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Reverse engineering my e-scooter and rewriting the firmware in Rust

bensimms.moe

91–100 of 113 posts

Re: Reverse engineering my e-scooter and rewriting the firmware in Rust

#91
post #17
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what is nice about LLMs. You CAN do these things now!

So you're still not brainy enough to do it, but the LLM can. I mean. Sort of? The LLM won't go into checking random USB-C connections with an oscilloscope - it doesn't have hands, for one.

You could give it some robot hands if you felt so much inclined

Re: Reverse engineering my e-scooter and rewriting the firmware in Rust

#92
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For now, but I think eventually the hardware companies will catch on and build everything much more locked down with signed firmwares, keys burned in to the chip, encrypted communications with accessories, etc.

Why haven't then done this things so far?

This is what’s done for phones, game consoles, and other devices where hackers have been ripping open in the past, but most other consumer devices haven’t utilised these modern security features yet.

Once we start seeing websites that can brick devices over webusb we might see more security.

Re: Reverse engineering my e-scooter and rewriting the firmware in Rust

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't call someone who puts food in a microwave a chef, would you? And you wouldn't say that putting food in the microwave is the same thing as cooking a Michelin star meal. These are different things.

How they meant "you": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you How you meant "you": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deixis#Personal I have a hunch this is not lost on you though, and you're doing this performatively. Please stop. It is beyond tiresome, and it is not going to compel anybody. On the contrary, it is a great way to induce animosity. I assure you that what you're describing is lost on no one either; rather…

> I have a hunch this is not lost on you though, and you're doing this performatively.

Uh, duh? I’m trying to draw a distinction that the person isn’t doing the work, the LLM is.

> On the contrary, it is a great way to induce animosity.

Sorry, what had you under the impression I was trying to make friends? When people who suck show up to your spot, you make them go away by making it clear they’re not welcome.

Re: Reverse engineering my e-scooter and rewriting the firmware in Rust

#94
post #34

We need to free up Bosch systems. They use lots of open source libs, but they close the whole chain (like spare batteries) so that you cannot plug external batteries from other suppliers.

Having been on the flip side of this divide in the past, there really are a lot of potential safety and reliability problems when using random third party versions of components. While I'm sure there are strong financial incentives to constrain supply, there are also some other strong reasons as well. Also it's very expensive to actually make an ecosystem compared to a close one. The best way to incentivize manufactu…

That's kinda been the experience I've found in the open source diabetes space; several manufacturers have floated making things harder to hack, and we've found that actually showing them how many people use the reverse engineered API and would definitely go to their competitor is a really useful way of disincentivising that sort of anti-consumer behaviour.

Re: Reverse engineering my e-scooter and rewriting the firmware in Rust

#96

> To my surprise, two of the USB-C pins were being used as a CAN bus (which smells horribly noncompliant). Oh god that's awful. Why would anyone in their right mind do this?

As long as it's not intended for user to plug in, it's fine. Many other vendors also do that.

Re: Reverse engineering my e-scooter and rewriting the firmware in Rust

#97
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much anything hardware based is like this. Everything is 100% closed source and bolted down such that inspecting it is outright impossible without extensive reverse engineering.

I definitely think AI is going to change this. Astra is shockingly good at reverse engineering. I was working with a proprietary software library and I just asked it how some (poorly documented) function worked and it just went off and disassembled it without me even prompting. I asked it if there was a way of disabling some error checks and it went and found some undocumented functions (not in the header), disassemb…

I've been surprised how much Astra prefers to go off script to "find the answer" than Sol was unprompted.

I've been doing some PCB design lately, and I was working up the firmware with Codex and asked about how to handle a specific part of my SPI setup. The firmware and KiCad hardware are in different folders/repos so none of it was in-context, but Astra just decided to `find` the folder nearby, then read the KiCad net lists by directly invoking the KiCad CLI on the .kicad_sch/.kicad_pcb files it found. Topped it off by reading the Espressif code vendored in my PlatformIO install to make sure everything would work.

Re: Reverse engineering my e-scooter and rewriting the firmware in Rust

#99
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there really are a lot of potential safety and reliability problems when using random third party versions of components. What are you talking about? If a seller sells you random junk that causes safety issue, they are liable of the damage like the OEM would if their product was bad. Then, if the seller is in a jurisdiction where you can't hope to sue, then it's either your problem for picking this random seller on…

> What are you talking about? > If a seller sells you random junk that causes safety issue, they are liable of the damage like the OEM would if their product was bad. No, the GP comment is right. I’ve worked on products where a lot of users did mods and used third party accessories. Customers don’t care who, how, or why their product broke. They want to make noise and try to get a warranty fix for it. Customers would…

Right, I see what you mean, but that's merely “saving the company the hassle of bogus support requests” and still has nothing to do with the claimed “improves reliability and consumer safety”. This actually confirms my intuition that the safety argument is BS (as always with this argument).

And even from a “bogus support request” PoV I fail to see how opening up your product degrades things, as the risk of a user having an issue with third party components should be lower, not higher, if the said components don't have to hack around proprietary restrictions.

Re: Reverse engineering my e-scooter and rewriting the firmware in Rust

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How they meant "you": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you How you meant "you": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deixis#Personal I have a hunch this is not lost on you though, and you're doing this performatively. Please stop. It is beyond tiresome, and it is not going to compel anybody. On the contrary, it is a great way to induce animosity. I assure you that what you're describing is lost on no one either; rather…

> I have a hunch this is not lost on you though, and you're doing this performatively. Uh, duh? I’m trying to draw a distinction that the person isn’t doing the work, the LLM is. > On the contrary, it is a great way to induce animosity. Sorry, what had you under the impression I was trying to make friends? When people who suck show up to your spot, you make them go away by making it clear they’re not welcome.

What if you're the one that sucks?
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