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Everything I own, owned

schlarp.com

11–20 of 367 posts

Re: Everything I own, owned

#11

All this ownage will get shut down when manufacturers start whining to politicians and the AI companies will ask how high to jump.

Open hardware being reverse engineered with LLM is cool.

I’d say John Deer will be among first ones requesting a halt.

It was similar with Napster vs recording companies… and then Spotify bulldozed everything with its attitude.

With LLM it could be much faster.

Re: Everything I own, owned

#12
post #3

This a fascinating security write up. I had no idea the models were this capable for reverse engineering. I heard CISA is getting defunded. I wonder if it'll become a common assumption for Americans that all their devices are just perpetually compromised.

we haven't even seen the peak yet, as the author says

> Network-connected devices seem near universally fucked at this point?

Re: Everything I own, owned

#13

I'm hopeful that in the future we can end planned obsolescence from devices that require companion apps which eventually get shut down. Just vibe reverse engineering replacements.

A replacement app could just send the vendor-signed image and leave the signature check to the device. Plenty useful once the official app disappears.

Re: Everything I own, owned

#14
I am wondering if there is a list of “things you should learn to do with your LLM” (But not the rubbish ads youtube keeps showing me)

Reverse engineering seems a good one (ev en if his RE nix sandbox looks fairly usable, it seems like a weekend to get this working.

Re: Everything I own, owned

#15
post #5

I just reverse engineered the Supernote note file format with an agent a few weeks ago. For years the community had been asking for a document on the format. And in a few hours the agent, with 20 something file format example fixtures and 30 something prompts, was able to reverse out the format. It would have been completely not worth the effort to do this by hand for a niche device. Now, in a few hours of effort the…

While it’s impressive work from the LLM and a TS implementation is novel, there’s at least a couple of pre-existing Python REs eg. https://github.com/jya-dev/supernote-tool :)

Re: Everything I own, owned

#17
> I haven’t actually been brave enough to write a modified firmware to the thing yet - it’s a pretty expensive monitor - but I’ll get there at some point.

Honestly if you don't have working patches, it's really not owned.

I would love to get a better understanding of how to safely iteratively patch firmware. I bricked a router last week trying to add a TFTP boot path to the boot partition. It just sucks that it's so risky.

Relatedly, we also need good glitching tools, as some firmware even for cheap devices are not available unencrypted, and flash read is disabled...

We are NOT there yet but I hope we get there soon.

Re: Everything I own, owned

#18
post #10

Key takeaway: > And the existence of WebUSB, WebHID, and WebBluetooth mean that for some devices, depending on the specifics of which classes are used, a moment of user indiscretion in accepting a permissions prompt could permanently backdoor one of their attached devices.

This is why most of the browsers rejected these specs. They are super useful, but the security risks are incredible. Most USB devices were not designed to hold up to being exposed to the internet.

Re: Everything I own, owned

#20
post #10

Key takeaway: > And the existence of WebUSB, WebHID, and WebBluetooth mean that for some devices, depending on the specifics of which classes are used, a moment of user indiscretion in accepting a permissions prompt could permanently backdoor one of their attached devices.

The key takeaway for me was he bought a $300 microphone and is acting indignant that he has full access to his own hardware via — gasp — a command shell.

Do we live in a bizarro world now where we expect — no, demand — our hardware be locked down?

It's worth mentioning all USB mics are toys anyway. Analog interfaces have gone away — artificially so — now they cram them into the device.

All mics are analog.

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