Security
Technology
16 rabbit holes · 11 people exploring
Common starting questions
- Why does my NES keep blinking?
Rabbit holes
- speedrunners reprogram Super Mario World with a controller
Line up the right sprites in the right slots and the game jumps into memory it shouldn't and runs whatever is there as code. TASBot has injected Pong and Snake into SMW live at a GDQ, and SethBling entered Flappy Bird into it by hand on a real console. A TAS is just button presses, nothing about the cartridge gets modified.
Ethan Cole · 6 sources
- Facebook took itself off the internet in 2021
A config change withdrew the BGP routes to Facebook's DNS servers, so nothing could find facebook.com, and the internal tools needed to fix it were also down. Reportedly engineers had trouble getting into the buildings.
Ben Adler · 4 sources
- Heartbleed explained by a comic
Tobi Adeyemi · 4 sources
- rowhammer: flipping bits by reading memory really fast
Ben Adler · 4 sources
- Stuxnet
A worm that spread via USB sticks, used multiple zero-days, and quietly made uranium centrifuges spin at the wrong speeds while showing operators normal readings.
Vera Lindholm · 6 sources
- phone phreaks whistled into the phone network
The phone network used a 2600 Hz tone to signal an idle line, and a toy whistle from a cereal box happened to produce it. Jobs and Wozniak sold blue boxes before Apple.
Callie Sutherland · 5 sources
- correct horse battery staple
Still the best explanation of entropy for non-technical people. Then I generated a Diceware passphrase with actual dice like a weirdo.
Tariq Ali · 4 sources
- master keys are a security hole
Each pin stack in a master-keyed lock has an extra split, so more than one key works, which also means more ways to pick it. Matt Blaze showed you can derive the master key from a single change key.
Ben Adler · 4 sources
- the Pentagon's 'terrorism futures' market lasted about a day in public
In 2003 DARPA planned a market where traders would bet on political and military events in the Middle East. Once a couple of senators described it as betting on terrorism, it was cancelled the next day.
Yuki Tanabe · 6 sources
- how one bad config file crashed 8.5 million Windows PCs
Samuel Okafor · 4 sources
- the NES had DRM, and Tengen got the code from the Copyright Office
Tengen's engineers couldn't crack Nintendo's lockout chip in time, so its lawyers asked the US Copyright Office for a copy of the lockout program, saying they needed it for litigation. That part did not go over well in court.
Ludovica Ferri · 6 sources
- Cicada 3301 still doesn't have an answer
Three rounds of puzzles in January 2012, 2013, and 2014, with clues hidden in images, a phone message, websites, and paper signs with QR codes in real cities. The stated goal was recruiting 'intelligent individuals.' The third round was never solved and the last verified message was in 2017.
Tariq Ali · 6 sources
- the Morris worm (1988)
Possibly an experiment to measure the internet's size. A bug made it reinfect machines over and over and bring them down. First person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Later co-founded Y Combinator.
Ben Adler · 4 sources
- the vocoder was invented to save phone bandwidth, then it went to war
Rosa Delacroix · 6 sources
- the xz backdoor was caught because SSH logins were 500ms slower
A years-long social engineering campaign to become a trusted maintainer of a compression library, then a backdoor hidden in test files. Found by a Microsoft engineer benchmarking Postgres who noticed sshd using too much CPU.
Samuel Okafor · 5 sources
- Kessler syndrome is less sci-fi than I thought
Went in thinking it was a Gravity plot device. Came out checking how many tracked objects are in LEO right now.
Haruto Sato · 6 sources