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landr0id

1,332 karma · joined March 1, 2012

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/lander; my proof: https://keybase.io/lander/sigs/EH5ZD_-bXVwuHyJBpOud37S7telhzEEkGtmhbeIL0rQ ]
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landr0id··on Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit
FreeBSD didn’t have user land ASLR until 2019 and, amongst other mitigations, still doesn’t have kASLR. It’s not a serious operating system for people who care about security. If you want FreeBSD and security take Shawn Webb’s HardenedBSD.
landr0id··on Mythos is the best cybersecurity news in a decade
Mythos hacked the site, wrote, and published the article
landr0id··on Why TUIs are back
Their GUI system (GPUI) is not very mature for use outside of Zed. GPUI is basically a UI framework in the truest sense: a framework for building UI... frameworks/components. It has core functionality for async execution, an ECS for grabbing shared resources, and a div.

It's basically like building a website with div and basic CSS.

gpui-component exists: https://github.com/longbridge/gpui-component

Up until sometime late 2025 GPUI wasn't even on crates.io, and it seems like the GPUI-component ecosystem still promotes using git deps. It was also in "read the code for docs" state for a very long time

It's been a while since I've used it, but there were weird things missing too like the Scollbar was located in Zed's UI component crates instead of core GPUI. Arbitrary text selection also is not possible, which is something I really value about egui.

landr0id··on Localsend: An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop
https://www.iroh.computer/sendme

Iroh's protocol can figure out if the devices are on the same LAN and avoid going over the internet. It can work without a discovery server too -- i.e. completely LAN.

landr0id··on GitHub Stacked PRs
They wrote something that allowed them to virtualize Git -- can't remember the name of that. But it basically hydrated files on-demand when accessed in the filesystem.

The problem was I think something to do with like the number of git objects that it was scaling to causing crazy server load or something. I don't remember the technical details, but definitely something involving the scale of git objects.

landr0id··on GitHub Stacked PRs
>At the same time, the larger tech companies (Meta and Google, specifically) ended up building off of hg and not git because (at the time, especially) git cannot scale up to their use cases.

Fun story: I don't really know what Microsoft's server-side infra looked like when they migrated the OS repo to git (which, contrary to the name, contains more than just stuff related to the Windows OS), but after a few years they started to hit some object scaling limitations where the easiest solution was to just freeze the "os" repo and roll everyone over to "os2".

landr0id··on GitHub Stacked PRs
Part of the idea behind stacked PRs is to keep your commits focused and with isolated changes that are meaningful.

A stacked PR allows you to construct a sequence of PRs in a way that allows you to iterate on and merge the isolated commits, but blocks merging items higher in the stack until the foundational changes are merged.

landr0id··on Pijul a FOSS distributed version control system
I think Pijul has some good ideas, but I’m afraid the network effect of git at this point is too strong.

I think jj’s concept of being a front end for many backends and sharing a common UX over them is a good one, but without a pijul backend for existing tools I have a hard time seeing it catch on.

landr0id··on Binary obfuscation used in AAA Games
It's not something to over-index on, but it's not a strong protection measure. It simply raises the overall cost to attack and analyze a system.

Take the PS5 for example. It has execute-only memory. Even if you find a bug, how do you exploit it if you can't read the executable text of your ROP/JOP target?

landr0id··on Breaking the console: a brief history of video game security
Hi, quick note on "For modern Xbox platforms, public 2024 work exposed SystemOS kernel exploitation on both Xbox One and Xbox Series"

I'm a former Xbox hacker, then former Microsoft employee, and (long after) leaving Microsoft helped with the Collateral Damage post-exploitation payload.

The design of the Xbox One security predates me, but Microsoft has always known that SystemOS would be a weak link that would almost guaranteed to be compromised and shoved most of their attack surface that can be trivially attacked in there. The system shell, 3rd-party apps, guide, etc. all run in SystemOS.

The key things they focused on though were:

1. Extremely strong defense-in-depth

2. Making full or partial exploitation not economical

3rd party apps and the web browser were seen as being obviously untrusted _and_ needed JIT because they'd mostly be based on .NET or the JS VM. But practically speaking there should be nothing interesting in that VM: its compromise shouldn't enable piracy/cheating and ideally shouldn't leak game plaintext.

What some others found though was that for some reason plaintext was actually visible to SystemOS, but didn't enable piracy on console. You can take those games though and run them on PC using XWine1: https://github.com/xwine1

Technically speaking there's no reason why Collateral Damage couldn't have happened waayyyyy earlier in the Xbox One's lifecycle except for motivation. Even still you could probably take some Hyper-V N-day and compromise HostOS through.

Over there years there have been other "exploits" too: some folks have managed to tamper with gamesaves via cloud connected storage and other shenanigans, XSS in the system shell (some of these apps are JS), etc., but most of this was relatively benign and easily patchable. And there has been a very, very small group of people with similar but less capable exploits to Collat.

Collat allowed compromise of plaintext.

Bliss breaks everything :)

landr0id··on Media scraper Gallery-dl is moving to Codeberg after receiving a DMCA notice
For real. Use https://radicle.xyz/ if you want actual takedown resistance.
landr0id··on Learn Claude Code by doing, not reading
Looks like your wish was accidentally granted :)
landr0id··on Learn Claude Code by doing, not reading
Relevant: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s7zgj0/investiga...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s7mkn3/psa_claud...

landr0id··on A Faster Alternative to Jq
I maintain some tools for the videogame World of Warships. The developer has a file called GameParams.bin which is Python-pickled data (their scripting language is Python).

