Category: computer hacks

The bsnes emulator has a new overclocking mode to eliminate slowdowns in SNES games while keeping the gameplay speed accurate. We’re emulating old SNES hardware on modern machines that are vastly more powerful. Eliminating slowdowns should be trivial, right? For an emulator such as bsnes, which is written to achieve essentially pixel-perfect accuracy when emulating, […]
We assume your office policy allows for reading Hackaday during work hours. But what about cruising reddit, or playing Universal Paperclips? There’s a special kind of stress experienced when attempting to keep one eye on your display and the other on the doorway; all the while convinced the boss is about to waltz into the […]
I’m sure you’ve heard of Spectre, which was the first of many speculative execution vulnerabilities found in modern processors. A new one just popped up this week. At Blackhat on Tuesday, CVE-2019-1125 was announced by Bitdefender as SWAPGS. SWAPGS is an x86_64 instruction that is intended for use in context switching, that is when execution […]
This has been an interesting week. First off, security researchers at Armis discovered a set of serious vulnerabilities in the vxWorks Real Time Operating System (RTOS). Released under a name that sounds like the title of a western or caper movie, Urgent/11. Not familiar with vxWorks? It’s a toss-up as to whether vxWorks or Linux […]
When shopping online, there’s plenty of great deals out there on modern graphics hardware. Of course, if you’re like [Dawid] and bought a GTX1050 Ti for $48 from Wish, you probably suspect it’s too good to be true. Of course, you’d be correct. [Dawid] notes from the outset that the packaging the card ships in […]
Once a program has been debugged and works properly, it might be time to start optimizing it. A common way of doing this is a method called profiling – watching a program execute and counting the amount of computing time each step in the program takes. This is all well and good for most programs, […]
Selfblow (Don’t google that at work, by the way) is a clever exploit by [Balázs Triszka] that effects every Nvidia Tegra device using the nvtboot bootloader — just about all of them except the Nintendo Switch. It’s CVE 2019-5680, and rated at an 8.2 according to Nvidia, but that high CVE rating isn’t entirely reflective […]
When folk at Origin PCs realized that their company was about to celebrate its 10th anniversary of making custom (gaming) PCs, they knew that they had to do something special. Since one thing they did when the company launched in 2009 was to integrate an XBox 360 into a gaming PC, they figured that they […]
If you are the operator of a vintage computer, probably the only one of its type remaining in service, probably the worst thing you can hear is a loud pop followed by your machine abruptly powering down. That’s what happened to the Elliott 803B in the UK’s National Museum Of Computing, and its maintainer [Peter […]
Remember the end of GandCrab we talked about a couple weeks back? A new wrinkle to this story is the news that a coalition of law enforcement agencies and security researchers have released a decrypter and the master decryption keys for that ransomware. It’s theorized that researchers were able to breach the command and control […]