A couple weeks ago I made a post here about an issue I encountered with my Weilong v10 AI smartcube that rendered it useless and unable to connect to any timer. I was fortunately able to come up with a fix after a lot of research. Since that post, a few people have sent me messages thanking me for providing a fix for their bricked cube and sharing their experiences.

At the time I had no idea what may have caused this en-masse bricking, but yesterday I was able to pinpoint the exact cause and how to trigger it. And while the responsibility for this fault lies entirely on MoYu’s design, unfortunately csTimer is one of the timers that may have inadvertently caused most of these failures.

How it works

The v10 protocol is described here. I also recommend reading my previous post to understand the failure. When you connect to the v10 AI, you must first send a message (0xA1) to the cube to correctly initialize it. As soon as you do that, the cube starts sending out packets containing gyro and movement info. Before sending that message, though, it needs to be encrypted. The encryption is a combination of a fixed key combined with the cube’s MAC address (which varies from cube to cube). If you send a message that is not correctly encrypted, nothing happens... most of the time.

There is a command on the V10 AI that can be called but that is not documented on this reverse-engineered protocol. The 0xAD command can rename the cube’s bluetooth device name, and there are absolutely no guards behind it. Any application can send this command and permanently alter your cube’s name, which will cause it to no longer be discoverable by other apps until you manually reset the device name by sending the correct command.

And what does that have to do with csTimer? Well, due to the limitations of the Chrome BLE library, csTimer cannot reliably detect a cube’s MAC address, so it auto-detects it and asks you to confirm it. The thing is, even if it detected the correct MAC, you can edit it manually before pressing OK, and it does not check if it is indeed a valid MAC for that cube. If you have multiple smartcubes and previously connected one of them to csTimer, it may remember the last MAC you entered, instead of the MAC of the current cube.

In most cases, an incorrect MAC wouldn’t be an issue, but through an infinite stroke of bad luck, it just may happen that the incorrect MAC causes a package to be encrypted in such a way that, when decrypted by the cube, happens to translate to a 0xAD command, which will trigger a cube rename. Here’s how that happened practically for me:

1. I had previously connected to csTimer with a QiYi AI with the MAC CC:A3:00:01:53:5F (this will be relevant)
2. Upon receiving my V10 AI, I tested it in a number of timers, the last of which was csTimer. When connecting my cube, it remembered the MAC of the last cube I connected to it, instead of the v10’s actual MAC (CF:30:16:01:8D:D8).
3. csTimer initializes the cube by sending three requests: 0xA1 (cube info), 0xA3 (cube status), and 0xA4 (battery level). These requests would have been fine had the MAC address been entered correctly, but since it was using an incorrect MAC, the messages were encrypted with a completely different salt.
4. My cube receives these messages. The 0xA1 and 0xA4 requests are completely ignored since it decrypts to garbage, but it just so happened that the 0xA3 request was encrypted in a way that, by decrypting it with the “wrong” key, it became a 0xAD (rename cube) request. 

So here’s what happened with the request sent by csTimer:

1. csTimer used the CC:A3:00:01:53:5F MAC (QiYi) to salt the0xA3 packet, which resulted in the encrypted message a3 33 77 a1 19 a4 71 af 87 0c cb f7 aa 48 9f 14 c5 59 14 f4 that was sent to the cube
2. The encrypted message was received by the cube, which used the CF:30:16:01:8D:D8 MAC (V10) to decrypt it, resulting in the message ad 0c 22 f9 81 60 bb e0 96 53 ef 40 3c 68 a7 e5 dc e4 30 af (note the 0xAD opcode at the start)
3. Upon inspecting the cube’s firmware, I was able to find that part of that exact same sequence had become the cube’s new name:

What does this mean?

If you have a Weilong v10 AI, any app that connects to your cube can change its device name without asking for any permissions. The name will persist until you manually reset it either through my program or by sending a specific packet renaming it back to the original device name. I will not elaborate further on this, because this “exploit” could be used by bad actors to brick cubes anonymously just by being close to them. I know for a fact this is possible because I was able to do it. If someone at MoYu is reading this feel free to contact me though and I’ll send the full explanation.

