The only reason no one wrote a serious decompiler yet
I'd call Hex-Rays Decompiler for IDA pretty serious. It can do x86/64, PPC and ARM/ARM64; I've only seen output from the x86/64 version and it did a damn good job of making assembler into C. Of course, it also has a pretty serious price tag!
If someone made a voice activated service device that could work with no internet connection, I would bite. Play my MP3s/FLACs on command from a network share, control my lights or TV with an IR blaster, support SIP for VoIP calls, perform internet searches with my preferred provider (if a 'net connection is present). In short - do not connect to the internet unless I tell it to and never transmit my voice unless it's a VoIP call.
Aren't modern servers tested for rowhammer? My HP Integrity's offline diagnostics does three hammering tests, and will fail the diag if even a single read does not match what it should - and this is on a machine nearly 10 years old (though the diag disc is from 2012).
Real Fords are unaffected; if you read the paper, the vulnerable model are the Ka Mk2 and onward, which are actually rebadged Fiat 500's. No Ford actually designed or engineered by Ford is in the list.
I can very clearly see and read his comment: it said "Nevertheless that is what coreboot does.", and that is what I responded to. The "used to be" part of his comment is quite clearly refering to the name change, and not to a change of scope. In fact, if you had read what you linked to, you would realise that coreboot/LinuxBIOS has never used the linux kernel for anything past a payload (linux was the orignal payload, as the old name suggested) - it is not (and never has been) involved in the hardware initialisation at all.
Coreboot doesn't use linux at all. Coreboot just initalises hardware, then loads a payload from ROM. That payload can be a Legacy BIOS service provider (SeaBIOS), an EFI environment (TianoCore), a bootloader (U-Boot, GRUB2), a Linux kernel, or pretty much any x86 code that does not require any BIOS/EFI services present.
No one makes decent graphics drivers. Intels drivers have so many strange oddities it's not funny (random garbage textures/shader faults), AMDs are generally naff, nVidias break themselves every so often and need a full reinstall (wiping your configuration out along with it), and Matrox releases updates once every 3 years (if you are lucky).
Here in the UK, DIN is still a used standard. Walk into an auto parts store, and they will quite happily sell you any number of DIN head units and a mount/adapter kit for your car (if it needs one...).
Office 2003 was the last truly good version of Office (in my opinon at least). It worked properly then; without the quirks of Office 2000 (and still works perfectly now, having full compatablity with the new Office file formats via an update), didn't have the deliberately obtuse ribbon user interface - which steals a large chunk of screen space, and if hidden to reclaim that space, requries more clicks than simply having a toolbar did. I fail to see any good reason to switch, as unlike the move from XP to 7, no new features of any consequence have been added, and no (positive) updates in speed or behaviour have been made.
I cannot speak for OpenOffice, as the last time I used it was ~7 years ago - and at the time OpenOffice felt like something from the Windows 3.1 era. I also cannot speak for LibreOffice, as I have never used it.
OpenWRT Attitude Adjustment 12.04; loads of packages available from official repositories, nice webinterface, and no commercial side selling product activation keys for certain features (like DD-WRT).
So just factory reset via bootloader download mode which will remove all attached accounts and wipe the phone. Go reinstall all your stuff...
This is about as useful at preventing use of a device as setting a phone lock PIN/pattern/password. A better way of doing this would be to have the network operator disable outgoing calls/data/SMS/MMS during certain times, as another SIM would be needed (on GSM) or a carrier reprogram (on SIM-less CDMA). Of course this would not stop use of local applications or WiFi/Bluetooth data.
So, what Intel are saying, is that they are going to take a SSD controller with unstable, buggy firmware - and then add a feature that allows users to modify the internal constants the firmware uses to do it's job. This can only end very badly, unless Intel and Sandforce do some serious testing to find and fix the data corruption issues, the problems with the drive ignoring the host, and the problems where the drive gets stuck in busy.
(all problems detailed in this post have been experienced with an Intel branded, Sandforce controller-ed drive)
On the Xbox 360, you can use a retail console as a (limited) devkit for developing Xbox Live Indie Games with XNA. This requires two things: XBLIG Membership attached to your Xbox Live account, and the development/debug tool installed on the Xbox 360 (XNA Game Studio Connect). XNA Game Studio Connect requires you to be signed in to Xbox Live with an account with XBLIG membership before it will launch unsigned code. If at any time during execution of unsigned code your network connection drops, or you sign out of Xbox Live, the hypervisor/debugger forcefully resets the console.
I am gonna guess that you are 100% correct in your guess of retail XB1's behavior when running unsigned code - at least going from my use of XBLIG/XNA Game Studio Connect.
And what prevents you from doing this with any executable file format, be it APK, EXE, ELF or JAR? Diassemblers, unpackers and resource editors exist for all of those file formats. If you can run it, you can edit it, unless the format/architecture is totally undocumented.
