Notes

Nothing can ever replace Twitter because once it finally dies then never again will you have McDonald’s customer support, President of the United States, Zoe Quinn, future Nobel Peace Prize laureate Volodymyr Zelenskyy, The Prime Minister of Israel, Taylor Swift and the Ayatollah all on the same platform.

I used to be fairly interested in politics because I felt that I’d identified most of the reasons why everything around us was going to shit (for the sake of the following it doesn’t really matter if I was right or not). I even had solutions lined up and all. However, the more I kept debating the people around me, the more I started hating them. Because even after convincing them through logical arguments, they simply acknowledged that I was right and changed absolutely nothing.

I realised after a while that there are two kinds of people in the world. Ones that can infer the truth without having to experience it, and those who need to make deep personal experiences to change their core programming. The former type of people is very rare, while the latter is very useless.

The solution here is obviously that one should focus one’s energy on the “player” characters. The NPCs obviously live under a faith-based system of social orthodoxy, and will simply follow whatever is socially accepted. Therefore, one need not bother with them, for they shall fall in line when one becomes the person who determines social norms.

However, instead of focusing on the solution, I instead looked at what would happen were I to actually succeed. Presumably, through great sacrifice to myself in terms of time investment and personal safety, I would embark on a journey with a very low chances of success, to forcefully herd the sheep and my compatriots towards a better future. Of course, what I consider as a better future remains irrelevant. There remains only one issue. By “saving society”, I would have enabled the idiots amongst us, who had been so pathetically manipulated by promises of utopia, of endless love and prosperity, to get away with their frankly disgusting display of collective stupidity. I refused to abide by that outcome, and therefore, from that point on, when someone asks me about my view on politics, I simply began saying that I am apolitical (because most of people just aren’t worth saving).

It may seem a bit petty, that I would condemn myself and other good people to a fate brought upon us by manipulative elites and foolish hedonists. But there isn’t really any price I’m not willing to pay to see the subhuman trash which collectively brought us into this situation eat their just-desserts.

It’s not like I’ll be in real personal danger anyway, I know when to make my hasty retreat to some irrelevant island nation, and actually have the funds to do so.

sshd is a really cool challenge that is based on the XZ Utils backdoor. I get an image that has an sshd coredump. In it, I’ll find where it crashed, in the liblzma library. I’ll reverse that to see where it is decrypting a static shellcode buffer and running it. That buffer is connecting to a TCP socket and reading off an encryption key and nonce, as well as a file path. It then reads the file at that path, encrypts it, and sends it back over the socket. I’ll use the core dump to get the keys and encrypted file from memory, and then create my own server to serve them. Then I’ll write a shellcode loader to run modified shellcode to connect to my server and re-encrypt the file with the same key, decrypting it. Flare-On 2024: sshd

Make sure you already downloaded the macOS (in this case Catalina, but you can use Mojave or whatever) installer first, from either AppStore (hawk tuah) or archive.org (you’re supposed to have a /Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app if you did).

Start by creating a disk image dmg file:

$ hdiutil create -o ~/Downloads/Catalina -size 15500m -volname Catalina -layout SPUD -fs HFS+J

Mount the created dmg file:

$ hdiutil attach ~/Downloads/Catalina.dmg -noverify -mountpoint /Volumes/Catalina

Next use createinstallmedia to create the macOS installer application on the mounted volume:

$ sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Catalina --nointeraction

Unmount the volume:

$ hdiutil detach /Volumes/Catalina

Convert the dmg disk image file to iso:

$ hdiutil convert ~/Downloads/Catalina.dmg -format UDTO -o ~/Downloads/Catalina.cdr

Rename the cdr file to iso:

$ mv ~/Downloads/Catalina.cdr ~/Downloads/Catalina.iso

Just like Apple likes it, complex.

