@A.Hersean Interesting. Yeah I'm not particularly surprised. I knew Windows attempts to isolate applications and have always tried to be careful not to tell people that it is truly effective. This is a good resource to put the belief in Windows application isolation to sleep.

twitter.com/_markel___/status/1160255977809227778

I wonder what kind of security policies are set by OEMs...

@forest Wow, I wish I knew what any of this meant :D

Lol so do I. I know maybe 20% of it.

That guy (@_markel___) is a really good source of knowledge on Intel CPUs.

As is @h0t_max (who he works with).

google.com/search?q=fus_jtag_lockout

:(

I recall something about e-fuses in context with the original xbox

some mechanism to prevent the software from being downgraded

Yeah fuses are basically one-way programmable bits in modern CPUs.

Sometimes they're kept in an array to encode e.g. an RSA public key.

But other times they're standalone and select various CPU features.

Many of which are relevant to security but exceedingly secure.

How exactly does that one-way-ness work?

For example whether or not JTAG is disabled (spoiler: usually not, even on COTS CPUs).

@MechMK1 It's literally a fuse, but microscopic. You burn it to set it.

Man hardware is weird

It scares me

Just what I said mere minutes ago. :P

There are dozens (hundreds?) of fuses like this in a modern x86 CPU. Some of them are set by Intel during manufacturing (e.g. JTAG passwords). Some of them are set by OEMs.

Ever since rowhammer I knew we were all going to go out in flames. I'm just waiting for that one vuln to rule them all.

In fact for JTAG, the way it works is that each machine has a unique ID encoded in it. A server owned by Intel then allows people who have signed an NDA to get the password tied to that UID, and that password can be used to unlock system JTAG. And that process freaks me out.

What the actual ...

Seriously?

Damn

The FUSE station is where the UID (accessible to anyone using the CPU) and the JTAG password (secret, encoded in OTP fuses) are burnt in, then the server saves the pair. With access to the server (either obtained legitimately or otherwise), Intel can give you the JTAG password for the CPU's UID, which allows you to enter probe mode and boundary scan the rest of the hardware.

This is seriously weird

The NDA part is what scares me about it

@MechMK1 Oh it gets scarier. Intel has a few "levels" of access. Green is public. Orange requires NDAs to sign. Red is for Intel internal use only. The redder the color, the scarier.

That's just the levels you know about

Well supposedly there's also white but it doesn't give much.

But I'm pretty sure that's all there are. Red is Intel Top Secret.

There's also Scarlet, for use with TLA's only, and #FG0000, which is for use with things your brain is hardwired to forget

That stuff is available on their internal content network.

They take access to that very seriously.

I would imagine so

Man, I don't want to know how much dirt both intel and AMD have in their CPUs

AMD is scary just because no one looks at it.

I'm sure somewhere there's an NSA doc about "WHITEDOVE" and how literally any CPU is remotely exploitable

But yes, there's a lot of crap in Intel CPUs. A few years ago, they fired most of their formal verification team (a team set up in response to the famous FDIV bug)...

Is that the floating point bug?

Yeah.

Easy way to check for it

@MechMK1 Well that I'd doubt. As scary as all of this is, one common trend is that it's pretty much never exploitable from ring 3 (and in many cases, it requires hardware or modified firmware). Microarchitectural side-channels notwithstanding. That doesn't mean it's not scary, though.

e^pi - pi == 20

:^)

@forest I'm just going full on conspiracy theory at this point, and it's probably not true, but I really don't want to imagine "Heartbleed but it's your CPU"

Oh well something like heartbleed, yeah those exist.

That's what spectre, MDS, meltdown, etc. are all about.

And there are more of them. A lot more. And not all are public yet.

Yes, but on a shared CPU, as far as I know

It's mostly relevant for cloud architecture, as far as I know

No even within a single CPU, e.g. from JavaScript in the browser.

I mean, rowhammer.js was a thing (though that's DRAM). And some forms of spectre work in JS.

