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My mom died when I was 7, after which my dad bought me a Commodore 64 so I had something to lose myself in during the mourning process.
I learned everything about that system, from my first GOTO statement to sprite buffers, to soldering my own EPROM cartridges. My dad didn't deal with the loss so well, and became a missing person 5 years later when I was 12.
I got into foster care with a bunch of strict religious cultists who wouldn't allow electronics in the house.
So I ran away at 14, sub-rented a closet in a student apartment using my orphan benefits and bought a secondhand IBM computer. I spent about 16 hours a day learning about BSD and Linux, C, C++, Fortran, ADA, Haskell, Livescript and even more awful things like Visual Basic, ASP, Windows NT, and Active Directory.
I faked my ID (back then it was just a laminated sheet of paper), and got a job at 15-pretending-to-be-17 at one of the first ISPs in my country. I wrote the firmware and admin panel for their router, full of shitty CGI-bin ASP code and vulnerabilities.
That somehow got me into a job at Microsoft, building the MS Office language pack for my country, and as an official "conflict resolver" for their shitty version control system. Yes, they had fulltime people employed just to resolve VCS conflicts.
After that I worked at Arianespace (X-ray NDT, visualizing/tagging dicom scans, image recognition of faulty propellant tank welds), and after that I switched to biotech, first phytogenetics, then immunology, then pharmacokynetics.
In between I have grown & synthesized and sold large quantities of recreational drugs, taken care of some big felines, got a pilot license, taught IT at an elementary school, renovated a house, and procreated.
A lot of it was to prove myself to the world -- prove that a nearly-broke-orphan-high-school-dropout could succeed at life.
But hey, now I work for a "startup", so I guess I failed after all.23 -
I FINALLY DID IT!! I landed a job!! I'm going to be a firmware engineer!! Woohoo!! 😁
It only took half a year, but I finally got one, and purely off my own merit. It feels damn good when you get the job with no references or connections, just your own skills.
After a highly successful on-site technical/whiteboard interview, I was 90% confident I'd get it. The fact that my job search is finally over, is such a fucking relief. Good riddance to endless interview prep, applications & rejections.
I start on Monday. Goodbye freedom >.<19 -
At the beginning of an interview...
HR girl: You know, that position you applied is already taken but I found some similar in our company.
Me: Uhm, ok?
HRG: What about this one? It's some programming... *pointing at some IT position regarding db maintenance* Do you want to try that?
Me: Sure, why not.
I was applying to student position at embedded firmware development at the time. I did some school project with MySQL but it was few years back and I happily forgot most about it.
Anyway, story continues.
IT manager: Hi, I heard you want to join our lines.
Me: That is what I heard as well.
IT: Eh?
Me: I came for completely different position actually.
IT: Uhm, ok. We have standardised test, let's see what you can do.
It was some basic stuff for db guys but I was totally lost. I was done after 3 minutes returning nearly blank paper.
We shaked hands, both agreed this is not well fit for me and I went away.
After this botched attempt HR girl remembered that there is another team looking for embedded developer students. I was accepted.
Corporates are marvelous.3 -
Someday my toaster is going to have an IP address. A bad automatic firmware update will most likely cause it to get stuck on the bagel setting until I plug a usb key in and reflash the memory.
Grandma's refrigerator will probably get viruses, lock itself and freeze all the food inside, demanding bitcoin before defrosting.
My blender will probably be used in a massive DDoS attack because Ninja's master MAC address list got leaked and the hidden control panel login is admin/admin.
Ovens will burn houses down when people call in to have them preheat on their way home from work.
Correlations between the number of times the lights are turned on and how many times the toilet is flushed will yield recommendations to run the dishwasher on Thursdays because it's simply more energy efficient.
My dog will tweet when he's hungry and my smart watch will recommend diet dog food in real-time because he's really been eating too much lately--"Do you want to setup a recurring order on Amazon fresh?"
Sometimes living in a cave sounds nice...12 -
Not a rant, but I found this funny enough to share.
About two weeks ago, I’m contacted by a third party development firm that is responsible for building the next iteration of a control board were are developing. Alongside build of the PCB they were scoped to flash the firmware and verify all connected components.
During the call, they tell me they don’t have the resources to build our testing environment with the Ansible script I provided, and they don’t know if the updates they have made will work with our control system. Ugh...really...
I attempt to walk them through the 3 pretty simple commands to launch the playbook. Instead of listening, their project manager insists that I need to load up the environment and send them a ready to go system.
I quickly load up a RaspberryPi and prepare it for shipping. I hand the box to our shipping clerk and fill out the shipping request documentation. Then about a week goes by and this is where the story really begins.
I get an email from the same rep asking where the environment is, and I head down to the warehouse to inquire where the RaspberryPi might be. After speaking with the head clerk, we can’t seem to track down the package. I’m assured that they will find the Pi and send me the shipment update.
I pass the information along and after about a day and a half I still didn’t receive word back from the warehouse team. I load up another Pi and head back down to the warehouse. I follow up with the warehouse staff. They inform me that they have not been able to locate my package and another warehouse worker is called over. He says he hasn’t seen it, but they they were having a food day that day and he thinks more than likely someone ate it.
Like it didn’t even click at first but after a few seconds I realize that these guys have literally been looking for a pie for the past two days...and I JUST DIE.
After the 5 or so minutes of laughing I show them the newly flashed RaspberryPi, and of course they know exactly where the original one was.
It’s shipped out now, but wow. Also, it turns out the PCB manufacturing company didn’t even really need this and it was all a guise to hide that they are behind schedule and that they will not be able to finish the work scoped. FML!6 -
A group of Security researchers has officially fucked hardware-level Intel botnet officially branded as "Intel Management Engine" they did so by gathering it all the autism they were able to get from StackOverflow mods... though they officially call it a Buffer Overflow.
On Wednesday, in a presentation at Black Hat Europe, Positive Technologies security researchers Mark Ermolov and Maxim Goryachy plan to explain the firmware flaws they found in Intel Management Engine 11, along with a warning that vendor patches for the vulnerability may not be enough.
Two weeks ago, the pair received thanks from Intel for working with the company to disclose the bugs responsibility. At the time, Chipzilla published 10 vulnerability notices affecting its Management Engine (ME), Server Platform Services (SPS), and Trusted Execution Engine (TXE).
The Intel Management Engine, which resides in the Platform Controller Hub, is a coprocessor that powers the company's vPro administrative features across a variety of chip families. It has its own OS, MINIX 3, a Unix-like operating system that runs at a level below the kernel of the device's main operating system.
It's a computer designed to monitor your computer. In that position, it has access to most of the processes and data on the main CPU. For admins, it can be useful for managing fleets of PCs; it's equally appealing to hackers for what Positive Technologies has dubbed "God mode."
The flaws cited by Intel could let an attacker run arbitrary code on affected hardware that wouldn't be visible to the user or the main operating system. Fears of such an attack led Chipzilla to implement an off switch, to comply with the NSA-developed IT security program called HAP.
But having identified this switch earlier this year, Ermolov and Goryachy contend it fails to protect against the bugs identified in three of the ten disclosures: CVE-2017-5705, CVE-2017-5706, and CVE-2017-5707.
The duo say they found a locally exploitable stack buffer overflow that allows the execution of unsigned code on any device with Intel ME 11, even if the device is turned off or protected by security software.
For more of the complete story go here:
https://blackhat.com/eu-17/...
https://theregister.co.uk/2017/12/...
I post mostly daily news, commentaries and such on my site for anyone that wish to drop by there
19 -
"Europe to make it illegal to change the OS on radio devices like smartphones, routers and embedded devices."
I don't know what to say anymore29 -
It was only a while ago that I realized that “firm” was not quite “hard”, but also not “soft”, hence “firmware”, it's in between hardware and software.32
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Buckle up kids, this one gets saucy.
At work, we have a stress test machine that trests tensile, puncture and breaking strength for different materials used (wood construction). It had a controller software update that was supposed to be installed. I was called into the office because the folks there were unable to install it, they told me the executable just crashed, and wanted me to take a look as I am the most tech-savvy person there.
I go to the computer and open up the firmware download folder. I see a couple folders, some random VBScript file, and Installation.txt. I open the TXT, and find the first round of bullshit.
"Do not run the installer executable directly as it will not work. Run install.vbs instead."
Now, excuse me for a moment, but what kind of dick-cheese-sniffing cockmonger has end users run VBScript files to install something in 2018?! Shame I didn't think of opening it up and examining it for myself to find out what that piece of boiled dogshit did.
I suspend my cringe and run it, and lo and behold, it installs. I open the program and am faced with entering a license key. I'm given the key by the folks at the office, but quickly conclude no ways of entering it work. I reboot the program and there is an autofilled key I didn't notice previously. Whatever, I think, and hit OK.
The program starts fine, and I try with the login they had previously used. Now it doesn't work for some reason. I try it several times to no avail. Then I check the network inspector and notice that when I hit login, no network activity happens in the program, so I conclude the check must be local against some database.
I browse to the program installation directory for clues. Then I see a folder called "Databases".
"This can't be this easy", I think to myself, expecting to find some kind of JSON or something inside that I can crawl for clues. I open the folder and find something much worse. Oh, so much worse.
I find <SOFTWARE NAME>.accdb in the folder. At this point cold sweat is already running down my back at the sheer thought of using Microsoft Access for any program, but curiosity takes over and I open it anyway.
I find the database for the entire program inside. I also notice at this point that I have read/write access to the database, another thing that sent my alarm bells ringing like St. Pauls cathedral. Then I notice a table called "tUser" in the left panel.
Fearing the worst, I click over and find... And you knew it was coming...
Usernames and passwords in plain text.
Not only that, they're all in the format "admin - admin", "user - user", "tester - tester".
I suspend my will to die, login to the program and re-add the account they used previously. I leave the office and inform the peeps that the program works as intended again.
I wish I was making this shit up, but I really am not. What is the fucking point of having a login system at all when your users can just open the database with a program that nowadays comes bundled with every Windows install and easily read the logins? It's not even like the data structure is confusing like minified JSON or something, it's literally a spreadsheet in a program that a trained monkey could read.
God bless them and Satan condemn the developers of this fuckawful program.8 -
Prepare to get your MIND BLOWN:
They have successfully got Windows 10 ARM to boot on a Raspberry Pi 3 with a hacked UEFI firmware!
Take that Windows 10 IoT!!
Props to these guys: 👍
• https://github.com/andreiw
• https://twitter.com/NTAuthority
• https://github.com/andreiw
Here's a video of it in action → https://youtu.be/6b1IxvKJeho?t=94
11 -
Heck yes!
I implement a stack trace in my embedded systems!
Whenever a device crashes, it makes a stack dump in an unused part of ram.
After it has rebooted and is connected to the server again, it uploads the stack dump.
The server then opens the correct firmware elf file, walks the stack and associates the debug info from the elf.
The result? A beautiful stack trace with file names, function names and line numbers.
No more guessing where random crashes come from.12 -
Spent 4 hours today working on a monitor that wasn't working. someone had put by their garbage can in the rain. I dried it out for about 2 weeks before plugging it in. It turned on but when I plugged in the DVI, it did nothing.
Today, I pulled the ENTIRE thing apart because either I could find out what was wrong, or all is lost anyways. Who knows what the rain could do to it?
With no luck, I did a quick search online about the model and found that this one just had some defective firmware (Who knew monitors had filmware??) I installed it, ran it, it took about 20 seconds and it worked!
Lesson learned once again: google is your friend
9 -
I live in an apartment building that has about 20 floors. About once every month, I'm either waiting for the elevator or in it, and the floor indicator display flashes "14" very quickly no matter what floor the elevator is actually on. Whenever this occurs, it's always 14 that gets shown.
This has made me think about what this bug looks like and if it will ever be fixed. Will they ever update the firmware in the elevators? Is it a software issue? It could also be a hardware problem. Either way, every time it happens I think about it and if this bug will ever be fixed.
I've decided to call it the "phantom floor 14 bug."9 -
I installed a firmware update on my router, and discovered it both adds telemetry and breaks the navigation in firefox. 🤦♀️
It also started complaining that my password isn't secure (despite its length) because it doesn't contain a symbol.
Good freaking job.10 -
If you are a salesperson, you can just go straight to hell. You're all a bunch of cocksucking twats and I'm amazed you manage to get yourselves dressed each day. You're a no good fucking waste of oxygen and you need to put your fork in a socket the next time you're eating.
I'm working on building a crm and ticket management system for use in the office to handle client passwords. Since I'm building from scratch I wanted to make sure I had properly planned my classes and functions before opening the code editor so I put a message on my door that says "Don't interrupt, thanks" followed by the date so people knew it was a fresh message and not something left from the previous day.
I'm deep in the zone, the psuedo code and logic is flowing, I'm getting classes planned and feeling really productive for an hour or so when suddenly my door flies open and in comes a sales person.
SP: "Hey, do you have any extra phones lying around? Mine's being slow and keeps hanging up on people."
Me: "Do you see the sign on my door right there at eye level which says not to bother me?"
SP: "oh, do you want me to come back later?"
Me: "You've already interrupted me now, let's go see what's going on before I spent an hour setting up a new phone for you." While we are walking across the office I asked him when the last time the phone rebooted.
SP: "idk, Salesperson#2 suggested that as I was headed over here but I figured I'd just ask you."
We get over to his desk and I see he has two phones sitting on his desk. "Where did this one come from?"