Working with this is pretty painful, so I convert the Pickled structure to other formats including JSON.

The file has always been prettified around ~500MB but as of recently expands to about 3GB I think because they’ve added extra regional parameters.

The file inflates to a large size because Pickle refcounts objects for deduping, whereas obviously that’s lost in JSON.

I care about speed and tools not choking on the large inputs so I use jaq for querying and instruction LLMs operating on the data to do the same.

landr0id··on Cloudflare flags archive.today as "C&C/Botnet"; no longer resolves via 1.1.1.2
They aren’t wrong. They’re literally using scripts on their site in an attempt to DDoS a blog which (partially?) de-anonymized the archive.today operator.
landr0id··on Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'
lol. I wish you good health and best of luck Sanad.
landr0id··on Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'
lol
landr0id··on Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'
And the plaintext stuff by the way was a great effort by some other folks running https://xboxoneresearch.github.io/

I think it was tuxuser, Torus, and Billy(?) who accomplished that. Hopefully not forgetting anyone critical.

landr0id··on Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'
Thanks for the mention! I helped with the collateral damage exploit (wrote the PE loader).

I didn't ask but Emma -- who wrote the kernel-mode exploit -- and I would probably agree that Collat is not really what we would consider a proper hack of the console since it didn't compromise HostOS. Neither of us really expected game plaintext to be accessible from SRA mode though.

landr0id··on Dolphin Progress Release 2603
> Thankfully, the game's community narrowed down the issue and eventually found that the fnmsubs CPU instruction was implemented incorrectly in Dolphin's JIT but worked correctly in our interpreter.

Sounds like a good opportunity for differential fuzzing!

landr0id··on Helix: A post-modern text editor
I've always used GUIs and had to basically break my brain to learn vim keybindings (in Sublime Text) some time ago and the helix bindings are just different enough to throw me off. Sucks because I would prefer an out-of-box solution that "just works" and I'm comfortable in across all my machines for terminal text editing.
landr0id··on [dead]
I mean to be fair, there's really no guarantee that something in the phone's hardware is neither sending nor receiving (and processing) signals. I agree though that if you're worried about being tracked or attacked, in most scenarios you're better off just not having the phone on your person.

If you for some reason do need one, it's important to know when you put a modern iPhone in airplane mode it disables cellular but leaves WiFi/Bluetooth enabled. When you disable WiFi/Bluetooth it just disconnects from the devices for a day, but doesn't actually fully disable these fully. You can verify by going into the settings app and seeing that the radios are still toggled on.

And even if you do _that_, I have no idea how the software actually disables the hardware, but it may not physically power off the chip.

landr0id··on Flameshot
>But this app doesn't capture HDR.

When you say the Xbox game bar accounts for it, do you mean video or still images? I've had HDR disabled for some time but I remember win+shift+s on Windows 11 capturing over-exposed screenshots when playing videogames.

landr0id··on Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
Android also allows developers to split up their APK so features can be delivered on-demand: https://developer.android.com/guide/playcore/feature-deliver...

AFAIK iOS does not offer anything similar.

landr0id··on Miri: Practical Undefined Behavior Detection for Rust [pdf]
If you have a codebase that uses unsafe, I highly recommend running your tests through Miri (cargo miri nextest) and seeing what spills out.

I ran tests for a codebase at work through Miri a while ago and found a couple of distinct classes of UB: https://github.com/rust-lang/miri/issues/1807#issuecomment-8...

These can be summarized as:

1. Converting a reference to the first field of a struct to a pointer of its parents struct type

2. Functions with signature (&self) -> &mut self_inner_field_type

3. Having a mut pointer to the data inside of a Box<T>

#1 and #3 were somewhat surprising to me. #2 seems to be common enough that there's even a clippy lint for it.

A lot of C and C++ developers understand that undefined behavior is bad, but in practice observe its impact less. From my own experience, Rust's optimizations are pretty aggressive and tend to surface UB in way more observable ways than in C or C++.

landr0id··on Hacking Washing Machines [video]
>so a customer without a smartphone could relay the diagnostic session to a technician

Do you mean by mimicking the noises themselves?

landr0id··on Hacking Washing Machines [video]
Pretty cool for BSH and Miele to hop on a call with the researchers just to make sure there were no issues they were unaware of. Sounded like it was productive and positive for everyone involved. Hopefully they don't start doubling down on hardware security though :p

The optical communication for the Miele was pretty interesting too. I'm assuming it's to prevent moisture from corroding a port of some kind. Does anyone know of other devices this is used in or other benefits to this?

landr0id··on Gpg.fail
Yeah, instead they have a cargo-cult of self-proclaimed OSS contribution experts who harass anyone that critiques or challenges ffmpeg's twitter account.
landr0id··on How uv got so fast
They speak about “technique” but rkyv is a Rust-specific format. Could be an editing error or maybe they’re suggesting it’s more difficult in python.
landr0id··on Linux Kernel Rust Code Sees Its First CVE Vulnerability
From my experience UB in Rust can manifest a bit differently than in C or C++, but still generally has enough smoke in the right area.

I believe their point was that they only needed to audit only the unsafe blocks to find the actual root cause of the bug once they had an idea of the problematic area.

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