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Seems really terrible engineering to design a laptop where malware can destroy the speakers. I guess there's reason to wonder whether malware might also be abl
by devit 3y ago
Seems really terrible engineering to design a laptop where malware can destroy the speakers.
I guess there's reason to wonder whether malware might also be able to set the whole machine on fire.
- jareklupinski 3y ago> malware might also be able to set the whole machine on fire that was one of my favorite parts of Mr. Robot
- coldtea 3y ago>Seems really terrible engineering to design a laptop where malware can destroy the speakers It's not something laptop specific: you can damage any pair of plain regular speakers (say hi-fi speakers) by sending them the right (meaning wrong) audio signals to them: burn the voice coil, fry the tweaters, etc. Audio engineers take certain precautions to what they send the speakers. Laptop speakers have software control of the speakers for protecting them from this, and to allow better performance as long as the components aren't overheating, etc.
- Gigachad 3y agoMacOS has SIP which makes it impossible for malware to alter these system components.
- nicce 3y agoThen there us powerusers which disable SIP for better window control… But also, there have been many bugs in the past which bypassed SIP.
- londons_explore 3y agoAll modern hardware can be destroyed by something that gets sufficient permissions to poke hardware registers. You could for example blow all the efuses in anything with signed firmware versioning - meaning there would be no firmware release that will boot anymore. You can also typically increase system voltages to cause failure, erase flash so many times it fails in a few minutes, overwrite bootloaders in peripherals so they can't be fixed without a soldering iron, etc.
- devit 3y agoProperly designed hardware with signed firmware versioning has the bootloader permanently disable the ability to blow efuses until reboot before passing control to the OS, either through hardware or a mandatory hypervisor (and the bootloader itself is trusted and cannot be replaced without either a signature or special physical hardware access).