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My current employer (regional O&G multi) loads all laptops with the most horrid mix of itsec garbage known to man. We have both the compliance module of AnyConnect (without using the VPN part) AND Zscaler for VPN.

Upon boot this has a 50/50 chance of triggering a chicken and egg problem where AnyConnect wants to connect to the complience server but can't because of Zscaler is not yet authenticated through PingID, but PingID cannot be reached because of the aforementioned complience check not succeeding. Or atleast that is my theory. Toggling the network adapter in the Windows control panel 1-2-3 times tends to solve it. Not 100% sure about my theory of what's going on, but my tickets about this are getting ignored so theorising is the best I can do. Atleast we as IT staff get local admin, so It's not all bad.

At my previous workplace (mid size SSC) the work machines themselves were less bloated and could do anything other than change UEFI settings, but certain servers we were assigned to maintain were monitored down to the keystroke level. The itsec shift gave me a call at around 3am to chat about my choice for script filenames (suckmydick.PS1) like 30 seconds after I created it.


I hope one day someone will make a movie about the warez scene. The only piece of media we have as far as I'm aware is The Scene (2004–2006) which I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone with a love for moving bytes around illegally.


Not about warez but demoscene, the french movie "DEMO" is currently in pre-production. Demoscene from Atari ST and Amiga.

https://fr.ulule.com/demo-par-alex-pilot/


Also not the warez scene, but the Swedish public broadcaster made a series about the pirate bay recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay_(TV_series)

It's watchable, but not great. It unfortunately doesn't cover many of the most interesting details, such as what happened with TPB after the operators were arrested.



BBS: The Documentary touches on _some_ Warez scene topics and legendary characters of the era.

http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/


Highly recommend downloading the .isos and playing them in mpv with deinterlacing. Lot of great native 60i footage in this doc.


Not a movie per se, but one of the protagonists in my game is a veteran from the warez scene. He mentions BlueBeep, BBSs and Demoscene in the game :)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/


>eXecute-in-place supported

Losing this when you load ELFs is kind of a bummer. Probably a dumb question but I wonder if it'd be possible to only swap in the parts of the binary that are needed at any given time.


swap requires MMU, so no, unfortunately. But there are tricks to have XIP userspace: cramfs supports it, as well as a special AXFS file system.

cramfs parses ELF files and marks XIP only a .text/ro segments of it, not the whole file.

https://github.com/npitre/cramfs-tools/commit/2325ed2de8fd17...


Historically, Unix SVR7 and Minix had swap with no MMU. But Linux can't do it.


lol same. All my parts arrived except the 804. The supply chain for these cases appears to be imploding where I live (Hungary). The day after I ordered it either went out of stock or went up by +50% in all webshops that are reputable here.

I’m still a bit torn on whether I made the good call of getting 804 or the 304 wouldve been a enough for a significantly smaller footprint and -2 bays. Hard to tell without seeing them in person lol.

Are you satisfied with it? Any issues that came up since building?


I have been running my NAS on the 304 for 5 years. It fits natively 6 HDDs but I think it is possible to cram two more with a bit of ingenuity. It is tucked away in an Ikea cabinet that I have drilled the back of for airflow.


Ah I haven't built yet, I am still waiting on some parts to arrive.


Even if I try to steelman your argument that locking down general purpose computers has some benefits particularly to gaming, its very short term imo.

How far away are we from hooking up a vision model to the display output of let’s say, Battlefield 6 and hooking in mouse+kb input from said vision model + an aimbot that perfectly replicates a top performing players mouse movements?

I’d say not very far away.

Much like how in online chess, no technical solution can attest that a move is really from a human brain and not a chess program running on his phone.


I find it reassuring that you can still get access to the data running on your own device, despite all the tens of thousands of engineering hours being poured into preventing just that.


I doubt you own hardware capable of any of the confidential computing technology mentioned


My 2017 bottom shelf lenovo has SGX whether I like it or not.

In current year you can't really buy new hardware without secure enclaves[0], be it a phone, a laptop or server. Best you can do is refuse to run software that requires it, but even that will become tough when goverments roll out mandatory software that depends on it.

[0]: unless you fancy buying nerd vanity hardware like a Talos POWER workstation with all the ups and downs that come with it.


Intel killed SGX on consumer CPUs a while ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31047888


Intel TXT is another related trusted execution/attestation/secure enclave feature, not sure how prevalent that one is, though


Pretty sure you can turn off SGX in the BIOS?


Well microcontrollers can prevent you from repairing your own device with DRM and secure enclaves


How do you even spoof your location on a modern phone OS? xposed module?


Android's developer mode has an option to "Set mock location app" so that you can test an app you're building that relies on location data. Various spoofing apps take advantage of this. On iOS, I don't know.


second phone, but who're you cheating on?


I don't understand how RMS ties into this otherwise well articulated comment.


In fact, one of the most repeated anecdotes about RMS hinged on him not wearing boots.


>Cloudflare’s ToS and contracts prevent them from doing nastiness

Crypto AG's ToS also presumably said "we pinky promise not to backdoor our devices" when selling it to foreign governments, and look how they ended up.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG


Crypto AG was a literal CIA front. Are you saying you think Cloudflare is a CIA front?


Yes. 0% sarcasm.

It is possibly the biggest MITM operation in the history of computing. An unbelievable intelligence asset.


Extremely worrying precedent if true. I'm frankly surprised there aren't any documented cases of this happening to Tor,I2P,Wireguard etc developers.


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