There are not many days that seem to be smaller than the typical size. February 29th is a tiny speck, for instance. But if you stare at the comic long enough, you may get the impression that the 11th of most months is unusually small. The title text of the comic concurs, reading “In months other than September, the 11th is mentioned substantially less often than any other date. It’s been that way since long before 9/11 and I have no idea why.” After digging into the raw data, I believe I have figured out why.

source: HN

At the time I’m writing this post, this bug is still happening, so you should be able to reproduce it. I reproduced it using two iPhones running iOS 18.5 RC. As long as your audio message contains the phrase “Dave and Buster’s”, the recipient will only see the “dot dot dot” animation for several seconds, and it will then eventually disappear. They will never get the audio message.

MessagesBlastDoorService uses MBDXMLParserContext (via MBDHTMLToSuperParserContext) to parse XHTML for the audio message. Ampersands have special meaning in XML/HTML and must be escaped, so the correct way to represent the transcription in HTML would have been “Dave & Buster’s”. Apple’s transcription system is not doing that, causing the parser to attempt to detect a special code after the ampersand, and since there’s no valid special code nor semicolon terminating what it thinks is an HTML entity, it detects an error and stops parsing the content.

source: simon

In 1993, Intel released the high-performance Pentium processor, the start of the long-running Pentium line. I’ve been examining the Pentium’s circuitry in detail and I came across a circuit to multiply by three, a complex circuit with thousands of transistors. Why does the Pentium have a circuit to multiply specifically by three? Why is it so complicated? In this article, I examine this multiplier—which I’ll call the ×3 circuit—and explain its purpose and how it is implemented.

That’s really weird! Why would top be using all of my CPU? It says 100% usr in the second line. Sometimes the usage showed up as 50% usr and 50% sys. Other times it would show up as 100% sys. And very rarely, it would show 100% idle. In that rare case, top would actually show up with 0% usage as I would expect. The 2.6.28 kernel did not have this problem, so it was something different about my newer kernel.

source: HN

Through some digging, I found that when a desktop enters S3 sleep, the system cuts power to PCIe GPUs, causing their VRAM chips to lose data. To preserve this data, GPU drivers copy VRAM in use to system RAM before the system sleeps, then restore it after the system wakes. However the Linux amdgpu driver has a bug where, if there is not enough free RAM to store all VRAM in use, the system will run out of memory and crash, instead of moving RAM to disk-based swap.

source: L

This blog post examines the details of the HVIF format using a hex editor and the canonical parser’s source code. In the process of dissecting an example icon, I’ll also show you an optimization bug in the icon image editor.

source: HN

This presentation was also the first time we had publicly disclosed the details of all exploits and vulnerabilities that were used in the attack. We discover and analyze new exploits and attacks using these on a daily basis, and we have discovered and reported more than thirty in-the-wild zero-days in Adobe, Apple, Google, and Microsoft products, but this is definitely the most sophisticated attack chain we have ever seen.

source: HN

And you know what’s special about 2040? It’s after 2038.

source: trivium

We analyzed this scene using Nvidia’s Nsight Graphics and AMD’s Radeon GPU Profiler to get some insight into why Starfield performs the way it does. On the Nvidia side, we covered the last three generations of cards by testing the RTX 4090, RTX 3090, and Titan RTX. On AMD, we tested the RX 7900 XTX. The i9-13900K was used to collect data for all of these GPUs.

source: HN

While this doesn’t happen too often, a computer clock can be freely adjusted either forward or backward. However, it’s pretty rare for a regular network utility, like ping, to try to manage a situation like this. It’s even less common to call it “taking countermeasures”. I would totally expect ping to just print a nonsensical time value and move on without hesitation.

Ping developers clearly put some thought into that. I wondered how far they went. Did they handle clock changes in both directions? Are the bad measurements excluded from the final statistics? How do they test the software?

source: L

Barbara Blackburn is often cited as the fastest typist in history. She even appears in the Guinness Book of World Records! She must be legit right? Well, maybe not. I was supposed to make a video about the new typing speed world record, and instead got pulled into a Barbara Blackburn rabbit hole that I can’t seem to escape. TL;DR She’s not that fast.

