The Google H1 Fritz Chip.

Edit (January 2023): This machine is long out of print, but NSA lackeys continue to spread “squid ink” regarding the supposed harmlessness of its Fritz chip. So, for the thick: Yes, it’s a backdoor. The CR50 bypasses any user-installed OS, and can extract arbitrary secrets from disk and memory (or silently implant “incriminating” info) via […]

Open Problem: Delousing the Asus C101PA.

Apr. 26 update: This article is obsolete, the pill — was found; if you have this machine, scroll to the end. The Asus C101PA Chromebook is a very interesting device: it contains a Rockchip CPU, for which we already have a working deloused Gentoo; it also contains such marvels as a non-blobulous Marvell 802.11 card, […]

The Peculiarly Quiet Decline and Fall of the KVM

Yes, that familiar little PC peripheral. The one that toggles a single keyboard/mouse/display ensemble between two or more connected machines. They’ve quietly vanished from the market. And the fact appears to be discussed nowhere on the Net, at all. So I have seen it fit to make a note of it here. What’s this, you […]

Posted in: Chumpatronics, Hardware, NonLoper by Stanislav 79 Comments

Still Tenser, Said the Censor.

Stay classy, YCombinator.

On the Matter of Brian Krebs.

The WWW of Brian Krebs, perhaps the second-most-worshiped1 patron saint to all English-speaking “computer security” charlatans — is sitting sadly offline today on account of a ~TB/sec DDOS flood.2 His titanic bandwidth, it turns out, was provided gratis by Akamai – spamatronicists par excellence and industrial-scale enablers of everything that makes the modern-day WWW a […]

Tungsten Will Melt in Your Mouth!

But, of course – it won’t. But let’s imagine that it were in someone’s financial – hell, geopolitical! interest – to convince the public that it will. The New York Times editorial might go like this: ‘you may have heard of tungsten, a metal, just like gallium; the latter, a favourite among stage magicians for melting at body temperature…’ […]

Comrade Ogilvy Nakamoto.

From the ‘Dear Idiots, ‘1984’ is Not a How-To Guide’ department: He might turn the speech into the usual denunciation of traitors and thought-criminals, but that was a little too obvious, while to invent a victory at the front, or some triumph of over-production in the Ninth Three-Year Plan, might complicate the records too much. […]

Modern Chumpatronic Engineering.

A reader recently asked me to comment on the demise of MtGox and its implications for Bitcoin enthusiasts. I refused to do so, on account of the MtGox scam having been thoroughly beaten to death elsewhere – long before the recent and final convulsive fit people erroneously describe as ‘its demise.’ – The unwashed masses, […]