We’re at a fortunate moment: microcontrollers available at modest prices are edging into the capability level previously reserved for full-fat systems and can, through emulation, run software beyond classic 8-bit home computers, consoles, or old arcade games. A project we’ve been watching for a while is tiny386, an emulator for ESP32 boards that provides a 386 PC with just enough 486 and 586 instructions enabled to run a modern Linux kernel. Now we’re pleased to note that this platform is making it to the RP2350, with ports for both the FRANK emulation platform and the Waveshare Pi Zero boards. You can now have a 32-bit PC with all the peripherals, including VGA and DVI/HDMI, for the cost of an inexpensive development board.

Having seen tiny386 run on its minimum-spec ESP32 platform, we’ll concede that while it’s usable, it’s not the fastest experience, but the RP2350 port promises better performance. It’s not for a modern full-fat Linux distro, but should work well for running older operating systems such as DOS, or Windows 3.1 and 95, or even a lean Linux setup. This has fascinating potential: while these systems are old, they still have an enormous software library. The idea of useful general-purpose computing, 1990s style, in the palm of the hand, is interesting.

If you’re curious, you can find tiny386 here and the FRANK boards here. Maybe they’re a better route to ’90s fun and games than a 386 laptop.

During his continuing analysis of the architecture and microcode of Intel’s highly influential 8087 floating point unit (FPU) co-processor, [Ken Shirriff] has now arrived at the point where he can put together how the 8087’s microcode implements various x87 instructions. One of these, the FSCALE instruction turned out to be far more complicated than assumed, with one might assume to be a straightforward powers-of-two scaling turning out to entail over 140 micro-instructions and three levels of sub-routine calls just to handle all cases.

The annotated die shot in the heading image shows the functional blocks that are used by this one x87 instruction, to give some kind of idea of what amount of hardware even ‘just’ scaling a floating point number involves.

Much like with the x86’s CISC-style ISA, these 8087 instructions break down into individual steps that involve everything from loading values into registers, performing operations, checking for and handling error conditions as well as stack management. As can be seen in [Ken]’s breakdown of the FSCALE implementation in the 8087 it’s all very logical, taking a high-level instruction and doing all that’s needed for a robust implementation, without bothering the developer with the details.

Of note is that the 8087’s implementations led to the IEEE 754 floating point standard, providing what definitely at the time was one of the most mathematically accurate FPUs that somehow still was financially responsible enough to make it into a relatively affordable PC.

Clocks are almost the ideal devices to inspire creativity in hackers — they have a simple, well-defined task, but there’s an almost unlimited number of ways to carry it out. [ekaggrat singh kalsi]’s OVODYO is a particularly intriguing approach, tumbling a pair of icosahedral counters to display the current time.

Each 3D-printed icosahedron has numerals sunk through each of its twelve sides, and is raised above the base of the clock on a brass support shaft. An inner drive shaft runs through the center of the support shaft and drives a set of beveled gears. These spin the outer shells around two axes, periodically cycling through all twelve faces. The pattern in which an icosahedron rotates means that only set of numerals appears upright at a time, making it easier to distinguish the time.

A split path around the icosahedra both lets them rotate around the support shaft and shows off the internal gearing. On the control side, an ATmega8 drives a pair of stepper motors with drv8833 motor drivers, using a hall effect sensor to detect each indicator’s position. Since the minutes dial only gives the time in five-minute intervals, it also drives an LED strip to indicate the exact minute.

[ekaggrat] has a long history of creative clock designs, from this dynamic chain-link sculpture to a hair-tie clock or a mechanical seven-segment display.

We tend to think of breaking the sound barrier as a comparatively modern accomplishment, but on a smaller scale, cattle herders have been breaking it for centuries: the cracking sound of the tip of a bullwhip snapping comes from a small-scale sonic boom. Reliably getting a crack out of a whip takes skill and practice, though, which is why [Craig Turner] built a whip-cracking machine.

The first step was to build the whip itself, which was surprisingly complicated. Bullwhips taper down toward the end of the whip. As the whip uncurls during a crack, momentum passes down the whip; since the whip becomes continually narrower and lighter, conservation of momentum means that different stretches of the whip must move progressively faster. To get this effect, [Craig] joined together a series of increasingly thin and light ropes. The heavy end of the whip terminated in an eyelet connected to a length of elastic shock cord. Stretching the whip back on the shock cord and releasing it whipped it around, resulting in a fairly reliable crack.

