Viewing profile — scarybeast

@tptacek -- you're so awesome. I keep meaning to reply on some of these security threads but then I see you've made the relevant points of sanity in a well reasoned manner. For wha…

The floppy disc controller doesn't have a way of knowing if the write worked or not. There are some corner cases here, like the drive can signal a fault line if it's on fire, but i…

Do you have any recommendations for any particular techniques or software? I'd gladly try them.

Great that you're working on something similar! How are you finding those tools for handling degraded tape waveforms? I keep bouncing back and forth between hacking up my own vs. w…

The blog post uses conventions associated with the machine in question, the BBC Micro, which is an iconic 1980s UK machine. It was pretty much "Disc" back then, e.g. the dreaded "D…

I'd personally phrase things a bit differently: an _individual_ was able to pull this off while surrounded by screaming children. A large government, with all its resources and hun…

We definitely wanted fun! I guess there are two ways to slice and dice it: 1) fun because the application is exotic / iconic, or 2) fun because the chip is exotic. This is definite…

I think this is a bad decision. The "in-the-wild" part is the interesting part because it is not the norm at all and it implies an interesting story.

These are some good hacks and tricks! The good news is that these fun days are still upon us. I'm a member of the Bitshifters collective: https://bitshifters.github.io/ For example…

That's an interesting story of the 6522 VIA for sure :) I don't think it is what I was hitting though, for a few reasons: 1) "The 6522 has a bug in mode 011, shifting synchronous s…

I've also been referred to this which definitely belongs here. It's a write up of fairly advanced weak bits usage on the 1984 Apple II educational title "Kingdom of Facts". https:/…

Interesting, I didn't know the Apple II's controller could write the combined data and clock bits. That's unfair :) I was also pointed to this Twitter thread where it is explained …

I like the framing here, that of seeing this as a showcase of modern superscalar improvements. And yes, it's about single core performance only. What is particularly interesting to…

I was wondering about this. Does LLVM offer facilities expressive enough to model things like self-modification and arbitrary interruptability? I agree it'd be wonderful to see aut…

A lot of BBC BASIC programs, doing real work (e.g. Mandelbrot drawing etc.), should have a shot at 10GHz. Games are slower because they are hammering hardware registers external to…

FWIW, I've been very impressed with how Yahoo! handled this disclosure.

This is YB (Yahoobleed) #2. You might also enjoy YB #1: "*bleed continues: 18 byte file, $14k bounty, for leaking private Yahoo! Mail images": https://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.c…