

Thanks to [George Graves] for the tip!

hackaday.com/2025/11/07/artsy-…

La Cina supererà gli USA nella corsa all’AI! Il CEO di Nvidia avverte “siamo bloccati dal cinismo”

Il CEO di Nvidia, Jensen Huang, ha avvertito che la Cina sconfiggerà gli Stati Uniti nella corsa all’intelligenza artificiale (IA).

Il FT ha riportato che Huang, al Future of AI Summit ospitato dal Financial Times (FT) quel giorno, ha affermato: “I paesi occidentali, inclusi Stati Uniti e Regno Unito, sono bloccati nel cinismo. Abbiamo bisogno di maggiore ottimismo“. Citando le nuove normative sull’IA in fase di elaborazione negli Stati Uniti, Huang ha avvertito: “Potrebbero esserci 50 nuove normative (in tutti i 50 stati)“.

Ha sostenuto che questo contesto normativo sta minando la competitività occidentale. Le sue dichiarazioni sono arrivate dopo che l’amministrazione Donald Trump ha mantenuto le restrizioni sull’esportazione dei più recenti semiconduttori per l’IA di Nvidia in Cina.

Huang ha aggiunto: “L’elettricità è (praticamente) gratuita in Cina” e che la Cina sta creando un ambiente in cui le aziende locali possono utilizzare chip di IA prodotti internamente come alternativa molto più economica ai chip di IA di Nvidia, espandendo i sussidi energetici per le aziende tecnologiche.

È noto che i chip di IA cinesi sono significativamente meno efficienti dal punto di vista energetico rispetto ai chip Nvidia. Tuttavia, i sussidi energetici del governo cinese hanno contribuito a compensare in parte questa carenza. Infatti, secondo quanto riferito, la Cina ha recentemente aumentato i sussidi energetici per importanti aziende tecnologiche come ByteDance, Alibaba e Tencent.

Il Wall Street Journal (WSJ) ha riportato il 3 che l’amministratore delegato di NVIDIA, vicino al presidente Trump, ha cercato di convincere il presidente Trump a consentire l’esportazione in Cina dell’ultimo semiconduttore per l’intelligenza artificiale di Nvidia, “Blackwell“, poco prima del vertice USA-Cina del 30 del mese scorso, ma i suoi collaboratori hanno bloccato la sua richiesta.

Huang ha sottolineato l’importanza del mercato cinese, affermando: “Circa la metà dei ricercatori mondiali nel campo dell’intelligenza artificiale si trova in Cina“. Ha inoltre sostenuto che le esportazioni verso la Cina devono essere consentite per garantire che l’ecosistema aziendale cinese dell’intelligenza artificiale continui a dipendere dai semiconduttori di Nvidia.

Alcuni ipotizzano che l’amministrazione Trump possa limitare l’uso di semiconduttori per l’intelligenza artificiale all’avanguardia, come Blackwell, solo per uso interno.

Secondo quanto riferito, alcuni funzionari chiave dell’amministrazione Trump sono preoccupati che l’esportazione di Blackwell in Cina possa rafforzare le capacità di intelligenza artificiale della Cina e indebolire la sicurezza degli Stati Uniti. In un’intervista alla CBS andata in onda il 2, alla domanda se avrebbe permesso a Nvidia di vendere semiconduttori all’avanguardia alla Cina, il presidente Trump ha risposto: “No, non lo faremo. Non lo faremo. Non permetteremo a nessun altro di avere semiconduttori all’avanguardia“

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