For greater convenience, [Craig] built this into a launcher mechanism, with the elastic cord wrapped around the end of the launcher, an electrical-conduit guide for the whip, and a spring-loaded trigger mechanism to release it. This worked even better than expected, getting a reliable crack every time. The tip of the whip could slice leaves, tear open aluminium cans, put out candle flames, knock the cap off a bottle without tipping it over, and reliably hit small targets on the first shot.

As [Craig] mentioned, this setup would make it much easier to study the cracking effect with a schlieren imaging setup.

If you’ve never heard of the Spin Semiconductors FP-1 digital signal processor chip, don’t worry– that just means you haven’t been deep into guitar petals and audio effects hardware lately. [adamjvr], a.k.a. [avr] has, and he’s gone to the point of creating a PC-based emulator of this sound chip to simplify development.

If you don’t see the utility, stop and think about the development cycle without a simulation like this: you program, you flash to a board, and you test there. Not only does the ‘flash to the board’ step add time and friction, you do also have a limited number of flashes on the board’s memory. With an emulator on your PC, the workflow tightens to ‘code, test’ and you don’t flash the board until the simulated DSP is doing the sounds you want it to.

As for the FV-1 itself, it’s an interesting little chip in that it’s quite a full-featured DSP– rather, it’s small instruction set is focused entirely on audio effects. If you’re into that world– be it guitar pedals or otherwise– you may find this project very useful. There are releases for Linux, MacOS and Windows, and it’s all open-source on GitHub, under the Mozilla Public License. It’s not the most common choice, but we’re hardly going to complain about licenses to anyone willing to share their hard work.

If you like the idea of testing your work before you go to the bench, we’ve seen software that offer the same functionality for Arduino projects, as well as other AVR and PIC micros. It’s been a while since we featured a programmable guitar pedal, so we hope this tool enables others to rock out.

You want Retro? We did, when we started our retrocomputing challenge. [Peter] decided that transistors weren’t retro enough, and sent us this lovely homebrew relay computer, complete with 16- bit CPU, which is rather more bits than one normally associates with clicky clacky contacts.

The architecture is very simple– it just uses an accumulator register, ACCU, and goes from there. All mathematics and save/load operations go through ACCU. There whole instruction set is only 19 commands, and he’s used that set to program such lovely things as calculating 3 digits of Pi– which only took 8 minutes of glorious clicking. There’s a demo video of that embedded below. [Peter] has even implemented a display by hooking his computer to a 32×32 LED matrix, but don’t expect it to relay updates really quickly.

If this computer looks familiar, it’s because its earlier incarnation was one of the more “extra” entries in last year’s one-hertz challenge, where it was used to blink an indicator lamp. Yes, even relay computers apparently get started with the “blinky” sketch.

If you want in on the fun, our retrocomputer challenge runs until October 27th, so there’s lots of time left to turn back the clock.

Although building a table saw out of LEGO is probably not the first thing that comes to mind when you look at those colorful bits of plastic, [Jamie] has been on a bit of a search for more applications of his LEGO-based air-powered motors. Naturally this led to the idea of doing something useful with it, like making a table saw you can actually use for real wood.

Starting off with a basic prototype using only regular LEGO pieces to get the mechanism figured out, [Jamie] then builds this up into said air-powered table saw featuring an actual metal blade. Suffice it to say that this isn’t something that you want your children to do with their LEGO while unsupervised.

The star of the show is of course the air-powered turbine that spins the blade. This is something that [Jamie] has been working on for a while, going through a number of prototypes to figure out a 3D printed geometry for the turbine blade that helps to convert as much of the high-pressure air into rotation.

Along the way it was also discovered that 3D printing saw blades is pretty hard, probably due to the lack of a sharp edge. This is definitely an area where it’s hard to beat a real table saw blade, with the added caveat that anything that’s good at cutting up boards of wood and sausages will just as happy slice through careless primate fingers.

In terms of safety features, the air supply is cut automatically with a sort of dead-man switch that requires you to keep one hand on it while using the final table saw design. There also an auto-feeding system added that tries to guide the board into the saw, but this turned out to be finicky. Suffice it to say that an air compressor and a handful of non-LEGO-approved components created a pretty convincing table saw.