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The only reason no one wrote a serious decompiler yet
I'd call Hex-Rays Decompiler for IDA pretty serious. It can do x86/64, PPC and ARM/ARM64; I've only seen output from the x86/64 version and it did a damn good job of making assembler into C. Of course, it also has a pretty serious price tag!
If someone made a voice activated service device that could work with no internet connection, I would bite. Play my MP3s/FLACs on command from a network share, control my lights or TV with an IR blaster, support SIP for VoIP calls, perform internet searches with my preferred provider (if a 'net connection is present). In short - do not connect to the internet unless I tell it to and never transmit my voice unless it's a VoIP call.
Aren't modern servers tested for rowhammer?
My HP Integrity's offline diagnostics does three hammering tests, and will fail the diag if even a single read does not match what it should - and this is on a machine nearly 10 years old (though the diag disc is from 2012).
Real Fords are unaffected; if you read the paper, the vulnerable model are the Ka Mk2 and onward, which are actually rebadged Fiat 500's.
No Ford actually designed or engineered by Ford is in the list.
MTGOX
Magic The Gathering Online eXchange
He couldn't even be bothered to get a new domain name...
I can very clearly see and read his comment: it said "Nevertheless that is what coreboot does.", and that is what I responded to. The "used to be" part of his comment is quite clearly refering to the name change, and not to a change of scope. In fact, if you had read what you linked to, you would realise that coreboot/LinuxBIOS has never used the linux kernel for anything past a payload (linux was the orignal payload, as the old name suggested) - it is not (and never has been) involved in the hardware initialisation at all.
Coreboot doesn't use linux at all. Coreboot just initalises hardware, then loads a payload from ROM. That payload can be a Legacy BIOS service provider (SeaBIOS), an EFI environment (TianoCore), a bootloader (U-Boot, GRUB2), a Linux kernel, or pretty much any x86 code that does not require any BIOS/EFI services present.
No one makes decent graphics drivers. Intels drivers have so many strange oddities it's not funny (random garbage textures/shader faults), AMDs are generally naff, nVidias break themselves every so often and need a full reinstall (wiping your configuration out along with it), and Matrox releases updates once every 3 years (if you are lucky).
Here in the UK, DIN is still a used standard. Walk into an auto parts store, and they will quite happily sell you any number of DIN head units and a mount/adapter kit for your car (if it needs one...).
Office 2003 was the last truly good version of Office (in my opinon at least). It worked properly then; without the quirks of Office 2000 (and still works perfectly now, having full compatablity with the new Office file formats via an update), didn't have the deliberately obtuse ribbon user interface - which steals a large chunk of screen space, and if hidden to reclaim that space, requries more clicks than simply having a toolbar did. I fail to see any good reason to switch, as unlike the move from XP to 7, no new features of any consequence have been added, and no (positive) updates in speed or behaviour have been made.
I cannot speak for OpenOffice, as the last time I used it was ~7 years ago - and at the time OpenOffice felt like something from the Windows 3.1 era.
I also cannot speak for LibreOffice, as I have never used it.
OpenWRT Attitude Adjustment 12.04; loads of packages available from official repositories, nice webinterface, and no commercial side selling product activation keys for certain features (like DD-WRT).
So just factory reset via bootloader download mode which will remove all attached accounts and wipe the phone. Go reinstall all your stuff...
This is about as useful at preventing use of a device as setting a phone lock PIN/pattern/password. A better way of doing this would be to have the network operator disable outgoing calls/data/SMS/MMS during certain times, as another SIM would be needed (on GSM) or a carrier reprogram (on SIM-less CDMA). Of course this would not stop use of local applications or WiFi/Bluetooth data.
So, what Intel are saying, is that they are going to take a SSD controller with unstable, buggy firmware - and then add a feature that allows users to modify the internal constants the firmware uses to do it's job. This can only end very badly, unless Intel and Sandforce do some serious testing to find and fix the data corruption issues, the problems with the drive ignoring the host, and the problems where the drive gets stuck in busy.
(all problems detailed in this post have been experienced with an Intel branded, Sandforce controller-ed drive)
On the Xbox 360, you can use a retail console as a (limited) devkit for developing Xbox Live Indie Games with XNA. This requires two things: XBLIG Membership attached to your Xbox Live account, and the development/debug tool installed on the Xbox 360 (XNA Game Studio Connect). XNA Game Studio Connect requires you to be signed in to Xbox Live with an account with XBLIG membership before it will launch unsigned code. If at any time during execution of unsigned code your network connection drops, or you sign out of Xbox Live, the hypervisor/debugger forcefully resets the console.
I am gonna guess that you are 100% correct in your guess of retail XB1's behavior when running unsigned code - at least going from my use of XBLIG/XNA Game Studio Connect.
And what prevents you from doing this with any executable file format, be it APK, EXE, ELF or JAR? Diassemblers, unpackers and resource editors exist for all of those file formats. If you can run it, you can edit it, unless the format/architecture is totally undocumented.