SP: "Oh that was on the desk over here but I figured I could use it."
Me: "Well aside from the fact that the phones are assigned to specific people for a reason, you took the time to unhook your phone to set this one up and you didn't think to reboot your phone first. Plug your phone back in."
He plugs the old phone, which is assigned to him, and while booting it does a quick firmware update and boots up fine. He tests a few things and decides it's all better now.
So someone suggested a fix for you and you decided, instead, you would break company IT policy by moving equipment from one station to another without notifying the IT department. You entered a room which had a closed door without knocking, and you disobeyed the sign on the actual door itself which politely requests that you go away. All because you couldn't be bothered to take 2 minutes and reboot your phone, which you had to do anyways.
You completely broke my train of thought and managed to waste 2 hours of effecient workflow because you had an emergency.9 -
Storytime
A story about an Android TVbox which decided to become an iPad
Several years ago we've bought an android tv-box.
It served me and my family well for several years.
Specs are not that important in this story, but there they are:
Android 4.4
1GB RAM
Amlogic quadcore 1.4HGz
8GB memory.
This device served us well - online TV, browsing, music, file sharing and so on. But recently cheap Chinese memory deciteed to take a break and damaged ROM. Because of that device won't boot. The only option was to take it apart and "short circuit" certain legs on memory chip and make it boot from SD card and install new firmware. After such operations tv-box worked well again.
Hoverer, memory glitched again and again and this algorithm was repeated for several months.
But that is not what is this story about.
One day memory went completely crazy and there was no way to install new firmware on it. It just hanged on install. (BTW, it was official firmware for this device)
But after countless attempts it finally worked! It installed the firmware and booted into launcher and connected to WiFi!
But now comes the most interesting part.
It was not android anymore.
It decided to became an iPad.
My dad logged in to his Google account via tv-box and got mail that someboby connected from our IP via iPad (we don't have an iPad) and using safari browser! Stock browser is not safari browser.....
"Ok, nvm, crazy glitch." - we thought.
But preinstalled play marked wont launch. Because he told us, that we're trying to connect from iPad.
And Google chrome page suggested to download chrome for iPad
And everything was acting like it is an iPad.
OK, downloaded iTunes, why not??? ._.
Tried to install elixir for android via apk from flash, but then memory glitched one more time, everything went black and tv-box had damaged ROM again...
After that we decided to not torment it anymore...
That's it. Poor Android TVbox that all his life dreamed to become an iPad. Rest in peace.2 -
Finally got myself a Lytro Illum!
I,v been wanting to buy one since it came out but the company who made it closed down in 2015..
Thoose fuckers just thrown everything in the trash and set it on fire, software, firmware, mobile app etc.. no open source, no archives, your expensive camera is now a paper weight! You’r welcome!
So i got myself a new hobby, started reverse-engineering the fuck out of it, luckily it’s based on android (api17), i have adb and it’s running a hidden DHCP server too so it’s coming along nicely :D
I’m planning to make a camera control mobile app for it and maybe some faster image processing, wifi sharing etc..
I love beeing in home office :D
19 -
(Written March 13th at 2am.)
This morning (yesterday), my computer decided not to boot again: it halts on "cannot find firmware rtl-whatever" every time. (it has booted just fine several times since removing the firmware.) I've had quite the ordeal today trying to fix it, and every freaking step along the way has thrown errors and/or required workarounds and a lot of research.
Let's make a list of everything that went wrong!
1) Live CD: 2yo had been playing with it, and lost it. Not easy to find, and super smudgy.
2) Unencrypt volume: Dolphin reports errors when decrypting the volume. Research reveals the Live CD doesn't incude the cryptsetup packages. First attempts at installing them mysteriously fail.
3) Break for Lunch: automatic powersaving features turned off the displays, and also killed my session.
4) Live CD redux: 25min phonecall from work! yay, more things added to my six-month backlog.
5) Mount encrypted volume: Dolphin doesn't know how, and neither do I. Research ensues. Missing LVM2 package; lvmetad connection failure ad nauseam; had to look up commands to unlock, clone, open, and mount encrypted Luks volume, and how to perform these actions on Debian instead of Ubuntu/Kali. This group of steps took four hours.
6) Chroot into mounted volume group: No DNS! Research reveals how to share the host's resolv with the chroot.
7) `# apt install firmware-realtek`: /boot/initrd.img does not exist. Cannot update.
8) Find and mount /boot, then reinstall firmware: Apt cannot write to its log (minor), listed three install warnings, and initially refused to write to /boot/initrd.img-[...]
9) Reboot!: Volume group not found. Cannot process volume group. Dropping to a shell! oh no..
(Not listed: much research, many repeated attempts with various changes.)
At this point it's been 9 hours. I'm exhausted and frustrated and running out of ideas, so I ask @perfectasshole for help.
He walks me through some debugging steps (most of which i've already done), and we both get frustrated because everything looks correct but isn't working.
10) Thirteenth coming of the Live CD: `update-initramfs -u` within chroot throws warnings about /etc/crypttab and fsck, but everything looks fine with both. Still won't boot. Editing grub config manually to use the new volume group name likewise produces no boots. Nothing is making sense.
11) Rename volume group: doubles -'s for whatever reason; Rebooting gives the same dreaded "dropping to a shell" result.
A huge thank-you to @perfectasshole for spending three hours fighting with this issue with me! I finally fixed it about half an hour after he went to bed.
After renaming the volume group to what it was originally, one of the three recovery modes managed to actually boot and load the volume. From there I was able to run `update-initramfs -u` from the system proper (which completed without issue) and was able to boot normally thereafter.
I've run updates and rebooted twice now.
After twelve+ hours... yay, I have my Debian back!
oof.9 -
I just started a new job where PHP and JavaScript are the primary languages. I came from a position as a firmware engineer where I coded in C/C++. I'm learning PHP as I go. I don't see why everyone hates on PHP. I find it extremely powerful. Especially when used in an object-oriented context.9
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Paranoid Developers - It's a long one
Backstory: I was a freelance web developer when I managed to land a place on a cyber security program with who I consider to be the world leaders in the field (details deliberately withheld; who's paranoid now?). Other than the basic security practices of web dev, my experience with Cyber was limited to the OU introduction course, so I was wholly unprepared for the level of, occasionally hysterical, paranoia that my fellow cohort seemed to perpetually live in. The following is a collection of stories from several of these people, because if I only wrote about one they would accuse me of providing too much data allowing an attacker to aggregate and steal their identity. They do use devrant so if you're reading this, know that I love you and that something is wrong with you.
That time when...
He wrote a social media network with end-to-end encryption before it was cool.
He wrote custom 64kb encryption for his academic HDD.
He removed the 3 HDD from his desktop and stored them in a safe, whenever he left the house.
He set up a pfsense virtualbox with a firewall policy to block the port the student monitoring software used (effectively rendering it useless and definitely in breach of the IT policy).
He used only hashes of passwords as passwords (which isn't actually good).
He kept a drill on the desk ready to destroy his HDD at a moments notice.
He started developing a device to drill through his HDD when he pushed a button. May or may not have finished it.
He set up a new email account for each individual online service.
He hosted a website from his own home server so he didn't have to host the files elsewhere (which is just awful for home network security).
He unplugged the home router and began scanning his devices and manually searching through the process list when his music stopped playing on the laptop several times (turns out he had a wobbly spacebar and the shaking washing machine provided enough jittering for a button press).
He brought his own privacy screen to work (remember, this is a security place, with like background checks and all sorts).
He gave his C programming coursework (a simple messaging program) 2048 bit encryption, which was not required.
He wrote a custom encryption for his other C programming coursework as well as writing out the enigma encryption because there was no library, again not required.
He bought a burner phone to visit the capital city.
He bought a burner phone whenever he left his hometown come to think of it.
He bought a smartphone online, wiped it and installed new firmware (it was Chinese; I'm not saying anything about the Chinese, you're the one thinking it).
He bought a smartphone and installed Kali Linux NetHunter so he could test WiFi networks he connected to before using them on his personal device.
(You might be noticing it's all he's. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't).
He ate a sim card.
He brought a balaclava to pentesting training (it was pretty meme).
He printed out his source code as a manual read-only method.
He made a rule on his academic email to block incoming mail from the academic body (to be fair this is a good spam policy).
He withdraws money from a different cashpoint everytime to avoid patterns in his behaviour (the irony).
He reported someone for hacking the centre's network when they built their own website for practice using XAMMP.
I'm going to stop there. I could tell you so many more stories about these guys, some about them being paranoid and some about the stupid antics Cyber Security and Information Assurance students get up to. Well done for making it this far. Hope you enjoyed it.
26 -
My trusty password manager, so I dont have to remember those shitty passwords. (its however being rebuilt after a failed firmware upgrade who bricked it).
7 -
Ok wtf? How is it that I can give myself admin access to almost any Apple computer just by turning it on, holding down two keys, and then removing one file called “.AppleSetupDone”, without any kind of authentication? And I get access to all of the data on the device too. Within two minutes of having physical access to the computer.
This is a company with millions of devices in use, why is this even possible? And the only way to prevent it is to have a firmware password, which, by the way, is not a default option...are you serious9 -
Yesterday I bought myself a PSP to relive some of my childhood memories, run custom firmware on it and so on. Unfortunately however, the battery on this one is seriously puffed up, and I need one in order to update the firmware from 5.50 CFW (the seller actually modded it too!) to 6.61 OFW (to then install CFW from there again).
I figured that I might as well have a kick at disassembling the battery for good measure, to take out its controller and power it from my lab bench power supply. I set it to 3.70V, double-checked the connections.. nothing. I raised the voltage to 4V, still nothing.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the controller from looking at it. The magic smoke is still in there, all I did was removing the housing and snipping off the battery. I measured the cell voltage and it was only some residues at 0.01V. Might be internally shorted or something, normally even dead cells settle back at 3.7V unless you keep them shorted externally.
After seeing this so many times now with controllers, I'm starting to get a feeling that manufacturers actually program these things to look at the battery voltage, and when it reaches 0V, to just make the controller kill itself. Doesn't matter if the controller's electronics are still good, just fucking kill it.
If true, that is very, VERY nasty. It would also explain why batteries in laptops especially all have different form factors, despite having used regular 18650's internally for a very long time. It would explain why they're built like tanks. It would explain why manufacturers really don't want people in there. Yes there are safety issues and you're literally diffusing a bomb. Since recently we've also got space optimization.. anything for half a mm of thickness, amirite? But doing it this way is fucking disgusting. There is absolutely no reason for the controller to kill itself when the cell dies. Yet it seems like it does.
PS: I've posted the original picture on https://ghnou.su/pics/... now if you're interested. I noticed in my previous rant that devRant really squishes these down.
12 -
Never update the firmware of your delta-fan driven server when your girlfriend is sleeping. Got thrown out of my own room!
Fml9 -
if (down(KEY_LEFT) && down(KEY_UP) && down(KEY_DOWN)) {
calc.exe
}
/*
because why not..
src: https://fwupd.org/lvfs/devices/...
*/
6 -
I bought an internet radio from pioneer...
Unfortunately, the remote control has a small delay. So I thought, maybe there's an app to control the radio. But after downloading the app could not connect. During a network scan several services appeared. You are able to update the firmware via an unprotected web interface which makes me sad. But that's not the best thing yet. You can also connect to the device via the telnet port. Guess which user you are...
3 -
Got a new eval board. It came in with a stock firmware, had its own IP and naturally its own webGUI. I wanted to check what was under the hood. So I SSH'd in to the device, and was prompted to enter the username. There weren't any specs or documentation.
*Hmm, let's try root*
User: root
Password: *Eh? Well, what the heck* admin
.
.
.
root@evalboard#
Muhahaha!!! Meet your hacker, eval board!3 -
YAY.... fuck you Belkin!
Just found out my router is vulnerable to CVE-2017-14491.
For all you not following these issues, this one allows the attacker to intercept connections and perform a traffic hijack, or execute arbitrary code with unrestricted privileges as well as access all important and private data stored on the device aka: the devices login/password, the Wi-Fi passwords, and configuration data just by sending malformed DNS packets to the device.
Now this is all well and good, except Belkin haven't released firmware since 2013, which is strange... seeing how the damn thing was "NEW" out of the box in 2016.
Last time i buy a fucking router from these lousy assholes. -
In the before time (late 90s) I worked for a company that worked for a company that worked for a company that provided software engineering services for NRC regulatory compliance. Fallout radius simulation, security access and checks, operational reporting, that sort of thing. Given that, I spent a lot of time around/at/in nuclear reactors.
One day, we're working on this system that uses RFID (before it was cool) and various physical sensors to do a few things, one of which is to determine if people exist at the intersection of hazardous particles, gasses, etc.
This also happens to be a system which, at that moment, is reporting hazardous conditions and people at the top of the outer containment shell. We know this is probably a red herring or faulty sensor because no one is present in the system vs the access logs and cameras, but we have to check anyways. A few building engineers climb the ladders up there and find that nothing is really visibly wrong and we have an all clear. They did not however know how to check the sensor.