[Andy Huot] has a fantastic-looking infinity mirror digital clock that really raises the bar. It uses high quality components, smart use of RGB LED animations, and a clever “stacked diffuser” vertical design to the 7-segment display elements that really enhances the infinity mirror effect. It needs to be seen in action, so check it out.

The end result is expressly portal-like, with the smooth animations of the LEDs really playing into the effect. The size helps, too. It’s 24 inches in diameter, giving it considerable presence.

A basic infinity mirror design consists of lit elements sandwiched between a reflective back surface and a partially-reflective, partially-transmissive top cover. That same basic principle is used here, but with great care given to ensure nothing so much as a fingerprint spoils the illusion. For example, the top cover is a disk of acrylic with a 90% reflective film affixed to the inside surface. That’s easy enough to DIY with some car tint, but [Andy] found that for the very best results it was worth having high-quality film professionally applied.

We like the use of 3D-printed custom jigs for soldering the segments of RGB LED strips, and holding the pre-measured wires in place with some putty is a great way to keep them in place while working. In case you’re wondering, the mirrored acrylic making up the back wall has holes in it for mounting each segment’s LED strip in a holder, and running the wires to the rear.

The video (embedded below) documents every step of the assembly, and it’s a serious build. While the design files for the 3D-printed parts are not free, there’s certainly enough detail for an enterprising hacker to replicate the design in their own way.

Apple hardware has always been proprietary, sometimes to an extreme. But that’s not to say that it’s impossible to make something that does the same job, which is what [DosFox1] appears to have done with the OSHintosh. It’s an open source PCB that implements a Mac 512k. Is it a 68k Hackintosh? You decide.

While it boots into a classic Mac OS image, it’s not quite a Mac. For a start, there are no disks, and no SCSI. Instead it boots from a disk held in ROM, which we guess will be a lot faster than the floppy from back in the day. They’ve even managed to do it on a 2-layer board, which means that despite its size, it shouldn’t be too expensive to have made.

We’re not sure quite what the legality of dumping a Mac ROM image to the ROM on this board would be, but assume for a moment that you own a copy in a defunct original Mac. This board can’t yet replace the original due to the disk issue, but given that original Macs are now long in the tooth, a modern replacement for those who must have hardware rather than an emulator sounds like a good idea. Perhaps for some people it will join the FPGA Amiga.

The 2026 Hackaday Superconference is just around the corner in November. It’s hard to believe that we’ve been having an annual gathering for so long, but this is number ten. Every year, it’s a great time to refresh your pool of new ideas, hang out with fellow hackers, put your soldering skills to the test, eat some phenomenal tacos, and catch some of the two tracks of talks.

What’s got me stoked right now is that we just finished up talk selection, and this year is going to be a banger! We had more talks submitted than ever, and all of high quality. Frankly, if this keeps up for next year, we might have to figure out a third stage.

This year also marks the move to a bigger venue, with more space for hacking in the courtyard, more space for talks in two halls, and more room for you to all settle down and share your work, or create something new. Even the badge is going to be bigger this year – but that’s all we can say at this time.

If you don’t have your tickets yet, go ahead and get them. Flights are still relatively cheap, and hotels not booked up yet. See you all soon!

Launched in 1976, LAGEOS-1 (LAser GEOdynamic Satellite) is unusual in that it contains no instrumentation, no electronics, no power supply, and no means of propulsion. It’s spherical, weighs just under 407 kg, and looks a bit like a disco ball. It may not be accurate to say it does nothing, but unlike most satellites its role is entirely passive. It’s also one of the oldest scientific satellites still in service.

The lens-like objects covering the surface of LAGEOS-1 are corner cube retroreflectors, which have the nifty effect of always reflecting incident light right back towards its source.

Ground stations fire short laser pulses at it and measure the time it takes for the light to return, a form of time-of-flight ranging. Since LAGEOS-1’s orbit is highly stable, it provides a reliable reference point for measuring even tiny changes in the Earth itself. The size, shape, rotation, and more of our planet can be measured as a result. LAGEOS data (LAGEOS-2 was launched in 1992) has also been used in tests of general relativity.