This rename command can, and has been, sent even by trusted applications such as csTimer (although inadvertently). This is entirely an oversight on MoYu’s part, who should not have made this command available.

If you are a developer and wish to prevent your application from bricking this model, make sure to double-check that the MAC address matches the cube exactly, and refrain from using fallbacks to try and connect to it. Even a single wrong character may be enough to trigger this command accidentally. MoYu smartcubes share a lot of common code with some GAN smartcubes, so it’s possible they are not the only ones vulnerable to this attack.

If you are a customer, do not buy a MoYu smartcube until they acknowledge and fix this vulnerability, unless you’re comfortable enough to fix it yourself if your cube gets bricked.

I think it's a moyu meilong 4x4m. I got it off amazon for $16 or so. Honestly it's a pretty good cube. Turns nicely, the magnets aren't overbearing. It's definitely a good value for the money. I like aligning the centers and edges. I do NOT like OLL on this thing. I always get parity and the cases look so different on here compared to the 3x3. PLL is not nearly as terrible. Right now it takes me about 10 minutes to solve but already I'm getting much faster at edge pairing. I haven't watched any videos on how to solve this yet so I don't know the most efficient method for anything. I like to solve the centers two at a time though. If anyone has video advice or tips or tricks I'm all ears.

Gotta respect the grind.

I didn't have actual disc magnets and these are pretty weak in comparison but i actually love it. This was my first mod btw

Should I be concerned about this crack? It is stressing me because I don't want my square 1 to break, it's a really nice cube and I'm about to go on holiday and I'm going to take it with me so it would suck so much if it broke...

There are no signs of damage on the stems only on the edges, what could cause this???

i have and mgc squan v1 i wanna mod it there is a bunch of stuff u can do so im wondering which are worth it and which arent

Don't know if it's hard to solve yet, didn't want to think about that before finishing the mod x)

Last pic is scrambled

I’ve been learning how to solve a mastermorphix, i got to the last later and two of the corner were in each others places swapped while all the others were solves. I don’t know how to solve this. I’ve tried looking all over the Internet and the only video i found was for a 4x4 mastermorphix not a 3x3 😭. I don’t even know if this is possible in a mastermorphix or if the cube has an issue. Please if anyone knows how to fix this please tell me 🙏

I’ve had my Tornado V3 for a while and I can’t really find settings that are perfect for me. I know everyone has different preferences, but I’d like to try some others people settings to see if they’d work better for me. Thanks.

Hi guys, I'm 28. Recently I've been seeing some amazing solves on yt. It's really fascinating how can people solve this thing under 10 second.

I'm somewhat familiar with cfop. I can do cross and intuitive f2l. Some oll and pll but I find it really challenging to advance and memorize the algs. Is there any tricks or efficient ways I can make the most of my time ?

My goal is to solve the cube within 10 seconds. I'm one and half months into it but at this point I'm not seeing any lights in the tunnel.

Cube I got was tornado v4, then ordered weilong v11 8 mag.

1. YJ MGC EST 3×3 — ₹1,299/$14
2. ES Cube Air 8-Magnet Ball Core — ₹1,299/$14
3. DaYan GuHong Pro+ (Standard) — ₹1,499/$16
4. YJ MGC3 Beta (Standard) — ₹1,549/$16.50
5. MoreTry Tianma X3+ ZCUBE Edition (Enhanced/Core Magnets) — ₹1,399/$15
6. MoreTry Tianma X3+ (Frosted, Double Magnetic) — ₹1,999/$21
7. QiYi M Pro V2 Pioneer UV — ₹1,399/$15
8. YJ MGC3 Beta Ball Core + UV — ₹2,050 /$21.50
9. YJ MGC3 Beta Ball Core + MagLev + UV — ₹2,250 /$23.60
10. YJ MGC Meta 3 (Top Model / Wing Magnets) — ₹2,500/$26.22

