I have managed to extract a list of encoded strings within the liblzma/xz backdoor payload (5.6.1):

https://gist.github.com/q3k/af3d93b6a1f399de28fe194add452d01

The code has a dictionary of strings that are encoded as a prefix trie, which helps to keep things stealthy. This is eg. then used to look up symbols, eg. bd_elf_lookup_hash(..., 0x2b0, ...) means bd_elf_lookup_hash(..., "__libc_stack_end", ...). This is also why it's slow :).

This should bring us one step closer to knowing what the binary payload does.

#RISCV Micro #Linux Distro (#QEMU)

https://popovicu.com/posts/making-a-micro-linux-distro/

A new study shows a whopping 87% of games released prior to 2010 are no longer available for sale or download by any means other than the second-hand market and archival/"piracy": http://gamehistory.org/87percent/

Proof if you ever needed it that the community is doing the work that corporate interests won't do to preserve gaming history and the slice of culture it represents.

We are living in an age when it is so astonishingly cheap to keep copies of things around and yet the perverse incentives exist for companies to memory-hole anything that doesn't perform well or that might compete with newer offerings.

IMO, in the big picture this is what legislation is for, correcting a horrible tendency that the market will have if left to its own devices, and there should absolutely be legislation protecting archivists of content that's no longer available for sale, or even requiring that content creation companies keep content available in SOME form. Until then, we depend on each other to do this.

Something that bugs me so much when people complain about the complexity of Mastodon or decentralized services, is that they've done it already.

Email. It's just like fucking email.
You choose a provider, you get an address, and then you share that address with others.

That's it. That's all there's too it.
You change email providers? You share your new address.

#rant #FOSS #decentralization #opensource