Its orbit and construction were deliberately chosen so that atmospheric drag and other disturbances would be minimal. The simple, maintenance-free design combined with an extraordinarily stable orbit means LAGEOS is expected to circle our world for millions of years to come.

LAGEOS-1 also contains a message to the future in the form of two identical plaques prepared by Dr. Carl Sagan just in case there’s anyone around to find it some day. Check out the short 1975 video from NASA, embedded just below.

Although hard disks weren’t a common feature yet in many home computers in the 1980s, they were becoming increasingly more affordable. For relative meanings of the word ‘affordable’, naturally. This is illustrated by the 12 MB HDD for the Radio Shack TRS-80 that [Clint] over at LGR recently took a peek at.

Costing a cool $3,495 in 1983 – or $11,932 in 2026 USD – this 12 MB storage wonder used a Tandon TM-603 full-height 5.25″ HDD inside. Lacking a working TRS-80 to try it out with, the video is limited to just a basic powering up and opening up of the unit, but [Clint] will be donating it to a computer museum who can hopefully put it to use again.

The connection to the TRS-80 computer is handled by a ribbon cable, while the HDD has its own built-in power supply, rated at 60 Watt.

On the main board for the external HDD controller there is a Signetics 8X300 microprocessor that forms the brains of what makes it into an external drive for the TRS-80. Despite its age, it still looks brand new inside, so despite the Rifa capacitors in the PSU, [Clint] decided to power it on. This resulted in an auditory experience that’s probably best compared to a very rusty jet engine spinning up after languishing for a decade prior to spooling up for take-off.

Hopefully we’ll find out whether this particular unit and its HDD are still working in 2026.

Among all the machines of the 8-bit home computer era which booted straight to a BASIC prompt, there were a very few that went their own way with another language. The Jupiter Ace springs immediately to mind, a diminutive Z80-based machine similar to Sinclair’s ZX81, which booted to FORTH.

The Ace wasn’t a commercial success, but what would have happened had it booted to a more accessible language? It’s a question [jordanhubbard] appears to be trying to answer, with an OS that boots to a Python interpreter.. The OS is Python, and everything on top of it uses the interpreter. Better still, it has a GUI mode.

The OS boots on an x86-64 platform or in QEMU, and appears to have been created using an LLM. There are two build options for the GUI version or the interpreter version. It provides a set of UNIX-like commands for interacting with the OS and disk, something which brings back memories of disk-based systems back in the BASIC days. We’re surprised to see no screenshots of the GUI in action though, an omission he’d do well to correct, we think.

It’s fair to say that in 2026 this is more a bit of fun than a serious OS contender, but maybe someone will run with it. It has competition too, not so long ago we featured a similar OS that runs a BASIC interpreter.

Folding a sheet of metal in a straight line is one thing, but how does one fold multiple curved lines into a sheet of aluminum without fancy machines? [John] demonstrates how to do exactly that with little more than hand tools and a fair bit of patience. The secret is drilling a lot of small holes along each fold line.

First, a bit of background. [John] wanted to fabricate a curved piece of aluminum as cover that would match the sleek aerodynamic lines of a Belly Tank Lakester. The trick is that there isn’t a single straight line to be found, and the fold lines are all curves. How can one do such folding with only hand tools?

[John] found that fabrication was possible by drilling small holes all along each fold line, then carefully bending as needed. The line of holes weakens the metal, acting like a score line, and allow the required curves to be made cleanly. There’s some finishing work and straightening involved, but the hard part of making the actual folds is taken care of.

One method that didn’t work was cutting a shallow groove in the metal to create something like a pre-scored fold line. [John] tried this and found that while the metal does indeed fold along the weakened line, the aluminum tends to crack in the process. When making a line of holes instead, the metal between each hole bends nicely.

This technique does mean the finished part ends up with small perforations along each fold, but the part is mounted on the bottom of the car and [John] says that he’d have to look quite closely to notice. A little polishing goes a long way, too.

We have covered many ways to bend sheet metal and while machinery exists to do it exceedingly well, great results can be had with little more than simple tools and some patience.

Watch [John] go through the process in the video embedded below, or skip to 7:55 if you just want to see the end result.

