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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • OG Switches were amazing to hack. You literally just had to short two pins on one of the joycon sockets, then you could boot it into RCM/Recovery mode, and then you could inject a payload to run a layer between the OS and the hardware so you could tell the OS whatever you liked about the hardware. The ghetto method was to just use a paperclip, but you had to be careful because if you accidentally shorted a particular pair of adjacent pins you would brick the device. The better way was to buy a cheap little 3D printed jig, literally just a piece of plastic with a wire in it that slid into the joycon rail. You would then clone the system NAND onto an SDCard, running the console off the SDCard instead, leaving the original console completely clean and available to swap back to with a regular boot.

    Then you had stores, freeware apps where you could just download games directly to the console. Nintendo started cracking down on those (although as usual you only seem to get their attention when you start asking for money) so most of them went away or into deep hiding.

    On top of all that, when the Switch first came out it had a WebKit browser exploit that allowed complete hacking. It turned out this browser exploit was actually pretty widespread across other browsers on PC, and they were all subsequently patched.



  • Probably not. Back when the WhatsApp Pegasus vulnerability happened, there was a vector on iOS, but it was iMessages.

    I don’t know any first hand details, but my suspicion is that the way WhatsApp on Android worked was via Facebook system apps bundled with the phone by the manufacturer. Back in the day, Facebook itself used to be a system app on some phones (making it difficult to remove), but gradually they moved away from that to having the Facebook or WhatsApp apps be the same as the one on Google Play, but there would be a separate system app that would be much harder to remove. I suspect this system app used various exploits for further data mining by Facebook (perhaps even gaining microphone access so they can present ads based on what you say?) and that the Pegasus hack got into WhatsApp, then simply called the system app to use its established exploits. One other thing that maybe points to this: the Pegasus hack would only sometimes be effective on Android phones, and researchers couldn’t pin down why. To me, that suggests some other app or configuration variation.

    WhatsApp on iOS shouldn’t have this vector, as Apple control both software and hardware on their phones, hence why the strategy was to go for Apple apps directly (as they had the direct access to system level permissions, like I’m alleging Facebook sometimes had on Android).

    Like I say, the exact workings of the hack are my own assumptions, and I understand that the WhatsApp Pegasus entry vector has been patched, but ultimately I don’t think Facebook/Meta or any of their apps are trustworthy and encourage people to remove them from their devices.














  • Back in the day your monitor(s) would have been drawing a lot more power (I’m talking way back with CRT monitors). Also, your PC doesn’t draw 750 watts all the time if at all - 750W is the max rating for the power supply. Even if you did have a very power hungry system (read: GPU) it would only draw that while running full whack, most of the time the PC will idle at lower clock speeds and lower power.

    Your soldering irons are probably only 25W, certainly less than 100W (unless you’re showing off). The big things are generally anything involving heating, but many of the things at your desk probably don’t use that much. After heating it’s motors. And, again, these things are generally not all on at the same time.

    Suffice it to say, there isn’t really any higher risk to the volume and type of load we have today than back when electricity was first installed in houses. It certainly should be said that the installations are much safer now than they used to be, where even a faulty install like this shouldn’t lead to a fire - if your cable is installed in ducting or kopex then even if a faulty termination heats the cable up there won’t be anything in contact with it to start a fire.

    But you should still get check these things checked out. The layers of redundancy by design are great, but you don’t want holes in the Swiss cheese to line up - that’s when bad things happen.