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User: Myria

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  1. There's an upside to losing asymmetric crypto on Team Constructs Silicon 2-qubit Gate, Enabling Construction of Quantum Computers (phys.org) · · Score: 1

    No more locked bootloaders like Secure Boot or iBoot.

  2. Wake me when they get to 10,000 or so qubits on Team Constructs Silicon 2-qubit Gate, Enabling Construction of Quantum Computers (phys.org) · · Score: 1

    The original Xbox's 2048-bit RSA key and I have some unfinished business from more than a decade ago.

  3. Re:Same reason we're looking for earth-like life on Why We're Looking For ET All Wrong · · Score: 1

    At present, human scientists are attempting to communicate outside our species to primates and cetaceans, and in a limited way to a few other vertebrates. This is inordinately difficult, and yet it represents a gap of at most a few SQ points. The farthest we can reach in our "communication" with vegetation is when we plant, water, or fertilize it, but it is evident that messages transmitted across an SQ gap of 10 points or more cannot be very meaningful. What, then, could an SQ +50 Superbeing possibly have to say to us?

    How about, "Hello"? My cat is sentient enough to say "Hello" in a primitive form that I can understand. Sure, an alien civilization much smarter than us wouldn't be able to discuss topics such as advanced quark interaction with us, but why couldn't they say, "Hello"?

    I don't think that the problem with communicating with alien life is an intelligence issue. It is far more likely to be impossible, or be an issue of the wrong communication medium.

  4. Are prions a life form? on Another Neurodegenerative Disease Linked To a Prion · · Score: 1

    If you define viruses as a life form, then I think prions ought to be considered a life form. They work by coaxing something else into reproducing themselves.

    I'm probably not the first person to have thought about this. To me, it sounds like this could be a model for theories of abiogenesis.

  5. Error at the start on A Naysayer's Take On Windows 10: Potential Privacy Mess, and Worse · · Score: 1

    I tried to use Windows 10's Media Creator to create a .iso I could burn to upgrade multiple computers. It threw the trending "Something happened" error message. Great start.

    I later figured out that this error is thrown if you try to save the .iso to a directory junction. It's probably not the only cause, since directory junctions that aren't preinstalled are rare, but it is one of them.

  6. I have an exploit that fits in a tweet, too... on A Tweet-Sized Exploit Can Get Root On OS X 10.10 · · Score: 1

    A lot of security exploits could fit within a tweet, but I've never seen that comparison before. It misleads people into thinking that you can pwn a Mac via Twitter.

    My exploit to load unsigned drivers on Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 even with Secure Boot enabled fits in the length of a tweet. I'll release it whenever WinPhone 10 comes out, probably.

  7. Esserwhich? on A Tweet-Sized Exploit Can Get Root On OS X 10.10 · · Score: 2

    It's just Stefan Esser, as far as I've known for the last decade.

  8. Re:Pakistan has nukes on Why the Framework Nuclear Agreement With Iran Is Good For Both Sides · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If "third world" Pakistan can control itself while wielding nuclear weapons, I'm sure Iran can as well. The inescapable fact of the matter is this: The United States does not "militarily" mess with nation possessing nuclear weapons. This fact alone makes the weapons highly desirable.

    Didn't stop us from covertly assassinating a high-valued target with a special-ops team.

  9. Contradicting yourself? on Millennial Tech Workers Losing Ground In US · · Score: 1

    They used to teach them C/C++. Pointers and memory management would filter the serious people from the "I wanna make games" crowd.

    Games are one of the last bastions of C/C++ and raw memory management, so what are you going on about? =)

  10. Re:Hasn't worked since at least 2008. on MIT Debuts Integer Overflow Debugger · · Score: 1

    -ftrapv hasn't worked since at least 2008.

    ...but you're right, the logical thing to do would be to just check for this shit at runtime. Do you want fast code or do you want secure code? I can buy a faster computer, but I can't buy a more secure one.

    clang -fsanitize=undefined, since signed integer overflow is formally undefined.