When you see a listing for an Ethernet switch whose specification list is in effect ‘yes’, with a four-digit price tag when new, and with the seller asking for less than 10% of said $3,000 asking price in an ‘untested’ condition, the only rational thing to do is of course to mash that ‘buy’ button. This is what [This Does Not Compute] did, and created a video about to show what a great investment decision this was.

Naturally this Juniper EX4100-F-12P switch came without power supply brick for its 48VDC input. Figuring out its pin-out and probing said input showed that the voltage rails had been shorted, giving a first clue as to why this switch had been on sale for so very cheap. Bravely hoping that it would be a straightforward fix, the unit was disassembled.

With a 280 Watt power brick, it’s little wonder that the top of the unit is a one massive aluminium heatsink, including a large heatpipe. Also visible on the lid near the power input was a very-bad-news black skid mark.

From that first discovery the news just got worse and worse, with clear signs of water ingression, rust and corrosion, along with the aftermath of a powered circuit meeting such bad corrosion. After some clean-up it’s clear that some components had violently exploded, ripping apart layers of the PCB and likely parts of traces in those inner sections too.

With no schematics available and no other good repair options via Juniper or anywhere else, it seems that unfortunately this gamble turned out to be merely a pile of e-waste and a few bucks worth of scrap metal. Caveat emptor, once more.

For a little while vacuum tubes and semiconductors were fighting a heated battle for dominance, with bipolar junction transistors and 1959’s RCA Nuvistor both allowing you to build a compact circuit with relatively low power usage and no high voltages. Although we now know that semiconductor technology won out overwhelmingly, that doesn’t mean that you cannot build a brand new Nuvistor board in 2026, as [Eric Schlaepfer] AKA [TubeTimeUS] recently did.

Nuvistors saw their most use in small-signal radio frequency applications, like VHF and UHF, with excellent low-noise characteristics that saw them used until the early 1970s in television sets, radios and oscilloscopes, as well as in space probes like the 1960s US Ranger Moon missions, so by that metric they had a good run.

Nothing so exciting is built in this video, sadly, but alongside a breakdown on how nuvistors work, we do see a discrete 555-style timer built using a gaggle of tetrode nuvistors, giving a pretty good idea of what using them in a project is like. Being a vacuum tube at its core, nuvistors still have the heater element, which is what gives vacuum tubes their reputation for being slow to start working and large current draw.

Despite their drawbacks, nuvistors still have a range of benefits compared to modern-day transistors, including being practically immune to electrostatic discharge (ESD) and electromagnetic interference (EMI) all the way up an EMP that will destroy most semiconductor electronics.

That said, the somewhat limited 8-nuvistor implementation of the 555 had to get a few extra pins for the heater supply, which burns up about 7.5 Watt just to allow the circuit to function. Terming it the ‘hollow-state 555 timer’, it works effectively just like any semiconductor 555, just with that extra power cost and of course no significant prospect of making it smaller, barring a semiconductor evolution as with the pixels-sized CRTs in the SED and FED type displays.

We covered the nuvistor before, including a great reference on this device, and its history that was much longer than people often assume today, as well as the vacuum tubes we use every day in for example our microwaves.

Nintendo has made many game consoles in its long history — one that famously overlaps that of the Ottoman Empire — but only one of them was ever Super. It’s that console, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, that [Inkbox] has decided to delve deeply into as he crafts a game in assembly using all the hardware tricks he can.

Hardware tricks he’ll need, given he’s limited to the two 64 kB RAM banks and 3.58 MHz Ricoh 6502-based CPU. Even the 4 MB limit he sets for a historically-accurate homemade cartridge seems positively claustrophobic by modern standards. The game he’s after making is a top-down adventure game a la Zelda, and [Inkbox] gets right into the weeds explaining how the SNES works as he shows his work in this nearly hour long video. If you’re looking for a deep dive into the architecture, along with how it is meant to be used, you could certainly find worse sources. Everything from the different graphics modes to what registers handle sound are covered in this and the previous video in the series.

We can’t help but call out his dedication to open source — the SNES Sound Engine he has put up on GitHub looks like it could be a real asset to anyone else doing this kind of homebrew. The game itself is on itch.io and is pay-what-you-want.

[Inkbox] doesn’t just limit himself to the SNES’s 6502-esqe assembly — he’s done impressive work in x86 ASM, too.