*click on the image for a higher-res one

I’m using a debloated Windows 10 Pro on an Apple MacBook Air 2012 (11 inch one, Intel i7, 8GB RAM, 512GB storage), application-level firewall that blocks all Windows connections except for specific apps/hosts/ports, OpenVPN, Pihole for additional filtering, the UI is a custom-built version of CairoShell (hint, that’s what Visual Studio 2022 is for) and a theme called sizeofcat. Terminal is Windows Terminal, font is Fira Code, I’m using WSL and openEuler for Hoshi development. I have a bunch of stuff installed (mainly development tools and games) because this is my main machine now. I can dual-boot into macOS Catalina if needed, and most of the dev tools are mirrored there too (Sublime, Jetbrains IDEs, IDA Pro, Lazarus), just in case.

Brave, Firefox and Tor Browser for web browsing, VLC for media playing, Winamp for music, Hexchat for IRC, iaWriter for notes, QuiteRSS for RSS feeds, Ricochet Refresh and Telegram for communications, Adobe Photoshop 2025 for messing around, Oracle Virtualbox and VMware Workstation pro for virtualizing stuff.

On the fun (read gaming) side, Allods Online, Civilization IV, Dawn of Man, Desperados 3, Dungeon Siege II, Fallout 2, Heroes of Might and Magic 3, Machinarium, Oxygen Not Included, Pharaoh - A New Era, Quake II, Shadow Tactics (and expansion), Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri and Timberborn.

It’s not just pursuit of pleasure in general, it’s the fact that the expectation of pleasure is now embedded at the instinct level so that every person effectively has ADHD and is constantly urging for a cigarette of stimulation. Supply meets demand, and the market churns out forms of stimulation that are smaller, more parcelled-up, more bite-sized. The loop between craving-hit-craving-hit-craving-hit is getting tighter, shorter, more binary.

These basic drives and instincts are supposed to be built up into complexes of behaviour, with holistic and emergent properties, ultimately forming a personality with life goals etc. Instead, we are “atomising” down to our most basic pleasure-seeking drives, until all the machinery of our evolved consciousness exists only to satisfy the craving-hit-craving-hit loop in as rapid an alternation as possible.

This makes our higher conscious functions vestigial, especially all the unactivated, merely potential ones that are lying dormant. We’re at a real risk of dying as a species this century and giving birth to something much uglier, some kind of hybrid of animal and machine that probably exists to service a larger machine, whether that is mechanical or distributed and cybernetic.

My bet is that a subhuman beige worker class will emerge, like the deltas in Brave New World who only want their fix of soma, and these will be ruled by a cognitive “elite” (probably retarded by mid-20th century standards, but smarter than the deltas) descended from the present oligarchic class. Basically Brazil on steroids: if you are on the favela side of the tracks, your offspring will become more animal, and if you are on the oligarch side, your offspring will regress to midwit level (think the typical college-educated but useless functionary from a well-off family) but rule over them in an unquestioned neo-feudal arrangement. This elite will itself be integrated into a cybernetic global structure of some kind, but one that isn’t very interesting, just despotic and stagnant.

In the realm of IT administration, Group Policies serve as a powerful tool for centrally managing and controlling various aspects of an Active Directory network environment in a Windows-based operating system. They provide a way to enforce consistent settings and configurations across multiple computers and user accounts within a domain or organizational unit.

In this (hopefully) series of posts, I’ll describe some of the most unusual, and potentially dangerous configurations, I’ve encountered over my years of experience. Group Policy Security Nightmares pt 1

The White Tiger has returned.

I’ve been working a bit lately on the Hoshi USB stack, and I can finally say its status is “implemented”. Not done, because for that I would need to map the filesystem and so on and so forth. But for now I have a basic USB implementation in Yukiko (the kernel) as well as an Enhanced Host Controller Interface (EHCI, basically USB 2.0) driver that can be loaded by the kernel on request.

[init] loading kernel_module_ehci from /initrd/initmod/ehci.mod
[init] registering Enhanced Host Controller Interface (EHCI) driver
[ehci] found EHCI (USB 2.0) controller (8086:265C)
[usb] new device connected (0BDA:0109)

I’ve written a small utility called lsusb that obviously lists all USB devices that are connected to the master USB controller as well as add a new page to the SystemInfo utility, which lists the same information.

Also, I have no intention of implementing Extensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI). Fuck that.