I remember rowhammer.js

It's funny

A friend of mine uses like really weird non-mainstream linux distros

And his PC is always in a horrible state

All these microarchitectural bugs have very odd attack requirements. Some of them require weird gadgets. Others only allow leaking information in the same address space...

No audio, no microphone, no desktop, etc.

But I believe he's probably safer than most of us :D

Heh, that sounds like my main workstation. :P

90% is command line. No microphone or camera. Very limited GPU. It's a Gentoo system.

I do have audio though, but it's ALSA and has most plugins removed.

I'm just a basic bitch with Windows 7

Mostly for gaming, so my options are limited

For the games that I can't run with Wine in an isolated user, I use QEMU GPU passthrough.

It lets me run games on Windows in a VM with near-native performance.

Yes, I recall this. I don't know how difficult it is to set up steam to work with it

I don't know anything about Steam.

I can't imagine it would have any problems.

Best not to think about it

But in the past few days, I feel so burnt out about games

peaks in

Hey! What's up?

Most of the video games I play are simple enough that I can use Wine for them.

Gimme a sec to get caught up lol

@JourneymanGeek tl;dr talk about how CPUs are scary.

Valve actually contributes to a few porting projects - you might actually be able to get lots of stuff running natively

Like, I work for 9 hours a day, then do my chores at home, and in the limited time I have at home I can listen to people who play 8 hours a day how bad I am at videogames, etc.

It's so draining

@MechMK1 :/

that's why I mostly play single player XD

I'm lucky enough doing (mostly) online work that I can game in between tasks. :P

I just want to play some games without constantly being told how bad I am

(I don't do that as much anymore, though)

(though at the moment I have 1 3/4 of a gaming box ....)

which ironically means I game less

I just want to play some games with my gf, or alone

@MechMK1 that's just people... compensating for how ....

But every game we play, sooner or later we get into the zone where all the toxic people are

:/

Like, do you know the game Dead by Daylight?

Not for Touhou!

You know her stance on touhou :/

@forest isn't that that murderously hard bullet hell series?

Yes, exactly

@MechMK1 I thought she only disliked weeb stuff. Touhou isn- oh wait.

I'm not a great gamer.

But most people know it for the insane amount of spin-off content

I have fun ;p

@JourneymanGeek Well it's hard on Lunatic mode. But it's really, really fun.

If your keyboard doesn't ghost

Unlike the one I had

ow

That's why you get a PS/2 keyboard!

which ghosted when I shot and moved diagonally

@forest ._.

My new G512 doesn't, and it works fantastic

@JourneymanGeek Seriously. PS/2 is actually much better for gaming.

There's absolutely nothing about USB that makes it better in any way.

do they even make those any more or is it one of those things that people are eventually going to hoard like good chalk?

Sure they do.

PS/2 supports native NKRO and it's interrupt-driven (not polling-driven, unlike USB).

So it won't complain no matter what key combos you use, and there's no latency.

I just want someone with like the most ancient gear to come to a lan, only to open up his PC and have like a RTX 2080 Ti inside

@forest I probably don't type fast enough for it to matter ;p

(Or at least, the latency is limited only by copper wire and the APIC)

@MechMK1 .... actually....

I've seen that meme :D

Oh, I actually had a PIII case lying around.

@JourneymanGeek NKRO is mostly useful for video games, not typing.

@MechMK1 Wouldn't an ancient CPU also create a bottleneck for the GPU?

I mean, the CPU has to process and pass data to the GPU and that requires a good CPU.

@forest old old case, modern hardware

ah

Not necessarly an old CPU

But old periphery

Atx and its smaller varients are pretty much as old as dirt at this point

Like an old CRT monitor :D

@MechMK1 but...

heh

I WAS ABOUT TO ASK ABOUT THAT ;p

RTX 2080 Ti, 640x480

and some folks prefer CRTs for some kinds of gaming...

I've always wanted to play a high-end video game on a very tiny or old black and white CRT.

