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  1. It's also going to need to connect to both SCK and SDA and 3.3V and GND to do anything on the bus.
      Typical I2C topology only has discrete 10K pullups to VDD, can't do much with a 2 pin device that's in an 0201 package.

  2. Re:Does the chip in question even exist? on Apple Insiders Say Nobody Internally Knows What's Going On With Bloomberg's China Hack Story (buzzfeednews.com) · · Score: 1

    It's actually quite likely, if this chip/mod/hack whatever causes a problem, the board will be pulled and sent for repair.
    Of if the board comes in for something else and the odd part is noticed, when you look at these boards all day, something different sticks out.
    Someone's going to inspect that board and do some analysis to see if it's a problem that affects thousands of other servers.
    Once one chip gets found, the datecode printed on the board will identify the factory and production date.
    That would start a purge of all the boards and a major blacklisting of the manufacturer.
    None of the big guys (Foxconn, Wistron, Inventec, Quanta etc ) would risk it, the tracking would point right back to them.

  3. Supermicro has the BOM, Schematics, Layout files, they , pre the article are not in on the hack and would be motivated to clear their name.
    If there is a chip inserted in between layers, you won't need a BOM to find that, no one does that on mass-produced serverboards, it's far too expensive.

    Now, if there is a part that is nominally on the board, is part of the schematic and BOM , but has been replaced with a modified part, you wont find that on the paper work or even layout, you'll have to find a board with the part on it. I could see a reel of parts with the same footprint being substituted during a production run, but that means hundreds or thousands of boards are in the field.

    Surely some Engineer or Tech has one of these in a box that had failed for an unrelated reason, or were part of an engineering test or even a spare. There are only so many parts that are potential candidates for substituion, ie ganged pullups on the I2C lines , a single 2 pin package wont be able to affect or read data, buffers or possibly a filter on the RMII lines from the BMC MAC to the management network PHY , filters or baluns on the PHY to RJ45 network jack, the jack itself. the BMC boot EEPROM all come to mind.

    That's the problem with a hardware hack, it's going to leave a physical evidence trail. So far nothing has been produced.
    IMO this story is unraveling.

  4. The one thing I've yet to see is one of these devices.
    If they got into the supply chain and made a production run of boards with these parts, there should be hundreds if not thousands of modified boards in multiple datacenters. Surely some engineer or tech has a failed or spare board in a box somewhere that has this part on it. If there was such a purge of servers once this became known, people would have talked by now, or someone would know and again have an old one or a lab board that they could pull this part off of. Getting into the supply chain at the board house is a single point, but the back end of where those boards went, that's hundreds of people.

    As to where you'd put the device, another place would be between the management PHY and the BMC , the AST2400 otherwise connects to the Southbridge
    https://www.aspeedtech.com/pro...
    You'd not going to have direct access to the CPU there.

    IMO a 'Plausible' hack, but until someone can produce one of these 'spy filter' chips, I'm not buying it.

  5. Like to see this for my DJI on Open-Source Firmware For Your Toy Drone · · Score: 1

    I'd love to have Open Source firmware for my DJI P3, the hardware is really nice, but the restrictions and auto upload and forced updates by DJI are starting to annoy me.
    Sure, they're the biggest target and they'll do whatever the FAA asks to keep their market share.
    "Nice business there DJI, it'd be a shame if anything happened to it"

  6. ebola doesn't have DNA - it has RNA on Ebola Nose Spray Vaccine Protects Monkeys · · Score: 1

    You could always read the original paper
    : A Single Dose Respiratory Recombinant Adenovirus-Based Vaccine Provides Long-Term Protection for Non-Human Primates from Lethal Ebola Infection
      http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...
    is a link to the abstract, the full PDF requires a free registration

  7. Re:No. on Do Car Safety Problems Come From Outer Space? · · Score: 1

    Far more likely, there's a bug in an interrupt handler that corrupts memory used by the throttle position servo.
    If they forgot to put a lock around a read-modify-write operation, it could get hit under unexpected operating conditions, that could be triggered by cosmic rays, ie a memory access exception handler routine.

    The brake failure could be caused by the anti-lock system, but that's always a separate processor.
    Having that fail in a no-brakes mode, and the throttle fail in a wide open mode, seems really improbable since both sorts of failures are worst case and would imply some sort of interaction between the engine controls and the braking system. Those should be totally independent systems.

  8. Re:"Jamming" is such a misused term on South Carolina Wants To Jam Cell Phone Signals · · Score: 1

    And with every call tracked, you don't think that there will be questions raised when a guard's phone is found to be calling Crips HQ ?

  9. Re:But why? on WikiLeaks Under Fire · · Score: 1

    Well, they're not really offline, just no Nameservice.

    This IP is still up. It may be a mirror though.
    http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks

    Goes to show, attempts at net censorship just make more copies of the information available.

  10. Re:Poison the NXD data? on Domains May Disappear After Search · · Score: 1

    Publish the names you've looked up so that other people can run a script to hit them.
    After a few hits, the squatter will register the domain. This costs $$
    it cost you nothing to do a whois and run an automated script to hit random
    URLs from a list. Once a domain is registered, it can be dropped from the list
    and never pinged again.

  11. Re:The thing is on The Nuclear Power Renaissance · · Score: 1

    The biggest investors in several viable solar panel startups are the current oil companies.

    Theres a few trillion$ worth of oil left, we've used about 1/2 of the cheap oil.
    They are smart, they arent about to leave that oil in the ground.
    It may only last 20years or less. Pretty fast considering it took 100 years to
    use up the first half.

    And when oil becomes too expensive to waste by burning it to make electricity and run passenger vehicles, those same (now diversified) companies will be selling us photocell generated electricity by the kW or selling photovoltaic panels to the local utilities.

