magnat

> might have already ran into cpu bugs

Not only that. There were microcode updates which disabled CPU features (most notably TSX). During process startup such features might have been detected as available and decided to use optimized subroutines. Disabling features while the process is still running might either severely degrade performance or outright crash it.

According to the Polish copyright law, by default one can reverse engineer and modify licensed software without author's permission to ensure interoperability with other software and for fixing bugs. Such right can be explicitly denied by the copyright owner, though.

For Windows 7 you have to manually force-install an update (from Microsoft) which unlocks further ESU updates. One can view this either as modifying software for ensuring interoperability (which is allowed in most of EU) or as bypassing DRM (which gets you a jail time under DMCA).

For Windows 10 you have to obtain Enterprise LTSC license. Those come only via volume-deals and are not officially available for us mere mortals. On the other hand, in EU reselling licenses is explicitly allowed (no matter what EULA tells you) and there are tons of dirt-cheap second-hand LTSC licenses. Again - one can see this as either outright stealing or exercising your consumer rights.

No idea how that applies to US laws.

Despite all the EOS dates and warnings, you can still get "free" monthly security updates for Windows 7 directly from Windows Update [1]. Windows 10 IoT LTSC support ends in 2032 [2]. If the trend continues, as long as you are OK with some morally dubious practices, you can get security updates for your installation for at least 10 years.

[1] https://catalog.s.download.windowsupdate.com/d/msdownload/up...

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows...

You can go one step further and instead of separate ICMP ECHO trace, use existing HTTP TCP connection between client's browser and your web server. That way you can traverse client-side NAT and/or stateful firewall.

Don't forget you have to do it for chips at both ends.

https://www.antenna-theory.com/ is a good starter for apprentice-level RF voodoo.

30 dBm = 30 decibels wrt to 1 milliwatt. 10 decibels = 1 bel = 10-fold increase of the base quantity, so 30 decibels = 10 x 10 x 10 = 1000x increase, so 30 dBm = 1000x 1 mW = 1 W.

> Translation is a process which both erases information and introduces new information

"Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful."

> crashing Win 95 remotely by sending an Out-Of-Bounds packet to my IP

WinNuke. Any packet on TCP port 139 with URG (Out-of-band data) flag set crashed NetBIOS/SMB service.

First program I have paid for, and after 20 years I still use it every day.

Both Gopher and BBSes still work today but that doesn't mean they are useful or even used at all.

April Fools joke that may be, but that looks more or less like a XML-serialized CodeDOM - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/reflectio...

Modifying binaries (on disk or in RAM) would be detected by anti cheat mechanisms. Most likely they change how to interpret a certain sequence of API calls or replace shaders with their optimized versions.

> super electronic network cathode

> fully nano-crystallized LFP cathode material

> second-generation fast ion ring technology

> superconducting electrolyte formula

Can someone confirm those are proper names of some recent breakthroughs in LiFePO4 manufacturing or just some marketing technobabble?

Can Intel refuse to sell such license to nVidia or ask for much higher fees than other companies? If nVidia bought one of those companies, would that allow them to produce x86 chips at will?

I use custom fork of AOSP Messaging (on local LineageOS/microG build) with some minor UI tweaks and bugfixes. I have tried all other messaging apps on F-Droid, but every single one of them was broken in some way (mostly regarding MMS support or notifications while in deep sleep) or was missing a key feature (like delivery notifications).

The problem with MMS is that there is no built in system-level support for the protocol on Android, and due to legacy of 3G network/WAP, the protocol is quite odd when compared to modern alternatives.

QKSMS has not been updated for two years and has broken MMS support.

They already did in 2015, when they (unsuccessfully) sued a.pl (polish online grocery store) for their domain name.

What kind of useful data would accelerometer provide? 99.999% of the time wheel rotation rate matches exactly car movement speed and direction, so as long as you have odometer (resolver/encoder), you have accelerometer data for free. For the cases when wheels are spinning freely, you have a serious situation which needs to be dealt with using specialized safety equipment.

Since SpaceX has no (official / publicly disclosed) ground stations in Ukraine, are they using only laser links between satellites for backhaul to stations in western EU, or does Starlink support terminal-to-terminal connections, outside of publically routable Internet?

Unlike PCI, ISA has no concept of mandatory configuration space, apart from optional Legacy Plug and Play. Worst case scenario is that ISA card responds on some arbitrary I/O port known only to manufacturer and hardcoded in driver. Since all installed cards share the bus, you can't really pass through a single card without exactly knowing its resources.

In principle your VM/emulator could intercept guest reads/writes to those selected addresses and pass them (using host-side kernel driver) directly to the card. If the card uses no IRQ nor DMA, that could work. Routing IRQs would be tricky (again: determining which card raises which interrupt without global configuration registers requires a lot of manual work and/or guessing), but I guess it's doable.

DMA won't work. As far as I can tell, you can't use IOMMU to isolate ISA bus memory requests, let alone isolate a single device from the bus. Without knowing how card receives DMA parameters from the driver and no hardware support to translate device-generated addresses, your card would corrupt host memory on first DMA request.

Usually these machines come with obscure hardware interface cards (ISA card if you are lucky) and software which talks directly to those cards. Even though you can find a modern PC with ISA slot, passing through ISA devices to a VM/emu is the hard part.

> Aside from security patches, I see nothing that prevents 7 from being used today

Security patches for Windows 7 are still released each month, you "just" have to download [1] them manually and convince Windows Update service to apply them [2].

[1] https://catalog.s.download.windowsupdate.com/c/msdownload/up...

[2] https://www.deskmodder.de/blog/2019/12/07/windows-7-erweiter...

What if each genuine unit would have entire PCB covered in glitter nail polish at factory? Based on a serial number of your device, you could check if a pattern on your device matches the one taken by manufacturer right after assembling the device.

> the use of that particular version is a strangely shoddy mistake. It should have been very easy to use a version string that exists

Perhaps attackers wanted to discourage user from trying to upgrade firmware/bootloader before first use by using version one step higher than officially released. If they used older version number, savvy user might try to flash newest firmware and discover something isn't quite right. Using nonexistent, but plausible looking version number, can also be used to explain minor discrepancies in behavior between fake and original unit, if some are introduced by mistake.

You can actually bit-bang low speed USB on Arduino [0]. There is even a bootloader [1] for ATtiny visible to host as HID USB device. It is obviously not compatible with Arduino, but those tiny boards look too cute to ignore [2]. Also, you can use USB port both for downloading firmware and your application.

[0] https://github.com/obdev/v-usb

[1] https://github.com/micronucleus/micronucleus

[2] https://cpldcpu.wordpress.com/2014/04/25/the-nanite-85/

I have been using maildir storage for a few years now, on 4 instances of Thunderbird, each with 10-50GB worth of messages per folder, on both NTFS and ext4. So far not a single case of lost message or usability issues. All operations are instant and don't block UI.

> For example, if I archive an email, it takes 10 to 15 seconds for this to be reflected in the interface

Have you tried changing local storage format from default mbox (one big linear file per folder) to maildir (each message in its own file)?

As a sole maintainer of a TB add-on, I can't wait for it to completely stop working until rewritten yet again when old TB API gets removed and new version goes live.

Huge pages need contiguous free physical pages. Without preallocating them at boot time, with higher system uptime, chances of finding such region to satisfy the allocation are slimmer, especially for 1G pages, to the point when even services starting later at boot time might not get them due to external fragmentation caused by 4k pages allocations.

While I can see why special permissions are needed to grab them, the whole filesystem thingy is clunky as hell. I have no idea why they didn't put them by default in /sys or /proc.