Hardware and Linux

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 11, 2026

• Devices/Embedded

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Jailbreaking the F-35 Fighter Jet - Schneier on Security

    Countries around the world are becoming increasingly concerned about their dependencies on the US. If you’ve purchase US-made F-35 fighter jets, you are dependent on the US for software maintenance.

  • Reccurrent Ventures ☛ F-35 Software Could Be Jailbreaked Like An iPhone: Dutch Defense Secretary

    The F-35’s ‘computer brain,’ including its cloud-based components, could be cracked to accept third-party software updates, just like ‘jailbreaking‘ a cellphone, according to the Dutch State Secretary for Defense. The statement comes as foreign operators of the jets continue to be pressed on what could happen if the United States were ever to cut off support. President Donald Trump’s administration has pursued a number of policies that have resulted in new diplomatic strains with some long-time allies, especially in Europe.

    “If, despite everything, you still want to upgrade, I’m going to say something I should never say, but I will anyway: you can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone,” Gijs Tuinman said during an episode of BNR Nieuwsradio‘s “Boekestijn en de Wijk” podcast posted online yesterday, according to a machine translation.

  • Arduino ☛ Your Arduino Nano Matter board is now a professional Zephyr development platform

    Zephyr RTOS is an embedded platform backed by the Linux Foundation with Platinum members including Google, Intel, Meta, NXP, Nordic, and Silicon Labs. With 900+ supported boards, 1,100 unique contributors in 2024, and its 10th anniversary in 2026, Zephyr has become the fastest-growing RTOS ecosystem for professional embedded development.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Hackaday ☛ There Are No LEDs Around The Face Of This Clock

    This unusual clock by [Moritz v. Sivers] looks like a holographic dial surrounded by an LED ring, but that turns out to not be the case. What appears to be a ring of LEDs is in fact a second hologram. There are LEDs but they are tucked out of the way, and not directly visible. The result is a very unusual clock that really isn’t what it appears to be.

  • Hackaday ☛ Clear Resin Casting Replicates Old Acrylic For Selectric Repair

    IBM Selectric typewriters have a lot of unique parts that can be tricky to source, but one we didn’t think of was the clear acrylic(?) dust covers, that are apparently very hard to find in good shape. [Eric Strebel] has a few Selectrics that all have issues with these parts. While you could come close to recreating this piece with acrylic sheeting carefully bent to match the original shape, [Eric] has a different hammer to try in a new video: replicating it with a resin casting.

  • Hackaday ☛ Power Control For A Busy Workbench

    Who among us does not have a plethora of mains-powered devices on their workbench, and a consequent mess of power strips to run them all? [Jeroen Brinkman] made his more controllable with a multi-way switch box.

  • Nick Heer ☛ Apple Used to Design Its Laptops for Repairability – Pixel Envy

    These four complaints range from the somewhat quaint — swappable Wi-Fi cards — to the stuff I actually miss, which is everything else. [...]

  • Bunnie Huang ☛ Baochip-1x: A Mostly-Open, 22nm SoC for High Assurance Applications

    It’s the latest step in the Betrusted initiative, spurred by work I did with Ed Snowden 8 years ago trying to answer the question of “can we trust hardware to not betray us?” in the context of mass surveillance by state-level adversaries. The Baochip-1x’s CPU core is descended directly from the FPGA SoC used inside Precursor, a device I made to keep secrets; designed explicitly to run Xous, a pure-Rust rethink of the embedded OS I helped write; and made deliberately compatible with IRIS inspection, a method I pioneered for non-destructively inspecting silicon for correct construction.

  • Nicole Express ☛ What if the Apple ][ had run on Field-Sequential?

    One thing I remain fascinated by is the field-sequential color system. Essentially, unlike composite video, which sacrifices color depth in space, field sequential sacrifices color depth in time. But the specifics matter, and we have the specifics: the United States adopted such a system, but didn’t stick with it. So this article describes a nonexistent, alternate-world computer– what would an early mass-market 8-bit computer have looked like in a world where the field-sequential color system was in place?

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Marcin Juszkiewicz ☛ RISC-V is sloooow [Ed: So make your software leaner]

    My usual way of working involves fetching sources of a Fedora package (fedpkg clone -a) and then building it (fedpkg mockbuild -r fedora-43-riscv64). After some time, I check did it built and if not then I go through build logs to find out why.

    Effect? At the moment, 86 pull requests sent for Fedora packages. From heavy packages like the “llvm15” to simple ones like the “iyfct” (some simple game). At the moment most of them were merged, and most of these got built for the Fedora 43. Then we can build them as well as we follow ‘f43-updates’ tag on the Fedora koji.