161–170 of 188 posts
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“Arbitrary code execution” is a bit of a stretch. It’s a sandboxed Ruby interpreter, not a ROP chain that pops a shell logged in as root.
How do you know that there aren't any vulnerabilities in the interpreter that could lead to taking over the system?
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You would still have to find an exploit for the kernel or other system components in order to break out of the game's sandbox.
That is how a lot of exploits start, though. Certain PSP games used to be valuable because you could present them with crafted save files to root devices. Although, you could also buy special batteries that would let you root a PSP...what a weird handheld. The point is, who knows, the game's scripting language could have shipped with an undocumented 'write word to memory' function.
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Assuming the jar has no holes. The jar apparently has holes and the brain inside it can peek out.
I haven't seen any exploits from application level getting access to the OS. There is basically one exploit being used on the switch which uses a bug in the nvidia chip at boot which gives you a higher level of access than the OS and all of the security checks. Its such a powerful exploit that can only be fixed by a hardware change that no other exploit is needed.
It’s currently the only known chain, and might be the only one in existence. And yet it’s a big threat. In practice, A Dark Room isn’t a particularly interesting entrypoint due to requiring an usb keyboard (web browser is easier to open). But it's understandable that Nintendo would want to keep those entrypoint to an absolute minimum. Especially since newer hardware revision exist which fixed Fusee-Gelee, the BootROM bug you talked about.
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It's not just nostalgia. Nintendo keeps providing excellent gaming experience that no one else does. Super Mario Odyssey is awesome not because it's the same old Mario guy from NES, but because it is just a great game. Nintendo games are not polluted by the games-as-service and free-to-play monetization mindsets as badly as other platforms. I don't like a lot of their rigidity, such as takedowns or still not getting…
> providing excellent gaming experience ... not polluted by the games-as-service and free-to-play monetization mindsets as badly as other platforms. But why does this have to do with draconian lock-down rules? Presumably, allowing homebrew code is not gonna affect the above at all.
When I want something with solid gameplay that doesn't just sell because the graphics are so good (or whatever marketing flavour of the month is in vogue at the moment), a Nintendo console is what I go to.
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Sure, just like developers never make games for Windows PC.
Developers who make games for Windows PCs tend to fill them with so many "DRM" and "anti-cheat" measures that they might as well just sell them as a prebaked rootkit.
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Two comments on that A) its impossible to prevent jailbreaks no matter if a second OS option exists or not and B) the Linux option was removed since it was seen as an unneeded expense. Its function for Sony was to keep the people motivated to jailbreak a console from doing so. After the removal of the Linux option the PlayStation was jailbroken.
OtherOS was officially removed due to security concerns. I'm not sure how to find this offhand but my recollection is that OtherOS was used to facilitate jailbreaking the system. Its function wasn't to prevent jailbreaks but to get people interested in programming for the Cell processor.
By providing something like OtherOS, you remove the incentive for that group to crack your console.
It is fairly telling that the PS3 was only cracked after OtherOS was removed.
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The fact that Nintendo were always like this does not mean it is okay. If there's anything wrong with this story it's how everyone seems to silently accept it is okay for a company to tell you what you can run on the hardware that you "buy" but not really own.
That's not the story at all. Rajan entered a voluntary agreement with Nintendo, through which his game would be distributed on their platform. He deliberately deceived them about the presence of a potentially security-critical feature, thereby breaching that agreement; Nintendo took the perfectly reasonable decision to remove his game from their platform. There is a perfectly reasonable debate to be had about bootloa…
This has got to be a joke.
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Sure, just like developers never make games for Windows PC.
Developers who make games for Windows PCs tend to fill them with so many "DRM" and "anti-cheat" measures that they might as well just sell them as a prebaked rootkit.
You are overstating its use, however.
I read every word of the post (including quotations) and watched every second of the video. I've played on a Switch (owned by someone else). Can someone ELI5 what the issue is here or why there's any reason for remorse? Since it's a text adventure game, what's the difference between the game as allowed (text adventure) and the sandboxed bundled ruby? What's the difference between those 2 things? (A sandboxed ruby see…
One issue that can easily crop up - the sandbox has bugs that allow access outside the game. This makes the game suddenly more than just an adventure game, and could be exploited. This is what Nintendo is trying to prevent here.
Is there some more context here? I'm still confused.
Could you make a video game for these platforms, Nintendo or iOS, where there is a fully... is endogenous the word? virtual machine in the game world that you could program on? Like, the registers and compute cycles weren't real ticks, they actually happen within the game loop?
Like, if I made a space sim¹, and the flight computer ran on PICO-8², and there were actual transistors in the spaceship model, and there was a terminal with actual wires that go to them, would that get banned from the app stores?
¹ (similar to what 0x10c was intended to be)