𞋴𝛂𝛋𝛆

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • The easiest way I know of to check any machine is to put another router or machine in front of it with a white list firewall or way of logging DNS traffic. You just need to spot the address in the list.

    DNS filtering usually only filters on incoming packets, but for bot stuff that should catch issues.

    In general, most routers run everything from a serial flash chip on the board. These are usually 8, 16, or 32 megabytes. They have a simple bootloader like U-Boot. This is what loads the operating system. These devices have a UART serial port on the PCB. You can use a USB to serial UART adaptor to see what is happening in the device. With a proprietary OS, you are still likely to see the pre-init boot sequence that the bootloader prints to terminal. Most operating systems also print information to this interface, at least of the couple dozen junk devices I have been given and messed around with. I make a little mount for a USB to serial adaptor and add it to all of my routers when new, so I only need to plug in USB to get to the internal bootloader and tty terminal interface of OpenWRT. You will need to know the default baud rate of the device, although it is probably listed somewhere online or can be guessed as one of the common high values at or above 9600.

    Getting into this further gets complicated. It is probably better to look for any CVE that is relevant to the device or software and work backwards. Look for any software updates that have obfuscated the risk for each CVE. If the issue was not fixed, that is where to look to see if someone has exploited the device. Ultimately, they need clock cycles from the CPU scheduler. So it must be a process or some way of executing code from unregistered memory.

    This is getting to the edge of what I have messed around with and understand. There may be a way to get a memory map that includes unused pages, and compare that with a hex dump of the flash memory. This is outside of your scope of a proprietary OS, but hopefully frames the abstract scope of what is possible on this class of device when you have an open source stack. The main advantage of this kind of device and issue is that you can physically remove the flash chip and then see and manipulate every page and memory location. The device likely doesn’t have microcode loaded into the CPU(s) that make it challenging to determine what is going on.

    There is probably an easier way, but a hex dump of the current system can be hashed against the factory updated version to see if any differences are present. It is likely that any exploit will include a string with the address to connect to somewhere in flash memory. It could be obfuscated through encryption or a cypher, but a simple check for strings in the hex dump and a grep for “http” is a simple way to looks for issues.

    The OpenWRT forum is a good general source. The people behind the bootloaders for these devices are also Linux kernel developers and on the OpenWRT forum.





  • The ability to filter information using proprietary devices and software in the kernel of all of these garbage devices is the core issue. Trusting the owners of that code is to surrender your right to unbiased and unfiltered information. I am not at all concerned about hacking or security by small insignificant players. I am massively concerned about the extremely powerful using the leverage they have normalized and embedded to become tyrannical neo feudal lords in a fascist society. Google IS the biggest danger by orders upon orders of magnitude. Trusting them is to give up democracy entirely.

    All mobile devices are proprietary. Android is a scheme to make a Linux kernel that has everything ready to deploy except the actual hardware drivers for the processor and modem. Manufacturers take this kernel and add their proprietary binaries at the last possible moment. That source code is not available anywhere. The hardware documentation is not available anywhere publicly. Every device model is just different enough that reverse engineering one does nothing transferable to any other. The level of reverse engineering is extreme and requires destroying many devices using things like fuming nitric acid and fluorine solutions just to have a small chance at reading some parts of embedded memory. These are some of the most dangerous and hazardous chemicals humans make, and you still need xray equipment, special microscopes with stepping automation to stitch images, and a ton of time.

    This is moving to a tyrannical surveillance state of fascist authoritarianism. Open source software is a major front on the line of real democracy. This is a nuclear bomb released on that democracy. You fear the wrong pirates and criminals. The biggest threats always come from within. Trust as a mechanism is fundamentally antithetical to democracy. Everyone demanding trust is a traitor to democracy. Trust is the key of the fascist kingdom. Once that key is held, democracy has failed regardless of whomever is aware of the situation. Democracy requires fully informed citizens with skepticism and the liberal right to decide for themselves even when they are wrong. This is impossible without full access to information. The source of that information cannot be filtered at any level. We already have the narrowest bottleneck of available information sources in the last 1000 years of history. There are only 2 relevant web crawlers. All search queries filter through one or both of these two and the results from these are not deterministic. Two people searching for the same thing at the same time will get very different and very biased results. This is individualized regardless of any protections people imagine they have in place. Outside of the internet there is no real unbiased media. A dozen people own it all. Even the garbage claiming to comb all sources is drawing the line and dictating what is center right or left is. Anyone at the grassroots level is impossible to find because there are no organic unbiased search results. The results are all filtered junk full of agenda and bias.

