Mastodawn

davidc__Dec 29, 2023

Alright fellow electronics nerds - I'm in the market for a new soldering setup. JBC, Metcal, Thermaltronics, something else? I wouldn't mind buying something nice that will last for a while and be nice to use, rather than something cheaper that I will need to replace or will fight with.

I've used Weller's all my life (initially the WESD51 with PES51 and a used WD1 / WP65). My WESD51 died, and the WP65 tips are too small to put real heat into larger components. A larger iron for the WD1 is fairly pricey, especially given that its old tech (resistive heat in the handle, rather than cartridge).

So - any recommendations, for or against? Any other brands I should look into?

davidc__Dec 13, 2023

Show thread

Felix "tmbinc" Domke Dec 13, 2023

@foone My favorite part is how the CPU in the (original) Xbox implemented this, so all you had to do is to ground A20M# and it would boot from FEFFFFF0 instead of FFFFFFF0, which would be decoded - in the southbridge - to the external NOR flash (instead of the s3kr1t boot-ROM), so you'd skip all that (wanna-be-)secure boot.

All that because of a hack that MS-DOS did, that was highly irrelevant already even in old DOS times.

Microsoft hacked itself.

davidc__Feb 16, 2023

Andrew Zonenberg Feb 16, 2023

Anybody know of a modern replacement for Effasol from Ernest F Fullam? We used it in the materials science department EM lab at RPI in the early 201x's and it was awesome.

It was an aqueous solution that was wiped/sprayed onto the inside of a sputter coater or evaporator bell jar. It would dry to an optically clear, water soluble layer a micron or so thick. After a couple of depositions when the jar started getting too opaque to see through easily, you'd just use a wet paper towel or kimwipe to clean the glass. The sacrificial layer would dissolve and all of the sputtered metal would just come off with almost no scrubbing or effort.

davidc__Dec 16, 2022

Bryan Cantrill Dec 16, 2022

Throughout my career, I have believed that it is essential to dig into mysterious pathological systems behavior even if it seems somewhat tangential, for it can often reveal problems deep in the system that can have much more damaging presentation.

For a vivid example of pathological behavior, a deep underlying problem, and (especially) the methodology to connect one to the other, read this extraordinary analysis from @oxidecomputer engineer Dave Pacheco:

https://github.com/oxidecomputer/omicron/issues/1146

cockroachdb crashed in Go runtime during test run: `s.allocCount != s.nelems` · Issue #1146 · oxidecomputer/omicron

There's a lot of detail in this report. For a summary of this problem, the root cause, and a workaround, see this comment below. Again trying to reproduce #1130, I found a different issue that ...

GitHub

davidc__Nov 25, 2022

Chad Loder Nov 25, 2022

The massive Twitter data breach is real. Here is a small offer of proof. There is data from entire countries in the data set.

davidc__Nov 10, 2022

Andrew Zonenberg Nov 10, 2022

#introduction Hi everyone! I'm Andrew AKA https://twitter.com/azonenberg.

By day, I do embedded security for IOActive. In my spare time I mostly build open source test and measurement SW/HW and will be launching a line of high performance solder-in oscilloscope probes soon.

I also volunteer with local SAR so will occasionally disappear into the woods on short notice.

Andrew Zonenberg (@azonenberg) / Twitter

Infosec, RE, high speed digital, T&M, network hardware, microscopy, FPGA/ASIC, @IOActive, KD2HKV, #SoOthersMayLive. Lead dev of glscopeclient. Tweets are my own

Twitter

davidc__Nov 10, 2022

Gus Nov 9, 2022

Good write-up about using fault injection to bypass read-protection on a Renesas automotive MCU https://blog.willemmelching.nl/carhacking/2022/11/08/rh850-glitch/

#hardwarehacking #electronics

Sad to see what is effectively DRM on automotive components in the real-world now. Terrible long-term for #repair and repurposing.

Bypassing the Renesas RH850/P1M-E read protection using fault injection

Willem's Blog

@ridt it really is.

Apparently we do introductions here. I got into infosec because I heard that people would pay me to reverse hardware and firmware. After a few years doing offensive consulting in the industrial control space, I blundered over to this newfangled "cloud" thing, and now architect HW security for a public cloud.

In fits-and-starts I write a perpetually buggy-and-unfinished piece of software for circuit-board-imagery to netlist/schematic reverse engineering. Also occasionally dabbling in semiconductor reverse engineering, machining, electronics design, embedded firmware, and various associated topics.

Expect few toots, at least judging by how often I used twitter.