Category Archives: Hardware

Montevideo Goes To The Beach After Second Week Of Clashes Between Navy And Rebels Leaves Kilometers Of Broken Glass

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PlayaPocitosFor the second week in a row Uruguayan Naval forces were attacked by youth along the Rambla Charles De Gaulle in the early morning hours. Roughly 12 hours earlier, the same location had hosted a victory celebration for Uruguay's president elect Luis Lacalle Pou which was attened by several tens of thousand Uruguayos and Uruguayas (archived).

The violence allegedly began as members of Uruguay's Naval Prefectura were providing protection for transit inspectors carrying out a fairly routine operation. The mood of this sort of operation in the past has usually been rather jovial with youth in attendance laughing at the misforune of their compatriots suffering the indignity of seeing their ambiguously owned and dubiously roadworthy vehicles hauled away on flat bed trucks. This time the transit inspector's naval protection force was met with rocks and bottles thrown by rebels who escaped naval jurisdiction by crossing the street and continuing their campaign of destruction before scattering. Continue reading →

Intel Continues Burning Former Selling Points As It Sets To Pull Old Firmware Downloads Offline

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Intel has decided to burn its former "we support our products forever" marketing point by announcing they will pull firmware update downloads for "end of life" products from their website (archived). Their "being fast" selling point started to collapse back in January 2018. The reason why they lost their being fast selling point keeps them from presenting themselves as a "safe" choice. All they have left is their large existing install base of defective products.

More Intel Data Leak Flaws Documented This Week Situation Particulary Grave

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This week has seen a number of flaws in Intel chips that leak data, but two seem to dwarf others publicized so far (archived). The first, TPM-FAIL allows private keys stored with the "Intel Platform Trust Technology"(TM)(R) "trusted platform module" to be acquired via timing leakage. The ST33 by MTMicroelectronics was also shown to have a similar vulnerability.

The gravest reveal (archived) is a set of "Microarchitectural Data Sampling" attacks allowing any data passed through an Intel CPU to be leaked, in flight, whether the data has been stored in the CPU's cache or not. Many of these attacks abuse Intel's handling of speculative execution. Others take advantage of flaws introduced or made worse by efforts to patch Intel's previously documented speculative execution bugs.

US Meddling Provoked Defeat Of Mexican Military, Police By Commercial Enterprise

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An operation in Mexico provoked by US meddling over concerns that fentanyl was being produced in the country lead to the defeat of Mexican police and military forces during a clusterfuck in which one of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán's sons was briefly detained (archived, archived). Mexican President Obrador claims to not want to be forced into a drug war, a position likely informed by increasingly decisive and embarrasing defeats in the field suffered by Government forces repeatedly breaking informal ceasefires in aggression against superior Commercial forces.

US Court: Family Not Entitled To Compensation After Police Destroyed Home Pursuing Shoplifter

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The US 10th Circuit Court of Appeals has determined that victims of the local police's destruction of their home are entitled to no compensation at all for their home's reckless destruction by police. An alleged shoplifter unrelated to the home's owners attempted to use the structure as shelter to evade police after he allegedly shoplifted two belts and a t-shirt from a Walmart. With their quarry cornered, the local police spent 19 hours assaulting the structure with repeated strikes from an armoured vehicle and expended more than 72 chemical weapons and smoke munitions ultimately leaving the structure a ruin.

The Court's decision is reproduced in full below: Continue reading →

What Happened When Qntra Was Down (Again)

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Outside the Republic:

  • Turkey began operations in Syria. Immediately Kurdish militias formerly allied with the USG made peace and entered into alliance with democratically elected Syrian President Assad. So called "moderate rebels" formerly allied with the US moved into alliance with Turkey. Due to poor implementation of the US withdrawal, on occasion US troops have found themselves squeezed between former allies aligned with Assad and former allies Allied with NATO member Turkey.
  • "Mainstream" US media and Joe Biden have entered into an agreement not to discuss the continued emergence of evidence coming out of Ukraine which appears ready to further collapse the remains of the US "Democratic" Party.
  • Preventative power outages were implemented in 34 California counties under the pretext of fire prevention after KKKalifornia government approved a measure for doing so this May.

Inside the Republic:

2011 To 2017 iDevices Jailbroken Via "Apple Bootrom" Exploit

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Someone calling themself Axi0mX has unveiled an exploit overcoming "Apple Bootrom" and allowing Apple's iDevices using Apple's A5 through A11 chips to be "jailbroken" or otherwise be put in service of a new master (archived). This exploit reportedly requires physical access to a target device, and patching against the exploit supposedly would require new hardware.

USG And Israel Moving Towards "Mutual Defense" Treaty As Hawks Continue Pushing To Bomb Iran

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Reports have begun emerging that suggest the USG and Israel are moving towards a "mutual defense" agreement, provided Bibi survives today's elections (archived). This movement comes as hawks inside the USG, Israel, and Saudi Arabia are escalating their anti-Iran talk in the wake of a Yemeni rebel attack using 80's vintage drones which crippled Saudi oil production over the weekend (archived).

One notable "mutual defense" agreement of historical interest had Britain opening the second World War after Germany intervened to stop the Polish government's genocide of ethnic Germans in Danzig (archived). With Israel already conducting airstrikes on its neighbors, it is very hard to see the move as anything other than a committment to further antagonize the Middle East.

Intel "DDIO" Technology Allows Keystroke Capture In SSH Sessions – Peripherals Interacting Directly With CPU Cache

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Intel's "Direct Data I/O" feature introduced in 2011 has been shown to allow for capturing keystrokes in "keyboard interactive" SSH sessions (archived). Keyboard interactive logins have been a feature of SSH best disabled for some time, but Intel's DDIO backdoor is architected in a way that allows still further shennanigans. The DDIO "optimization" allows peripherals to go further than direct memory address and skip to directly interacting with the CPU's on die cache. Expect the continued documentation of Intel backdoors marketed as optimizations to continue.

Another Open BMC Bung: Virtual USB Open To Anywhere

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Yet another set of "Baseband Management Controllers" has been documented to compromise the systems in which they are implanted (archived). This latest batch of openings allows access from the network to a "virtual USB hub", and that vitual USB hub allows all of the mischief possible with a physical USB port. Or, almost all of it. The virtual USB port can't be meaningfully plugged with virtual epoxy to the same effect a real port can be plugged with real epoxy.