Two gentlement associated with a firm calling itself "Positive Technologies" have documented a manner for acquiring JTAG access to the "Intel Management Engine" on a machine running an 'Apollo Lake' family Intel Celeron (archived). Their recipe involves creating a special debug mode dongle of the sort used for opening up other consumer devices. This has been a very rough year for Intel's marketing wank.
Category Archives: Shitware
San Francisco To Pay Six Figure USD Compensation To Members Of Seperate Feces And Needle Clean Up Teams
In an attempt to address rampant street shitting and litter from intravenous drug use new San Francisco Mayor London Breed has approved hiring separate cleanup crew to address the problems (archived). Six new poop patrollers and ten needle pickers will be joining an existing crew of four needle pickers in an attempt to cover the city's 121.4 square kilometers. The specialist natures of the cleaning crews raises serious questions of the cost necessary to expand cleanliness to the whole city, especially when contrasted to other Western hemisphere cities like Montevideo which utilizes scheduled crews cleaning all types of messes to sweep Montevideo's 201 square kilometers while deep cultural pressures prevent the adoption of a street shitting norm.
Intel Adds "Anti Benchmarking" Clause To Licenses For Microcode Updates
Intel has begun attaching a license clause prohibiting comparative benchmarking to its CPU microcode updates (archived). Intel has spent the past year deluged with reports of critical flaws in their CPUs related to speed optimizations which fundamentally compromise the ability of their chips to be secure, especially in multi user systems. This fumbling by Intel to supress comparative benchmarks between patched and unpatched chips is only their latest attempt to paper over how much of their chips' fradulent speed advantage is lost with anything resembling effective mitigations1 for these engineered holes.
Note: It should be assumed these patches are not effective mitigations. ↩
Consumer Spy Software Left Piles Of Data In Exposed Bucket
Spyfone, a consumer targeted surveillance application has been found leaving data in an exposed "Amazon S3 Bucket" (TM)(R) (archived). Spyfone is marketed to consumers as a turnkey solution for monitoring their loved one's online activity, but the firm's storage practices offer the collected information to a far greater audience than the snooping consumer.
NY Times Attempting To Meddle In Brazilian Election By Publishing Essay By Corrupt Motherfucker
Today the New York Times published an opinion piece by disgraced and imprisoned former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva with the apparent intent to influence the outcome of the upcoming Brazilian election (archived). This comes after the New York Times has spent nearly two years attempting to delegitimize US President Donald Trumpś election with a social engineering campaign alleging Russian influence in the form of foreign Facebook memes affected the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election.1
In the piece Lula attempts to frame his and his party's decade and a half long kleptocratic reign as a "labor movement" and the criminal investigations that leaded him in jail and his successor impeached as a "right-wing coup".
Lula is attempting to run in the Brazilian presidential election from prison against a "Great Again" candidate despite his conviction as a corrupt motherfucker. Brazilian prosperity peaked in the 19th century under Emperor Pedro II, and lags behind the successes of its imperial age as it as been afflicted by socialists and kleptocrats of all flavors. For maximum meddling value the New York Times published the corrupt motherfucker's piece in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Editor's note: Qntra is not particularly concerned with the pretense of legitimacy fiat sovereigns try to drape themselves with by using "democratic" electoral processes. ↩
Puerto Rican Election Commisions Allowing Relief Aid To Rot
Numerous reports are alleging that supplies meant to provide for Puerto Ricans in the wake of last year's devastating hurricane strike on the island are rotting at local election commision offices (archived). Intended to have been distributed, many of the perishable supplies have rotted after sitting for a year under the watch of the election commisions. Relatedly, the Puerto Rican government has conceeded this week that Hurricane casualties numbered at least 1427 despite their official tally having sat at 64 for an entire year following the Hurricane's end. "Our Democracy" strikes again.
"Emergency" Wireless Gateways Making Holes in Substantial Numbers Of USG Assets
A report investigating a Denial of Service botnet has revealed a substantial number of wireless gateways emplaced in emergency vehicles and around numerous USG infrasctructure sites that are full of holes (archived). These ready bake botnet nodes are embedded in networks as varied as airports, hydrogen refueling stations, and ambulance fleets. In addition to being recruited into producing poor internet weather, when installed in vehicles they can allow tracking the vehicle with sufficient resolution to guess what kind of vehicle: police, fire fighting, etc is ferrying around the vulnerable wireless gateway. Fixed installations of the vulnerable gateways has in several cases been documented as motivated by a desire to provision emergency access to the networks so compromised by the device's installaton.
Germany Debates Starting Nuclear Weapons Program
Amid increasing isolation within Europe, political instability, and an unyeilding committment to a 1990's Clintonesque "end of history" worldview, the German political establishment is considering the merits of starting a nuclear weapons program (archived). Several years of sending their soldiers to joint NATO exercises armed with black broomsticks in the place of rifles (archived) has the German regime fearful that its allies might take the alliances which have blanketed Germany with foreign protection as unseriously as the Germans themselves do.
Germany has been dismantling their civil nuclear power generation infrastructure for years raising concerns over what they will do with all their delicious yellow cake.
Yet Another 'Unhackable' And 'Tamperproof' Hardware Wallet Hacked And Tampered
The "Bitfi" wireless hardware wallet has been discovered to be very hackable and otherwise molestable contrary to vendor claims (archived). The device turns out to be a Mediatek Android smartphone board in a case readily pried open by a normal, healthy human thumbnail. Meanwhile the software stack is readily rootable and open to subterfuge as these things tend to be.
Reddit Hacked, User Data Taken
Reddit has announced that they were hacked in June losing control of current user email addresses and a complete 2007 backup including password salted and hashed to Reddit's 2007 standards for such things (archived). Reddit attributes their loss to SMS based 2 factor authorization being defeated with their third party cloud and code hosting providers. They further claimed to have involved "law enforcement" in this matter.