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This Week In Security: Too Little Too Late, And Other Stories

October 23, 2020 by 2 Comments

Microsoft has just announced a way to disable JScript in Internet Explorer. This would have been very useful a few years ago, to proactively prevent problems found in the now-ancient JScript engine, which ran their own slightly different version of standard JavaScript. Even though IE is no longer under active development, it still receives security updates. JScript, on the other hand, is basically done. If you’re one of the 1.06% that still use IE, then go flip the switch to protect yourself from additional JScript vulnerabilities.

Zerologon and Samba?

Samba is an open source re-implemenation of Microsoft’s SMB protocol. There’s a clever term that describes the reality of this situation: “Bug for bug compatibility”. Remember Zerologon, the flaw where a security token’s generation could be manipulated to vastly reduce the key space? Samba follows the specification, and therefore suffers from the same issue, though it seems to be unusual to actually run Samba in a vulnerable configuration.

Other implementations cannot say the same. QNAP in particular has been bitten by Zerologon when configured as a domain controller. What’s not clear is whether QNAP is running Samba on the NAS products, or if this is yet another vulnerable implementation. Either way, go update your devices. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Too Little Too Late, And Other Stories” →

Clacker Hacker: Popping A Cap In A Brother EP43 Thermal Typewriter

October 22, 2020 by 27 Comments

A few months ago, I fell down the internet rabbit hole known as Ted Munk’s typewriter site. I don’t remember if I just saw this Brother EP43 typewriter for sale and searched for information about them, or went looking for one after reading about them. Either way, the result is the same — I gained a typewriter.

Now I’m not really a typewriter collector or anything, and this is my first word processor typewriter. When it arrived from Goodwill, I anxiously popped four ‘C’ cells in and hoped for the best. It made a print head noise, so that was a good sign. But almost immediately after that, there was a BANG! and then a puff of smoke wafted out from the innards. My tiny typewriter was toast. Continue reading “Clacker Hacker: Popping A Cap In A Brother EP43 Thermal Typewriter” →

STM32 Clones: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

October 22, 2020 by 90 Comments

Whenever a product becomes popular, it’s only a matter of time before other companies start feeling the urge to hitch a ride on this popularity. This phenomenon is the primary reason why so many terrible toys and video games have been produced over the years. Yet it also drives the world of electronics. Hence it should come as no surprise that ST’s highly successful ARM-based series of microcontrollers (MCUs) has seen its share of imitations, clones and outright fakes.

The fakes are probably the most problematic, as those chips pretend to be genuine STM32 parts down to the markings on the IC package, while compatibility with the part they are pretending to be can differ wildly. For the imitations and clones that carry their own markings, things are a bit more fuzzy, as one could reasonably pretend that those companies just so happened to have designed MCUs that purely by coincidence happen to be fully pin- and register compatible with those highly popular competing MCU designs. That would be the sincerest form of flattery.

Let’s take a look at which fakes and imitations are around, and what it means if you end up with one. Continue reading “STM32 Clones: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly” →

Taking A Crack At The Traveling Salesman Problem

October 21, 2020 by 16 Comments

The human mind is a path-planning wizard. Think back to pre-lockdown days when we all ran multiple errands back to back across town. There was always a mental dance in the back of your head to make sense of how you planned the day. It might go something like “first to the bank, then to drop off the dry-cleaning. Since the post office is on the way to the grocery store, I’ll pop by and send that box that’s been sitting in the trunk for a week.”

This sort of mental gymnastics doesn’t come naturally to machines — it’s actually a famous problem in computer science known as the traveling salesman problem. While it is classified in the industry as an NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization, a more succinct and understandable definition would be: given a list of destinations, what’s the best round-trip route that visits every location?

This summer brought news that the 44-year old record for solving the problem has been broken. Let’s take a look at why this is a hard problem, and how the research team from the University of Washington took a different approach to achieve the speed up.

Continue reading “Taking A Crack At The Traveling Salesman Problem” →

Lewis Latimer Drafted The Future Of Electric Light

October 20, 2020 by 40 Comments

These days, we have LED light bulbs that will last a decade. But it wasn’t so long ago that incandescent lamps were all we had, and they burned out after several months. Thomas Edison’s early light bulbs used bamboo filaments that burned out very quickly. An inventor and draftsman named Lewis Latimer improved Edison’s filament by encasing it in cardboard, earning himself a patent the process.

Lewis had a hard early life, but he succeeded in spite of the odds and his lack of formal education. He was a respected draftsman who earned several patents and worked directly with Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. Although Lewis didn’t invent the light bulb, he definitely made it better and longer-lasting. Continue reading “Lewis Latimer Drafted The Future Of Electric Light” →

Mazda Investing Big In Advanced Gasoline Tech With Skyactiv-X

October 20, 2020 by 124 Comments

Electric cars, as a concept, were once not dissimilar from the flying car. Promised to be a big thing in the future, but hopelessly impractical in the here and now. However, in the last ten years, they’ve become a very real thing, with market share growing year on year as new models bring greater range and faster charging times.

With their lower emissions output and ever-improving performance, one could be forgiven for thinking that traditional combustion engines are all but dead. Mazda would beg to differ – investing heavily in new technology to take the gasoline engine into the next decade and beyond. Continue reading “Mazda Investing Big In Advanced Gasoline Tech With Skyactiv-X” →

Ethernet At 40: From A Napkin Sketch To Multi-Gigabit Links

October 19, 2020 by 50 Comments

September 30th, 1980 is the day when Ethernet was first commercially introduced, making it exactly forty years ago this year. It was first defined in a patent filed by Xerox as a 10 Mb/s networking protocol in 1975, introduced to the market in 1980 and subsequently standardized in 1983 by the IEEE as IEEE 802.3. Over the next thirty-seven years, this standard would see numerous updates and revisions.

Included in the present Ethernet standard are not just the different speed grades from the original 10 Mbit/s to today’s maximum 400 Gb/s speeds, but also the countless changes to the core protocol to enable these ever higher data rates, not to mention new applications of Ethernet such as power delivery and backplane routing. The reliability and cost-effectiveness of Ethernet would result in the 1990 10BASE-T Ethernet standard (802.3i-1990) that gradually found itself implemented on desktop PCs.

With Ethernet these days being as present as the presumed luminiferous aether that it was named after, this seems like a good point to look at what made Ethernet so different from other solutions, and what changes it had to undergo to keep up with the demands of an ever-more interconnected world. Continue reading “Ethernet At 40: From A Napkin Sketch To Multi-Gigabit Links” →