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Comment by udev | Hacker News Reader

I read it as in researched found zero-day vulnerability to Antikythera mechanism.

Same, and honestly that would make for a good story too - as in SciFi. The builder of the mechanism. purposefully adds an error in order to change the trajectory of human history.

"When the mainspring is overwound, the mechanism will begin to drill holes in the floor of the cargo hold..."

So is that just an overlooked bug or "works as designed--closing" type of bug? Was this thing designed as a trojan horse/sabotage to take down one ship? Was this just some overworked craftsman that didn't realize he left the torque setting too high from a previous project? Intent matters

Nice! Callback to the old folktale Why the Sea is Salt

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8933

Closing as not reproducible. We haven't heard back from any of the testers that have tried to reproduce it.

Now I’ll just make that change in Jira…

This is such a fun narrative hook. It immediately draws parallels to Asimov's Foundation, but has Greco-steampunk vibes.

I might have to steal your idea.

Like 2001, except instead of a buried monolith, aliens planted a mechanism that, when X-rayed and simulated on a computer, breaks an AI out of the simulation and onto the internet

This scared me a bit as one of the apps on my iPhone is in fact an Antikythera simulator.

Greco-steampunk certainly makes sense. In ancient times, Greeks were considered master automata makers:

Robots were so prevalent in the imaginative and material culture of the Greek-speaking world that they were seen as emblematic of Hellenistic culture by others. Buddhist legends focused on north-eastern India from the fourth and third centuries BCE recount the army of automata that guarded Buddha’s relics, built with knowledge smuggled from the Graecophone world. In one version, which features both killer robot-assassins and robot-guardians, a young man travels in disguise to the land of the Yavanas (Greek speakers) to learn the art of automaton-making, a secret closely guarded by the yantakaras (automaton makers) there, knowledge that he then steals to make the artificial guards. We find stories of automatic warriors guarding the Buddha’s relics in Chinese, Sanskrit, Hindu, and Tibetan texts. Additionally, mechanical automata also appear elsewhere in the Chinese historical record: for example, at the court of Tang ruler Empress Wu Zhou (c.624–705 CE).

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-ancient-history-of-in...

Nowdays, we're better known for our army of civil servants guarding state pensions :/

There is such rich kindling in this post that it sets my imagination on fire. Thank you for sharing!

If you end up writing something I'd love to read it :)

Be my guest - I've too may ideas already ;)

Same, but then I thought that zero days don't matter for non-networked devices like this one

So did my grandpa, until the day he and his pacemaker walked through the security checkpoint at Schiphol.

It's taken a little over two thousand years, but researchers have finally uncovered an exploit in which EMF fluctuations emitted from a nearby NVIDIA card, which is in the process of calculating DOGECOIN, can rewrite the Antikythera EPROM.

Dr. A. Medes, the project's head researcher from Kythera University said, "the real breakthrough was decoding the instruction set of the RISC Antikythera in order to understand what the ancient JTAG interface was telling us".

Google verified the device no longer has Android security updates available.

Damned Roman hackers!

I did too!

Me three!

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