In this specially-numbered podcast episode that lines up quite nicely with our Retrocomputing Challenge, Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met over surprisingly low latency and loud beverages to bring you the best of the previous week’s hacks.

But first, the news. German company Isar Aerospace can now claim that they’ve launched the first spacecraft into orbit from Europe. Be sure to check out the in-link, where we reported on the building of the spaceport.

In Hackaday news, the aforementioned Retrocomputing Contest had 64 entries at last check, which is just perfect for Episode 386. Will yours be the 65th?

Supercon Ten tickets are selling out, and per Elliot, the talks have been chosen, pending approval by each submitter.  Keep an eye on the blog for the official announcement!

After reviewing the news, Elliot reached into the ol’ Mailbag and found two missives, including another from [Vik Olliver] regarding the printing of LEGO. The other is from [Mendel Munkis], who has been enjoying Wikipedia offline since 2018, thanks to a 32-bit ARM9 processor. Then, it was on to the hacks.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download in lovely MP3.

Episode 386 Show Notes:

News:

• The First Spacecraft Launched To Orbit From Europe
• Announcing The 2026 Hackaday Retrocomputing Challenge
• Retro Computing Contest
• Wikipedia: Unusual articles

Mailbag:

• This week, we have a double feature!

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Making A Pole Balance Itself With Propellers
  • 3D-Printed Self-Balancing Robot Brings Control Theory To Life
• Free Your Rotary Telephone From Its Wire
  • • Simplify Your Life With This Pocket Rotary Cellphone
    • The Open Source Rotary Cell Phone, Two Years Later
    • Using Old Phones As An Intercom In Your VW Bus (or Anywhere Else)
    • Wikipedia: Intercept messages
    • This Is a Recording
• Printing Micron-Scale Benchies With Resin And Turmeric
  • GitHub – 0x23/MicroManipulatorStepper: A sub-micrometer 3D motion control plattform. · GitHub
• This Clavichord Is A Well-Tempered Project
• The Different Ways To Look At Negative Resistance
• There’s A Whole Computer Inside This Mouse

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  • If It’s Electronic Paper, Why Not Print To It?
  • 3D Printable Lenticular Indicators
  • The Helicopter With Radioactive Blades
• Kristina’s Picks:
  • A Split Keyboard Designed For Human Hands
  • Take Tool Photo, Generate Custom Gridfinity Bin
  • Anti-Doomscroll Tamagotchi Only Lives If You Do

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• Hackaday Europe 2026: Outdoors With Robots
• Hunting The Wild Vibrotruck

The revival in film photography has brought a range of specialist films to tempt the experimenter, as well as increased the popularity of loading your own cartridges. But perforating the film from blank stock has always been beyond the reach of home gamers. Now [Jon Schiereck] has done it, but not quite with film. He’s made a perforator for photographic paper, producing a strip which can be shot in a camera. It’s film, but it’s not exactly film.

The machine takes the form of a 3D printed mechanism which feeds a strip of photographic paper through a pair of punches to make the sprocket holes. In this case those holes are circular, being made by a pair of drill bits ground for the purpose, and they’re moved up and down by a crank driven by a set of gears from a hand crank or even a cordless drill. A rubber roller pulls the film forward.

It seems to be a well-thought-out machine, and you can try it yourself for free via a slightly unusual distribution medium, his Ko-Fi page. In case you’re worried about finding a slitter to make those 35mm paper strips, it seems he’s also working on a 3D printable one of those. So you can shoot on paper, and develop it just as you would a print.

If you’re further into extending what you can film through the use of a 3D printer, how about 8 mm movie film?

Several times this summer, Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday, the monthly roundup of major security patches for Microsoft products, has included record-breaking numbers of security fixes. The August 2026 patch set actually seemed to catch up. Was this a sign of the bug apocalypse lessening? Ha, nope!

Brian Krebs at Krebs On Security once again brings his excellent roundup of Patch Tuesday events, with this months patch set absolutely crushing previous numbers with nearly 1,000 security fixes.

Two of the fixes are for zero-day vulnerabilities under active exploitation in the wild, both allowing privilege escalation on Windows. Privilege escalation bugs turn general vulnerabilities in applications and games into full administrator access to gain persistence and deploy ransomware, and generally make any vulnerability significantly worse.

