hack

A compilation of the hacking scenes from the 1995 film Hackers, featuring flashy visualizations of computer intrusion.

Joe Grand recounts being hired to hack a Trezor One hardware wallet and recover $2 million of cryptocurrency. He describes three months of experimentation, voltage glitching, failures and high-stakes attempts with only one chance to get it right.

Benn Jordan details security vulnerabilities in Flock Safety license-plate-reading cameras and how easily they can be compromised. It includes citations from security researchers and discussion of police surveillance.

Owen Maitzen's animated hour-long introduction to Hackenbush, a simple combinatorial game, and how its strategy leads to surreal numbers and the roots of the number system.

In Ars Technica's War Stories, Naughty Dog co-founder Andy Gavin explains how the team squeezed Crash Bandicoot onto the original PlayStation. They overwrote Sony library code in RAM, built custom animation compression, and streamed assets around slow seek times.

A long George Hotz livestream in which he explores the coronavirus genome and molecular biology from scratch using a browser and Python, hacking on the science in real time.

In a long live-coding session, Andreas Kling works on making the Cookie Clicker game playable in the Ladybird browser from SerenityOS. He tracks down bugs in the browser engine and fixes them.

Jeremy Howard's 90-minute practical tour of language models. It covers how they work, GPT-4's capabilities and limits, using the OpenAI API, code writing, data analysis and fine-tuning.

Lex Fridman interviews George Hotz, founder of Comma.ai, in a three-hour conversation. Topics include self-driving, Tesla and Waymo, crypto, GPT-3, immortality and book recommendations.

An art project by Simon Weckert in which 99 smartphones pulled in a handcart create a fake traffic jam on Google Maps. A green street shows as red, which diverts cars to other routes.

A 57-minute account of Clifford Stoll's tracking of a KGB-linked hacker through Lawrence Berkeley Lab computers in 1986, the story of The Cuckoo's Egg. It covers the FBI and Chaos Computer Club involvement.

A one-minute political ad from a PAC tied to Missouri Governor Mike Parson attacking a reporter who disclosed a state website flaw as a hacker.

Kaze Emanuar explains how he rewrote and optimized the Super Mario 64 source code so it runs far faster on real N64 hardware. He covers performance bottlenecks and fixes in detail for his ROM hacks.

A short Coding Secrets episode explaining why hitting a Sonic 3D cartridge triggers a hidden level select. The cause was a custom crash handler that redirected CPU error interrupts to the level select screen.

Omar Rizwan's short !!Con talk about writing a Breakout game in JavaScript that runs inside a PDF. It explores the surprisingly large PDF specification, including its scripting support.

DIY Perks shows how to modify devices that use older USB connectors so they charge and connect over USB Type-C. He solders in a USB-C connector board and works through cases such as dongle-dependent gadgets and a mouse receiver.

CNLohr explains how he made an ESP32 produce valid LoRa packets without a LoRa radio, using aliasing and clever signal tricks. It walks through the RF math and shows how far the signals reach.

A DEF CON 30 talk by Sam Bent, a former darknet vendor, on operational security when using Tor and the darknet. He applies the hacker mindset to staying anonymous and avoiding capture.

MattKC fits a playable Snake game into a QR code by writing tiny x86 machine code and patching the ZBar scanner so it can run the decoded data.

Scam-baiter Jim Browning explains how he fell for a phishing email and ended up deleting his own YouTube channel. He walks through the circumstances and prior incidents that made the scam convincing.

Linus Akesson demonstrates the Commodordion, a fully functional 8-bit accordion built around Commodore 64 hardware with bellows made of floppy disks. He performs Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag and tells the story of the build.

Tom7 (suckerpinch) builds and evaluates a series of absurd hard drives, including storage made from ping packets across the internet. The video accompanies his paper and mixes deep technical hacking with comedic storytelling.

Matt Parker analyzes the Minecraft speedrunning controversy in which Dream was accused of cheating via improbably lucky drops. He walks through the probability and the statistical arguments in the original accusation and the reply.

A long video essay on MyHouse.wad, a Doom II mod uploaded by an anonymous user that hides unsettling secrets in its walls. It tells the story of the map, its mystery and its liminal horror.

Keith Packard traces the 35-year history of the X Window System at linux.conf.au 2020. He uses X to examine licensing, corporate interests and community dynamics in free software, including Unix workstation vendors and Stallman's influence.

A DEF CON 29 talk by Richard Henderson about encoding the EICAR antivirus test string into QR codes and barcodes and scanning them at real systems. Many systems that do not expect such input misbehave or collapse, including a parking garage system.

The Lock Picking Lawyer tests the supposedly unpickable lock designs built by the Stuff Made Here channel. He looks for bypasses and weaknesses in the novel anti-picking mechanisms.

Modern Vintage Gamer examines the claim from the Super Mario 64 decompilation project that the game shipped unoptimized, and puts it in the context of 1996 N64 development.

Cory Doctorow's DEF CON 31 talk describes how platforms decay in a pattern he calls enshittification. He lays out a plan to stop it through antitrust, interoperability and fixing the law.

Linkus7 explains how a community reverse-engineered The Wind Waker to predict its random number generator and beat the Sploosh Kaboom battleship minigame consistently. It includes d3 animations by Peter Schmidt-Nielsen.

Engineer Stuff Made Here builds two new supposedly unpickable locks with different designs and sends them to the Lock Picking Lawyer to see whether they can be defeated. The video covers the novel anti-picking mechanisms.

Medlife Crisis asks whether academic research should sit behind paywalls, covering publisher profit margins, unpaid reviewers, Sci-Hub and Aaron Swartz. It includes an interview with Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan.

John McCall of Apple's Swift team presents at CppNow 2023 on introducing a memory-safe successor language into large C++ code bases. He argues incremental improvement of C++ hits hard limits and explains Swift's C++ interoperability for gradual migration.

A five-hour documentary history of the Super Mario 64 A button challenge, which aims to beat the game with as few A presses as possible. It covers the bugs and exploits discovered over the years.

A 37C3 talk by Kaspersky researchers on Operation Triangulation, a zero-click iPhone attack that targeted their own colleagues. They describe capturing every stage of the chain, four zero-days and a previously unknown spyware active for years.

Nicholas Carlini of Anthropic talks at [un]prompted 2026 about how adversaries could misuse current LLMs for attacks. He shows recent models finding zero-day vulnerabilities in heavily tested software, including a SQL injection in Ghost.

Deviant Ollam gives a long talk on risk and preparedness: get a lawyer, passport, locksmith and other resources before you need them. It covers practical steps to build defenses against serious problems in life.

A tool-assisted speedrun of Ocarina of Time at Summer Games Done Quick 2022, using TASBot and arbitrary code execution to reach an alternate ending in about 53 minutes. The run is introduced by its creators and followed by an interview.

RustConf 2020 closing keynote by Sian Griffin that dives into Pokemon Blue glitches, notably Missingno and arbitrary-code-execution tricks. It uses them to explain how memory unsafety works and how memory-safe languages like Rust prevent such bugs.

Jake Archibald argues that URLs are nearly impossible for humans to interpret, especially for security. He walks through what browsers do about it, including highlighting the registrable domain, and floats a possible better design.