  11. Operation Downfall on Feds Attempt To Censor Parts of a New Book About the Hydrogen Bomb · · Score: 1

    The number killed was very approximately 100,000. It is plain that not even the majority could possibly have been military personnel.

    Clearly. However, the most important thing is to compare the Bombs to the estimated casualties of Operation Downfall--a hell of a lot more Japanese people would have been killed by the Allied invasion.

  12. Mass Effect 4 on Time-Lapse of Pluto and Charon Produced By New Horizons · · Score: 1

    So, what's Mass Effect 4 going to do when the premise that Charon is actually a "mass relay" is no longer usable for suspension of disbelief? =^-^=

  13. Not the first on New Destover Malware Signed By Stolen Sony Certificate · · Score: 1

    Well, it wouldn't be the first Sony-signed rootkit...

  14. Flying on holidays, too on Google Maps Crunches Data, Tells You When To Drive On Thanksgiving · · Score: 1

    Driving ON the holiday is much, much easier than driving the day before.

    It's cheaper and there's less airport chaos if you fly on Thanksgiving or Christmas.

  15. This happens every so often. on New Music Discovered In Donkey Kong For Arcade · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As another example, in January 2013, I discovered a cheat code in the SNES RPG Breath of Fire 1 that allows you to create a save file at a few key locations in the story. This cheat code sat hidden for about 20 years, and it wasn't until I came along and reverse engineered the game that it showed up.

    Link to it: click me. Sorry for the quality; it is a really difficult thing to record when your only recording device is an iPad and there was nobody home at the time. Not to mention how hard it is to do that controller sequence and record with only two hands.

  16. Common? on How English Beat German As the Language of Science · · Score: 1

    The point is that claiming "things are worse than ever" is pretty silly in a country where it used to be common for people to own slaves.

    Except that it was never common to own slaves. Slave ownership was primarily among Southern aristocrats--your average white Southerner wasn't rich enough to afford one.

    Still laughed, though. <3

  17. Thermodynamics on Spot ET's Waste Heat For Chance To Find Alien Life · · Score: 1

    The new approach, dubbed G-HAT for Glimpsing Heat from Alien Technologies, makes no assumptions about what alien civilisations may be like

    Such assumptions as, that alien life has not found a way around the Second Law of Thermodynamics?

  18. Signed integer overflow being defined. on Interviews: Ask Bjarne Stroustrup About Programming and C++ · · Score: 1

    Screw ancient architectures and minor compiler optimizations. I'd rather have my binary math work like all of us were taught in discrete math classes. Not to mention not have my machine pwned by the mob because a programmer didn't realize that their security check was removed for being undefined behavior.

  19. Signed integer overflow and security holes on Interviews: Ask Bjarne Stroustrup About Programming and C++ · · Score: 1

    Signed integer overflow is undefined. That is, in C++, overflowing a signed integer is considered to be equally bad as dividing by zero. Combined with modern compilers, this is resulting in exploitable security bugs in many programs.

    Programmers have been taught for decades about two's-complement integer arithmetic and how it overflows. As a result, many of us who don't know about signed integer overflowing being undefined are making "mistakes" like assuming that it wraps as we were taught.

    The reason that C++ considers signed integer overflow to be undefined is because of non-two's-complement machines. Such machines pretty much don't exist anymore. Why does C++ insist upon keeping such requirements around, when it is wreaking security havoc on everyone else?

  20. July 2015 on Can We Call Pluto and Charon a 'Binary Planet' Yet? · · Score: 1

    Well, Earth has an unmanned expeditionary mission that will take pictures of Charon in July 2015 =^-^=

  21. Not all that new, but what is personal? on New Russian Law To Forbid Storing Russians' Data Outside the Country · · Score: 1

    As another pointed out, Russia isn't anywhere near the first country to do this; in fact, doesn't the European Union require it Union-wide?