  12. Re:Why give notice, then?Resign effective immediat on Microsoft's Treatment of Google Defectors · · Score: 1

    If you were non-ethical, at the time you decided to leave, but before you gave formal notice, you could do all those things you mentioned. Any non-ethical employee could do this at any time.
    Treating outgoing employees as potential criminals is a reflection on the culture of the company.

  13. Distributing Microsoft Products? on Microsoft CIO Stuart Scott Gets Axed · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Says here 'Scott was charged with the distribution of Microsoft products among employees.'

    So, was he bootlegging Halo betas?
      I cant see them firing him for giving out copies of Vista.

    http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/microsoft-executive-fired-violating-company/story.aspx?guid=%7B3C9D5FC9-8119-4559-93AE-8FA7ED975002%7D&dist=hplatest

  14. Re:matter of time on Cell Phone Jamming on the Rise · · Score: 1

    The best ones look like a pager, you pull it out of your pocket, press a button,
      then put it back in your pocket.
    5 seconds later, all phones jammed for a minute.

  15. Re:Admins to blame? on Call For Halt To Wikipedia Webcomic Deletions · · Score: 1

    It sounds like it's time for every slashdotter to nominate pages randomly for deletion.
    Once the whole thing comes to a crash then someone can start another project.

  16. Re:Lift? on Astronauts Open ISS Station Room · · Score: 1

    How much as a percentage of the normal force of gravity as felt by those of us on the surface of the earth.

    0.0001% or less?

  17. Re:Intentional Transmitters on Japanese Airlines Ban DS, PSP · · Score: 1

    Here's an idea..
    Put the GPS antenna outside of the metal airframe.
    RF gaskets on the doors and metallized glass windows and no RF gets out of the interior.

    If aircraft systems are so sensitive that consumer FCC certified gear can take them down,
    then why hasn't anyone with bad intent brought up a 100W wideband noise source and
    glitched out the ILS or nav gear?
    Because maybe it cant be done?
    Any aircraft certified system is going to have strict requirements for out of band filtering.
    The antennas are placed on the top and bottom of the body, well away from the doors and windows
    where interior RF can leak out. The whole thing is more security theater and liability paranoia
    by the airlines. Some dope probably wasn't paying attention to the attendants when they told him
    how to buckle up because he was listening to a walkman and got tossed out of his seat in some
    turbulence and sued the airline for not telling him to put his damn seatbelt on.

  18. Re:It's a numbers game on Why Is US Grad School Mainly Non-US Students? · · Score: 1

    If you're younger than 30, don't count on getting anything from SS or Medicare when you hit 65.
    Right now you're paying for all the boomers in the system.

  19. pointless on High Performance DDR2 Memory Breaks 1.25GHz · · Score: 5, Informative

    The basic structure of Dynamic RAM has not changed, it still takes about 50nS for row precharge (Tras
    and 20bS column reads. All they've done is speed up the interface logic. The memory cell access is no faster.
    OK, so once you've opened a row, you can read that faster, but how many operating systems are
    optimized to keep the data row aligned in the system memory? You have a data request that is outside
    of the row you've opened, you have to close that row and open another, 120nS penalty.
    At 1.0GHz, that's 120 clock cycles.

  20. Re:Pretty much unknown how big an effect ths has on Cosmic Rays and Global Warming · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Cosmic rays are basically high energy nuclei, which include essentially all of the elements in the periodic table; about 89% of the nuclei are hydrogen (protons), 10% helium, and about 1% heavier elements. They are accelerated to between 40% and 99% of the Speed of light, or between 100Million electron Volts to 10GeV, this must leave some sort of chemical or isotopic signature on things like organic molecules in ice cores.
    Sort of like the carbon14/12 ratio which is used to date formerly living things.

    If the Cosmic Ray flux has changed substantially over a few thousand year period, there should be some way to test for it's effects.

  21. Re:Slowly degenerate? on Mars Camera's Worsening Eye Problems · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I read that as ringing in the electrical signal. Possible caused by a ground on a coax cable working loose
    or maybe a component failing due to thermal cycling or cold stress.

    The boards are built at room temperature, it's pretty cold in space if the sun isnt shining on something.
    Parts contract and if whatever they're attached to doesnt contract at the same rate, if can loosen things
    or even crack them over time. Qualifying parts for that sort of thermal stress is what makes things cost so
    much for Space Grade parts. It's also where they try to save money, only test 10 parts instead of 100 or
    only test for 10 day/night thermal cycles instead of 1000. It's always easy to say after the fact that
    they should use better, more expensive parts, but sometimes if you do, the mission goes over budget and
    doesnt get done at all.

  22. Re:Reasonable suspicion on Aqua Teen Hunger Force Brings Boston to a Halt · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If they disguise their bombs by making them look like a homeless person, nobody will ever notice them.

  23. Re:It's alright on RedOctane Speaks Out on Guitar Hero's Future · · Score: 1

    It's gotta be BRUTAL!!
    or it ain't METAL!

  24. Re:And this will accomplish what? on Feds to Recommend Paper Trail for Electronic Votes · · Score: 1

    Suppose I'm your boss/bank/whatever

    You better show me that you voted for the people I wanted or else
    You're fired/home loan/you might have an 'accident' soon.

    See the problem?

    Think you'll complain to the cops?
    What if the first thing they do is ask to see the recipt?

  25. Re:Very interesting -dormant viruses =bio-WEAPONS! on Viral Fossil Brought Back To Life · · Score: 1

    As well as other 'axis of evil' places that have interests in that sort of thing.

    Amazing all the fuss about nukes, when this could be far more devastating.