Hello #FediAsk, what the heck is this and how is it used?

This #thing turned up on my desk and... what?

It's like a big mechanical keyboard key (twice the surface area of a regular key), but with a little handle on top, two springs, and the bottom has a little, very sharp knife point in it. You can press down on the thingy's orange cap and the knifepointybit will start pricking down below the thingy's bottom.

There's two of 'em stuck on a little pad of foam.

#weirdmastodon #weirdmachines

If y'all should find yourself in a “Turing Complete" discussion somewhere, do remember that the Intel x86-64 MMU page fault handler is itself Turing Complete:

https://github.com/jbangert/trapcc

No x86-64 instructions are required.

I've wondered whether a developer would use this as the foundation of a weird machine. This given the absolutely boggling NSO Pegasus iMessage JBIG2 exploit from a few years ago:

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-deep-dive-into-nso-zero-click.html

Difficulty of detecting an exploit in code that doesn't exist seems analogous to detecting a weird machine built upon a compression CODEC.

#InfoSec #History #history #security #Security #Turing #WeirdMachines #NSO #Pegasus #Apple #exploits