This is a detective story about how a car was stolen - and how it uncovered an epidemic of high-tech car theft.

Now that people know how a relay attack works generally possible to defeat it: car owners keep their keys in a metal box (blocking the radio message from the car) and some car makers now supply keys that go to sleep if motionless for a few minutes (and so won’t receive the radio message from the car). Faced with this defeat but being unwilling to give up a lucrative activity, thieves moved to a new way around the security: by-passing the entire smart key system. They do this with a new attack: CAN Injection.

Two boxers. No flicker? How is this possible? The MMC2 Mapper chip: Explained

How to draw too many sprites by making one a background, then how to smoothly animate it by side scrolling.

Still, the debugging process we went through here to discover the cause of the problems in the first place is worth sharing from the beginning, as the code in question was particularly bad with plenty of textbook mistakes. Who knows what you might find in your own investigations elsewhere.

Email: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=167734639712745&w=2

source: L

Thus begins the “do not violate the DMCA challenge 2023”. The goal of this challenge is to figure out how to watch Netflix on Asahi Linux without bypassing or otherwise breaking DRM. You may notice that this article is significantly longer than my 280-character publication on doing the latter, from 2019.

We’re on the home stretch now, right? Right??? Not quite, there is one last showstopper for Asahi users, and it’s a big one: Asahi Linux is built to use 16K page sizes. The Widevine blobs available to us only support 4K pages.

source: HN

Version 1 of Stable Attribution’s algorithm decodes an image generated by an A.I. model into the most similar examples from the data that the model was trained with. Usually, the image the model creates doesn’t exist in its training data - it’s new - but because of the training process, the most influential images are the most visually similar ones, especially in the details.

source: HN

Intel introduced the 8086 microprocessor in 1978, and its influence still remains through the popular x86 architecture. The 8086 was a fairly complex microprocessor for its time, implementing instructions in microcode with pipelining to improve performance. This blog post explains the microcode operations for a particular instruction, “ADD immediate”. As the 8086 documentation will tell you, this instruction takes four clock cycles to execute. But looking internally shows seven clock cycles of activity. How does the 8086 fit seven cycles of computation into four cycles? As I will show, the trick is pipelining.

One in a series looking at 8086.

http://www.righto.com/2023/02/silicon-reverse-engineering-intel-8086.html

http://www.righto.com/2023/01/reverse-engineering-conditional-jump.html

http://www.righto.com/2023/01/counting-transistors-in-8086-processor.html

http://www.righto.com/2023/01/inside-8086-processors-instruction.html

http://www.righto.com/2022/11/how-8086-processors-microcode-engine.html

http://www.righto.com/2022/11/a-bug-fix-in-8086-microprocessor.html

http://www.righto.com/2022/11/the-unusual-bootstrap-drivers-inside.html

http://www.righto.com/2023/01/reverse-engineering-intel-8086.html

http://www.righto.com/2023/03/8086-register-codes.html

http://www.righto.com/2023/02/how-8086-processor-determines-length-of.html

http://www.righto.com/2023/02/8086-modrm-addressing.html

http://www.righto.com/2023/02/8086-interrupt.html

http://www.righto.com/2023/03/8086-multiplication-microcode.html

Six privilege escalation exploits are bundled with this app. Five are well-known, publicly available N-day exploits for older iOS versions. The sixth is not like those others at all. This blog post is the story of the last exploit and the month-long journey to understand it.

Of course you can leak memory, even in Rust. For even medium-sized long-running applications, lots of graphs from a good memory profiler can make life better. And they’ll probably help you find the memory leak too.

I’ll cut to the chase; through a combination of unlikely discoveries, crazy hacks and the 90s BBS warez scene I’ve been able to port Lotus 1-2-3 natively to Linux – an operating system that literally didn’t exist when 1-2-3 was released!

source: L