Demozoo.org is a website that is a library of not only old school ’90’s era demo competition submission – but even all the recent ones as well. They have lists of current competitions and news too. An extra feature is many demos have youtube videos of the runs so you don’t have to download the binaries and run them locally.
Ars Technica reports that, researchers at security firm Binarly found that Secure Boot is completely compromised on more than 200 older device models sold by Acer, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, Intel, Lenovo, Supermicro and others. The cause: a cryptographic key underpinning Secure Boot on those models that was compromised in 2022.
They found that more than 10% of firmware images had this vulnerability. The cure – update your bios to ones without compromised keys.
We discovered the private component of one Platform Key in a data leak where a suspected ODM employee published the source code containing the PK on a public GitHub repository. The private key was stored in an encrypted file, which was “protected” by a weak 4-character-long password and thus easily guessable with any password-cracking tool.
-Binarly report
I have written about how Amazon’s Graviton4 CPU is starting to out-perform x86 offerings from Intel and AMD. Now there is yet another front that should worry Intel and AMD: security.
Like many custom chip designs coming from Apple, Google, and Amazon, Graviton4 is an ARM-based architecture. While AMD, Intel, and some other chip designers have struggled with the various forms of Spectre and Meltdown attacks, new designs are defending against them at their hearts.
ARM8.5-A and subsequent security extensions have been slowly and steadily introduced to combat the vulnerabilities found in classic chip designs. These features include things like Branch Target Identification to avoid branch prediction and speculative execution attacks. Memory addresses can be accessed only if they have been marked as valid for that execution prediction. Pointer Authentication adds a cryptographic signature to authenticate memory pointers and prevents data alteration. All data sent across high-speed hardware interfaces such as Graviton memory and AWS Nitro cards is encrypted to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. All of this is enabled by default for customers that use Amazon Linux 2023.
“Many people told me it was impossible to build a chip that could compete with the x86 CPUs and didn’t use the x86 architecture,” Ali Saidi, senior principal engineer at AWS, said in an interview published by Amazon’s A to Z blog. “But 25 years ago, x86 wasn’t the dominant architecture. The innovation and economies of scale of the PC drove success in other areas like servers. Since it happened before, I knew it could happen again.”
NCOT Technology has a number of retro-programming videos. Bonus points for using old school DOS Borland C++ to compile the examples.
This gives you an idea of how things were done, but the reality is that demo scene code was a LOT more complex – full of inline assembly, crazy lookup tables, direct framebuffer manipulation, and every programming and hardware trick known to man. You had to be a wizard of not only coding – but expert at tricking the hardware to do what you wanted too.
8086 emulator is a fun Intel 8086 emulator / vm on github. It can run most of the 8086 instruction set and provides an interactive interpreter and debugger that allows you to run programs line by line. [hackaday]
Are the days of SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) numbered? SR-IOV was originally designed for 20 or so VMs with most instances using 8 vCPUs or less. Now that we have 60-128 cores/120-256 hw threads and beyond with multiple sockets and CXL, things have changed.
Scalable IO offers better scalability, flexibility, over-provisioning, and a Scalable IO system can still support traditional SR-IOV in backwards compatibility mode.
It does this with hardware-assisted, efficient routing and has different modes for direct and intercepted path functionality. I won’t claim I fully grock all the details, but it does seem like a great way to start taking advantage of newer architecture enhancements we’re seeing in a wide variety of upcoming hardware platforms.
Give the spec a read to learn more.
Links:
After 4 years, Windows 11 installations finally reached an adoption rate of just over 50% – likely due to dire sounding announcements about the end of Windows 10 support. And just one month later, install rate immediately starts a retreat and Windows 10 sees an increase of installs.
The OS wars are long since over, but it is obvious some folks at Microsoft clearly haven’t learned, or just don’t care, about disappointing your customers.
Links:
The Video Game History Foundation (VHGF)’s digital archive of video game research has launched its first round of online early access to it’s library. It’s free to access anywhere in the world and intended for “anyone who wants to study video game history.”
What do they have?
There are some caveats: There are no playable games in the archive due to copyright restrictions and VGHF said it “cannot give express permission” for users to reproduce materials in the library unless explicitly stated otherwise though researchers may be exempt under fair use cases.
https://youtu.be/RCInsJ6BLjY?si=1a2wUVjed_kpSpm0
TipsNNTricks shows how to bypass the login password without a recovery CD or without any software. It does require physical access to the system (or a way to trigger a recovery boot); but this really helps if you found an old hard drive or system and can’t remember the password from eons ago.
You first boot in recovery mode. You then gain access to the drive by opening a debug message which opens notepad. This allows you to do File…Open and look at all the files on the C drive. You rename the ‘c:\windows\system32\sethc.exe’ to something else (bak or whatever), then make a copy of cmd.exe and name it sethc.exe in the same directory as the original sethc.exe.
When windows reboots, you can then press the shift key 5 times to trigger hotkeys (sethc.exe), and it will open a cmd prompt instead. Then use net use to reset the password for your accounts and you can log in. Clever!
Runevision invented a form of dithering called surface-stable fractal dithering.
He released it as open source along with this video showing how it works:
Find the shader source and example project here: https://github.com/runevision/Dither3D