Hacker News: hexadecimated

New comment by hexadecimated in "There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence"

hexadecimated — Sat, 14 Oct 2017 11:16:16 +0000

Sorry but I don't quite understand your comment. What do the chemical underpinnings of evolution have to do with AGI?

New comment by hexadecimated in "There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence"

hexadecimated — Sat, 14 Oct 2017 10:59:53 +0000

> whether humans are the fittest carrier of information for our DNA

We humans are defined by our DNA, so are we not by definition the fittest carrier for it?

New comment by hexadecimated in "Thoughts on Microsoft's Time-Travel Debugger"

hexadecimated — Sun, 08 Oct 2017 12:57:28 +0000

It's freely available in the Windows 10 store as "WinDbg Preview". I recall reading somewhere that they will be rolling it into the Windows SDK once the preview is complete.

WinDbg can work with managed code through extensions, see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/de....

New comment by hexadecimated in "When I asked Tinder for my data, it sent me 800 pages of my deepest secrets"

hexadecimated — Tue, 26 Sep 2017 09:47:35 +0000

I think the more interesting question would be, how much data do they retain on you if you close your account?

New comment by hexadecimated in "Ask HN: Sell my startup for $14M because I can't raise $2M?"

hexadecimated — Sun, 24 Sep 2017 01:23:58 +0000

> most of what you said is nothing more than a personal subjective judgement

Indeed it was, I was offering my own considered opinion, not some absolute universal truth.

No surprise such opinions don't go down favourably on HN though. Amidst all the interesting technical and scientific discussion, there are disappointing overtones of wealth worship, and a weird cult-like following of billionaire entrepreneurs.

New comment by hexadecimated in "LeakyX, a vulnerability that Apple and Microsoft have known about for years"

hexadecimated — Sun, 24 Sep 2017 01:15:50 +0000

I don't see what other response he could have reasonably expected from Microsoft, given that his complaints were about the iOS Exchange connector, and actually had nothing to do with Exchange Server.

New comment by hexadecimated in "Some Excel users pop F1 off their keyboards (2012)"

hexadecimated — Fri, 22 Sep 2017 21:20:15 +0000

Before Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V to copy and paste, the usual method was Ctrl+Ins and Shift+Ins (and Shift+Del for cut), so this key did have a lot of use back in the day. These key combinations still work in most Windows software.

New comment by hexadecimated in "Ask HN: Sell my startup for $14M because I can't raise $2M?"

hexadecimated — Fri, 22 Sep 2017 21:08:55 +0000

Such hideously wasteful extravagance, and how sad that these people who are already absurdly rich are still greedy for more.

New comment by hexadecimated in "Retguard: OpenBSD/Clang"

hexadecimated — Sat, 19 Aug 2017 23:59:33 +0000

The post-fork canary value could be paired with the stack pointer at which it became valid. If not valid, the process could walk a linked list of pre-fork canary and stack pointer pairs, to find the correct value to use. Would be interesting to see the performance hit on such an approach.

New comment by hexadecimated in "Retguard: OpenBSD/Clang"

hexadecimated — Sat, 19 Aug 2017 23:32:34 +0000

Perhaps OpenBSD should consider randomizing the per-process stack canary value upon fork().

New comment by hexadecimated in "Why We Terminated Daily Stormer"

hexadecimated — Wed, 16 Aug 2017 23:36:20 +0000

A sensible business decision by Cloudflare, and a fine moral stand to take. There is nothing positive to be gained by servicing such neo-Nazi websites, and Cloudflare is under no obligation to keep them as customers.

Similarly, the Daily Stormer is free to take their custom to a provider who turns a blind eye to or supports their toxic ideology.

New comment by hexadecimated in "Sandsifter: find undocumented instructions and bugs on x86 CPU"

hexadecimated — Fri, 28 Jul 2017 10:12:23 +0000

If it works inside a VM, an attacker could potentially cause a widespread denial of service on cloud computing platforms like Azure and AWS.

New comment by hexadecimated in "ARM Pointer Authentication"

hexadecimated — Sun, 04 Jun 2017 16:05:29 +0000

One exception may be if you could steal an authenticated pointer to a buffer that's about to have some generated machine code written to it (e.g. for JIT execution), and use that to write your own arbitrary code instead.

New comment by hexadecimated in "Shadow Brokers exploits are patched or inactive on supported Windows platforms"

hexadecimated — Sat, 15 Apr 2017 14:25:12 +0000

The exploits were released yesterday and the linked article says they have all been patched.

New comment by hexadecimated in "Shadow Brokers exploits are patched or inactive on supported Windows platforms"

hexadecimated — Sat, 15 Apr 2017 14:23:38 +0000

It was patched last month, so how is it a zero day when these exploits were released yesterday?

New comment by hexadecimated in "Shadow Brokers exploits are patched or inactive on supported Windows platforms"

hexadecimated — Sat, 15 Apr 2017 11:25:21 +0000

Room 641A wasn't a software vulnerability trying to hide in plain sight, it was a secret network tap.

New comment by hexadecimated in "Shadow Brokers exploits are patched or inactive on supported Windows platforms"

hexadecimated — Sat, 15 Apr 2017 10:16:48 +0000

That's just an insinuation of conspiracy with no evidence whatsoever behind it. The more believable alternative is that developers simply make mistakes now and then.

New comment by hexadecimated in "Shadow Brokers exploits are patched or inactive on supported Windows platforms"

hexadecimated — Sat, 15 Apr 2017 10:05:06 +0000

This idea that Microsoft is deliberately introducing bugs into its software so nation states can exploit them is so absurd, it really is tinfoil hat conspiracy theory ludicrousness.

New comment by hexadecimated in "Shadow Brokers exploits are patched or inactive on supported Windows platforms"

hexadecimated — Sat, 15 Apr 2017 08:45:55 +0000

Nice to see that these weren't zero day exploits after all, despite the claims being spread over Twitter.

Looks like some amateur security researchers forgot to patch their test VMs.

New comment by hexadecimated in "Shadow Brokers exploits are patched or inactive on supported Windows platforms"

hexadecimated — Sat, 15 Apr 2017 08:39:38 +0000

Once a patch is released, it's generally quite straightforward to compare before and after, reverse engineering it to find the vulnerability. So the general advice is always to patch as soon as possible.