News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

MadnessASAP

Re:Domain hacks with unusual Unicode characters (2018) on Sunday November 01, 2026 @03:04PM (#50329197)
Would you mind sharing your editor and magic recipe?
Re:The $6.3B Binance Hack Was Pulled Off in Just 20 Minutes on Saturday October 31, 2026 @02:38AM (#50313769)
It also requires a significant degree of willfull negligence. So in this case the criminal would be anyone who had deposited funds in Binance.
I also speculate that OpenAI and Anthropic will crater, but I also expect that the market will remain irrational much longer then anyone shorting it today will remain solvent.

So yes, I believe it's going to leave a smoking hole in the ground, but I won't be betting money on it.

Re:eMudhra to Exit Global SSL/TLS Certificate Business on Thursday October 22, 2026 @08:07PM (#50202836)
I don't know if it will work on something as small as a private key, but you can compress the key. If the compressed key is significantly smaller then the original, it lacks entropy. Pure random data is mostly incompressible.

Note that 32 0x00 is a possible output from a pure random generator while still being quite compressible, you would probably still want to throw that one out though. After buying a lottery ticket.

My intent was to demonstrate the impossibility of establishing clear guidelines on what a computer should or should not be able to do because of the subjectivity of what is acceptable. I want my computer to do everything I want it to do and nothing that I don't want it to do. I don't expect that that is an achievable goal.

I guess you could say I failed the "TuringTest"

I don't find reports like this that surprising, they told an agent to do "whatever it takes" and the agent attempted to do everything it could to accomplish the goal. I'm almost of the mindset that this is correct behavior. If I tell a computer to do something, it should do it unless the result could be catastrophic in which case it should tell me so. If I then "sudo" (https://xkcd.com/149/) tell it to do something then it should do it regardless, torpedoes be damned.

That being said, ever since the first user sat at a computer they didn't design, build, and program themselves there's been a tension between what the user wants to accomplish, what the user told the computer to do, what the computer can do, what the people who did design/build/program/own the computer want it to do, and what society thinks the computer should be allowed to do. I don't have a generally applicable answer, I don't think anyone does, I just want to live in a world where MY computer does what I tell it to do... mostly. Unless it would be catastrophic, or immoral, at least immoral by my standards.

Re:Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D Scan Verdict on Sunday October 04, 2026 @04:22PM (#49957440)
So two issues. Fist, the lack of mathematical rigour in law and policy is generally considered a feature, not a bug. Second, if the state is unwilling to compel action or enforce punishment from/on the entity in the wrong (Rodin in this case) then it does not matter at all how compelling or rigorous the argument is.

Which in Rodin's case is what happened, the author did get a judgement ordering Rodin to turn over the data, they refused, the author then went back to the courts to force them to act. The court decided it didn't want to despite the prior judgement.

Re:Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D Scan Verdict on Saturday October 03, 2026 @10:22PM (#49950002)
And what happens when they say 1+1 doesn't equal 2 and ignore any objections?
Re:Woking Electrical Control Room (2016) on Saturday October 03, 2026 @12:21PM (#49945567)
It could just be that effect where when you see something once (again) you start seeing it everywhere, but I've seen a recent uptick in administration for old control rooms on the internet recently and I appreciate it.

In the age of digital clouds we've lost the tactile experience of managing the infrastructure we rely on to (IMHO) our own detriment.

I would like to imagine that if pushing a change to production meant a development had to walk down a wall of cabinets with blinking lights toggling chunky switches as they went the simple physicality of the act would be enough to make them pause and wonder if everything really was in order.

Can confirm, radar signal processing is very bandwidth heavy and not suited to a typical CPU.

Can also confirm that it is generally regarded as impolite to talk too much about it!

Radar is cheap now, thanks to semiconductors getting smaller and faster the analog front-end which used to be a long expensive chain of components is now much smaller, the ADC is now faster, more accurate, and cheaper, the processor is now fast enough to keep up with a higher bandwidth signal. You could probably drive a very rough radar system directly off a Pico's GPIO and ADC, maybe toss in a decently fast op-amp for a receive amplifier.

Where you will run into issues is processing radar signals into usable data. If you're happy with the results that radar was giving 30 years ago then it's fine and dandy, but the magic of modern radar is in the software, not the hardware.

Wow! You managed to break almost every financial law and regulation in one go. That's amazing!
Re:Compressing a Flag to 11 Bits on Monday September 14, 2026 @09:07PM (#49706459)
I feel like it would be unfair to make them include the SVG decoder, the artical uses TypeScript and I believe that is a feature most runtimes (browsers) provide. However they do have to include the SVG files themselves. The Canadian flag from Wikimedia comes in at 699 bytes and France at 262 bytes. So I'm fairly confident that even with compression they'll be over 5kB
(I fix airplanes, have been in aviation for 15 years)

Yes, it does. I can't speak universally but I would generally expect it to be a written rule, if not then at least it's the expectation.