Enter me, the only person from our firm on site that day. So in the next few minutes I am also in a monkey suit (bc protocol), climbing a 150 foot ladder that leads to another 150 foot ladder, all 110lbs of me + a 30lb diag "laptop" slung over my shoulder by a strap. At the top, I walk about a quarter of the way out, open the casing on the sensor module and find that someone had hooked up the line feed, but not the activity connection wire so it was sending a false signal. I open the diag laptop, plug it into the unit, write a simple firmware extension to intermediate the condition, flash, reload. I verify the error has cleared and an appropriate message was sent to the diagnostic system over the radio, run through an error test cycle, radio again, close it up. Once I returned to the ground, sweating my ass off, I also send a not at all passive aggressive email letting the boss know that the next shift will need to push the update to the other 600 air-gapped, unidirectional sensors around the facility.11 -
Oh fucking Huawei.
Fuck you.
Inventory:
- Honor 6x (BLN-L22C675)
- Has EMUI4.1 Marshmallow
- Cousin brother 'A' (has bricking XP!)
- Uncle 'K'
- Has Mac with Windows VM
Goal:
- Stock as LineageOS / AOSP
Procedure (fucking seriously):
- Find XDA link to root H6X
- Go to Huawei page and fill out form
- Receive and use bootloader code
- Find latest TWRP
- Flash latest TWRP
- TWRP not working? Bootloops
- XDA search "H6X boot to recovery"
- Find and try modded TWRP
- TWRP fails, no bootloop
- Find & flash TWRP 3.1.0
- Yay! TWRP works
- Find and download LineageOS and SuperSU
- Flash via TWRP
- Yay! Success.
- Attempt boot
- Boot fails. No idea why
- Go back to TWRP
- TWRP gives shitload of errors
"cannot mount /data, storage etc."
- Feel fucked up
- Notice that userdata partition exists,
but FSTAB doesn't take
- Remembers SuperSU modded boot
image and FSTABS!
- Fuck SuperSU
- Attempt to mod boot image
- Doesn't work (modded successfully
but no change)
- Discover Huawei DLOAD
Installer for "UPDATE.APP" OTAs
Note: Each full OTA is 2+ GB zipped
- Find, download, fail on 4+ OTAs
- Discover "UPDATE.APP Extractor"
Runs on Windows
Note: UPDATE.APP custom format
Different per H6X model
- Uses 'K''s VM to test
- My H6X model does not have
a predefined format
- Process to get format requires
TWRP, which is not working
- FAIL HERE
- Discover "Firmware Finder"
Windows app to find Huawei
firmwares
- Tries 'K''s VM
- Fails with 1 OTA
- Downloads another firmware ZIP
- Unzips and tries to use OTA
- Works?!
- Boots successfully?!
- Seems to have EMUI 5.0 Nougat
- Downloads, flashes TWRP
- TWRP not working AGAIN?
- Go back to XDA page
- Find that TWRP on EMUI 5 - NO
- Find rollbacks for EMUI5 -> EMUI4
- Test, fail 2-4 times (Massive OTAs)
- DLOAD accepts this one?!!!
- I HAVE ORIG AGAIN!!!
- Re-unlock and reflash TWRP
- Realise that ROMs aren't working on
EMUI 4.1; Find TWRPs for EMUI5
- Find and fail with 2-3 OTAs
Note: Had removed old OTAs for
space on Chromebook (32GB)
- In anger, flash one with TWRP
instead of DLOAD (which checks
compatability)
- Works! Same wasn't working with
DLOAD
- Find and flash a custom TWRP
as old one still exists (not wiped in
flash)
- Try flashing LineageOS
- LineageOS stuck in boot
- Try flashing AOSP
- Same
- Try flashing Resurruction Remix
- Same
- Realise that need stock EMUI5
vendor
- Realise that the firmware I installed
wasn't for my device so not working
- FUCK NO MORE LARGE DLs
- Try another custom TWRP
- Begin getting '/cust mounting' errs
- Try reflashing EMUI5 with TWRP
- Doesn't work
- Try DLOADing EMUI5
- Like before, incompatability
- DLOAD EMUI4
- Reunlock and reflash TWRP
- WRITE THIS AS A BREAK
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH7 -
Never ever run rm -rf /* on a UEFI system or you might brick your entire fucking system, including firmware.9
-
My Sunday Morning until afternoon. FML. So I was experiencing nightly reboots of my home server for three days now. Always at 3:12am strange thing. Sunday morning (10am ca) I thought I'd investigate because the reboots affected my backups as well. All the logs and the security mails said was that some processes received signal 11. Strange. Checked the periodics tasks and executed every task manually. Nothing special. Strange. Checked smart status for all disks. Two disks where having CRC errors. Not many but a couple. Oh well. Changing sata cables again 🙄. But those CRC errors cannot be the reason for the reboots at precisely the same time each night. I noticed that all my zpools got scrubbed except my root-pool which hasn't been scrubbed since the error first occured. Well, let's do it by hand: zpool scrub zroot....Freeze. dafuq. Walked over to the server and resetted. Waited 10 minutes. System not up yet. Fuuu...that was when I first guessed that Sunday won't be that sunny after all. Connected monitor. Reset. Black screen?!?! Disconnected all disks aso. Reset. Black screen. Oh c'moooon! CMOS reset. Black screen. Sigh. CMOS reset with a 5 minute battery removal. And new sata cable just in cable. Yes, boots again. Mood lightened... Now the system segfaults when importing zroot. Good damnit. Pulled out the FreeBSD bootstick. zpool import -R /tmp zroot...segfault. reboot. Read-only zroot import. Manually triggering checksum test with the zdb command. "Invalid blckptr type". Deep breath now. Destroyed pool, recreated it. Zfs send/recv from backup. Some more config. Reboot. Boots yeah ... Doesn't find files??? Reboot. Other error? Undefined symbols???? Now I need another coffee. Maybe I did something wrong during recovery? Not very likely but let's do it again...recover-recover. different but same horrible errors. What in the name...? Pulled out a really old disk. Put it in, boots fine. So it must be the disks. Walked around the house and searched for some new disks for a new 2 disk zfs root mirror to replace the obviously broken disks. Found some new ones even. Recovery boot, minimal FreeBSD Install for bootloader aso. Deleted and recreated zroot, zfs send/recv from backup. Set bootfs attribute, reboot........
It works again. Fuckit, now it is 6pm, I still haven't showered. Put both disks through extensive tests and checked every single block. These disks aren't faulty. But for some reason they froze my system in a way so that I had to reset my BIOS and they had really low level data errors....? I Wonder if those disks have a firmware problem? So that was most of my Sunday. Nice, isn't it? But hey: calm sea won't make a good sailor, right?3 -
That's it, the Nintendo Switch got fully exploited. Any firmware!
And only after about a year. nVidia absolutely screwed up with their security.
https://fail0verflow.com/blog/2018/...4 -
Didn't had to fix anything (so far). But took my dev laptop to show all the projects I've been working on to the dad of my girlfriend and he showed me his projects.
He's not mainly a dev, but an electrical ingenieur. He designs his own pcb boards (with 8bit processors on them, as "that's more than enough power to do almost anything!") and then programs that stuff with basic (he writes his own firmware for it).
He also creates desktop application to get data off the devices using Delphi.
Love that guy and have a shittln of respect for him!1 -
What is it with these companies and mandatory updates?
Microsoft with windows 10. Sorry your doing work? Nah, we've decided your going to update now! Sorry, we based our default update time on people not working late at night.
Philips hue. Wanna turn on your lights? Sorry, mandatory firmware update. You'd better install that before being able to see.
YouTube app on ps4. No sorry, can't open this, mandatory 80mb update.
FUCK SAKE PEOPLE.8 -
I am a firmware developer with 4 years experience. C and sometimes assembly is my bread and butter.
Like 2 years ago, I was really interested to make a switch to application development. Got referred by my friend to her startup.
But I was a bit rusty with my data structures, high level languages and interpersonal skills.
The first question was to find the number of occurences for each word in a paragraph. The language choice was Java. But I was allowed to use C++ since it was the closest relative to Java that I knew.
And I started implementing a binary search tree from scratch and started inserting each tokenised word into it, wrote a traversal algorithm.
The interviewer, luckily, was a patient guy. After I completed my whole mess, he asked is it possible to do this in a slightly better way with constant time access without traversal.
I said yes, we can with a hash table but I dont know how to implement one. He replied I dont expect you to implement the hash table but see you use it. I asked him if I am allowed to used the standard library, for which he said ofcourse.
*facepalm*.
Finally I understood his expectation, referred cppreference.com and used an unordered_map.
Later there were some quesion on databases for which I tried my best to answer. And I frankly replied that I am not comfortable with JS frameworks as of now. Got rejected.
So the mistake is I never asked basic questions like what is the time complexity expects, if I was allowed to use standard library, didnt spend some extra time on studying stuffs needed for the domain switch and most importantly I panicked.7 -
Short story for the one interessed in the image: when we change idea we change the whole idea. And it is likely to happen very often. Sometimes twice a day, every day, for a week.
Long stort:
I am hopeless:
I am an IT university student, i know how to program and how to search for a fucking manual, but i am dealing with eletronics and PCB...
I have to make the firmware for a board (atmel things) and it have to talk via spi with some other devices (it is slave of one, and master for all the others(i will use two spi channels)), this should be easy...
I am have no senior to ask to, all i have is google and i found problems in every thing i try to do, every - fucking - single - one!!!! I know that the solution is always of the "you have to plug it in" type, but
NEITHER GOOGLE IS BEING OF HELP!
Let me explain this morning pain:
i can't add libraries in atmel studio, something wrong with the asf wizard, i have only found a tutorial that says what buttons press to solve my problem... I DO NOT HAVE THIS BUTTONS!!!
And the library i wanted to add is the one to make the board talk with the computer on his COM port... (And have some debug message...)
And the wizard gives problem because i created the project using an online atmel tool...
YES, i tried to create a project with asf and then add the files given by the online tool.... THEY DO NOT COMPILE, I SHOULD HAVE TO MESS WITH A 400 LINES LONG MAKEFILE, that is anything but human readable...
I haven't even look for anything spi related this morning
I am even forced to use windows, because every question in the forums, or every noobbish tutorial is based on it...
And then i find the tutorial with the perfect title, holy shit this is the thing i truly need!!!!! It says how to open a file. And then stops. WHAT ABOUT THE THING YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT IN THE TITLE??????
This project is the upgrade of a glue-pump based on an atmega328 (arduino uno processor), that is currently being produced and sold by our "company" .... .... That is composed by me and the boss.
He is a very nice and and smart person, he tries to give me ideas for the solution, if i cannot find out how to do something we can even change a lot of specifics of the project (the image shows our idea-change) and every board has some weeks of mornings like the one described above (i work only in the morning).
I am learning a very lot of things...
But the fact that every thins i try fails is destroying me, what would you do in my place?
Ps. Lot lf love for the ones who made it until the end <3
6 -
1) Built an entire SoC around a MIPS CPU. Fixed bugs in the CPU. Created hardware, busses, firmware, wrote Linux drivers, ported Linux.
2) Still working on a C++ abstraction framework for heterogenous computations for 4 years. About to solve / create a prototype for GPGPU and maybe even HDL code generation. Utilizes dynamic dispatch for scalar, SSE, AVX and other targets. I started this only because I did not like the performance of procedural noise algorithms utilized in a game prototype I started in 2015.
3) Created a game in 5 months to drag myself out of depression. Feeling success while your job sucks is soooo goooodd...13 -
Me: have you tried turning it off and on again?
Customer: oh come on, is that the best you can do!
M:ok how about we
clear all active memory,
Reset the firmware parameters
run system diagnostics and
reinitialise the basic input output system?
C: Wow .. yeah how do we do that?
M: turn it off and on again! -
/* My Three Wishes */
1. Nvidia starts fucking supporting the linux community with open source mainlined drivers that support GBM.
2. All five eyes countries apply some proper privacy protection laws. Other countries would be appreciated.
3. 5G and other core future tech standards are implemented under open firmware/hardware that can be reviewed and reproduced.
Please monkey paw this3 -
5 stages of failing WIFI connectivity on Linux
This morning I woke up my laptop to start my work day. I have 2 very important meetings today, so I better get all prepared.
"Wifi connection failed"
Syslog says:
- wpa_supplicant: wlp9s0: SME: Trying to authenticate with <MAC>
- kernel: wlp9s0: authenticate with <MAC>
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 1/3)
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 2/3)
- kernel: iwlwifi: Not associated and the session protection is over already...
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 3/3)
- kernel: wl9s0: authentication with <MAC> timed out
#### DENIAL #####
No biggie, let's try another AP (I have 3). All 3 failed to connect. Fine, let's try my phone's hotspot! FAILED!!!!!
w00t.... okay, let's restart the router... but failing to connect to a phone hotspot is already a worrying sign.
Wifi connection failed
wtf.. disable and re-enable wifi
Wifi connection failed
#### ANGER #####
the fuuuuuuck. Maybe my router is dead. But my phone connects to it, no fuss. My personal lappy also connects there easily.
wtf... Does that mean I'm about to lose my uptime?? Come one!! It's Linux - there MUST be something I could do! I don't see processes hanging in D state so the radio must be fine - it's gotta be a software issue!
ChatGPT – type all the log entries manually, via phone (that took a while...). Nothing useful there: update firmware, restart NetworkManager, etc.
#### BARGAINING #####
Alright... How about a USB dongle? Plug it in and wifi connects immediately! Yayyy!!! But that's only b/g/n and I'd very much like to have ac. It works well as a limping backup, but not something I'd use for the meetings.
rfkill block/unblock all the radios. No change. USB dongle connects right away but the PCIe adapter keeps throwing notifications at me with failure messages. It's annoying, to say the least.
