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Reverse Engineering a Missile Launcher Toy's Interface
nitro writes "A fairly in-depth technical report by the security researchers at TippingPoint was released on how to reverse engineer the proprietary protocol for controlling a USB missile-launching toy system. They develop an iPhone application to control the device. 'The hardware is coupled with a simple GUI controller written in Delphi (MissileLauncher.exe) and a USB Human Interface Device (HID) interface written in C++ (USBHID.dll). The toys lost their allure within minutes of harassing my team with a barrage of soft missile shots. That same night I thought I would be able to extend the fun factor by coding up a programmatic interface to the launchers in Python. ... One interesting thing is that we have a lot more granular control of the turret movement now than we did with the original GUI. I wrote two simple loops to count the number of possible horizontal and vertical ticks and the results were 947 horizontal and 91 vertical versus 54 and 10 from the original GUI respectively. Granular control allows you to slowly and quietly reposition the turret for stealthy attacks.'"
God damn it John I want answers and I want 'em now!
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
I'd very much like a sentry gun that would squirt the @#$%@#@ deer with water (at least) when they come to eat the plants on the front porch.
Like this?
More granular control is ambiguous.
No, it is not. It means that the quanta of control are larger.
More granular means more grain like (not more grains), which means the grains are more evident. Because they are ... LARGER. You are making exactly the same mistake as the OP: more granular does not mean there are more grains, but it is more grain-like. For a fixed parameter range more granular means the quanta are larger, and higher resolution means they are smaller.
Granular and continuous are antonyms.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
your password is joshua.