An account was suspended for 90 minutes. Why is the automatic assumption that it was malicious?

In fact, if Meta had protections against this I’m sure some people would be crying about “obvious political favoritism”.

Hopefully they can move the needle that makes the system in general harder to abuse. But wow, the outrage is insane.

I have been in the cyber program since around the time it first went public and recently renewed it with the updated program.

You still trivially hit guadrails. I was trying to reverse engineer some bit of 20-year-old software that already has known, unmitigated exploits and it still downgraded me.

You can just throw it on the filesystem and the console will accept it. I believe it would require a system update to add the executable to a revocation list, which Microsoft is unlikely to do. It's not the only method of achieving initial code execution either.

There exist 3 main things in the software hack space for Xbox 360:

1. BadUpdate (Grimdoomer) which is the only software hypervisor exploit for the Xbox 360. It's intended to be launched from scenarios where someone could achieve code execution. The main method for launching BadUpdate was through Rock Band Blitz (created by ihateccompvir and InvoxiPlayGames). Pure software, works across all hardware revisions of the Xbox.

2. ABadAvatar (shutterbug2000) which uses a memory corruption vulnerability in the avatar loading code in the Xbox dashboard to gain code execution after the dashboard loads, then launches BadUpdate to exploit the console. Pure software, works across all hardware revisions of the Xbox.

3. Peer Pressure (Grimdoomer). First compromises the console through one of the above methods and modifies the SMC firmware to attack the southbridge. The SMC was abused in a similar manner for the JTAG hack, which likely led to Microsoft hardening it in later revisions of the hardware and mitigating the attack used here by Grimdoomer.

More info on #3 here: https://youtu.be/ftEuor1asBM?t=96

At any rate, #1 and #2 do not provide early boot exploitation.

#3 does. The hard drive security sector is involved and the kernel is responsible for loading that, so at this stage you've gone through 2BL, hypervisor, and kernel initialization. So you can't compromise the bootloaders, but you're early enough in the boot chain to do interesting things like replacing the boot animation with something custom.

The JTAG hack does some weird stuff that, truthfully, I've never seen replicated on other hardware. tl;dr the console must be on a vulnerable software version which did not blow a downgrade fuse and using an additional hardware flash chip containing a different version of the OS which had a hypervisor bug, boots the console into that, triggers the exploit using SMC black magic, then reboots back into the upgraded version of the OS.

The RGH hack described in this article would allow you to replace 2BL, so you've compromised the console earlier in the boot chain.

With BadAvatar you get interactionless console exploitation that's good enough for most people.

The softmod had me seeing what the status quo is and things are... not great.

17 years since the JTAG hack and just as of a couple days ago someone finally vibecoded a non-proprietary SDK. The scene by and large to the masses (or at least, the loudest group) mostly associates homebrew with "stealth" servers aka servers your console connects to which assist in bypassing Xbox LIVE challenges that detect modified consoles. The servers provide mod menus (trainers, basically) for various games and the ability to use older dashboards.

The kicker is the custom servers are not required, code for bypassing challenges leaked ages ago, and people still pay for stealth server access! I can't even imagine who is still playing Xbox 360 titles on Xbox LIVE except people with modded consoles at this point.

Hacking the console is complete. But the state of the scene is a bit sad.

At least now we can vibecode the missing bits of the ecosystem (I say this as I'm literally reverse engineering and reimplementing the devkit debug monitor).

This includes everything from the rack itself to the PDU/switch/BMC, to the actual server blade and its chassis.

All presented in a nice package to give you a on-prem cloud-like experience.

Timestamped to "the differentiator" (15:45) and "what are you guys doing about GPU?".

I would assume that the tracking number has the address details tied to it (I mean, based on support claims with USPS it definitely does), but maybe there's some obscure package type where destination is not distinct and they abuse that in a pool with other sellers, then at the last mile it gets sorted appropriately?

Seems wild that this market even exists considering how USPS flat rate postage exists.

Was your package something heavy or extremely light which makes weight-based shipping more economical?

It's a patch gap, plain and simple. Removing the sandbox certainly did not help things.

"But it adds motion" was the classic reply.

As others pointed out it's also useful for e.g. click/spam farms which need a "real" iPhone.

https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/02/13/crates.io-malicious-cr...

Not having an advisory INSTANTLY available isn't a sign of a decaying org. Chill.

I'll do you a favor though and cite a few things related to "lobbying"

The White House put out an RFI regarding open-source security: https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024...

Rust foundation's response: https://www.regulations.gov/comment/ONCD-2023-0002-0045

Neither have anything to do with making "programming in C illegal".

Just to add to this, on Windows for example you're really only supposed to invoke syscalls via ntdll as the syscall table is not stable so their numbering changes over time. You cannot guarantee forward or backward compat if you do not use the library.

If you look at some of the syscalls in https://github.com/j00ru/windows-syscalls, you can see they clearly do change over time too.

Here's the code: https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/src/commit/e44e927d33d37c44...

The closest callout in the doc comment is:

>Never reuses memory addresses, making it easier for Zig to detect branch on undefined values in case of dangling pointers. This relies on the backing allocator to also not reuse addresses.

But it's not really clear what this means. "branch on undefined values" would I think indicate that maybe they're doing a fill pattern that the compiler can detect at runtime when dereferenced? But I don't see it in the `free` path. It's not clear if this is deterministic or not either.

To clarify, is that to say that you have to use the `std.heap.page_allocator` as its backing allocator?

I don't know Zig so maybe they know something I don't, but I have seen no evidence that it catches any type of use-after-free including double-free?

While writing a blog post (below) I went through the documentation to figure out the possible runtime memory safety checks Zig can insert. The term "use-after-free" or "UaF" never occurs on that documentation page. Searching for "safety-checked" doesn't yield any related hits either.

Unless maybe they're using the DebugAllocator in release builds? Even that does not reliably surface UaF.

https://landaire.net/memory-safety-by-default-is-non-negotia...

The company itself had crazy production delays on both the Nomad and the Knob1, and seem to depend on hypebeast marketing. For $400 you would expect a very premium product and it's easy to argue that they missed the mark pretty hard.

Oh I also placed a pre-order and they refused to cancel after many delays. Unfortunately after that point it was too late for a chargeback.

*just found a random review if you want to see other opinions. The comments discuss some of the weird company shenanigans: https://old.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/1ngka3...