So I've already tried
- restarting the router(s)
- disabling/reenabling the radios
- multiple APs
- suspending/waking again several times
- praying
#### DEPRESSION #####
The only thing I haven't tried yet is the most cruel one - restarting the laptop. But that's unfair... It's LINUX! How could it disappoint me. I have so many tmux sessions open, so many unsaved leafpad notes, terminal histories with oh so comfy ^r and ! retriggers all ready and waiting to be executed...
#### ACCEPTANCE #####
But I can't miss the meeting. So I slowly start closing off apps, starting with the least important ones, trying to preserve as much history and recent commands as I can. I'm gonna lose my uptime, that's the inevitable obvious truth... Linux has failed me. Or maybe it's a hardware issue... I can't be sure until I restart.
I must reboot.
#### A NEW HOPE #####
Hold on.. What if... What if before restarting I try to reload the Intel wifi kernel module? Just for the giggles. I've got nothing to lose anyway...
rmmod iwlmvm
rmmod iwlwifi
modprobe iwlwifi
modprobe iwlmvm
*WiFi Connected*
YESSSS!!!!!!!!! My uptime is saved!
403 days and counting! YEAH BABY!!!
Linux is the best!8 -
tl;dr:
The Debian 10 live disc and installer say: Heavens me, just look at the time! I’m late for my <segmentation fault
—————
tl:
The Debian 10 live cd and its new “calamares” installer are both complete crap. I’ve never had any issues with installing Debian prior to this, save with getting WiFi to work (as expected). But this version? Ugh. Here are the things I’ve run into:
Unknown root password; easy enough to get around as there is no user password; still annoying after the 10th time.
Also, the login screen doesn’t work off-disc because it won’t accept a blank password, so don’t idle or you’ll get locked out.
The lock screen is overzealous and hard-locks the computer after awhile; not even the magic kernel keys work!
The live disc doesn’t have many standard utilities, or a graphical partition editor. Thankfully I’m comfortable with fdisk.
The graphical installer (calamares) randomly segfaults, even from innocuous things like clicking [change partition] when you don’t have a partition selected. Derp.
It also randomly segfaults while writing partitions to disk — usually on the second partition.
It strangely seems less likely to segfault if the partitions are already there, even if it needs to “reformat” (recreate) them.
It also defaults to using MBR instead of GPT for the partition table, despite the tooltip telling you that MBR is deprecated and limited, and that GPT is recommended for new systems. You cannot change this without doing the partitions manually.
If you do the partitions manually and it can’t figure out where to install things, it just crashes. This is great because you can’t tell it where to install things, and specifying mount points like /boot, /, and /home don’t seem to be enough.
It also tries installing 32bit grub instead of 64bit, causing the grub installer to fail.
If you tell it to install grub on /boot, it complains when that partition isn’t encrypted — fair — but if you tell it to encrypt /boot like it wants you to, it then tries installing grub on the encrypted partition it just created, apparently without decrypting it, so that obviously fails — specific error: cannot read file system.
On the rare chance that everything else goes correctly, the install process can still segfault.
The log does include entries for errors, but doesn’t include an error message. Literally: “ERROR: Installation failed:” and the log ends. Helpful!
If the installer doesn’t segfault and the install process manages to complete, the resulting install might not even boot, even when installed without any drive encryption. Why? My guess is it never bothered to install Grub, or put it in the wrong place, or didn’t mark it as bootable, or who knows what.
Even when using the live disc that includes non-free firmware (including Ath9k) it still cannot detect my wlan card (that uses Ath9k).
I’ve attempted to install thirty plus times now, and only managed to get a working install once — where I neglected to include the Ath9k firmware.
I’m now trying the cli-only installer option instead of the live session; it seems to behave at least. I’m just terrified that the resulting install will be just as unstable as the live session.
All of this to copy the contents of my encrypted disks over so I can use them on a different system. =/
I haven’t decided which I’m going with next, but likely Arch, Void, or Gentoo. I’d go with Qubes if I had more time to experiment.
But in all seriousness, the Debian devs need some serious help. I would be embarrassed if I released this quality of hot garbage.
(This same system ran both Debian 8 and 9 flawlessly for years)15 -
It's time to put my 3D printer together 😍
All the parts I ordered have arrived accept for two timing belts.
Super excited, will post pictures in a couple days when I finish building it and writing the firmware for it.8 -
My college updated a firmware of our device. The device stopped working. He then proceeded to update all the other devices one by one with the same new firmware before coming to a conclusion that it is indeed the firmware that is broken. We needed to send all the devices back to the manufacturer and almost missed our deadline.3
-
Seems my robot project is postponed for some days :) Let's have a look at some new interesting firmware first... . And some minor testing of course.
5 -
Sony updates the firmware on their wireless headphones over Bluetooth. For TWO FUCKING HOURS. If, for some reason, the connection was to break during that period, - perhaps because Bluetooth isn't a reliable connection and was never meant to be - then the device will turn itself off (as it does when it loses connection), and it will try to boot into the half-installed firmware the next time you turn it on.20
-
I feel like a lot of people in Dev Rant are web developers. There's nothing wrong with that but sometimes I feel disconnected from all of you. Where my Firmware Engineers at? 🤓7
-
Went from a web developer (mostly front end, moderate back end experience) to now being a firmware developer for a backup product. *head explodes*3
-
This is my first rant here, so I hope everyone has a good time reading it.
So, the company I am working for got me going on the task to do a rewrite of a firmware that was extended for about 20 years now. Which is fine, since all new machines will be on a new platform anyways. (The old firmware was written for an 8051 initially. That thing has 256 byte of ram. Just imagine the usage of unions and bitfields...)
So, me and a few colleagues go ahead and start from scratch.
In the meantime however, the client has hired one single lonely developer. Keep in mind that nobody there understands code!
And oh boy did he go nuts on the old code, only for having it used on the very last machine of the old platform, ever! Everything after that one will have our firmware!
There are other machines in that series, using the original extended firmware. Nothing is compatible, bootloaders do not match, memory layouts do not match, code is a horrible mess now, the client is writing the specification RIGHT NOW (mind, the machine is already sold to customers), there are no tests, and for the grand finale, the guy canceled his job and went to a different company. Did I mention the bugs it has and the features it lacks?
Guess who's got to maintain that single abomination of a firmware now?1 -
This moment when you are laying in your bed trying to turn off the lights and the uncloseable firmware update window forces you to update your lights before be able to turn them off.
5 -
Jesus fuck Gigabyte motherboards downloading and installing firmware updates over HTTP no fucking S
https://tomshardware.com/news/...10 -
!rant
Just had the best moment of my career today. Myself and two of my colleagues have been working on this system (firmware, hardware, web app etc) together and after months of hard work we finally saw it all in action.
My colleague turned on a device on the web site and it updated the db, turned on a light on his board and updated the devices state on the site (we use web sockets so it's real time).
I probably haven't did it justice here but it was flipping awesome!1 -
Dear boss,
I'm calling in sick today - this fucking thing has the bright idea to update the firmware on its own.
Regards,
@C0D4
21 -
In the course of our development, one day we switched to a different, more elegant bootstrap theme. One of our users called me to appreciate the improvement. He said, the new firmware on the system looks great.
-
One job I picked up was for an IoT Start Up. It was quite interesting work, reporting to the technical director, who was an electronics engineer, who was designing the hardware himself, they had a couple of firmware guys already, and just needed someone to take care of the software.
So they said they needed something in Azure that they could stream their data to and provide analytics for their clients. It had to be Azure, and it had to be Azure Native, and was to be Multi-client, as they had a deal with Microsoft to showcase how well Azure works in the IoT space at an exhibition/conference in 3 months time.
So I worked flat out for 3 months, on a whole variety of technology, from C++ to get the radio packets from their IoT chip, Python to run on the hub to take the data from the C++ and stream it to the cloud, Azure IoT Hubs in every continent to receive the data and store it an a Cosmos DB, and then Power BI analytics wrapped up in an Angular front end that the clients could log into.
Got it finished 2 days before the show, and they were so pleased I got flown business class to Singapore to be on the stand and talk to customers.
The first sign of trouble was when we arrived at the show to find we just had one of those little circular tables with two stools in the middle of the floor, about two feet across and no power.
No problem, I was able to sort that, swapping laptops in and out.
Microsoft were really happy with what we had, and couldn't believe I had thrown it all together in 3 months.
We picked up a potential customer for the system, a major Asian Telecoms company.
Then when we got home, the CEO swooped in. I had never met this guy before. Imagine one of the VC guys from Silicon Valley, or the CEO from the IT Crowd. You get the picture. Could talk the hind leg of a donkey, and real street smart, but no brains. He insisted on "taking it from here" and flew alone to strike the deal with the customer. Came back with an MOU in his pocket and said to me, their guys will be in touch with you.
Then I got a call. Can you send us the source code and tell us how what servers we have to run this on?
Um, its cloud native.
No, we can't use a cloud it has to be on our servers - your CEO told us that was no problem..
He hadn't even taken the trouble to find out what it was we had built, and what he was selling.1 -
I wanna meet the dumbass that decided it was a good idea to teach scratch, basic, java, or even python as a first programming language course in college.
I’m so sick of seeing developers out of with shitty code structure and practices, and absolutely no understanding of what is going on behind the scenes of the IDE when you push run.
In order to be a good engineer you MUST know the basics, the root level, bare bones, bare metal shit.
I fear the future, less and less software engineers are comming out of colleges, the majority today is script kiddies, and folks with some basic java experience.
Who the hell is going to be writing firmware in the future then?
It’s insane the lack of foundational skills these students get in college. If they would get a strong foundation in C, and C++ they can easily attack at problem in any language, but missing the foundation, and relying on IDEs.. you will never be-able to go from a knowing only a high level languages and scripts to Lower level problems.
RIP the future of Software Engineering
Welcome to the hell full of script kiddies27 -
This is a follow up to my previous rant where I complained about Lenovo firmware update failing and bricking a relative’s computer.
We bought a chip programmer, got the bios from some forum and the thing fucking worked. I’m actually surprised it did, I’m not used to doing shit like this. I was pretty fucking scared of burning something.
The programmer also came with a clamp so we could hook it to the chip without desoldering it. Thank god.
I’m terribly depressed so good timing with that I guess.1 -
Worked at a big company as firmware dev a few years ago (less than 2) but switched cause of bad pay. Joined a consulting firm with better pay and bemefits. In 2 weeks I am going back to the old company but as a consultat... they should have just payed me and we could have avoided this :D1
-
Gotta admit. Amazon fire tablets are awesome for cheap tinkering and installing custom firmware in it. Using 7 of them to use at my super efficient smart home (😎) and they don't break at all...
I wish they allow direct international shipping tho...2 -
Angular is still a pile of steaming donkey shit in 2023 and whoever thinks the opposite is either a damn js hipster (you know, those types that put js in everything they do and that run like a fly on a lot of turds form one js framework to the next saying "hey you tried this cool framework, this will solve everything" everytime), or you don't understand anything about software developement.
I am a 14 year developer so don't even try to tell me you don't understand this so you complain.
I build every fucking thing imaginable. from firmware interfaces for high level languaces from C++, to RFID low level reading code, to full blown business level web apps (yes, unluckily even with js, and yes, even with Angular up to Angular15, Vue, React etc etc), barcode scanning and windows ce embedded systems, every flavour of sql and documental db, vectorial db code, tech assistance and help desk on every OS, every kind of .NET/C# flavour (Xamarin, CE, WPF, Net framework, net core, .NET 5-8 etc etc) and many more
Everytime, since I've put my hands on angularJs, up from angular 2, angular 8, and now angular 15 (the only 3 version I've touched) I'm always baffled on how bad and stupid that dumpster fire shit excuse of a framework is.
They added observables everywhere to look cool and it's not necessary.
They care about making it look "hey we use observables, we are coo, up to date and reactive!!11!!1!" and they can't even fix their shit with the change detection mechanism, a notorious shitty patchwork of bugs since earlier angular version.
They literally built a whole ecosystem of shitty hacks around it to make it work and it's 100x times complex than anything else comparable around. except maybe for vanilla js (fucking js).
I don't event want todig in in the shit pool that is their whole ecosystem of tooling (webpack, npm, ng-something, angular.json, package.json), they are just too ridiculous to even be mentioned.
Countless time I dwelled the humongous mazes of those unstable, unrealiable shitty files/tools that give more troubles than those that solve.
I am here again, building the nth business critical web portal in angular 16 (latest sack of purtrid shit they put out) and like Pink Floyd says "What we found, same old fears".
Nothing changed, it's the same unintelligible product of the mind of a total dumbass.
Fuck off js, I will not find peace until Brendan Eich dies of some agonizing illness or by my hands
I don't write many rants but this, I've been keeping it inside my chest for too long.
I fucking hate js and I want to open the head of js creator like the doom marine on berserk19 -
Finally had a weekend to myself to work on some projects. I got my hands on a Sonoff switch. Did a manual flash of some new firmware and got it setup on my crappy old washer to do a little DIY smart home upgrade.
Always nice to get to do a personal project 😊 Just wish I had time to tinker more.
3 -
!(!(!(!(!(!(!(!rant)))))))
My new HTC smartphone hates me.
First it started to shut down all of the sudden yesterday night, when I was solving quadratic equations on my laptop.