@MechMK1 actually, they topped out at at least 1024x768

Don't laugh, I played Borderlands 1 at 640 x 480

@JourneymanGeek Wait what? How??

maybe better if you got some fancy sony thing

Damn, that must have been the ultimate gaming monitor

@forest retro stuff dosen't look right apparently

Oh

So there's literally folks hoarding CRTs

Yeah for retro that's true. Speccy doesn't look great on an LCD (square pixels are an issue).

here's the best part.

No one can make them any more apparently

Why not? Legal or tech reasons?

@MechMK1 the story I heard was that they sold the facilities to the chinese, and forgot to pass on one critical part of the process.

And eventually folks just stopped bothering

𝖔𝖔𝖋

I can't imagine that such things couldn't be reversed from existing monitors, if people cared enough

Hello there!

Man, the past few days have not been fun for me. So much stress :(

At least now I know why people advocate so much for a proper work-life balance

To me it felt more like a work-chore-sleep balance :/

Hello to who?

@user23995

Who just joined us a moment ago

Huh, that user's profile on Psychology.SE says 404 not found.

Though maybe it may have been a bit rude to be so forthcoming

Nah, I just didn't notice anyone joined. I'm too used to IRC telling me in-line.

Can I be honest?

I find the idea of IRC really cool

But I never got around to figuring out how it works

IRC is really cool.

And the people on IRC can be really, really clever.

@MechMK1 tbh it's pretty simple

How it works like, the channel system, commands, that kind of thing?

Yes, just all the additional tidbits of information

Because when you join a channel, you don't know what's standard IRC thing, and what's convention within the channel

Hard part is finding where you want to be

In all honesty, these days I am really not too communicative

Channels start with an octothorpe (e.g. #channelname). Joining channels is done with /join #channelname. Leaving a channel is done with /part while in that channel. Quitting is done with /quit. Mods (chanops) can kick or ban users. Using someone's name "pings" them.

Also, there are some idiots on IRC:

bash.org/?244321

@forest I think it's more on a "I'll know it when I see it" kind of things, about the stuff I don't understand

Ah

Well I've been on IRC for many years so I forgot how I learned it.

@forest See security.stackexchange.com/a/214857/163495

But yeah, it's quite simple at its core.

You just learn how to use it by using it

I just never really had the need to do so

I tried to become involved in the development of dolphin

But I got quite overwhelmed by the sheer size of the project

The KDE file manager or the emulator?

Emulator

The emulator is fascinating, especially their fastmem hack. :D

I wish I knew how any of it worked

Tried to ask for some guidance in the IRC, and some folks were really trying to be helpful

Only emulators I've regularly used are NEC PC98 emulators, and MAME.

For PC98 Touhou games, and CAVE shootemups, respectively. :P

Then someone who was really involved with the project recognized me

Why? Because I had a political argument with them on twitter weeks prior

O_o

It was so weird

"Aren't you that guy from Twitter?"

Did he kick you from the channel or something?

No

I just didn't want to start drama

So I left

Well, IRC is kind of the land of drama...

But I don't think anything would have happened, especially on Freenode.

(I think that's where #dolphinemu or whatever is?)

Because I knew if I wouldn't have left, something would have happened sooner or later

Because I know myself, and I know I can't keep my damn mouth shut

I have a different alias on all services I use, so I never need to worry about people recognizing me.

Yeah, well I'm just an idiot with a keyboard :D

But that was quite some time ago, I've changed a lot in those years

People tend to change on the internet far faster than anywhere else.

I also feel like I changed a lot personally. Dealing more actively with my depression helped a lot

I mean, I don't know if it is clinical depression

I just know how I feel, and I know the symptoms of depression. Just seemed to fit

If it's chronic and severe enough to cause issues, then it probably is.

Things are better now than they were before, that's what matters

I'm actively trying not to become too negative about things

I'm the opposite. I'm always a pessimist and a cynic.

