Hacker News Reader

soundson The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

This is what I found at the top of an internet search:

Under voltage fault injection - "In general, single instruction skips are easily achievable, though skips of multiple nearby instructions are more difficult to induce and control."

https://research.nccgroup.com/2021/07/07/an-introduction-to-...

soundson Vulkan update: version 1.2 conformance for Raspberry Pi 4

Vulkan may be easy to use one day, but it will probably be because you are "writing vulkan" but actually using an impressive set of libraries, languages and other tooling that do stuff for you that you don't want to do.

soundson EU regulators make anti-speeding tech and 'black box' mandatory by 2035

Email him using the email in his profile.

soundson Super Planet Crash – A game of gravity

27M points at 385.7 years. I added an ice giant at a 1:1 resonance with the highly elliptical orbit. Looks like it wasn't perfectly in resonance, but it was close enough to get the 385 years.

soundson The Great Salt Lake Dries Up

Mining activites for hundreds of years dumped toxic chemicals into the lake that nobody cared about. Now that the water is gone, those chemicals are airborne.

soundson Hertzbleed Attack

True.

But did you want a microcode vulnerability? That'd make for another one of these awesome HN discussions...

soundson Hertzbleed Attack

Simplest solution here is to implement the algorithm in hardware, with a new instruction that has all the security attributes. (Including resistance to power differential and timing differential attacks.)

Downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31745105

soundson The Linux kernel can spawn processes on its own

That's what the "kthreadd" kernel process is for.

Try this command:

  ps axo pid,ppid,comm | less

The kernel-created processes will all have "kthreadd" as their Parent Process ID (PPID). Typically init and kthreadd are the only processes with a PPID of 0.

soundson The Linux kernel can spawn processes on its own

The interest is warranted, but it was been true for a long time that the kernel spawns processes where the executable is in the kernel itself.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-kswapd0-in-Linux-Kernel

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9154042/where-can-i-find...

Here's some official documentation on it:

https://tldp.org/HOWTO/From-PowerUp-To-Bash-Prompt-HOWTO-8.h...

soundson Rare pulsar detected in the Milky Way

I think the author started with a separate article and was using at as template. They forgot to replace one of the sentences with something actually relevant.

1. Breathless nonsense

2. Back story of authors

3. The uphill climb making them seem like underdogs

4. Finally state the few sentences of actual news

5. Describe the impact on the community, which amounts to repeating the lede

(You get the idea.)

soundson Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab

It's a move back down the supply chain. Fine, they haven't completely verticalized the entire supply chain. It's still a strategic move.

soundson Why does this code execute more slowly after strength-reducing multiplications?

Looks like someone wrote pretty good parallelizable code on the original question, here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/72333152

soundson My students cheated... a lot

You're right.

I am curious though what the frame of reference is for someone who cheats on the assignment where they promise not to cheat.

Perhaps there are people who make it through life with a sense of learned helplessness or even possibly a cultural mandate - basically, something that represents a higher authority to that person than the Western standard of justice, ethics and fairness.

I'm fully in favor of true justice, shared ethics and fair and compassionate treatment - that's a conversation for another time.

If that's not reality for that person, then to have a teacher attempt to engage with them seems more likely to have an impact on their success in a Western society. I'd guess that failing them and possibly expelling them would not.

I'm curious what you think?

soundson Show HN: I turned my face rec system into a video codec

Not a strawman - I think I'm seeing a video codec. You're seeing a "boosts eye contact" video filter?

Can you clarify your statement? Maybe I missed what you meant.

soundson Show HN: I turned my face rec system into a video codec

Seriously, this hits all the wrong points before sliding into "don't sell this to a patent troll."

"We, the armchair internet, have come to shout at you, innovative dude, that your ideas are worthless and that your interesting product is just fodder for patent trolls," ignores a few minor things -

• The video codec industry is absolutely crawling with overlapping patents enforced by shell companies whose only purpose is to extract license fees from every screen that ever existed. The USPTO seems to not care.

• This video codec was produced cleanly, and does not appear to overlap with any of the existing codecs.

