PaX [comrade/them, they/them]

Very tired nerd who doesn’t know how to speak correctly

Ask me about floppa, Plan 9, or computer architecture or anything computers really (if you want)

The only zoomer qualified to operate an RBMK reactor

Researcher of rare and powerful beanis

:cat-vibing:

  • 8 Posts
  • 77 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: July 15th, 2022
  • PaX [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.nettocybersecurity@infosec.pub•Alejandro Cáceres, the hacker who took down North Korea’s internet from his home: ‘My attack was a response to their attempt to spy on me’
    176·
    7 days ago

    He rented all types of servers around the country in the cloud and designed a denial of service (DoS) attack

    doug-clap What a uniquely skilled individual!

    His feat did not go unnoticed. Over the next year he had meetings with officials from the United States Cyber Command, the branch of the armed forces dedicated to this field. He also met with officers from the Marines, the Space Operations Command and intelligence (NSA). Cáceres shared with them the keys to his successful operation and told them that, in his opinion, similar operations could be carried out with small commandos of two to four hackers. That would give them agility, autonomy and the ability to react.

    Me, a cyber-commando, dressing up in full tactical gear, ready for anything, for the trip from my gaming chair to my refrigerator to get beer while I watch my rented Azure servers send spam to a small country’s routers

    He tried, but failed. “To do anything you need authorization, which takes six months to get. And when you get it, what you wanted to do no longer works. That is the reality here in the U.S.: we have very, very good people working on our cyber defense, but they are hogtied. They can’t do anything, even though I know we have the resources to do a lot.”

    Smh our bureaucratic government won’t approve my request to start a war with the DPRK from my couch

    If he did this to any other small nation, especially a US-aligned one, he would be charged with a serious crime. The US can’t openly do electronic warfare but they can stand by and watch this clown do what basically amounts to cyber-terrorism, a least for a little while

    Anyway, now that he doxxed himself I hope the DPRK actually gives him something to fear lol

    Also

    And ever since he took down the internet in North Korea, he has also been approached by the National Security Agency (NSA). Everyone wanted to know how he did it.

    Lmao

    This is peak journalism, they obviously took him at his word

  • PaX [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.nettoLinux@lemmy.ml•determining why/how hardware is supported in one distro but not another?English
    7·
    2 months ago

    The vast majority of drivers are included with the Linux kernel now (in tree) so the difference usually comes down to kernel version (newer kernels have more drivers, of course) or kernel configuration set at compile-time (this can be anything from including or not including drivers, to turning driver features on and off, or more fundamental changes beyond drivers)

    You can get kernel version info from uname -a and a lot of the time, probably most of the time (this is also down to configuration), you can get kernel configuration info from /proc/config.gz (use gzip -d to decompress) or something like /boot/config

    Then you can run diff on configurations of 2 different distro kernels you’re interested in to see how the 2 distribution’s kernels were set up differently

    This could also be caused by different setups of userspace tools or UI that interact with these drivers in different, sometimes worse ways but this is usually much less likely in my experience (most Linux distros do things like this the same way these days tbh)

    Oh, also, there are a lot of drivers that require vendor-supplied firmware or binary blobs to function and most of the time distros don’t bake these into the kernel (although it is possible) and different distros might have more or less of these blobs available or installed by default or they might be packaged differently. The kernel should print an error message if it can’t find blobs it needs though

    I guess there’s kinda a lot to consider lol. Sorry if all of this is obvious

    What hardware are you talking about specifically?

  • PaX [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.nettoLinux@lemmy.ml•Are there any CPUs that work well with Linux that aren't made by Intel or another company on the BDS list/that supports Israel?English
    1·
    3 months ago

    What motherboard do you have? Also what happens exactly when the lock-ups happen? Have you ever been playing audio when the lock-ups happen and does it loop or stop or keep playing?

    I recently had to “fix” (workaround) a similar issue in the OpenBSD kernel with a specific hardware peripheral on my PC (running a 2nd-gen Ryzen), the High Definition Audio controller. For whatever reason (and only when I was running OpenBSD) interrupts from the HDA controller (to let the CPU know to refill audio buffers) would just randomly stop making it to the CPU and audio would loop for a few seconds and then shut off. I spent a long time trying to figure out what causes it and reading Linux driver code but I couldn’t find a cause or why only OpenBSD would trigger it. I ended up having to write kind of a hacky polling mode into the HDA driver. My only guess is some of these AMD-chipset-having motherboards have faulty interrupt controllers.

    Maybe there is a similar issue with your system and timer interrupts aren’t making it to your CPU or something. But I’m not really an expert on PC architecture and idek if it even works like that on PCs lol

    Sorry for so many questions but do you also have any kernel logs available from when this happens?