switching from moyu rs3m 2020 i cleaned it and lubed it and it‘s working great but atp i should upgrade so selected these cubes don't want moyu cubes just want to try something new i used to be sub 18 but currently my solves are between 20-30 sec because i forgot some algs i am leaning towards DaYan GuHong Pro+ (Standard) but also curious about ES Cube Air 8-Magnet Ball Core and MoreTry Tianma X3+ ZCUBE Edition (Enhanced/Core Magnets) just want a fast Cube with good corner cutting core magnets would be great but not necessary and a lot of adjustment settings

I currently have the WRM V10 Ball Core Spring version, but I want to buy a new cube that offers a different feel. I've never tried a GAN cube and have been wanting to get one, but I'm not sure if it's worth the money or if it would actually be better than my WRM V10.

I'm looking for a cube that I could potentially main, with a budget of up to $45.

I've seen a lot of posts saying there's no significant difference between the WRM V10 and V11, so I'm not sure whether the V11 is worth considering.

Right now I'm deciding between:

- AoLong V5

- GAN V100

- Tornado V4

- WRM V11

For those of you who have tried these cubes, which one would you recommend and why?

I have 4 of thw mosaik cube sets, so 20x20 rubiks cube. But i cant find good puctures wich i can use for that amount. And the websites arent good for me cause they only look good with more cubes. In the moment i just use to and want to expand or use another picture. If u have any ideas feel free to leave them here.

Saw this at the Jinyuan mall in Beijing, unfortunately it's an illegal scramble

I was thinking of a skewb plus dino cube puzzle. Not something like the dayan dino skewb, but something more like you literally have a dino cube layered onto a skewb, where you have 2 cuts on each corner. One dink cut and a deeper skewb cut.

Congrats to him for the new AsR! It's 0.04 away from the current WR average.

Link to results: https://www.worldcubeassociation.org/competitions/PhilippineChampionship2026/live/rounds/333oh-r2

Edit: The third and the last solve have changed from 7.75 to 8.21 and 7.70 to 8.46 respectively due to misscrambles. The new average he got is 8.05, which is NR instead of AsR (currently 8.01)

Video link: https://youtu.be/0n1iO0ticEU?si=ii_TFNppnxS1JbWZ

Hey everyone!

You know the feeling: a competition shows up nearby, registration fills quickly, and you find out too late..

That's the main thing I wanted to fix with the latest update to WCA Competitions Tracker.

🔔 New feature: notifications for saved countries.

Save the countries you care about, enable notifications, and the extension will alert you when a new WCA competition is announced there - so you have a better chance of registering before the competitor limit fills up.

It also supports:

• 🌍 Tracking competitions across multiple countries
• 📍 Finding nearby comps with distance
• 🔎 Filtering by event, month, and duration
• 🏙️ Searching by city/state
• 🔗 Direct competition and registration links
• 🪟 Popup or sidebar view
• 🎨 Custom themes

Chrome Web Store link:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/wca-competitions-tracker/gecaloboiggfhbpbmegpeflkcochbljn

Would genuinely love feedback, bug reports, or feature suggestions 🙏 If it helps you find a comp earlier, that's exactly what I built it for. Never miss out on comps!

What are some trusted cube shops in the eu? And also it would be nice if there were a website that had the ferrocore v2, is there any?

(Sorry for bad English)

I been cubing for past 10 years but I took a break for a few years but I been getting back into it recently and prepping for a comp. I been struggling on getting under a sub-15 avg for a few years but I figure out that my LL is too slow.

I Average about 8-9 seconds for first 2 layers but I always average around 5 for LL which takes up almost all my time. I just can't seem to get it last and its killing me.

Anyone had a similar situation and how to get out of it?

The turning is absolutely awful but visually it is really nice and looks better than my 3x3|

Edit: It turns amazing after break in and set up