Hacker News: not_a9

New comment by not_a9 in "How do functions like alloca allocate memory from the stack?"

not_a9 — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 02:21:43 +0000

While I’m not sure if this is a bot (where did vidya enter the convo?), game hacking on both cheat and anticheat side has genuinely deep Windows internals knowledge (admittedly somewhat lopsided, but deep nonetheless)

New comment by not_a9 in "AI Is Solving CTF Challenges in Minutes"

not_a9 — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:29:55 +0000

OK, but is that fun for people who don’t wanna clankermaxx? In addition this does not address the paytowin aspect of clankermaxxed CTFs

New comment by not_a9 in "AI Is Solving CTF Challenges in Minutes"

not_a9 — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:28:49 +0000

The talk about DEFCON CTF this year on Twitter seems to imply having LLMs allowed in CTF (or, at least, allowing autoslopping without significant restrictions) kinda kills the game. There’s a ton of sentiment about CTF being effectively dead.

Outside of DEFCON I think this is an interesting article: https://osec.io/blog/save-ctfs-fund/

New comment by not_a9 in "AI Is Solving CTF Challenges in Minutes"

not_a9 — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:26:23 +0000

Safeguards don’t really trigger for CTF stuff. I’m sure most people are on the subscription plans instead of suffering through API pricing

New comment by not_a9 in "Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities"

not_a9 — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 11:19:15 +0000

To the best of my knowledge: doesn’t the current build of Claude Code use the Rust port of Bun?

New comment by not_a9 in "Datalog Disassembly"

not_a9 — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 07:13:28 +0000

Generally binary rewriters will add a new section for the rewritten code/other stuff that needs regeneration (relocations, exception info, the like)

New comment by not_a9 in "Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc"

not_a9 — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 19:47:18 +0000

To add to this, the obfuscation used for their anticheat seems to be… kinda bad? Worse than Epic’s virtualizer/Griffin probably

https://k0mkc.hatenablog.com/entry/2026/08/06/032440

Mind you, odds are their anti-tamper/DRM is a different case.

New comment by not_a9 in "Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc"

not_a9 — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 14:22:37 +0000

back.engineering folks seem to imply that Denuvo is another case of virtualization based obfuscator being vulnerable to a symbolic execution/optimization approach.

> As AI assisted static deobfuscation continues to improve we will see more virtual machine based obfuscators fold away. In an upcoming article we will publish details on how we fully statically devirtualized Denuvo anti(tamper/cheat). One of the most attacked pieces of software second only to anticheats.

…or you can not bother with analyzing at all and just feed correct CPUID/shared data/whatever values to Denuvo, like the hypervisor thing does.

https://back.engineering/blog/31/07/2026/

New comment by not_a9 in "The Art of 64-bit Assembly"

not_a9 — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 13:39:59 +0000

Out of idle curiosity: can NASM emit Windows unwind information? For the matter, can any assembler do so automatically?

Static Devirtualization of Tencent VM

not_a9 — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 19:01:34 +0000

Article URL: https://back.engineering/blog/31/07/2026/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49137336

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by not_a9 in "Valve Sponsors Work Bringing Open-Source RADV Driver to Windows"

not_a9 — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 21:17:44 +0000

The service where Counter-Strike actually gets played competitively, FaceIT, does not work on Linux.

New comment by not_a9 in "User Interfaces of the Demo Scene"

not_a9 — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 14:02:02 +0000

Kinda offtopic, but I was somewhat surprised by Assembly having an “exclusive AI partner” this year.

New comment by not_a9 in "Cracking Windows Open: Porting RADV to Win32"

not_a9 — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 12:34:38 +0000

Throw a lawn dart at the contents of https://vx-underground.org/Archive/Driver%20Collection/Bulk%... all drivers download, load the resulting driver and try to get into Fortnite or something. It'll probably get in fine assuming driver isn't Unknowncheats superstar already

New comment by not_a9 in "Cracking Windows Open: Porting RADV to Win32"

not_a9 — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 09:53:58 +0000

Sandboxie/WinFSP/KVM guest drivers for Windows are open source too

I’m sure there are more open source examples. A newer one is https://github.com/namazso/PawnIO/tree/master I guess?

New comment by not_a9 in "Cracking Windows Open: Porting RADV to Win32"

not_a9 — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 09:41:14 +0000

If anti-cheats actively whitelisted drivers playing competitive video games would be impossible for people using any rarer HW/utilities. Vulnerable drivers are generally blacklisted when found.

Getting your driver signed seems like a pain these days, yeah

Implementing SEH in Rust and why you shouldn't do it

not_a9 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 22:42:32 +0000

Article URL: https://engineering.zeroitlab.com/2022/03/13/rust-seh/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49042513

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by not_a9 in "Claude Opus 5"

not_a9 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 17:41:07 +0000

Reversing for the most part, though lately I’ve been doing some code obfuscation/binary rewriting stuff. Fable will switch to Opus instantly on these and I’m unsure how this will perform. I suppose the only way to find out is to test.

New comment by not_a9 in "Claude Opus 5"

not_a9 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 17:17:53 +0000

5.6-Sol is a lot more permissive than Opus/Fable even w/ CVP (once you sign your soul away to Palantir via Persona, anyway), while maintaining better capabilities

New comment by not_a9 in "Claude Opus 5"

not_a9 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 17:11:05 +0000

> Opus 5’s safeguards match those of Claude Fable 5’s, with one change: it now permits source-code vulnerability discovery at all access levels. This means that the model can support defensive cybersecurity work while still blocking vulnerability discovery in compiled binaries, which is more commonly used offensively.

Okay so it’s worse than Opus 4.8 for my purposes I guess?

New comment by not_a9 in "Roblox Officially Supports GrapheneOS"

not_a9 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 19:12:40 +0000

Are the other Zero IT Lab products like their code virtualizer of similar quality to Theia? My only exposure has been that one RE//verse presentation and shitposts on UC.