qb45

84 ms·

721.
by qb45 10y ago
Potentially exploitable or backdoored firmware with weak crypto is no better than potentially exploitable or backdoored firmware with strong crypto, unless you are expert enough to know how to exploit it and then fix. And you probably aren&
722.
by qb45 10y ago
Sorry, I only heard it from someone who heard it from someone who heard it from someone who worked on it. Some googling yielded this, for example: http://www.networkworld.com/article/2331257/lan-wan/encrypti..
723.
by qb45 10y ago
Seems to be the same event. http://www.slashgear.com/android-soc-security-keys-extracted... I don't know what those keys were and whether they were indeed "Qualcomm private" or per-device or something else. G
724.
by qb45 10y ago
Any sources? And no, it's not mutually exclusive. In principle, it should be possible to enforce regulatory constraints in hardware. But then I guess you can forget about taking this hardware to another country, unless they make this h
725.
by qb45 10y ago
This cruft doesn't need three letter agencies to exist. Big customers pay for it so it's done. Once it's done, it's easier to leave it there and soft-disable for people who haven't paid for it than to actually build
726.
by qb45 10y ago
Except for the Itanic (is this thing still made?), 64-bit processors from Intel are x86 ;) It's common to apply this label to x86-64 too, in other words.
727.
by qb45 10y ago
Actually, since you mention Realtek, some of their gigabit NICs do take some firmware. I have a vague notion that it's not needed for the basic functionality of sending and receiving packets, but I might be wrong - it's been a
728.
by qb45 10y ago
If you mean CVE-2015-6639 The Widevine QSEE TrustZone application in Android 5.x before 5.1.1 LMY49F and 6.0 before 2016-01-01 allows attackers to gain privileges via a crafted application that leverages QSEECOM access, aka internal bug 24
729.
by qb45 10y ago
> Atheros Wifi chips work with open-source firmwares. Interesting. Isn't such firmware able to initiate unlawful transmissions? How are they going to deal with this new FCC goodness?
730.
by qb45 10y ago
Check the one in x browsers have this value column for large numbers. In my case, for example, it says that roughly 1 in 6 browsers (of those tested by them, I suppose) have JS disabled as I do, so I don't stand out too much. Howev
731.
by qb45 10y ago
In fact, if you count commit messages, e-mails and keyboard layout flamewars, your average developer may easily turn out to type more natural language than code.
732.
by qb45 10y ago
Hmm, I learned Vim on Dvorak and never had a chance to really appreciate this weirdness. What's better about Vim on QWERTY?
733.
by qb45 10y ago
CH would be enough of a reason for me to stay away from this layout. Worse than the infamous ls -l on Dvorak. Though not worse than ln on Dvorak, that's true.
734.
by qb45 10y ago
Are there products on the US market that ignore the FCC? Also, I heard that current TP-LINK are a piece of cake to jailbreak. Being a cheap Chinese brand, they have little reason to go out of their way to "secure" those devices an
735.
by qb45 10y ago
OTOH, industrialized countries leapfrog them in certain other technologies, like wired networks. I'm not sure if wireless would scale to the traffic capacity of our developed and industrialized telephone and TV cabling, especially in d
736.
by qb45 10y ago
Solution: buy computers with "generic" motherboards, not OEM boxes. I have had like 5 different motherboards in the last 10 years and all could be updated from a flash drive with the BIOS setup. And yes, this required user action,
737.
by qb45 10y ago
In fact, the last few Intel CPU generations had issues at launch which had to be resolved with BIOS workarounds.
738.
by qb45 10y ago
Or with Apple logo, for some extra confusion and hilarity.
739.
by qb45 10y ago
Things wouldn't be much different if they shipped Ubuntu preinstalled.
740.
by qb45 10y ago
Could be worse, the title made me imagine UEFI firmware itself making HTTP downloads and reflashing itself ;)
741.
by qb45 10y ago
To make such program work it's sufficient to map it into the lowest quarter-petabye of address space. I can imagine a flag for that in the executable if it ever becomes a problem.
742.
by qb45 10y ago
If they store something there they have to mask it out before dereferencing the pointer. x86-64 doesn't ignore the topmost bits, if you set them wrong the CPU will throw an exception.
743.
by qb45 10y ago
Just nitpicking, but in real mode it is at least conceivable to implement arbitrary pointer arithmetic (at some significant performance hit) because segments are spaced evenly every 16 bytes. The real killer is arbitrary segmentation, where
744.
by qb45 10y ago
> int* can be the same number with the lowest 2 bits always 0. And now you have to right-shift int pointers on every dereference for some dubious benefit. It's easier and more efficient to make pointer arithmetic and casting painful
745.
by qb45 10y ago
This one is about portability, not optimizations. There are architectures where pointer isn't a simple int, due to things like segmentation, tagging or even possibly something as stupid as lack of sufficiently wide integer type. Heck,
746.
by qb45 10y ago
Or at least a kind "hey, we are releasing this new crap, your software will stop working in 2 weeks".
747.
by qb45 10y ago
Arch is largely OK. The only troublesome and WTF-ish upgrades I recall were systemd (which I avoided) and symlinking of /bin and /lib to /usr.
748.
by qb45 10y ago
Yeah, some 32-bit one that predates SATA and ships with 20 known remote vulns.
749.
by qb45 10y ago
Did somebody really manage to isolate some "IQ genes" and demonstrate that just changing them makes one dumber or smarter with no other effects?
750.
by qb45 10y ago
Good catch. I'm not sure where I got this idea that schizophrenia is more likely to develop in high-IQ individuals, but that's what I thought.

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