Krebs also calls out a CVSS 9.8 (so close to a perfect 10!) vulnerability that allows remote code execution in the Windows shell with no user interaction and no authentication, a remotely exploitable DNS bug present since Windows Server 2012 and Windows 10 which will likely see exploitation in the wild soon, and over a hundred other bugs are ranked “Critical”.

How the sheer volume of vulnerabilities in this patch will fit with recent Microsoft recommendations that companies should apply the patches immediately remains to be seen. (Likely: not very well, depending on what new behavior and issues the fixes cause!)

Is Your LG TV Spying on You?

Gamers Nexus continues their trend of high-quality investigation, and they have posted another tremendous multi-hour investigatory video. This time Gamers Nexus focuses on the ecosystem of LG televisions and monitors.

It shouldn’t likely surprise many here that “smart” devices are usually more to the benefit of advertisers than consumers. Similarly, it shouldn’t be a surprise that a “smart” device harvests user data to sell to advertises. What may be surprising is the degree to which LG devices appear to collect data, how much data is sent even when collection is turned off, and how overt executives at the company are, with multiple executives making statements in pitches to advertisers that LG “owns the glass”, “owns the living room”, and is designed to correlate devices, inhabitants of the environment, and viewing habits so that ads can be served to the TV and mobile devices in the same room simultaneously.

With tracking enabled, the smart TV captures telemetry of what applications are used, as well as continually capturing the video displayed and reporting fingerprints to LG servers and ad partners. The screen content is tracked not only for TV, but for the HDMI inputs, including if the TV is used as a PC monitor. If voice control is enabled, the TV also records audio and analyzes it. The TV also continually scans the local network and nearby Wi-Fi networks, reporting all the devices it finds on the local network, including host name, MAC address, and sometimes software running depending on the MDNS advertisements. Near-by Wi-Fi networks are sufficient for very precise geolocation, so LG effectively knows the location of every customer, as well.

Gamers Nexus makes the point that while the invasive ad tech is gross, it’s mostly limited if the user does not agree to the end-user license agreement – but the infrastructure required to enable it is riddled with security flaws, both discovered and likely additional undiscovered issues. A smart TV is basically a computer, usually running either some flavor of Android or Linux, with the attendant flexibility, power, and problems. A vulnerability in the TV operating system or its apps can provide a route into your internal network. (Not that this required an exploit: LG was called out earlier this summer because 42% of apps on the official app store contained residential proxy systems to sell your home Internet connection.) But it can also access any of the attached hardware, like the microphone.

Gamers Nexus demonstrates that a LG TV can be exploited to gain local root, and from there, it can record audio from attached devices – even when the primary microphone is muted. Gamers Nexus also discovered that muting the microphone on some models does not disconnect or disable the microphone, it simply sets the gain levels extremely low; recording is still possible, and with amplification, audio is still recoverable.

Spy tech and ad tech goes hand in hand; it will be interesting to see if LG responds by at least hardening the security on the devices, or if another company finds traction in selling modern televisions and monitors without the “smart” advertising.

Shai-Halud NPM Worm Returns

Aikido.dev reports that after 111 days, the Shai-Halud worm returned to the NPM repository.

Shai-Halud was one of several worms hitting package repositories in the Spring of 2026, installing backdoors, stealing cryptocurrency wallets, and taking every login credential and authentication token it could find before infecting every package the tokens linked to. Since then, infections have remained quiet, and repositories like NPM have stated that they now scan every package as it is uploaded.

Charlie Erkisen at Aikido.dev observed that on September 7, 2026, four additional packages uploaded to NPM were infected with Shai-Halud; not a variant of the worm, but the original code, matching the known public signatures. Whatever scanning is in place in the NPM repository didn’t filter them, and if an exact match for a known, major worm isn’t caught by the infrastructure, it’s unclear how a new threat would be.

Boston Scientific Hack Continues

The apparent ransomware attack against Boston Scientific continues to have impacts, with Boston Scientific filing a report with the SEC that the attack is expected to have an impact on the company earnings.

Boston Scientific makes medical devices, like pacemakers, stents, and monitoring equipment. It has not yet been publicly disclosed what happened, or if customer data was compromised, but the SEC filing confirms that unauthorized access on “certain systems” causing an outage. After several weeks of outages, the company reports that it is able to ship almost at capacity, and that the sterilization facilities for medical devices are online. While there is no estimate provided for full recovery, efforts are ongoing.

