India and Pakistan are exchanging fire over their mutually disputed territory of Kashmir (archived). So far Pakistan is holding one captured pilot from India after downing two Indian planes which were allegedly striking targets on Pakistan's side of the contested territory. Both combatants are "liberal democracies" with parliamentry systems of goverment in the British tradition.
Category Archives: Hardware
Another Round Of BMC Exploits Hit X86-64 And IBM OpenPOWER Servers
The problem of ugly "baseband management controllers" rears its head again as two popular chips deployed on a variety architectures have been demonstrated exploitable (archived). The marketers have dubbed the vulnerablity "pantsdown" but you never really had pants if you were using these.
"El Chapo" Allegedly Used VOIP, Had Sysadmin Flipped By Criminal FBI
As Joaqín 'El Chapo' Guzman's trial continues USG agents are alleging they flipped an IT guy running a private VOIP network, then had him deliver 'the' encryption keys to him after which they recorded hundreds of hours of calls (archived). The IT guy in question, Cristian Rodriguez was even kept alive and working after Guzman suspected him of incompetence following an FBI induced incident where the network's servers "needed" moved from Canada to the Netherlands.
After this move Rodriguez delivered the new network's keys to the FBI, the possibility of which suggests poor key management procedures and a lack of functional information security knowlege on Guzman's part. The tools and culture necessary to thrive in the future are being developed in The Most Serene Republic. To ignore the Republic and its offerings is a choice, and that choice means adopting a posture of perpetual vulnerability.
Russia Phasing Out USD In Arms Deals
Russian trade minister Denis Manturov has annouced that Russia will be phasing out the USD for valuing and settling arms contracts in favor of national currencies of the parties, or the euro in situations where national currencies are impractical (archived). This move comes as the USG continues make moves to marginalize its own USD altcoin in international trade.
US: Our 'Military Edge' Has Eroded
After 17 years of refocusing to combat rural adversaries fighting as small units, and still more years of procurement boondoggles, a report commisioned by the United States congress suggested the US is positioned to lose wars against either Russia or China (archived). While the US is looking to procure Latino combat aircraft to counter the non-perforance of their decades long F-35 development disaster, it turns out that other countries were making procurement decisions on criteria other than how many congressional districts manufacturing can be spread across.
Onboard SSD Crypto Demonstrated To Be Homeopathic On Numerous Drives
Researchers at the Netherland's Radboud University, total enrollment 19,904 students, have confirmed the safe assumption that the onboard encryption offered by a number of SSD makers is indeed homeopathic and useless (archived). They describe what they refer to as a "pattern of critical issues" which allow them the freedom to read nominally encrypted volumes on a number of Crucial and Samsung drive models. Users of Microsoft Window's "Bitlocker" drive encryption are especially vulnerable since "Bitlocker" trusts onboard SSD encryption engines and will forgo applying its own software encryption when an SSD offers to do the encrypting. The "Make Security Theatre Again" movement is alive and well with mainstream hardware and software vendors.
Another Intel CPU Sidechannel Leak Documented With The Leak Dependent Once Again On A Thing Intel Did To Boost Appearance Of Speed
Another issue with Intel CPUs has been documented demonstrating the things are leaking bits from what Intel's marketing labels "secure" parts of CPU cores through a sidechannel made available via the simultanuous multi threading gimmick Intel's marketers labeled "hyperthreading" (archived). This has not been a good year for the accumulated gimmicks Intel has been tossing in their chips to simulate speed.
This vulnerability has been dubbed "Portsmash" as the continued accretion of trendy names for these things shows no signs of stopping.
Another Round Of Router Pwning Holes Found In Mikrotic RouterOS
Mikrotic Routers have been popular targets for all kinds of shennanigans recently, and yet another round of vulnerabilities has dropped (archived). This suggests the lulz won't be ending any time soon.
Intel CPU Shortage For Most Distribution Channels As Production Focuses On "High Performance Segments"
Reports are emerging from PC makers that they are seeing a shortage of Intel CPU parts (archived). Representatives of the firm are claiming that their production lines are being prioritized for "high performance" parts.
USG And Victims Deny Allegations Of Chinese Ownership Of Their Implanted Servers
Various "national security" agencies in the US and Airstrip One are aggressively denying reports that server motherboards assembled in China for their darlings including Amazon and Apple by way of a defense contractor, contained hardware implants allowing for Chinese ownership of the machines (archived). The language of the denials, especially on the part of the afflicted darlings, involves substantial claims and fabrications of ignorace with respect to this particular embarrassing episode. At the same time the denials on the part of the companies are sufficiently slimey to likely evade claims of fraud over the denials when weighed according to the rituals performed by empire courts at a later date.
Given their hallucinations of immunity from claims, denials by "national security" agencies are rarely bounded by such cautions. Given the weight of incentives, hedging by parties that might have problems, and the contrasting boldness by parties imagining themselves to immunity from those problems… The credibility of these denials is very low.