    This is the real big picture abstract issue in play. When the maga traitors said this was a coup, they absolutely ment that. Mobile devices are all rental garbage someone else controls. Your computer likewise has a secret operating system running in the background that you do not control. In Intel it is called the Intel Management Engines or ME. This started with Intel VPro in 2008. AMD adopted it is 2013. Arm has one too.

    All that is left is to steal your right to have a digital front door by eliminating DNS filtering and all of these devices will be controlled and connected directly by someone else that is watching and listening at all times. You are already in tethers as a digital slave that can be bought and sold for exploitation and manipulation without your consent or knowledge using your digital presence. You have not effectively realized the implications of that surrendering of rights to citizenship with full autonomy. The next step is to redefine the word citizen to be functionally equivalent to slave. “You will own nothing, and you will be happy about it” because if you are not, you will be dead. This is the death of democracy. My words will echo in your head years from now. The dystopia to come is beyond anything you can presently imagine and there is no way to stop it now short of taking up arms and playing Luigi if you are able.

    The consolidation of wealth is what really made Caesar. That was the death of the republic. It was not Caesar. We are all a product of our time and environment. It was the consolidation of great wealth. All that wealth did not give a shit about Rome, it went to Constantinople for better opportunities at first chance because consolidation of wealth is treasonous. It is as it was, just look at outsourcing and off shoring, or the disgusting mismanagement of banking and housing that have made the American worker completely uncompetitive with Asian counterparts at the same standard of living. No, I have no fear of the boogie man or foreign state actors. I am terrified of the criminal that normalizes domestic trust, actively manipulates and exploits me, and steals my purchased property. That is a real monster.







  • It is not the tool, but is the lazy stupid person that created the implementation. The same stupidity is true of people that run word filtering in conventional code. AI is just an extra set of eyes. It is not absolute. Giving it any kind of unchecked authority is insane. The administrators that implemented this should be what everyone is upset at.

    The insane rhetoric around AI is a political and commercial campaign effort by Altmann and proprietary AI looking to become a monopoly. It is a Kremlin scope misinformation campaign that has been extremely successful at roping in the dopes. Don’t be a dope.

    This situation with AI tools is exactly 100% the same as every past scapegoated tool. I can create undetectable deepfakes in gimp or Photoshop. If I do so with the intent to harm or out of grossly irresponsible stupidity, that is my fault and not the tool. Accessibility of the tool is irrelevant. Those that are dumb enough to blame the tool are the convenient idiot pawns of the worst of humans alive right now. Blame the idiots using the tools that have no morals or ethics in leadership positions while not listening to these same types of people’s spurious dichotomy to create monopoly. They prey on conservative ignorance rooted in tribalism and dogma which naturally rejects all unfamiliar new things in life. This is evolutionary behavior and a required mechanism for survival in the natural world. Some will always scatter around the spectrum of possibilities but the center majority is stupid and easily influenced in ways that enable tyrannical hegemony.

    AI is not some panacea. It is a new useful tool. Absent minded stupidity is leading to the same kind of dystopian indifference that lead to the ““free internet”” which has destroyed democracy and is the direct cause of most political and social issues in the present world when it normalized digital slavery through ownership over a part of your person for sale, exploitation, and manipulation without your knowledge or consent.

    I only say this because I care about you digital neighbor. I know it is useless to argue against dogma but this is the fulcrum of a dark dystopian future that populist dogma is welcoming with open arms of ignorance just like those that said the digital world was a meaningless novelty 30 years ago.