We should probably assume that the authors are aware of ceramics, Curie points, and the earth magnetic field. While the article isn't very clear on what effect causes the change in temperature needed to erase the VRM. I suspect is has something to do with how long the object has spent stationary with respect to the earth's field. At least that's my takeaway from having to periodically rotate magnetometers to prevent them from acquiring a bias.
StimDeck, for autism on the go.
Re:Processing in Memory: DRAM Is About to Do Math on Friday August 28, 2026 @05:25PM (#49484418)
AI inference is basically 1 operation iterated over every single model weight. That's what's makes computer in memory attractive and feasible.

General purpose workloads would require much more silicon real estate and are not (typically) nearly as bandwidth hungry. Just like not all CPU workloads benefit from being adapted to a GPU, even fewer will benefit from being adapted to processing in RAM.

Re:C2PA Cameras Do Not Survive Contact with Reality on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @11:07PM (#49443764)
The signature doesn't touch the image data in any way. It's just a piece of metadata attached to the image, like any other metadata tag.
They did, they contracted with a vendor to store and backup the data. If that is insufficient then just about every customer of AWS, Azure, GCP, OCP, and every other managed storage provider is guilty of the same sin.
As a whole, I'd say it's for better. Obviously Nine PBS's situation is shitty and fuck "OSS" for putting them in that position, but they are not Iron Mountains customer. They are strangers to Iron Mountain who just demanded 50TB of customers data from Iron Mountain. The only sane response is to tell Nine PBS to come back with a court order, and (hopefully) to tell their lawyers to just make sure Nine PBS is in fact the rightful owner and if so, not to fight them on it.

Anything else is the sort of stuff that causes blog posts and news articles about data breaches to be written.

Re:Security Vulnerability in Pioneer Rekordbox on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @12:30PM (#49260738)
You and crtasm both make an excellent point about where the problem lies. I suffered from a critical imagination failure by never considering the implications of running the link on anything other then a controlled and isolated network.
Re:Security Vulnerability in Pioneer Rekordbox on Monday August 10, 2026 @04:00PM (#49248923)
They do not care, AlphaTheta is well down the enshittification road. They captured all the DJs, then they captured all the venues, and now they'll squeeze both for profits until a sufficient critical mass has built to trigger a collective switch away from them. At which point executive bonuses will be paid, investors will get their returns, and the PioneerDJ brand will be sold to an even scummier company to wring a few more dollars out of it.
Re:Security Vulnerability in Pioneer Rekordbox on Monday August 10, 2026 @03:55PM (#49248857)
I too also have a special place of hate for Rekordbox. However I'm somewhat confused by this vulnerability, isn't plug n play unauthenticated file access essentially a core feature of "PRO DJ LINK"? The security mitigation, and best practice, being to have the involved devices connected on a entirely private LAN. I've never tried connecting them to a "public" network.
That's why most platforms have been forced to adopt non-DMCA takedown procedures (available only to large corporations of course). This way they are able to get rid of "infringing" content without the responsibilities or accountability of a DMCA notice. And of course without having to provide any rights to the original poster.
I like to remember that Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter and hadn't even touched a computer till (I believe) half way through Count Zero.
Re:Drone Physics on Saturday July 04, 2026 @05:10PM (#48789126)
> The hard part seems to be smooth rapid vertical descent. It's impossible to predict how the prop wash will interact with the wind and push the drone around as it descends into its own turbulence. I was tracking betaflight development for a while and was wondering if we'd ever see some kind of prop-wash calibration. Is there some adjustment of PID gains while descending through prop wash that could improve stability?

The phenomenon is called Vortex Ring State* and it's not a problem that can be solved with a better calibration/control. A basic description of the problem is the prop moves into it's own prop-wash replacing happy lift with sad turbulence. The solutions are to:

1. Don't descend vertically, always have a reasonable degree of lateral motion. 2. Descend vertically slowly, how slow is vehicle specific 3. Angle the propellers so that their thrust angle is off vertical. 4. Descend with no power at all, thus avoiding the creation of prop-wash entirely, halting the descent will require the use of 1-3.

If you do happen upon a solution that can be applied to traditional helicopters there's probably a good deal of money in it for you.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_ring_state

Oh yeah, there's no shortage of reasons not to use SF6. Even in conventional waveguides, as far as I know most designs these days prefer nitrogen or dried atmospheric air.
You don't need a significant flow of argon, just enough to keep unwanted gasses out of the waveguide.

It's possible there exists a material that is transparent to mm waves, airtight, and can survive the conditions at the bottom of the hole. In such a case they could cap the waveguide and prevent any gas leakage.

I'm quite sure Quaise is well aware that Argon isn't cheap and are already exploring multiple avenues for reducing its usage.

It is interesting that they have to use Argon instead of the more typical Nitrogen or SF6. A waveguide with such a significant pressure differential is decidedly unusual and a unique challenger for what they are doing.

Nobody is questioning the value of unconstrained mass surveillance on solving crimes.

Unfortunately it also enables a good deal of more heinous crimes against the people its supposed to protect, by the people who are supposed to be protecting them.

Its not integrated to the SoC, it is soldered to the mainboard though.

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