lolsowrong

How long would it have taken you to root, debloat, and code a new UI for your TV?

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Why didn’t they?

Do you have any evidence this is actually happening to good faith security researchers?

There are many examples of Microsoft and other large corporations treating security researchers well. Microsoft hosts BlueHat, where they invite external parties to talk about their findings. They thank researchers monthly who do contribute reports to MSRC. As I recall, they treated bunnie well, and I think they also treated “hoodie” (the original Xbox 360 hacker) well as well.

I saw the paper from Google last year and thought something in it aligned with not everything running through the microcode engine, though I could be wrong.

I believe only some parts of Jazelle are handled in hardware, though I don’t know if anybody has got their hands on any of the bits of the software side. I do know there’s documentation on handling unimplemented instructions.

I don’t know how I feel about micro-ops being executed in hardware - I mostly agree, but also, microcode updates exist…

Most of the time. But sometimes, no. See ATL thunk emulation (last I checked, still alive in the windows kernel) and ntvdm handling of the BOP pseudoinstruction.

See also: Jazelle DBX.

Hell, on modern x86 processors, many “native” instructions are actually a series of micro-ops for a mostly undocumented and mostly poorly understood microcode architecture that differs from the natively documented instruction set.

It’s turtles all the way down.

I agree there’s a big divide. I think I’m also team “let people do things they enjoy.”

I like using computers to solve problems. I’m more interested in the problem being solved than the journey most of the time, though I’ve also been on some lovely journeys. Sometimes that means I write a tool all by myself. Sometimes it means I download an existing open source tool. And sometimes it means I delegate the creation to an AI model.

I agree with this, but I’m also curious: what would have to change before that advice is as sound as “write a little bit of assembly by hand” or the even more ridiculous “just write the raw bytes for the program in a hex editor?”

Yea, but Galen’s a beast so it might actually happen.

If I asked a human assistant to do this and it came back with that level of research, I’d be pretty disappointed.

This doesn’t seem true. Doesn’t LSASS cache credentials for 30 days?