I thought that it might be due to low battery. So I have restarted it. After putting itself into a bootloop for 4 start sequences, it was able to fully start to the page where it told me to enter the security pin to decrypt my files. I also had 30 attempts left. Like a ransomware.
I was like "tf I didn't set anything up".
So I decided to use my first attempt as I had 30 attempts left.
I entered the pin (I can swear that it's correct) and it told me that it has to wipe the /data partition.
I did that. I pressed that button. After waiting for 30 minutes I gave up and rebooted into the bootloader.
Bootloader -> Download Mode -> wipe /data (stock rom + stock recovery btw.)
Some error with "e: mount /cache failed[...]e: mount /data failed"
So, I tried using the adb sideload - no success.
Fastbooted into RUU Mode - HTC keeps rebooting itself into the RUU Mode - no success
Tried to flash the firmware and twrp recovery from Download mode - no success
Then I tried to flash all these things from the sd card - no success
Searched for revolutionary (I know this from my old HTC sensation device).
It wasn't big of any help.
Then someone on xda recommended htcDev (htc's <b>developer-friendly</b> lol site)
I followed every step. Everything seemed to be okay.
I got to the last step.
I needed to get my encrypted token by entering "fastboot oem get_identifier_token" to be able to submit it to HTC, and after they would send me an e-Mail with an .bin file that would let me unlock the bootloader to be able to flash my way through all this headache giving fucking piece of dog shit!
But since I can't back to the phone settings to select the bootloader activation box that would let me get my token... but nah.
FML
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Sent by using the devRant web app (:\)8 -
Laying cozy on sofa, watching yt from phone. Decide there's a need for a bigger screen but too cozy to adjust position to watch from TV. Grab trusty old chromebook running Debian from arm's reach instead. Haven't used that thing in a while. Try to connect bt headphones. Notice that the Bluetooth module is not detected according to the UI. Weird, never noticed that. Wonder what that's about. Apparently someone had fixed it in kernel already long ago, I'm on a much newer kernel. Too lazy to pick up wired headphones from across the room. Maybe I'll update the firmware, I haven't done that in a while. Oh, the script doesn't run because it requires newer glibc. Wait, I'm still on Debian 11, maybe it would be worth it to upgrade to 12. Wow, upgrading Debian is a surprisingly manual process. Wonder what I'll be doing tonight. Wait, what was I doing again?14
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So, apparently upgrading the firmware of certain routers can make 60 Mbps connections drop down to 5. GG D-Link! Fuck you! I wish I could still use my Asus babe with this new fiber line. :(3
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So flashing microcontrollers gets kinda annoying when you have to simultaneously fight Windows defender's urge to flag the flashing software as Trojan every 30 seconds like a 10 year old kid with ADHD that just discovered coffee.
It doesn't get easier when suddenly only one of three USB ports recognises thumb drives with the current Windows version, and only after two reboots.
Maybe I should just run it in a VM like the three remaining QA testers at Microsoft do, but on the other hand I don't really like the idea of flashing firmware from a VM. Just feels even dirtier.19 -
Today is haut garbage, too much stupid, too much management. Feeling nihilistic. Time to do something crazy
*updates linux-firmware6 -
it was my first job as an embedded engineer i was hired to write firmware for arm microcontroller that has ble radio. But the microcontroller we used didn't have FLASH it had a SRAM and an otp ( one time programmable) memory. In ble you can make a proximity beacon and When a phone passes by this beacon it will get a notification '<device_name> nearby'
. I thought it is funny if i keep device name 'MILF' (original name of device is FLIP ) so when somebody's phone is in proximity it will have a notification 'MILF nearby'. joke didn't work as nobody has their bluetooth switched on by default ,but i forgot to change it before programming otp memory.
i just buried that device and told everyone it is not working properly1 -
THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS.
I recently got a secondhand Sony WH-1000XM3 headphones. they were used for less than a year, were in perfect shape and they still had warranty.
The app that is supposed to go alongside the headphones told me that I have a firmware update for my headphones. So naturally, I pressed install.
AGAIN, THIS IS A FIRMWARE UPDATE ISSUED BY SONY!!
It bricked the headphones. I can't turn them on.
The issue was probably Bluetooth file sharing. BTFS is SO unreliable and it's known to be unreliable and Sony updates their top tier headphones with this communication method.
Thankfully, I still have warranty. I had to fight with the official importers of Sony in Israel (called "Ishfar", you read it like you see it) to go through the process of repairing / giving me a replacement.
O U T R A G E O U S12 -
wk66 {
Don’t pay as much for things that aren’t as important.
}
tl;dr {Mobo won’t POST.};
Backstory:
Me and @Rekonnect built a website a few years ago. So I built a “server” and ran server 2008 on it. Our server was very budget oriented and featured the following:
AMD Athlon X4 860K
Biostar Hi-Fi A70U3P
8GB G.Skill Ripjaws series
Small HDD
R5 220 Core Edition
EVGA 430W
ODD
Over the years, I’ve made many changes. Now it’s a GTX 960 with 3 Small SSDs and one large HDD. No internal optical. PSU is now at 600W from EVGA. Also a really old Sound Blaster sound card just for the fun of it. The case is now a Corsair SPEC-01. Put a T92 CPU cooler and 3 Riing RGB case fans and you’re ready to go. I was getting ready to put a third monitor but haven’t gotten to it.
If you’ve been following my rants recently, you would’ve seen that I was interested in developing iOS apps. Thanks to the team at http://AMD-OSX.com and four days of work, I’ve installed macOS on one of the SSDs. I think.
The computer won’t POST.
I’ve tried everything and nothing seems to work. Well, there goes my hopes and dreams. Let’s hope I can borrow money from my parents to at least replace my motherboard. :(
Ideas/Help?
FYI: I at one point did get 4 beeps in post, the system decided to upgrade firmware, and the BIOS people are American Megatrends.
Anything will be appreciated.
9 -
Multiple all-nighters (all day every day):
1) Working, studying and developing an Android game as pet project. Last few weeks before release (yup, I've set a deadline for a pet project) my day consisted of uni, work, more work and 4-5h sleep.
2) Having worked on my thesis (Development of a CPU/SoC + Firmware + Linux kernel) and actual paid work. In parallel. Because, you know, I need to eat and pay rent and shit while I'm writing the thesis. And debts at that moment were not an option (still made some). All-day all-night all-week. After submitting the thesis I went to the doc and enjoyed 2 weeks of doing nothing.
3) Sometimes on my main open-source project after regular work hours. If I have the motivation and ideas that I want to check out or prove it gets late/early too fast. -
1. It's gonna be more and more specialized - to the point where we'll equal or even outdo the medical profession. Even today, you can put 100 techs/devs into a room and not find two doing the same job - that number will rise with the advent of even more new fields, languages and frameworks.
2. As most end users enjoy ignoring all security instructions, software and hardware will be locked down. This will be the disadvantage of developers, makers and hackers equally. The importance of social engineering means the platform development will focus on protecting the users from themselves, locking out legitimate tinkerers in the process.
3. With the EU getting into the backdoor game with eTLS (only 20 years after everyone else realized it's shit), informational security will reach an all-time low as criminals exploit the vulnerabilities that the standard will certainly have.
4. While good old-fashioned police work still applies to the internet, people will accept more and more mass surveillance as the voices of reason will be silenced. Devs will probably hear more and more about implementing these or joining the resistance.
5. We'll see major leaks, both as a consequence of mass-surveillance (done incompetently and thus, insecurely) and as activist retaliation.
6. As the political correctness morons continue invading our communities and projects, productivity will drop. A small group of more assertive devs will form - not pretty or presentable, but they - we - get shit done for the rest.
7. With IT becoming more and more public, pseudo-knowledge, FUD and sales bullshit will take over and, much like we're already seeing it in the financial sector, drown out any attempt of useful education. There will be a new silver-bullet, it will be useless. Like the rest. Stick to brass (as in IDS/IPS, Firewall, AV, Education), less expensive and more effective.
8. With the internet becoming a part of the real life without most people realizing it and/or acting accordingly, security issues will have more financial damages and potentially lethal consequences. We've already seen insulin pumps being hacked remotely and pacemakers' firmware being replaced without proper authentication. This will reach other areas.
9. After marijuana is legalized, dev productivity will either plummet or skyrocket. Or be entirely unaffected. Who cares, I'll roll the next one.
10. There will be new JS frameworks. The world will turn, it will rain.1 -
I guess Motorola decided to join the Slow Down Your Device So You'll Buy The Next Model club. I had a Moto G5s Plus I bought not too long ago. I mainly use it for debugging now.
I mean, can't prove anything, all I can say for certain is their last update, literally, the final one they plan on releasing for that model, made the device so slow it was useless.
So I unlocked it and put LineageOS on it. Not easy, since there's no official build for it. Once I got it working, all the issues with the stock firmware vanished. It runs faster than it ever has.
Now I get greeted with a message when it boots telling me that the device was unlocked and can't be trusted, because, you know, we can all trust cell phone manufacturers to not put a bunch of spyware on our phones.4 -
Recently I have updated my lubuntu to 18.04.
I don't use it regularly but I like to have it on the side of my window 10.
Anyway today I boot and decide to use it and get this error.
[0.000000] [Firmware Bug]: TSC_DEADLINE disabled du to errata; please update microcode to version 0x22 (or later)
and two MMIO read fault.
At first it sounds really dramatic and I was thinking, "Nice ... I never get a problem with Windows Update and when its Linux it doesn't work ..."
But lubuntu boots normally after so it's not a blocking problem.
So I do what most of us do in case like this, go to Google and search to know what the hell is going on.
And the answer is simple, my CPU microcode isn't up to date to prevent Spectre, one apt get install and a reboot later my 4700HQ is patched in 0x24 version and protected for Spectre where my windows didn't patch anything and worst disable the KB that I have installed manually before the last big update.
So thanks Linux, you scared me with your error but it was a good job to throw it :)1 -
You want to change the wifi network to which is your embedded device connected?
It's easy:
- The native process is broken
- ESP is in the correct state, but refuse to communicate with anything
- Restore to default doesn't work
- Flashing default firmware doesn't help
- download the whole NodeJS/NPM
- compile two perl binaries
- bump into 2 year old bug, that your Intel wifi won't connect to the ESP SoftAP
- reinstall the Intel driver, just to find out it's still not fixed
- connect the external Atheros wifi adapter
- connect that shit back to the cloud
And just after little under 4 days of fiddling with GPIO pins it finally works and communicates.2 -
FUCK YEAH! FUCKING HELL FUCK YEAH! IT FUCKING WORKED! THE FUCKING CODE FINALLY COMPILED PROPERLY!
What happened:
I was trying to use the Adafruit Feather HUZZA esp8266 with the AdafruitHTTPClient Library... and it didnt work... then I downgraded THE FUCKING FIRMWARE FROM 2.5.0 TO 2.4.2 AND THE BLOODY THING COMPILED!3 -
Dear devs: Is 8:06am here and I didn't sleep cause I was updating some firmwares.
I think I'm blind.
Good night! I mean, good morning! -
I'm in sad nostalgia....
32MB BIOS updates take a loooong time.
Reset...
Hey. i'm updatinf the LED firmware.
Reset again.
Hey. I needed to reset all settings.
BIOS.
Fan detection for min rate.
Dozen settings changed.
Laggy mouse because EFI and graphics is slooooow...
I miss the old days of just keyboard based BIOS. And where updating didn't take 15 mins....2 -
Reanimated an old e-ink tablet today.
First, I didn't even know it needed to be reanimated. I just copied my books there, but it didn't find them. When I connected it again, they were gone.
Factory reset. Format storage. The memory seems empty, but after rebooting I see that everything is still intact.
Ok, imma hit forums then. They tell me I need to replace the internal memory. But isn't that something you need soldering for? Wrong! The internal memory IS JUST A MICRO SD CARD on the motherboard. The card is some cheap no name one, and people tell the similar story of it burning out after like four years of use.
Damn! The vendor has the AUDACITY to charge for signing their firmware to be flashed to a new micro sd card.
But I won't go down this easily. I hit forums again, and apparently there is a tool to sign the firmware yourself, but you need to find the card's serial number. To do that, you have to flash a bootleg tool, boot from that card, and it will show you the data you need. Then, you have to insert them into some shady .ini file (why is everything touching bootleg firmware runs only on windows?).
So I do that. The problem is, I need an image for my book. I find some shady one online, sign & flash it — touchscreen doesn't work. But I have the official firmware. I put two and two together and figure out that if the reader is able to display the ui, it probably has the firmware update tool working. So, immediately after flashing, I launch the firmware update utility that picks up my firmware from the second sd card (yes, they have an additional external slot).
Bingo. It works.
So, here are the steps:
1. Find a shady sd serial number detection tool
2. Flash it on a memory card with a shady vendor-specific flashing tool
3. Insert the new (now shady) card
4. Boot, write down the serial number
5. Find a shady boot image online
6. Edit a shady .ini file of a shady self-signing tool to sign the shady boot image
7. Flash the altered shady boot image with the shady flashing tool on your memory card
8. Copy a shady firmware update on a new card
9. Insert both cards
10. Pray4 -
I'm working on a firmware for 3d printers. I had to send a lot of data to another microcontroller and I was making a very sophisticated protocol. When finished I was so proud of my work but in that moment I remember that there is a thing called JSON but I didn't care. Now I have to send the same data to a webserver and need to move from my own protocol to JSON.