    Anyway, I'm most curious how the Kremlin defined "personal". Being that a lot of us are software industry programmers, product managers, etc., it'd be useful to know what kind of changes we need to make to our respective companies' international back-end infrastructure.

  22. If any questions about the original Xbox come up.. on Interviews: Ask Andrew "bunnie" Huang About Hardware and Hacking · · Score: 1

    ...and Andrew/bunnie doesn't answer them, I can. I'm very briefly mentioned in the book under a different Internet name that I'd rather not say here.

    I was the person who figured out how to dump the second version of the MCPX's secret boot ROM without having to repeat the HyperTransport bus tap craziness that Andrew did in the first place. Namely, the A20M# attack, which was much easier to do. (If Andrew hadn't done his original attack, though, we wouldn't have had the knowledge necessary to pull off my attack. <3 Andrew)

    We kept the A20M# attack secret until the 360 was released, in case another MCPX silicon revision was released. It turned out that Microsoft had, in fact, coded a new MCPX ROM to defeat many of the exploits used to hack Xboxes - they just never released it, probably because it would've cost a fortune for what was then a console in its late stages. We didn't find out about this MCPX ROM update until some people looked into how the Chihiro arcade boards worked in 2014, which showed the new MCPX code in the debug ROMs. The A20M# attack still would have worked on this design - it was an attack on entire secret boot ROM design, not the MCPX ROM's code =)

    Myria

  23. Waterworld on Hawaii's Oahu Used To Be a Bigger Island · · Score: 1

    I'll probably sound crazy for asking this, or get modded off-topic, but... My understanding is that the scenario in the movie Waterworld can't happen by melting the polar ice caps because there isn't enough water frozen in them to rise enough enough to cover the continents. Goodbye to Florida and similar areas, but most of the continents would remain. (And thanks to global warming, we'll likely see that scenario... >.<)

    But it seems to me as though one way in which it could happen is if we greatly expanded our use of geothermal power, to the point that we exhausted the energy driving plate tectonics. (Hopefully most of the leftover heat would escape into space, or we'd really be screwed.) Then the continents would gradually erode until the solid surface of Earth was at an even level, at which point the existing ocean would completely cover Earth.

    To use that much geothermal energy seems pretty ridiculous, though. Just some random Myria musings...

  24. Re: Can we install linux on it ? on Surface Pro 3 Has 12" Screen, Intel Inside · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Surface Pro, like any other x86 PC that comes preinstalled with an OEM version of Windows 8/8.1, is locked down with Secure Boot UEFI. However, Microsoft follows its own rules--the Surface Pro also meets their own requirement that the BIOS allows you to disable Secure Boot given physical access.

    Also, I believe that the Surface Pro's preconfigured UEFI Secure Boot NVRAM contains the Microsoft "Third Party Marketplace" UEFI certificate, which if true would mean that the Surface Pro would out-of-the-box recognize, as an example, the Secure Boot-compatible GRUB2 on the 14.x x86-64 Ubuntu disks as legitimate. I don't have a Surface Pro to check this, however.

  25. No, not quite true. on Microsoft Confirms It Is Dropping Windows 8.1 Support · · Score: 2

    Yes, apple want you to upgrade to iOS 7, but if you don't want to (or can't because your hardware is too old) they still provide security patches for iOS 6.

    The last update was iOS 6.1.6 in Feb:

    6.1.6 was only released for devices that cannot run iOS 7. If you have a device that can run iOS 7, you had to upgrade to iOS 7 in order to get the important security fix, even if the device had iOS 6.x at the time. There was never an iOS 6.1.6 released for iPad 2 or 3, for example.

    If they had released an iOS 6.1.6 for iPad 2/3, it would've allowed downgrading from iOS 7.x to iOS 6.x then jailbreaking, something Apple hates with a passion.