Pessimism is fine, just like cynism

To me, "too negative" is more related to constant suicidal thoughts

But I haven't felt that way for quite some time

As I said, actively seeking help actually helped me. Who would have thought?

Moving out from home and having responsibility for another person also was a big factor for me

Ah, yeah that's depression for sure.

Yeah, most likely

To some degree, I don't understand myself, or why I sometimes act the way I am

The human mind is a complex beast.

Which is funny, given that I consider myself to be a somewhat rational person, as opposed to someone primarily emotional

And probably with enough exploits and backdoors built in

Too bad JTAG is disabled in my brain. Would have made things a lot easier.

I've always felt the same.

Although the duality of benefit and risk would be problematic.

I wouldn't want to see a court order to open my brain's JTAG header.

"The analysis showed the exact thoughts of the suspect"

Man, this is the stuff Cyberpunk is made of

Very basic mind reading is already possible, but it generally requires full cooperation.

With the exception of certain tests to see if someone recognizes an image.

Those are scary.

It's also called "Asking questions", isn't it?

I'm a bit sceptical when it comes to such psychology

For example, I looked at a study that supposedly revealed internalized sexism, racism, etc.

It's not psychology, it's brain imaging.

What's the difference?

You flash an image quickly during functional brain imaging, and see if certain parts of the brain light up. It's actually pretty accurate. It can tell if you recognize a scene or word, for example.

That's pretty scary

Although I wonder how much you can change the image

Like, slightly blur or distort it

You can't. If you recognize it, you recognize it, and that's what the imaging picks up.

Yes, but that's not what I meant

Oh, what do you mean then? Blur it where?

Let's say you showed me a photograph of my mother for 1 ms. I would imagine my brain would react the same if the image was unaltered, or if it were slightly blurred

Well generally if it's too blurred for you to recognize, it probably won't be picked up.

no, but slightly blurred or distorted

Yeah you'd recognize it then for sure.

Hence my question: How much can you alter the picture for it to still work

Yeah I think you could alter it quite a bit, until it's no longer recognizable.

Plus it doesn't need to be an exact image, e.g. a house with a camera position that we've never looked from would still be recognized if we had been in that house before.

This is a 70% blur, and I'm sure the picture is still instantly recognizable, even if viewed in periphery

yep

Human brains are excellent image classifiers.

(Also, wasn't meant as a political statement. But the current US president is a good candidate for a well-known person)

My first candidate was actually the pope :D

heh

But I figured Trump was a more visually recognizable candidate

One of the scary things about it is if it's used for law, people could spoof it. I'm sure someone could create a sketch of, say, a child porn image and show it to someone, then report them for illegal pornography. If the real image is used as a recognition test, an innocent person will be flagged as having viewed illegal pornography, and they'd have no ability to deny it because they recognized it.

Quite literally, a thought crime

mhm

The world is a scary place. Can't wait for babies to get chips implanted to check their thoughts for red flags. After all, if you have nothing to hide...

I wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't a couple decades away.

But I think machine learning-based facial expression recognition is more likely.

After all, that's already used in the UK and at TSA checkpoints.

Do you think it'll ever stop?

The mass surveillance, I mean

No.

Well, not in my lifetime, at least.

So the only limit is our technology, and not our morals?

As soon as people in power stop craving power, then it will stop.

Right.

Do you think people will ever revolt against it?

The NSA has a desire to know everything. Their only limits are physics and resources.

Well people already are. Snowden caused some major changes in industry.

And the EFF is getting more donations than ever.

But I think the only true revolt will be a civil war.... in multiple countries simultaneously...

Well, I am at least reasonably convinced that the NSA hasn't backdoored the laws of physics.

Oh yay, can't wait to raise my child in a war zone

Sure, but man do they love finding loopholes (see: EMSEC).

At least there is a reasonable chance that this time it's not Austria that starts a new World War

Eh, I'd be fine with that if said child helped with the efforts.

Come on boy, you can carry those mags

Heh, well not necessarily in active combat. :P

But then again, I'm a bit of an extremist in some of my parenting views.