Fuck me. -
Let me begin by giving props to the KDE team for being proactive, and working to improve the ecosystem in which they exist.
https://fossbytes.com/kde-slimbook-...
With that said, I'm sitting here wondering why bigger organizations - companies with significantly more clout - can't manage to do the same thing. Canonical is so busy, fapping at the notion of competing in the mobile space (they won't though) that they've lost sight of their core audience - computer users. While they insist on trying to piss in Google's Cheerios, smaller teams are 1) pushing out better firmware and software, and 2) are now creating (seemingly) good hardware as well.
As the public face of Linux (unfortunately), Canonical and the Ubuntu team have an obligation to lead from the front. In neglecting to do so, they do a disservice to the entire Linux community. KDE, Manjaro, Arch, Mate, Debian, etc are all doing more with less, and they're offering better end products than Canonical has in the last decade.
/rant
16 -
Bought a new toy drone to play with at home, Ryze Yello. It boasts an Open SDK on the box and claims to be programmable. Awesome, I think, I end up buying and going home to get to work.
All is great using the app, I can fly the drone and the video feed is mostly usable. Now let's get in to the SDK and see what we have.
Docs say I've got a few basic commands, 8 directional flips, 6 directions of movement, rotate, takeoff, and land. Plus a config option to set the speed. After a bit of tinkering I discovered that only 3 commands actually work: takeoff, flip, land. The rest error out with no (currently) useful message.
A bit more searching online tells me that they borked the commands with a recent firmware update and are working on it as of 3 months ago.
I wish I knew more about firmware or deconstructing the wifi packets from the app so I could try to do something useful.
So many stupid things I wanted to do with an automated drone and I'm stuck waiting for them to fix their firmware to put functionality back into the device.
7 -
Years ago was the first time I put custom firmware on our wndr3700 router, it hasn't crashed since.
I bought a wndr4700, faster, 5ghz, possibility for a hard drive.
It's been 3 years and still no custom firmware. -
pure genius! Ubuntu's firmware-xx-installer installation package for legacy network adapters doesn't install diddly. it *downloads* the firmware for you.
because yeah, people installing network adapter firmware obviously are doing it because they have a working network connection and what they really need help with is downloading the file 9_9
another 30min down the hole finding the actual firmware and the cutter tool for it1 -
TLDR; macOS wouldn’t update to the version I needed because I have a 3rd party SSD. All I needed was a firmware update only found deep within a google search and a secondary SO answer.
I have a video edit project this weekend. No big deal.
Except that the Final Cut Pro project was saved in the latest version of FCPX, for which I need latest MacOS version
As a music producer on the side, I had heard the new file system of MacOS High Sierra would possibly break audio plugins. I didn’t bother updating until now. Looked further into plugin problem, it would be simply a broken hard link which I can easily fix. No big deal.
Except that I have upgraded my MBP SSD from 256gb to this 3rd party 480gb SSD. macOS does not recognize this SSD as compatible with update. No big deal. Simple google search for a terminal command would do the trick.
Except that I found and tried several solutions, including wasting an entire hour updating the original ssd and booting from that to try to update it.
Nothing worked, but deep down in the google search, found in a secondary answer on SO, there was a link for a beta release of a firmware update for the SSD that took two minutes to install, and I was finally able to update.
That firmware update needs to be more prominent everywhere. Wasted well over 3-4 hours updating crap, swapping out SSDs, and googling when all I needed was a fucking firmware update.9 -
My 2009 ThinkStation has been running loud for a couple of years now, reaching temps in the 70s-80s at max load (40s idle) with stock settings, fans spinning like jet engines to try to cool it. Only recently (today) did I consider that maybe there's dust stuck somewhere, so I took the fan off my cooler and began the hunt there.
IT WAS FUCKING COVERED. Half of the fin intake area behind the fan was completely clogged up with dust. I was starving the poor thing and I never figured out why until now.
I deep-cleaned the entire system, and now it's running a gentoo install with all cores maxed running compiler tasks... Fans are much quieter, barely above idle noise, the main difference is just pitch of the noise because of the higher RPMs.
I dont have the firmware installed to measure temps, but I will update once I get that data.
Specs, in case anybody is curious:
> Xeon W3520 4c/8t 2.67Ghz
> 8GB DDR3 1066MHz
> RX 460 2GB (my student-budget upgrade)
> Dual 500/750GB HDD3 -
Wasted a day as Shitlock Holmes with the build chain.
It would not reproduce the firmware hexfile that had been checked in. Reverse engineering that along with the mapfile to find out the cause, it was a const string that was guarded by an ifdef from another file that was auto-generated as prebuild step via a script that fetched some version control info.
Or, it would have been if the installation instructions had been correct and someone had described that no spaces in the absolute path name of the project are allowed. Otherwise, that shit just failed silently.
I then had to reverse engineer the intended workflow from the commit history in the version control to figure out that the last dev obviously hadn't quite understood the project specific workflow and how the version control interacts with these build scripts.
At least, I finally did get a matching hexfile.1 -
The Director of my employer's Firmware Engineering department, an older guy, sent out a department-wide email introducing a new hire. IN COMIC SANS.
Even though I am a new employee myself, I cannot let a disgrace like this pass unaddressed. So I politely and as respectfully as possible urged him not to use Comic Sans in a professional setting, and even offered rationale & alternatives.
He essentially responded, "No offense, but I'm gonna use whichever font I choose," but with that one simple sentence riddled with grammatical and spelling errors.
Shortly afterwards, he then sent out a mass email introducing me as a new hire. With my provided bio in a business-appropriate font, sandwiched between two hideous blocks of Comic Sans.
Honestly, how the fuck do people like this make it to a managerial position? >_>4 -
This was initially a reply to a rant about politics ruining the industry. Most of it is subjective, but this is how I see the situation.
It's not gonna ruin the industry. It's gonna corrupt it completely and fatally, and it will continue developing as a toxic sticky goo of selfishness and a mandatory lack of security until it chokes itself.
Because if something can get corrupted, it will get corrupted. The only way for us as a species to make IT into a worthy industry is to screw it up countless times over the course of a hundred years until it's as stable and reliable as it can possibly be and there are as many paradigms and individually reasonable standards as there can possibly be.
Look around, see the ridiculus amount of stupid javascript frameworks, most of which is just shitcode upon vulnerabilities upon untested dependencies. Does this look to you like an uncorrupted industry?
The entire tech is rotting from the hundreds of thousands of lines of proprietary firmware and drivers through the overgrown startup scene to fucking Node.js, and how technologies created just a few decades ago are unacceptable from a security standpoint. Check your drivers and firmware if you can, I bet you can't even see the build dates of most firmware you run. You can't even know if it was built after any vulnerability regarding that specific microcontroller or whatever.
Would something like this work in chemical engineering? Hell no! This is how fucking garage meth labs work, not factories or research labs. You don't fucking sell people things without mandatory independent testing. That's how a proper industry works. Not today's IT.
Of course it's gonna go down in flames. Greed had corrupted the industry, and there's nothing to be done about it now but working as much as we can, because the faster we move the sooner we'll get stuck and the sooner we can start over on a more reasonable foundation.
Or rely on layers of abstraction and expect our code to be compilable on anything the future holds for us.2 -
In these dark times, it's inspiring to see that a country as insignificant as Australia can demonstrate to us how things can always get worse.
By passing a law mandating that encryption must be broken, in secret (like the US's National Security Letters), at the demand of the Government, the two biggest parties have colluded to destroy Australia's tech sector.
This is the same government that has been whining endlessly about using Huawei LTE equipment in Australian infrastructure "because it might be secretly compromised". Now the same is true of Australian equipment, by law.
My favourite part of all this is how there will be firmware updates for devices sold in Australia, in order to comply with the new law. How well do you think those backdoors will be secured? How thoroughly do you expect them to be tested, given Australia's population of only 25 million?
How can any Australian company expect customers to trust them now?3 -
The project that we spent one freaking year on, researching, developing our own hardware and software just got cancelled and I ain't getting paid shit...
https://youtu.be/Dv3eduzcZxc
This is a fucking nightmare! All this motherfucking work for nothing! I think I am going to cry... I mean we still have all the hardware and stuff but we can't do anything with it because is was build for one fucking task and noone would probably buy it because how specific the task that it's made for is. I mean I technically only own the software... anyone interested in buying an Android app that connects to a sensor (that counts stuff) via BLE, processes data from the sensor and uploads it to a database? It can also upload new firmware to the sensor, set basically any parameter and get all kinds of telemetry from it... can't really say what does this sensor count or anything about the hardware (I am not sure if I am allowed to brcause I don't own it - I only got to work on the firmware and the app)3 -
My dad asked a facebook group for help decoding a calibration script I wrote for the new 3D printer, instead of just asking me, and every single person yelled at him that "oh that's so dangerous if you didn't write it yourself don't run it, if you can't manually write gcode sell your printer" etc.
why are these groups always full of degenerate assholes? (and why do they legitimately think calibrating a printer has to be done by manually writing bits to the EEPROM with a needle, or it's not worth having a printer?)4 -
UGHHH XIAOMI CAN YOUR SHITTY FIRMWARE STOP NAGGING ME WITH "U NEED TO CLEAN UR PHONES STORAGE" NOTIFICATION2
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For what fucking reason the ability to set the date and time programatically has been blocked on Android?!
Why you can create fucking invisible apps that work in the background, mine cryptos, steal your data but they decided that something like that is considered dangerous?
Can anyone give me a logical explanation?
P.S.
There are cases (big pharma companies) where the users don't have access to internet nor a ntp server is available on the local network, so the ability for an app to get the time of a sql server and set it in runtime is crucial, expecially when the user, for security reasons, can't have access to the device settings and change it by himself.
"System apps" can do it, but you would have to change the firmware of a device to sideload an external "System app" and in that case it would lose the warranty.
So, yeah, fucking Google assholes, there are cases where your dumb decisions make the others struggle every other day.
Give more power to third party developers, dumb motherfuckers.
It's not that difficult to ask the user, once, to give the SET_TIME permission.
It was possible in the past...
P.S.2
Windows Mobile 6.5 was a masterpiece for business.
It still could be, just mount better CPUs on PDAs and extend the support. But no, "Android is the future". What a fucking bad future.
11 -
Actually have a dev thing to say now.
I wrote a script to compile my kernel with the latest mainline version using my current config options. It works...so far. I'll check back with it in a couple months and hope it still works good. It also checks daily if my kernel is out of date (yes I'm one of those, fight me)
Also managed to get my laptop to boot from power on to LightDM in 15 seconds, and 9 of those seconds are firmware. It DOES have this thing on occasion where it freezes during the boot process while initializing everything tho?? I've been meaning to try and figure it out for a minute but I put it off so much cause I don't reboot that often anyways.
As for a personal update, I hung out with some good friends today and my best friend heard my singing voice for the first time, she said I have a good voice (she does a lot of musicals and stuff and just sings all the time, so I trust her opinion). I also gave that friend a gaming laptop as a late birthday gift/early graduation gift today because she doesn't have anything to game on and I didn't really use the laptop much anyways. Plus she's like my favorite person ever and she really deserves it. Unrelated note, I have had an off and on crush on this girl for 2 years. She's always been there for me and she's just an amazing person.9 -
Fried two devices today by simply connecting them to a power source.
Changed nothing in the circuitry, no shorts due to solder residues (a simple modification was made), no changes in the input parameters. Check.
The afromentioned devices should have only minor HW changes compared to a previous version I'm working with and as far as I can see absolutely nothing which should cause the damn microcontroller to release smoke like a steam train. (All right, a very miniature steam train.)
So the only significant difference might be the firmware which I didn't check yet but will tomorrow. Not my code and the corresponding IDE just basically sucks. Yay.
On the other hand, the Software part finally feels like I'm getting somewhere. It seems just ... to work. Very suspicious.
Feeling ambivalently frustrated and relieved at the same time. Sigh.7 -
Ever wonder why there are so few HomeKit devices on the market? It's not any absurd Apple licensing this time... it is that the Accessory Development Kit / Software Development Kit (adk/sdk) is such a land of broken toys, that's why.
The base install per the guide on the Raspberry PI as a prototyping system system is a complete cluster fuck. The install itself breaks all over the place. Clearly these people are not embedded firmware engineers.
They could have just created a ready-to-go Raspberry PI disk image that you master over to a microSD card but noooo...
(They should be put on an island and work on embedded missile firmware. Those that are still breathing in 6 months might be real firmware engineers and not script kiddies.)
If you ever manage to get their garbage to actually work with the bags of shitty tools approach to a "dev stack" ... you should seriously be awarded a Nobel prize for patience and dedication.
The Made for 'i' (whatever the fuck 'i' stands for in MFi) is really "Made For Idiots" or "Mother Fucking Interface".
<https://mfi.apple.com/en/...>
Bunch of fucking bureaucrats more worried about certification and use of logos than product development.2 -
Ffs, I just spent the whole weekend setting up our new storage server. Moved it into the rack. Entered the UEFI to enable idrac. And BAM! The uefi decided to load it’s own raid config over the raid controller.
Raid controller bios doesn’t let me load it’s own config after that. So I have to reset the controller and setup raid, os and the whole shot again.
To make it even better. Debian doesn’t load the firmware for the broadcom chip, since it’s a non-free driver. Making me have to do lots of manual config after the install just to get it on the internet.
