I hope when people see RCS rev data on some of the stuff I publish it gives them pause.
Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
91–100 of 107 posts
Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s how everybody in academia, tech, and published authors in general used to write. Where do you think the LLM is getting it from? ^_^
the full on em dash requires a different character than - or -- it was generated that way, or else this person happens to know the correct combination of buttons to make that happen. in 2026, at least 20-40% of social media traffic is bots (and probably higher with better LLMs), so it is usually safer to just assume.
On Linux, with a compose key, it's (at least with the settings I have, I don't think I overrode that one). "⸻" is even more fun. You can even make your own sequences, e.g. I've got for "Ω", and for "μ", very handy for electrical stuff like "160μA at 1.8V needs a resistance of 1.25kΩ, dissipating 288μW".
Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
These middle eastern "civilizations" which torture and mutilate their own children... it's hard to see such barbarity winning out in the very long run against intelligence and human rights.
violence is the undisputed rule of life. rationalize the power of intelligence to whatever degree you may .... the bigger guy is still gonna wipe the floor with the smaller one. and if an entire homogenous block of the world agrees on a core set of violent tenets, they are bestowed a greater capacity to violence.
Being bigger and stronger didn't work well for dinosaurs.
Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Re-factoring code is a _panacea_ -- it's more likely factors that contributed to the code needing re-factoring in the first place, are very much in place still to contribute to the same condition repeating eventually, and another round you go. The factors that produce the causes of re-factoring, usually border on psychological causes embedded deeply within the brains of the developer or developers that are owners of…
Did you mean to say placebo? A panacea is a cure-all. So if code refactoring is a panacea then we should refactor code often.
I mean to write "not a panacea", my bad. That it's not the universal cure people think it is. And people _do_ think that re-factoring will magically solve problems, while it doesn't do all that much in practice, less so when you factor in the costs spent on re-factoring.
Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s how everybody in academia, tech, and published authors in general used to write. Where do you think the LLM is getting it from? ^_^
the full on em dash requires a different character than - or -- it was generated that way, or else this person happens to know the correct combination of buttons to make that happen. in 2026, at least 20-40% of social media traffic is bots (and probably higher with better LLMs), so it is usually safer to just assume.
> or else this person happens to know the correct combination of buttons to make that happen.
Yes, some people care about maximum impact of their words.
> at least 20-40% of social media traffic is bots (and probably higher with better LLMs), so it is usually safer to just assume.
Look around you. If you see 40% bots in HN comments, find a therapist.
Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
the full on em dash requires a different character than - or -- it was generated that way, or else this person happens to know the correct combination of buttons to make that happen. in 2026, at least 20-40% of social media traffic is bots (and probably higher with better LLMs), so it is usually safer to just assume.
On Linux, with a compose key, it's (at least with the settings I have, I don't think I overrode that one). "⸻" is even more fun. You can even make your own sequences, e.g. I've got for "Ω", and for "μ", very handy for electrical stuff like "160μA at 1.8V needs a resistance of 1.25kΩ, dissipating 288μW".
In pedantic tradition, I would like to gently remind you that there should be a space between a number and its unit, according to SI standard/NIST.
Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
#97Download link for anyone who is curious enough: https://bazaar.abuse.ch/sample/9a10e1faa86a5d39417cae44da5ad... I'll probably build a Windows XP VM first.
Has anyone posted the windows service file yet? That looks just to be the loader.
No I haven't found it yet. AFAIK MalwareBazaar (right now I cannot access the website) only has two files, one .exe and another one some 30K.
Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
#98For posterity, there was a subthread about how the main submission was some kind of AI generated article. This appears to have been deleted. (Or some HN magic happened where threads are merged? I don't know.)
At any rate, the original link was
https://hackingpassion.com/fast16-pre-stuxnet-cyber-sabotage...
Which while apparently being AI generated, does have some additional information over the other sources. (Which have apparently also been deleted from the thread.)
For example it makes a reference to this relevant paper, though it fails to cite it properly.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1155/2024/1672269
---
Another great source for the story is:
https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/24/fast16_sabotage_malwa...
And in case it changes again, the current link is:
https://www.sentinelone.com/labs/fast16-mystery-shadowbroker...
Which is a write up by the actual researchers.
Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
#99My 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.
Same for SciPy (At least the last time I dove into it around 10 years ago).
A lot of the C code you see for numerics is a straight up f2c run checked in.
Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
violence is the undisputed rule of life. rationalize the power of intelligence to whatever degree you may .... the bigger guy is still gonna wipe the floor with the smaller one. and if an entire homogenous block of the world agrees on a core set of violent tenets, they are bestowed a greater capacity to violence.
Being bigger and stronger didn't work well for dinosaurs.
sure worked well for the meteors that annihilated them though