Download link for anyone who is curious enough:
https://bazaar.abuse.ch/sample/9a10e1faa86a5d39417cae44da5ad...
I'll probably build a Windows XP VM first.
Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
41–50 of 107 posts
Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
#42sabotaging science must be the most morally corrupt thing you can do as a civilisation
How about killing scientists and engineers? [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassinations_of_Iranian_nucl...
Scientists and engineers also invented Zyklon-B gas and built the crematoriums in the concentration camps. Don’t underestimate what scientists and engineers can do to Jews.
Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
#43My favorite part of this was: That kind of notation, called SCCS/RCS, is the equivalent of finding a rotary phone in a modern office. Nobody uses it in 2005 Windows kernel code unless their programming background goes back decades, to government and military computing environments — The astrophysics lab I worked at in 2006 was still using svn and had a bunch of Fortran with references to systems from the 70s and 80s.…
Yeah, I used to be skeptical of the government provenance of things like Stuxnet (I am not any more, I'm fully sold, like everyone else), and notes like this were why. People used RCS well into the 2000s! RCS as a tool had virtues over SVN and CVS.
> People used RCS well into the 2000s!
I still use RCS today. It's certainly not my preferred option, but my collaborator likes it, and it's not too annoying for me to use.
Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
#44My favorite part of this was: That kind of notation, called SCCS/RCS, is the equivalent of finding a rotary phone in a modern office. Nobody uses it in 2005 Windows kernel code unless their programming background goes back decades, to government and military computing environments — The astrophysics lab I worked at in 2006 was still using svn and had a bunch of Fortran with references to systems from the 70s and 80s.…
If you're using R in 2026, you're probably invoking code compiled from Fortran from the 70s/80s somewhere along the line. It's a foundation for a lot of numerical computing.
Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
#45Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
#46My favorite part of this was: That kind of notation, called SCCS/RCS, is the equivalent of finding a rotary phone in a modern office. Nobody uses it in 2005 Windows kernel code unless their programming background goes back decades, to government and military computing environments — The astrophysics lab I worked at in 2006 was still using svn and had a bunch of Fortran with references to systems from the 70s and 80s.…
Does that mean that three-letter agencies were/are able to recruit from the fields for each type of malware? For example, fast16 might actually be written by someone who used to write scientific calculation software, while Stunex was written by someone who used to work for Siemens?
Try to remember how hypothetical everything tended to be before Snowden. And 'twas a meager pittance that was revealed. They have toys that'd blow minds and people yee'd swear weren't people. It's all fun and games to poke fun, but holy shit those guys are NTBF'dW.
Every academic institution, every school, all under the radar of recruitment and more. It's difficult to believe, but the network is real.
There are certainly people here on HN who've been solicited, most who'll never mention it.
It's fun to imagine, though, what tight groups of highly motivated, stupidly intelligent people can do when they collectively commit to doing so - and with a hefty budget to assist.
Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
#47[dead]
Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how many results got nerfed via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug before it was known about.
I’d be surprised if it were a lot. At that time (open to corrections) not a lot of scientific research was done on consumer intel platforms. Obviously it was found by a mathematician, but I still suspect it wasn’t obvious in published research or that it ended up not causing significant enough deviations to cause research to revisit the calculations. My team ran into some interesting but very small deviations when we…
At that time (open to corrections) not a lot of scientific research was done on consumer intel platforms.
We had researchers doing what I suppose might be called HPC on Sequent Symmetrys, which were i386s in the mid-80s and Pentiums by the mid-90s. There were other high-performance x86 SMP boxes that were roughly equivalent (e.g. NCR 3550). That plus some pretty good x86 FORTRAN compilers (e.g. Lehey (sp?)) made this reasonable. I also know a lot of folks who had desktop/side SMP PPros + FORTRAN to save grant money on the big iron and got useful work out of them.
Basically, x86 was way cheap and had useful amounts of FP. There's a reason x86 displaced risc; this is one. I'm sure they would have rather used something like an X/MP-48, but one plays the hand one is delt.
Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
#49My favorite part of this was: That kind of notation, called SCCS/RCS, is the equivalent of finding a rotary phone in a modern office. Nobody uses it in 2005 Windows kernel code unless their programming background goes back decades, to government and military computing environments — The astrophysics lab I worked at in 2006 was still using svn and had a bunch of Fortran with references to systems from the 70s and 80s.…
Does that mean that three-letter agencies were/are able to recruit from the fields for each type of malware? For example, fast16 might actually be written by someone who used to write scientific calculation software, while Stunex was written by someone who used to work for Siemens?
Don't think of it as a materials simulation engineer being recruited and trained on how to write complex malware.
Rather this was developed by a team of 6-8 people. Maybe two or three of them working on the implant, another engineer handling the exploits and propagation, and yet another building the LP and communications channels. They are supported by a scientist with deep knowledge of the process they are messing around with (say developing nuclear weapons), and a mathematician that knows how to introduce subtle and undetectable errors.
Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
#50[dead]