I wish I could’ve just bought a new server instead of working with this shit.
I would’ve used FreeBSD with ZFS, but our server only has 8GB ram, and I need about 120GB extra to work smoothly with all the storage.
It’s just a pita working with this. One step forward, ten steps back. -
Hey Guys
So... I Have a question / rant / frustrated commenting to do...
WHY THA FUCK DO FIRMWARE TAKE SO LONG TO UPDATE!!!
been configuring my webserver and 2 p2p cameras to access from the outside, and for each click or change can take 1 to 5 minutes to implement...
And then, like 6 or 7 hours latter I notice that everytime the port wasn't associated, a small label in like size8 text shows that port is already in use...
And... Da FUCK??
I'm associating the ports myself... how can port 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, ... be In use?
I have my server in 80, WebDav e another non relevant port, and trying to find open ports for the p2p cams...
Fuck I'll just delete all that services that no one uses and are pre configured, like, emule? napster? FifaPC? WTF? I never played Fifa, don't like socker. KaZaA SERVER? WTF why does this shit comes pre-configured?
Btw I'm writing this while I wait for the router to finish every time :p7 -
Relative: What degree did you finish?
Me: Computer Engineering
Relative: So what do you do?
Me: I currently venture into software dev, networks, and firmware.
Relative: ..... Ah (Doesn't know what the heck I'm talking about) -
when you're struggling to build small sized firmware on your 512Kb IoT Device resulting in bootloop every time... Then you see in the manual, that you have the 4Mb model and you frashed the rom to the wrong memory address for 2 weeks resulting in a bootloop... FML
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Updated my TP-Link router's firmware today. Because.. new is better than old? Anyway, I tried to enter the settings page. Page not found. Chrome seems to find the page too unsecure to enable me to access it. Before the upgrade I've never had an issue opening that page with Chrome.
Opened it through IE and, a miracle, the page is right there for me to use.
Google had very little to say on the matter. Looks like I'll be using IE once in a while after all.
Any ideas on why that's happening?5 -
Have a Dell desktop that was running Windows 11. Someone tried to revert to Windows 10. Now it will not even post. Anybody experience something this drastic?
I suspect it tried to do some kind of misguided firmware update in the process.14 -
Just helped in the little 'Büdchen' (kiosk comes close, but in reality it is more of an little super market) around the corner to Update the firmware of a money bill verifier and counter... As there are new 50 Euro bills.
God. Serial to USB. After running installer and starting firmware update, the owner was a bit frightened as it took so long....
XD
Setup. 30 secs. Firmware. 6 Minutes. XD -
The near future is in IOT and device programming...
In ten years most of us will have some kind of central control and more and more stuff connected to IOT, security will be even a bigger problem with all the Firmware bugs and 0-day exploits, and In 10 years IOT programmers will be like today's plumbers... You need one to make a custom build and you must pay an excessive hour salary.
My country is already getting Ready, I'm starting next month a 1-year course on automation and electronics programming paid by the government.
On the other hand, most users will use fewer computers and more tablets and phones, meaning jobs in the backend and device apps programming and less in general computer programs for the general public.
Programmers jobs will increase as general jobs decrease, as many jobs will be replaced by machines, but such machines still need to be programmed, meaning trading 10 low-level jobs for 1 or 2 programming jobs.
Unlike most job areas, self-tough and Bootcamp programmers will have a chance for a job, as experience and knowledge will be more important than a "canudo" (Portuguese expression for the paper you get at the end of a university course). And we will see an increase of Programmer jobs class, with lower paid jobs for less experienced and more well-paid jobs for engineers.
In 10 years the market will be flooded with programmers and computer engineers, as many countries are investing in computer classes in the first years of the kids, So most kids will know at least one programming language at the end of their school and more about computers than most people these days. -
The secondary access point stopped working, turns out the date/time is wrong. You guessed it, the ntp server is hard-coded in the firmware (last version), no option to change it, it a linksys but not supported by openwrt.
Grabbed a second one, flashed with openwrt, same shit, and can't access by ssh because it's an old dropbear build.
Hate trashing things, but sometimes too much is too much 🍺2 -
tfw you gotta get used to MS buying everything.
cancerSoft beta rev 0.0.0730832-48-0424249582017-42
Now coming as a fidget spinner firmware download near you. -
My new ISP's FTTH router is the most advanced I've ever had at home, but it doesn't allow changing the channels for different SSIDs.
I call them and they tell me the current firmware doesn't have the option because the connection is in beta test.
Great, now I can't have a guest SSID without channel overcrowding. -
Anything made by asus is a fucking garbage.
My first asus laptop was eee pc 701. It had only 2 gigabytes “ssd” which was just a flash drive using usb 2.0 inside. Doing this instead of using a proper sata ssd is like using bunch of rats glued to a frisbee instead of roomba vacuum. It displayed “intel 800mhz processor” in settings but this was only the processor’s name string, in fact it was only 640mhz single core. I still managed to install totally stripped version of windows xp to it and play some old games but overall it was horrible. It also heated up as hell.
My second asus laptop was infamous z99h. It had windows vista and was slow as hell right out of the box. Also BOTH hinges broke in just like six months. It was horrible as well. The screen itself broke in a year.
I also used asus rt-series router and it required a restart every day just to deliver some wifi. Don’t you dare tell me to “uPdATe fIrMwArE”, I pay money for the product and I expect it to work right outside the box.
Asus smartphones was also garbage.
So why have asus laptop if you can have a real laptop like MacBook or thinkpad? Why have asus phone if you can have a real smartphone like iPhone or pixel? Why have asus router if you can have ubiquiti?
Asus drivers suck, and all of asus software is just bloatware.10 -
My first gig was with an MSP doing tech support and eventually some proper infrastructure design and mangement.
Regularly myself and colleagues would find reasons why we should be doing things 'this way' and how we're doing wrong by our customers by not following best practices. (Things like firmware upgrades on routers, switches, servers)
We regularly got shutdown, just told 'no, it's not to be touched if it isn't breaking'. This obviously got us pretty worked up and kinda devided us.
The thing is, It wasn't until my next gig that I sorta realised they were kinda right to shut us down. There was clearly a risk to reward equation we weren't thinking about as employees with no financial stake in the company.
In an enterprise setting, sure doing those kinds of upgrades is necessary, and normally you have a team full of experts and tools to help you do those tasks whilst also mitigating as much risk as possible.
So at the time it felt like a bad experience, but looking back now I realise that from a business perspective it wasn't practical for us to constantly risk breaking things just because 'i read somewhere that we should do this'.
I think to be successful as a developer, IT tech, systems engineer, it's really important to get to know the other departments of the business and how the work you do affects them.1 -
Soooo i recently wanted to install FreeBSD on one of my servers. I configured the raidcard and booted the installer. Installation goes normaly. Sever restarts and begins looping. After tearing apart every firmware on this machine and going to bed, a thought was crossing my mind: What if the UEFI doesnt boot the disk? What if the RAID card does? What if the RAID card cannot boot GPT tables?
Next thing iin the morning, i reinstall freebsd with MBR. And it works (after my NICs stopped working, so i had tp reinstall another time). I STILL GOT IT! That wasnt the problem we all fear to cannot solve anymore ^^5 -
A few months ago I started to develop firmware for ARM architecture. Now I only see ARM. Every project, every machine, every thing is better with an ARM.
#LetsKillThe8Bits5 -
I really wanna get a keg of rum and start sailing across the globe...
Just to spank some devs / managers arses.
The last years were... very demanding regarding security and upgrades.
It hasn't gotten better.
Microsoft leaked it's security key thx to internal debugging and the tool to secure the debugging process so secure data gets filtered was buggy...
I'd guess I already have carpal tunnel after Redmond.
But the really really sad story is: This has become the gold standard.
https://lwn.net/Articles/943969/
Chrome selling the privacy mode for Ads, long topic ongoing for years... yeah they did it.
Apple... oh boy. I could write a Silmarillion about it and would still need an additional trilogy.
Amazon realizing that a Microservice architecture needs planning, cause yeah... just potting services in a data center doesn't end well.
It goes on and on and on....
Don't even get me started on the plethora of firmware / microcode updates cause there was either yet another CPU bug or another device pooped their pants cause the firmware is a mess and needed some dubious update without any background at all...
Serious question: Am I becoming a pepperidge farm uncle threatening to shoot everyone cause I'm getting old and cranky ....
Or is really everything in IT going down the drain the last few years?
It feels like every week is just another "we fucked it up" event.3 -
Compiled Gentoo after ~5 days.
It's not ever yet though.
My kernel is now 7.3M, and it contains almost everything I need. Even my network drivers (intel) firmware is built-in.
It boots straight off UEFI (default BOOT/bootx64.efi), and
Managed to install X, Waylan (sway!)
Got dvorak programmer's keyboard defaulted.
df -h:
root 4.7G/14G (exact) used
boot 21M/127M (exact) used
var 701M/~5.5G used
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHH
Was doing the installation from a Live CD (UEFI) during school hours, with my toughpad not working and no mouse with me. I feel bad for TAB.
I am, at this moment, still compiling...1 -
Fucking windows updates...
Went to do a job on a tank in 18 deg F Weather with snow on the ground. One guy brought an ice fishing tent (very nice). This is next to petroleum tank. We got guys on top of tank waiting for me to get data using a Windows 10 lappy.
Lappy comes up and tries to get into bios to do a firmware update. WTF! I reboot and it does it again! Go to look for power adapter as it wont do update without power. Not in bag. It has to have power to do update.
So I drive back to shop (with guys waiting on top of tank) which is 5 miles away. I am pissed. Its snowing and I have to drive slow. I find that adapter. I get back to the tank and plug it in. The AC source (battery based) starts alarming as the lappy takes too much power. Fuck! But somehow it boots Windows without doing firmware update. Fuck you Windows!
I get my job done, but don't fucking trust windows at all. Had this been a field tech he would be pissing his pants. Useless shitty software you have zero control over. Now considering changing their OS to Linux for field work. I am rewriting their software anyway with something can run Windows or Linux.4 -
Someone else updated a firmware and noticed that its worse than the older? The worst ia when you try to fix it and it broke another thing.
Too many bugs in a release (yes, a "verified" release)3 -
!rant
My ecig mod (or box how some call it) started to missbehave, it started at random not liking more and more batteries and generally it was good time for replacment. Fast forward, im at shop, and I have few options, i dont want to cheap out becouse I know how it ends, and I want reaible box for longer and I can pay a little more for that.
So there was few quite competetive options, but most of them had build quality i wasnt fan of, some even plastic outter shell, magnets which tend to break off, but their feature list was quite competetive, and there most expensive of all (400 pln +-90ish $) that seller presented me had (seemingly) no features. No menu even. But build quality is solid buttons feel are just better, and it looks like it could survive longer than half a year. Fine, i shell out what it looked missing features for solid build quality.
I go home, rtfm, and wtf? "Before use update firmware with XYZ software". Okay, done. But hmmm what is that?
It has plethoria, absolute TON of customization but from PC program. Hell yeah, that was fucking good choice and seller missed whole selling point of this box. Like literally, he didnt know its best feature. I can go as far as customize entire GUI on that small screen. Its been awhile since I did my last pixelart thingy but monochromatic so not too bad :)4 -
After waiting 3+ years, I finally found custom firmware for my netgear wndr4700.
LEDE project(based on openwrt), you are amazing.
Now just to figure out the 10000 options i have now.
Anyone that can help me?
Per example, my router should be capable of 300 mbit theory and 200 mbit practical.
But the custom firmware says max 150mbit.1 -
I can't use this keyboard to program:
Got a transparent touch LED keyboard because I thought it was cool, turns out the lazy chinese programmers have used a really long debounce time of ~100ms in its firmware to prevent duplicate keystroke detection.
Which means, I can't type as fast as I want on this thing! 😭
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How to discover and exploit vulnerabiliy in program or IoT firmware?C++, asm, writing zero-days, i have always been amazed by that. Art.
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I bought a Mi Band 3 4 days ago and I already modified the firmware. I hate when the manufacturer limit functions of software when the hardware it's very capable.6
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if anyone has firmware or any custom rom for htc 728, please help me. I need it asap. every file that I downloaded and tried was curropted while installing
Thanks!!2 -
Started with 3D-Printing last year, bought a cheap Creality Ender 2 and upgraded almost everything except the mecahnical parts.
Upgrades include a new Mainboard, stepper drivers, stepper dampers, custom firmware, new printed case, better extruder, OctoPI Server etc.
Oh yeah, and Animu ^^ -
20 hours for setting up environment and build tool chains and 1 hour for firmware coding
#all_embedded_engineers
FML -
Question for the electrically minded.
I have a laptop with a 19v input.
I have a portable UPC with 2 voltage options in the range of this, I can undervolt at 16v (the laptop battery voltage) which works with a small firmware correction to ignore a board sensor, the other option is to slightly overvolt to 19.5v which I assume the laptop could handle through its input regulation.
Can anyone confirm if a .5v variance at charger is within tolerance? It would be an overvolt of 2.5%5 -
I swear I touched some weird and complex programming shit in over a decade of programming.
I interfaced myself through C# to C++ Firmware, I wrote Rfid antennas calibration and reading software with a crappy framework called OctaneSDK (seems easy until you have to know how radio signal math and ins and outs work to configure antennas for good performance), I wrote full blown, full stack enterprise web portals and applications.with most weird ass dbs since the era of JDBC, ODBC up to managed data access and entity framework, cloud documental databases and everything.