  • Fuck smart phones and neo feudalism. This is theft of ownership with a criminal complicit government. I applaud all Luigi’s these people deserve it. These are the killers of democracy. If your device only runs factory filtered stalkerware garbage, all democracy is dead. All information is easily filtered by this proprietary shit. Freedom of the press is a bullshit tiny niche of the broader requirement for a fully informed public. The fucking “press” is bullshit to highlight. You must have fully informed citizens and you may not choose how that information is shared or disseminated between citizens. This is not democracy. People are so fucking stupid.





  • These imbeciles are funny.

    Did you know broadcom uses excess capacity in its semiconductor fabs to make the raspberry pi stuff? They sell it to the “”" nonprofit “”" Rπ foundation at cost to manufacture. This is not some charitable arrangement at all. Lower end hardware has expired patents and is capable of scaling into the computing space and growing from there. The path of least resistance created by the Rπ ecosystem suppresses grassroots adoption of any newcomers in the space. The unprofitable business structure for broadcom prevents scalable business investment by any competitors in low level compute. The actual Rπ chip is for TV tuners in particular. It is proprietary with only a partial datasheet for documentation. Three quarters of the actual die in the π is completely unused junk from the TV tuner stuff. In reality, if Rockchip could complete in a market without a monopoly and only compete on meritocratic value, broadcom would go out of business. The actual Rπ is barely good enough to suppress far newer and better spec hardware. All American businesses are anticompetitive crap of similar scope. The companies do not innovate and try to milk the lowest end ancient crap at a price point that makes large scale investments impossible, suppressing progress and innovation. Nvidia absolutely does this too. Buying a current GPU as a consumer is a joke of no value. They have produced the same tiers of VRAM for 3 generations. The 3090 series had firmware options all the way up to 32GB that only required the right chips and a configuration resistor to enable. Nvidia refused to let OEMs create models with more VRAM. If Nvidia was an honest business, a 5090 would likely be either 96 or 128 GB of VRAM and a notable value and progress. They do not do this because then their monopoly would be regulated. They are catfishing everyone, both consumers and competitors alike. Cutting them off from a market instantly makes domestic scalable competition possible.

    Either this halfwit red team is using spurious sophistry to criminally benefit from those that stand to gain massive market share, or they are so chronically incompetent we should tax the air they breathe to recoup losses suffered by the planet.





  • Have you ever worked in industry. I spent a couple of years as an operating engineering out of local 12. I worked at asphalt plants as a groundman and loader operator. Most heavy equipment is basically a rental contract with caterpillar or whatever manufacturer. Once the operation is above a certain size, the company is in a position to negotiate contracts that are tens of millions of dollars or more. When a loader or other equipment has an issue, the cat rep sends their team in to do the fix. The only things that are done on site are basic filters maintenance type stuff and when the contract is up, the equipment is replaced.

    In this situation, there is no potential for exploitation because ownership was never part of the equation. There is no room for manipulation because the contract covers everything except basic maintenance. This system is already feudalism. When a feudal lord interacts with another feudal lord, of course they can come to terms because each possesses considerable power. The stupid peasantry has no such negotiable position. Our only power is in democracy where we become the largest power against exploitation. This is how the real big picture world works. There have been various democracies in the past where citizens had power against exploitation, and all of those were fumbled by idiots and fools that allowed consolidation of wealth and assumed that giving power to potential exploitation was okay and that those in power would do the right thing. This NEVER turns out to be the case. Ownership IS democracy and a founding principal of autonomy and self determinism. People that fail to realize this critical factor are ushering in a neo dark age in the exact same fashion as what created the last. The future will look back on our era dumbfounded about epic and unrivalled stupidity of the people that ended post WW2 democracy by just giving it away for nothing of substance. It is unfathomable brain rot on epic scales.


  • It is quite a bit different in robotics like this. Check out James Bruton on YT for a practical example of open source larger robotics. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUbDcUPed50Y_7KmfCXKohA

    The motors used are almost always brushless because of the speeds accuracy and torque required. That means everything has software and electronics. This stuff gets very complicated fast. Most traditional auto makers are also outsourcing most of their software development and certainly not full stack or ground up oriented. This kind of thing needs to be designed from the start with every potential feature and future thing as part of the initial project. These types of things cannot be expanded easily. Like this is why China is actually good at EVs because they invested in building the whole thing from the bottom up the right way, instead of hack patching garbage and outsourcing.