Fluxfox is a floppy disk image library – written in Rust. It’s intended to serve the needs of the emulator world and supports IBM, Amiga, Macintosh, and Atari ST formats. It can even perform operations on disk images consistent with typical operations of a PC floppy disk controller, while also giving low-level access to the track bitstream for other controllers.
It’s written by martypc/GloriousCow that has written a lot about floppy protection schemes.
Back in the day, software didn’t come on encrypted, online, distributed marketplaces, they came on humble floppy disks. This made them susceptible to copying. To fight this, developers started using all kinds of interesting tricks, which hackers would try to break. Thus started a nearly decade-long war of hackers and copy protection schemes.
GloriousCow started a series of investigations on historical floppy protection schemes on his blog. His site is amazing – he makes his own tools as well as shows the assembly code and has great diagrams. He covers things like EliaShim CodeSafe, XEMAG Xelok, Vault Prolok, EA Interlock, Softguard Superlok, Formaster Copy-Lock, and even got an interview with Robert McQuaid who made the protection circumventing CopyWrite software.
I particularly like his article about Copy-Lock mechanism used by Kings Quest. Copy-Lock employed several tricks such as sectors with non-standard sizes and putting purposefully incorrect CRC values on tracks to make standard copying incorrect.
In this case, Copy-Lock used a mechanism in which sector 1 on track 6 was intentionally written as only 256 bytes (instead of 512 bytes), with a 256-byte blank section to fill the gap. Additionally, the CRC was also altered to make a normal read think it was invalid. A normal INT 13h disk read would search and fail the read and CRC check.
CopyLock worked by bypassing the BIOS and talking directly to the disk controller. It would issue an INT 13h read on sector 1 track 6 that it knew would fail. This would place the head on the right track. The code would then tell the floppy controller directly to read track – and dump all 512 bytes. It was looking for the special byte 0xF7 as the final byte of that supposedly empty section of the track. The key is that it is not possible to create invalid tracks with invalid CRC’s like this using a standard IBM PC floppy controller. Copy-Lock created the special hardware that could write in this way and sold that, along with the checking code, as their solution.
His article has all the assembly code – which is really awesome.
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On what are we to keep our lives focused? It’s a good question during Advent.
Dear Wormwood,
–Not written by C.S. Lewis but extraordinarily apropos today
Be sure that the patient remains completely fixated on politics. Arguments, political gossip, and obsessing on the faults of people they have never met serves as an excellent distraction from advancing in personal virtue, character, and the things the patient can control. Make sure to keep the patient in a constant state of angst, frustration, and general disdain towards the rest of the human race in order to avoid any kind of charity or inner peace from further developing. Ensure the patient continues to believe that the problem is “out there” in the “broken system” rather than recognizing there is a problem with himself. Keep up the good work.
Or another:
Recognize what is in your circle of concern and your circle of control. By keeping focus and energy on things that are in your circle of control, you stay focused on what you can actually do and avoid needless worry about things you cannot control. This focus helps you create real momentum towards goals and reduces a sense of victimhood and blaming others for problems you can neither control nor influence. You can sometimes change or move things that are outside your control in the circles of interests/concern with proper evaluation and effort, but recognizing when you do not have control over a situation keeps you from useless worry and concern about things and people you cannot change.
Stephen Covey
This all matches the central teach of Christ which was even more soul-centered. Right after teaching that one need only have complete trust in the Father’s love and care for them, he tells them the same advice: keep your circle of interest completely encapsulated in your circle of control. Even moreso, justice means that measure you hold against others will be held against you. So stay focused the Father’s love for you and rooting out the evil that keeps you from loving all others.
1“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. 2 For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
3 “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 4 How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
Matthew 7:1-6
Stargazers Ghost Network, an extensive network of GitHub accounts and repositories that provides malware distribution “as-a-Service”, has created ‘GodLoader’ which hides in Godot engine .pck files as a Godot script – and then downloads malware when activated.
Utilizing a network of ghost accounts, they distribute all kinds of malware by relying on users browsing github and downloading Godot tools and engine cheats. To obfuscate things, they used more than 200 repos with more than 225 ghost accounts – each with a slightly different purpose in the entire distributed scheme. Researchers note the script method works across Windows, MacOS, and Linux since the Godot engine works across those platforms too.
Victims were often infected with cryptocurrency miners or RedLine infostealer. The method is good – it still remains undetected by many antivirus tools.
One more reason to put github projects you download into VM’s before giving them access to your dev environment.
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This dog has an existential crisis when a horse comes up to say hi.
How do you know when AI generated frames on your graphics card or in video playback look bad? Some folks at Intel published a paper and shared a dataset for a technique called CGVQM+D: Computer Graphics Video Quality Metric and Dataset – which tries to quantify the image quality issues created by using AI generation techniques like neural supersampling, novel-view synthesis, path tracing, neural denoising, frame interpolation, and variable rate shading.
Politico has done what one should always do to get to the bottom of things: follow the money. It seems to show that this was a perfect case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing – or even the dreaded left-wing circular firing squad not unlike what David Hogg has done by being a DNC official and activist with conflicting goals.
During the later part of his presidency, Joe Biden was dogged for months by pro-Palestinian protesters calling him “Genocide Joe” — but it turns out some of the groups behind the demonstrations receive financial backing from biggest names in Democratic donors: Soros, Rockefeller and Pritzker.
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Even Atari isn’t immune from Web3 blockchain silliness. Using the AtariX platform, players can mint a non-fungible token that acts as their access pass and compete in the classic game Asteroids on the blockchain.
Players connect their bitcoin/ether wallet and mint NFT access passes. The access pass costs 0.0015 Ether (about $5). On AtariX, the fee allows players to compete against other players, potentially win Atari gift cards, and participate in its ecosystem of games.
Now that motherboards have just about every device one could want built in (surround sound audio, networking, etc), most of us have a few extra PCI slots laying around in our PC’s that aren’t getting used. Don’t lose out – they can be put to good use as:
I went out and got a Fanblack USB 3.2 Gen 2 pci card that gave me 7 more super fast USB 3.2 and USB-C ports. I tested the ports with some of my devices, and the speeds were dramatically improved from one set of front panel ports that likely used a cheaper and slower USB chipset.
Even better, I moved a bunch of cords to the back of my PC and out of the way. Now the front of my PC is clear of cables and devices and it just gets the odd USB stick.
Don’t let those empty PCI slots go to waste. Just make sure you check your motherboard book and put cards in the right slots so each gets the correct number of internal PCI lanes and doesn’t share with other devices.
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HowToGeek gives a good breakdown on the differences between the different versions and capabilities of HDMI, Displayport, and USB-C standards.