Please, please, please, PLEASE I BEG YOU, anyone, I don't even have the enough life force to pour into this, explain me why the hell Jest is still a thing in javascript testing.
I read on the site:
"Jest is a delightful JavaScript Testing Framework with a focus on simplicity."
Using jest doesn't feel any delightful and I can't see any spark of focus and simplicity in it.
I tried to configure it in an angular project and it's a clustefuck of your worst nightmares put togheter.
The amount of errors and problems and configurations I had to put up felt like setting up a clunky version of a rube goldberg's machine.
I had to uninstall karma/jasmine, creating config files floating around, configure project files and tell trough them to jest that he has to do path transformations because he can't read his own test files by itself and can't even read file dependencies and now it has a ton of errors importing dependencies.
Sure, it's focused on simplicity.
Moreover, the test are utter trash.
Hey launch this method and verify it's been launched 1 time.
Hey check if the page title is "x"
God, I hate js with passion since years, but every shit for js I put my hands on I always hope it will rehab its reputation to me, instead every fucking time it's worse than before. -
Fucking Intel. Only allowing specific SFP transceivers on their x520-da2 card. I gotta load the firmware with a flag to be allowed to use my ubiquti transceivers.
And for some reason grub doesn’t let me use the “array” as the firmware said. So only one sfp port is active on boot. So I gotta find a clever way to get it to load properly. Maybe add a script to run at boot that does what I want. -
Recently I have had to help our support team handle a variety of embedded development support tickets for a product line that is quite complex in nature. It is really starting become frustrating how common it is that the so-called “developers” that are using this product are so incompetent at requesting help in a proper/sane way. It is even more frustrating that some of these schmucks start acting up and stating bullshit statements like (para-phrasing) “OMG we have a ‘big opportunity’ and a deadline to meet”, “you need to help us faster”. These are also the same guys that are like “I know you have a free SDK that does everything correctly, but I want to write my own ‘pro’ driver written in my own ‘dumbass code style’. Oh and I am not going to follow documentation and not implement required functions and make you read my god awful code snippets to find out what I what I did wrong instead of reading the docs or comparing against the SDK.”
To anyone that behaves this way...fuck you! Just stop. Stop being a developer altogether. If your “opportunity” is so important, why the fuck are you half-assing your support ticket? Why are you making it SO DAMN DIFFICULT for someone to help support you! Give as much info as possible to prove your point or provide context to the problem you are having. In the majority of these tickets the dumbasses don’t even consider that relaying the product’s firmware version is relevant information, that a Wireshark (and/or logic analyzer) capture can be very useful to provide context to the type of operation being performed. Code snippets can be nice but only if there is sufficient context. We have had to ask one guy 3 times already for the FW version...what the flipping hell is wrong with you?!
Ug...I feel sorry for Support/FAEs sometimes dealing with customer bullshit drives me nuts and its a shame this stuff happens in a sector that should know better...Please don’t be like these devs. If you make a half-assed request it is only reasonable to expect a half-assed response and nothing more. -
Left my apartment this morning while pressing on "Yes, update firmware of soundsystem". What could possibly go wrong.
Listening to music using my iPhone right now.2 -
Recently many of us may have seen that viral image of a BSOD in a Ford car, saying the vehicle cannot be driven due to an update failure.
I haven't been able to verify the story in established news sources, so I won't be further commenting on it, specifically.
But the prospects of the very concept are quite... concerning.
Deploying updates and patches to software can be reasonably called *the software industry*. We almost have no V0 software in production nowadays, anywhere (except for some types of firmware).
Thus, as car and other devices become more and more reliant on larger software rather than much shorter onboard firmware, infrastructure for online updates becomes mandatory.
And large scale, major updates for deployed software on many different runtime environments can be messy even on the most stable situations and connections (even k8s makes available rolling updates with tests on cloud infrastructure, so the whole thing won't come crashing down).
Thereby, an update mess on automotive-OS software is a given, we just have to wait for it.
When it comes... it will be a mess. Auto manufacturers will adopt a "move fast and break things" approach, because those who don't will appear to be outcompeted by those who deploy lots of shiny things, very often.
It will lead to mass outages on otherwise dependable transportation - private transportation.
Car owners, the demographic that most strongly overlaps with every other powerful demographic, will put significant pressure on governments to do something about it.
Governments (and I might be wrong here) will likely adapt existing recall implementation laws to apply to automotive OS software updates.
That means having to go to the auto shop every time there is a software update.
If Windows may be used as a reference for update frequency, that means several times per day.
A more reasonable expectation would be once per month.
Still completely impossible for large groups of rural car owners.
That means industry instability due to regulation and shifting demographics, and that could as well affect the rest of the software industry (because laws are pesky like that, rules that apply to cars could easily be used to reign in cloud computing software).
Thus... Please, someone tells me I overlooked something or that I am underestimating the adaptability of the powers at play, because it seems like a storm is on the horizon, straight ahead.5 -
Got a western digital my cloud and WD my cloud home for thanksgiving. Cloud has pretty cool firmware and locally managable admin console. But cloud home is only internet accessible but only have basic stuff like link sharing with good hardware configuration. I am in a kind of confused state which one to return. Guys help!!
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I have 50Mb internet via Cox Cable (US), what AP should I get that:
1) Allows at least six devices on 802.11 at once
2) Still gets firmware updates -
How does one pull the firmware from various devices, decompile them, edit them and then place them back on the device ?
Like say, ssd firmware, or the firmware on phones etc ?28 -
No god damn documentation so I'm running blind
Anyone know where I can learn to understand firmware or whatever controls the Bluetooth in micro:bit??? -
And so again I'm here asking for your opinions.
My old router (linksys EA6400) had a meltdown yesterday and decided to lose wifi connectivity every 4-5 seconds for 4-5 seconds each time. So it was like 5 ICMP packets pass and then 5 fail, and this pattern held up through the whole day.
Did a hard reset hoping it will help. Little did I know.. Do you even imagine how fun it was setting it up with randomly not working wifi? :D And this router can only be set up over wifi. I had to count seconds in my head predicting when it will start losing packets. Because when it does - the setup fails :)
yayy!!
So I guess it's time to start looking for a new one. I barely use ethernet ports (one for RPi). But I do need a good wifi. AC is a must. AX is not since none of my devices support it. I'd also like it to have open-source firmware, maybe accessible via shell (100% dd-wrt/open-wrt compatible). A USB port would be a plus (for the RPi).
Do you have any suggestions worth looking at?
What do you think about WRT3200ACM MU-MIMO?
Also I came across something called MESH ROUTERS (wtf is that?). http://linuxgizmos.com/low-cost-802.... Is it worth looking at?
What would YOU suggest?4 -
I don’t know what my sister did but she trigged the firmware update mode by trying to charge her nexus 5x with my MacBook (USB C) wall charger.
I had to force restart the phone because it was in endless loop. Now everything is fine. -
I've had to update some 200 scanning devices on the only available computer old enough to still have the necessary connector. Over a serial connection that was so slow I could've probably written the firmware faster than updating it. It took me 14 hours to update all devices.
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when programming fails.
when I updated the firmware on this piece, something went wrong and the device broke.
Google'd and learned that the only way to unbrick is to break the other side open and remove a non-removable battery, to reset. else it will stay bricked forever
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any network admins with Cisco Meraki routers willing to do me a favor? i need to get a firmware file so i need someone in this position to sniff their own network to get where it gets the files from i will pay you like USD$0.04 in DASH3
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HELP!!! I fucked up my OP6 again trying to install Lineage 17.1.
I was running Oxygen Pie and folloqed steps .. Flashed Lineage Recovery 20200609
And then the rom but just boots into Fastboot now.
I'm guessing it's bc I didn't first install Oxygen 10 and upgrade the firmware?
Not though I'm trying to sideload the zip but it keeps stopping at Signature Verification failed.... Even though I said override...21 -
I am working on an embedded system, a microcontroller-based design. The system has an Ethernet port. I am using NetX framework in the microcontroller firmware.
The DHCP Client is executed properly, an IP address is assigned correctly when connected to a router. I connect a laptop to the router using a LAN cable. Then TCP sockets behave the way they should, UDP broadcast behave the way they should. The only issue is, when I connect a Laptop over wireless to the same router UDP broadcast are received on application on Laptop, but data sent is not received on the embedded device.
Any idea why?
Platform:
Laptop is Windows
Embedded Device: Renesas S7G2, NetX framework.4 -
Flashed the amazon-official firmware for the KF1. great. backed up. fantastic.
now to find a rom.
fuck.
nothing on XDA is actually there; all of the download links for kindle fire 1st gen lead to 404 pages. I'm actually getting very stressed over this. if i'm being stupid and missing a working link to a compatible ROM for KF1, PLEASE tell me
thanks,
- Your pal Park -
I recently went from being a java/python web developer to a PHP firmware developer. I've never written in PHP before and I keep typing $("# when I go to type a variable reference. jQuery has made this transition annoying to say the least =P1
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YAYYY! I MADE IT!!
After several nights of playing with my new and very first custom mechanical keyboard, at last I could successfully get my long-time-dreaming keyboard!
I read the guilds, tutorials, even youtube videos to get walked through the process:
- I started with building my own layout on different websites, since they said that it would be easier to use online tools than to write codes by yourself in order to build your own keymappings, but the UI/UX of the first one I tried was so bad that it took me a great deal of time to understand how to use it and working on it is even more time consuming. Later I found another webpage which was less recommended, but could help me to do that a lot easier.
- Then, the result was compiled to a firmware file, which would be flashed into the kb's controller. Loading the file into the board was also tiring and got me exhausted totally! I tried all the "lazy" recommended ways (using Windows softwares) but received the same error all the time. When I almost lost all the hopes, I'd come to the least recommended way: typing a few command lines on Linux. And it worked! The keyboard just do what I want it to do miraculously.
What I learnt: never do complicated things on Windows, because they are suuuuuper simple on Linux!
P/S: Sorry for the bad lighting in my room and the tiny spacebar (the spacebar size is 7u which I don't have one right now). I just need a beautiful keycap set to make it perfect.5 -
I do not feel insecure in my competency as software/Firmware engineer but i started feeling really insecure about being an engineer , mostly because the way Society in general place us
usually it's like
surgeon > physician > Scientist (or any basic science person) > engineer
i didn't realise this before but recently i noticed and i stopped introducing myself as engineer to the people i meet either from my family or from dating apps. Here is the conversation that usually happens
Person: what do you do ?
Me: I build things
Person: so what do build ?
Me: My work involves building lot of things related to smart phone's wireless capabilities.
Person: oh so you manufacture phones ?
Me: No i work in connectivity part of it like bluetooth , wifi
Person: I don't understand, does it involve staring at computers all day (makes a face )
Me: yes 90% of it , I like building things making something new HW or SW and most of them do require a use of computer , even if I was a mechanical engineer computers would be necessary
Person: Hmm if i was not a surgeon i would be hair dresser , because i can't do anything that involves staring at computers all day.
same conversation happened multiple times.
no matter how good you are at writing code or how important task that code is performing , society consider's Software Engineering as a mundane task of " staring at screen "
if that song Remember the name is written for software engineers it will go like
This is ten percent luck
Twenty percent skill
Fifteen percent concentrated power of will
Five percent pleasure
Fifty percent pain
And a hundred percent reason to live in disdain6 -
I hate how I have battery issues with every smartphone/tablet I buy. They do well for 1 week and then I have to buy an additional charger for work because after 5 hours of only lying there it only has 50% which wouldnt be sufficient for 30 minutes car drive (Maps, Spotify, Bluetooth, GPS and mobile data)... Fml. I am tired of batteries. My next phone is going to be a huawei mate 10. Maybe I habe more luck with this one. I dont believe im Samsung anymore.
And anyway why the fuck do they introduce better CPUs more sensors etc whilst Keeping the battery capacity the same.. Instead they introduce fast charge etc. Another reason for me to go away from samsung is the fact they bloat each firmware up, my battery got worst after each system update (even the security ones) and also doing 14 factory resets didnt work. Support is shit. They also integrated Clean Master into the system and an "Antivirus Protection"... Can't get worst.
samsungrant@devrant.com # > submit && exit -
Okay, so debian is just fucked by default then.
Created a Debian 10 persistence stick, and I'm having the fucking xorg issues ("No screens detected", xrandr says the same) i've had every fucking time i've installed debian, except a simple round of dpkg-reconfigure isn't fixing it this time.
Suggestions?
Things tried:
- dpkg-reconfigure <every package even remotely related>
- X -configure
- installing all firmware from linux-firmware repo
- reinstalling everything remotely related (with both reinstall and purge/install)
- Wayland ("failed to create compositor backend")
- creating my own xorg configs and driver-radeon configs and all that shit with my screen explicitly defined
- remaking the stick with a redownloaded ISO
- actually installing it to a HDD first
- crying in frustration
- different monitors
- someone else's machine (both AMD GPUs, mine's an R9 380, his an RX 3-digit something-or-other)
- an NVIDIA card (other tester threw his old 1080TI in his PC, set up all the drivers and shit, and nothing fucking changed)
what is this, Fedora?3 -
When you lost almost three hours to get an unsupported version of the qmk firmware (for mechanical keyboards) compiled, but got chickened out of installing it for fear it would break the only keyboard you have ($100+ and a bitch to get shipped in the country)
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