Whether the goal is reverse engineering, black hat exploitation, or just simple curiosity, getting inside the packages that protect integrated circuits has long been the Holy Grail of hacking. It isn’t easy, though; those inscrutable black epoxy blobs don’t give up their secrets easily, with most decapping methods being some combination of toxic and dangerous. […]
Should you be able to brick a keyboard just by writing a driver to flash the lights on it? We don’t think so either. [TheNotary] got quite the shock when embarking on a seemingly straightforward project to learn C++ on the x86-64 architecture with Windows and sent it straight to Silicon Heaven with only a […]
Continuing the series on floppy copy protection, [GloriousCow] examines Electronic Arts’ Interlock system. This was used from 1984 to 1987 for at least fourteen titles released on both 5.25″ and 3.5″ floppies. Although not officially advertised, in the duplication mark sector the string ELECTRONIC ARTS IBM INTERLOCK. appears, hence the name. Compared to other copy […]
One major flaw of designing societies around cars is the sheer amount of signage that drivers are expected to recognize, read, and react to. It’s a highly complex system that requires constant vigilance to a relatively boring task with high stakes, which is not something humans are particularly well adapted for. Modern GPS equipment can […]
Sierra’s King Quest v1.0 for DOS. Many have sought the holy grail of making commercial media both readable and copy-proof, especially once everyone began to copy those floppies. One of these attempts to make floppies copy-proof was Softguard’s Superlok. This in-depth look at this copy protection system by [GloriousCow] comes on the heels of a […]
Recently, [Richard Audette] bought an Akaso EK7000 action camera for his daughter’s no-smartphones-allowed summer camp, which meant that after his daughter returned from said camp, he was free to tinker with this new toy. Although he was not interested in peeling open the camera to ogle its innards, [Richard] was very much into using the […]
What can you do with a cheap Linux machine with limited flash and only a single free GPIO line? Probably not much, but sometimes, just getting root to prove you can is the main goal of a project. If that happens to lead somewhere useful, well, that’s just icing on the cake. Like many interesting […]
On an x86 system the BIOS is the first part of the system to become active along with the basic CPU core(s) functionality, or so things used to be until Intel introduced its Management Engine (IME) and AMD its AMD Secure Processor (AMD-SP). These are low-level, trusted execution environments, which in the case of AMD-SP […]
Is your multimeter one of your trusty friends when building up boards, repairing broken gadgets, and reverse-engineering proprietary ones? Is it accompanied by a logic analyzer or an oscilloscope at times? Having a proper probing setup is crucial for many a task, and the standard multimeter probes just won’t do. As a PCB is slipping […]
Remember when dead batteries were something you’d just toss in the trash? Those days are long gone, thankfully, and rechargeable battery packs have put powerful cordless tools in the palms of our hands. But when those battery packs go bad, replacing them becomes an expensive proposition. And that’s a great excuse to pop a pack […]