Commerce Sites Vulnerable

Adobe released a security bulletin that the Adobe Commerce and Magento platforms are under active exploitation from CVE-2026-75650, a flaw in the template engine.

These platforms power tens of thousands of commerce sites, and vulnerabilities in them are usually used to steal payment data or serve malware to customers during the checkout process. Previously this year, Magento patched another vulnerability which allowed uploading executable files to any store, and indications are that the current vulnerability has been exploited in the wild since early September 2026.

The current vulnerability allows implantation of PHP code by injecting custom styles into a query, which is then executed when Magento generates a failure email and renders the template. The attackers then download and install a control binary written in Rust which masquerades as a kernel thread task, which then monitors the store and collects payment data.

The vulnerability was publicly known and used for several days before Adobe made official statements of a fix being available, leaving any store running on Magento vulnerable with no official fixes, but as of writing this, Adobe has published patches and an advisory.

Microsoft to Block Unpatched Servers

Microsoft plans to block emails to to the cloud-hosted Exchange Online from unpatched on-premises Exchange servers.

Apparently the urge to self-host Microsoft Exchange is coupled with antipathy about actually patching it, to such a significant level that Microsoft is taking the steps to detect incoming mail from servers that have not patched since October 2025. While Microsoft updates rarely apply with zero problems, nearly a year is more than enough time to have tested and deployed a security fix.

“This update released nearly a year ago, and all organizations should have updated to it”: so say we all.

Hackers Pose as Recruiters

Government-backed groups in Iran have been posing as recruiters trying to infect targets with malware.

The group, designated “Nimbus Manticore”, is known to develop custom malware and remote access tools (RATs), and typically target specific individuals via spear-phishing attacks. The latest malware from the group is cross-platform and can infect Windows, macOS, and Linux, installing services to run websocket-based remote access tunnels, SSH tunnels, and a command-and-control client that allows live control of the infected device.

The group contacts targets posing as recruiters, but first the target must solve a coding challenge contained in a zip file. The zip contains a trojaned Node.js project which infects the victim system when compiled, deploying the remote access tools and setting up persistence to relaunch them if disabled. Multiple variants have already been spotted, generally targeting different countries, predominately Egypt, Afghanistan, and Ethiopia.

The latest version of the malware package also looks for settings and data from major security vendors like Symantec, CrowdStrike, and SentinelOne, as well as the contents of directories related to Google and Microsoft services.

The fake recruiting method has also been used by other groups in Iran and North Korea. Remember: any project with a build script can execute any commands as part of the build, and most IDE project files also allow embedding custom plugins and commands into the project. Triggering a compile on a project is the same as running arbitrary commands!

150 Million US Drivers Licenses Stolen

As many outlets are now reporting, a major ID validation company was compromised, leading to the theft of scans and data of 150 million US drivers licenses.

IDScan provides drivers license and identification card scanning services used by car rental companies, bars and dispensaries, hotels, concert venues, and a multitude of other businesses. If you’ve ever had to hand your ID over for validation, there’s a high chance you’ve interacted with IDScan or a similar company.

Evidence points to IDScan being compromised for at least a year, with full scans of licenses continually exfiltrated. The scans include everything visible on a typical license or ID card, including name, license identification number, ID photo, and home address, but also the date that it was scanned in. The collection even includes additional scans of the ID in ultraviolet and infrared to catch any watermarks. With 150 million entries, the data set contains everyone from the security researcher Brian Krebs who broke the story, to government officials like Pete Hegseth.

The data has been available for sale, individually or in bulk, although with the recent press coverage the site claiming to sell the data has gone offline for now. Before disappearing, the site claimed that all data was exfiltrated into their own databases, which means it’s still available somewhere, and shutting them out of the IDScan service won’t protect data already stolen.

Many aspects of this echo the scanned ID data stolen from validation services used by Discord and other online services: almost like scanning unchangeable government IDs is a bad plan?

American Meteor Society Knocked Offline

It’s all fun and games until they come for the geek hobbies. The American Meteor Society Fireball tracking program is was knocked offline, seemingly from a ransomware attack. Fortunately it looks like as of writing this, the admins were able to restore a backup and the site is online again.