Hacking, kicking and recording with a Raspberry Pi - all in today's Raspberry Pi Roundup

Poison Tap

PoisonTap is a Raspberry Pi Zero/Node.js hacking machine. According to the maker’s website, it:

siphons cookies, exposes internal router & installs web backdoor on locked computers

It plugs into the USB port of a computer and first of all tricks the host computer into thinking that it’s connecting to a network and then it intercepts unencrypted web traffic. It also stores cookies coming from the web browser and tells the computer to be a router, thus making it accessible remotely. And it does all this without the machine being unlocked.

Read more about the PoisonTap by going to Samy Kamkar’s website.

It’s entirely up to you whether you try it out – just don’t blame us if you get in trouble!

Dennis Fisher of On The Wire has interviewed Samy for his podcast – listen here.

Soccer ball

US-based eighth-grade student Amelia Day wanted to fuse her love of soccer (I know, I know, ‘football’) and her engineering skills into a project for school. So, she took a ball and filled it with sensors, LEDs, buzzers and, of course, a Raspberry Pi. Designed initially to be a soccer (umm… football) training aid, it soon became clear that it could be used for much more than that. She worked out that it could be used as a physical and mental rehabilitation aid for stroke therapy patients – the idea being that kicking the ball ‘correctly’ would build muscle memory and potentially create new neural pathways. Amelia entered the 3M Young Science Challenge 2016 competition and placed third runner-up. Take a look at the video above for more from Amelia.

Record BBC

get_iplayer is a set of scripts that can be used to download BBC iPlayer content for offline viewing. Recently, Alex Eames over at RasPi.TV noticed that something was amiss and that the scripts no longer worked. Well, he has now come up with a solution to the problem and get_iplayer works again, but only if you follow his instructions which are available on his site.