Story of a Tshirt with a Shellcode

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93 points·0xmarcin··13 comments

I remember the movie Elysium also had some assembler listings in it. It's not on screen long, but I saw enough to see the "enter protected mode" bit, so apparently x86 is still reigning in 2154.

The still from the movie: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bb830CJCcAEcqly?format=png&name=...

It looks like they borrowed the code from Intel. It's the code from Volume 3 9.10 "INITIALIZATION AND MODE SWITCHING EXAMPLE":

https://github.com/cirosantilli/x86-bare-metal-examples/blob...

In the original Terminator some 6502 assembly shows up in some of the "what the Terminator sees" scenes:

https://www.pagetable.com/?p=64

Great movie. I'm seeding it's torrent since 2014 (available on popcorntime)

Remember the dvd shirts with the code to break the drm printed on them? I use to have one, can’t remember what happened to it.

Now I want to know if I could hijack someone's machine by sending them a malicious tshirt.

There were the "RSA in one line of Perl" t-shirts that were technically illegal to export from the US.

I still struggle to understand how that US encryption export control was supposed to work at all. Sure one could just memorize the algorithm and cross the border?

Is it possible that the code on the shirt was deliberately altered to avoid legal issues?

What legal issues could it cause?

Some countries have pretty obscure and sometimes badly written laws stemming from a desire to criminalize exploits, rootkits and such.

Code, just like any other intellectual property, can't be used in basically any way unless you have written permission (such as a license)

Nice write up!

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