I'd say give this smart person some credit.

soundson How This Ends

One of the reasons the Fed keeps factors like servicing the government's debt at "arm's length" is because the debt figures are a political football.

The Fed wants to maintain a balanced, non-partisan position, as much as possible.

soundson Leaving The Qt Company

Skia is the compositing/rendering engine for Chrome.

I doubt Chrome will stop using Skia, though Google can always do something akin to a fork or name-change that will break all existing apps.

Highly doubtful that will happen.

soundson Twitter Deal Temporarily on Hold

I think the parent was suggesting, without being so blunt, that TSLA is undervalued and grabbing some of those shares while they're cheap is his strategy.

And, of course, the counterstrategy is to wait until next Wednesday, when the price of TSLA moves upward, then sell and catch the falling knife when other institutional buyers ease off the stock price.

To be clear, I hold no shares of TSLA because you can get hurt trying to catch falling knives.

soundson Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

There's more to this than just today's events supporting your theory that the wheels were in motion before Elon's bid -

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/21/technology/twitter-securi...

soundson Bzip3 – A better and stronger spiritual successor to bzip2

Can you test it out and post results back here?

soundson Criticizing Hare language approach for generic data structures

But why be the one to shoot it down?

If the industry makes mistakes, that's not news.

soundson How did the Enigma Machine work? (2021) [video]

Thanks!

I think it's worth giving a mention of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_talker as well. (The Allies were not sure if their encryption was secure, and attempted to find other means of securing their comms.)

soundson Apple's M1 Ultra comes with a 32MB TLB bottleneck

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1514295682777059329.html

The tweets refer to Tile-Based Deferred Rendering (TBDR) [1] as compared to Tile-Based Immediate Rendering (TBIR).

Here's another take on it: https://docs.imgtec.com/Architecture_Guides/PowerVR_Architec...

Note that TBIR appears to be a term the author just made up to refer to apps that have not be specifically optimized for the Apple M1 Ultra GPU architecture.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/resource_fun...

soundson Google’s Remote Key Provisioning will be mandated in Android 13

What's to prevent a man-in-the-middle in the factory?

Say the device is provisioned in the factory and generates its public-private keypair. The private key never leaves the secure enclave. The public key is intercepted in the factory and replaced by the attacker's public key, which then makes it to Google's servers.

To forestall "but that would require a lot of resources" argument, assume the man-in-the-middle is the Chinese State and the attacker moves their man-in-the-middle operation to China's Great Firewall. As long as the device remains in China, all traffic can be intercepted at the Great Firewall, where certificate requests are man-in-the-middled in bulk.

tl;dr: This new scheme shifts the burden of trust to the factory and Google's servers. I'm sure there are other ways to exploit that channel.

soundson EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

I suspect you already know that 44 years ago when Apple's system was a baby, it was what, today, you would call "open hardware." See the last two pages of the user manual for the schematics. [1]

At that time, Apple's system needed to attract developers, so instead of a walled garden, the company did what they could to encourage interoperability.

[1] http://apple1.chez.com/Apple1project/Docs/pdf/AppleI_Manual....

soundson NSA's Backdoor of the PX1000-Cr

I'm curious whether there is any info on the dev team who created the PX-1000 (where PC-1000Cr is implemented). Any more info on how the NSA got a backdoor inserted? There's [1] which gives a general overview.

This seems like a fascinating story, would be happy to read more!

[1] https://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/philips/px1000/nsa.htm

soundson Rogue black hole spotted on its own for the first time

Direct link to paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.13296

soundson DaVinci-style drone with 600-year-old screw rotor design

Here's a direct link to the video:

https://vimeo.com/672877397

(The article is completely choked with overlapping autoplaying video ads.)

soundson Ask HN: How do you record and edit (programming) videos on Linux?

Blender

soundson AMD Ryzen 6000 Series Mobile CPUs Feature Microsoft's Pluton Security

The Raspberry Pi foundation is working on adding a signed bootloader and trusted computing to their next chip. I'm looking for the source I found, and I thought it was [1] but don't see the text there anymore.

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/bullseye-bonus-1-8ghz-raspb...