Replacing a Thinkpad X60 Bootflash Chip

https://blog.patternsinthevoid.net/replacing-a-thinkpad-x60-bootflash-chip.html

by WestCoastJustin • 12 years ago

52 41 12 years ago

blog.patternsinthevoid.net

kelvie• 12 years ago

I get a cert error when trying to access the site.

agumonkey• 12 years ago

readable through printfriendly http://www.printfriendly.com/print/?source=site&url=blog.pat...

exo7622• 12 years ago

This is a self-signed cert. Pretty normal stuff for pages by hackers for hackers. Do you care who is running that site? Are you going to provide them any personal data? Were your browser hardened by you? If you answered no, no, yes then you are pretty safe.

pestaa• 12 years ago

Still pretty bizarre when properly signed certs for small sites are free of charge.

nullc5• 12 years ago

How kind of them to setup the site in a way which is indistinguishable from a MITM, so that its a common and usual thing and when there actually is a MITM against other sites you use you'll suffer from none of that uncomfortable alarm.

freehunter2• 12 years ago

It shouldn't be normal stuff. If you don't have a trusted cert, don't even bother. You shouldn't be training people, even people who should know better, to click past a certificate warning page.

taiki2• 12 years ago

why are you disabling the card bus, firewire and sd card ports?

hosay123• 12 years ago

At least 2 of those interfaces support DMA to host RAM.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMA_attack

taiki2• 12 years ago

D'oh. Somehow missed the fact that you were hardening the machine against attack.

pasbesoin• 12 years ago

Noted this at the bottom of the page:

You're currently helping people in censored regions with FlashProxy. Thanks! [1]

I just think that users/browsers should be aware of what activity a site may incur.

[1] https://crypto.stanford.edu/flashproxy/options.html

guelo• 12 years ago

Now you're on a terrorist watchlist.

voltagex_• 12 years ago

Aha! That explains why the corporate proxy blocked it as a "Botnet/Malicious outbound"

Thanks.

randyrand• 12 years ago

Damn, I hope I didn't just eat a lot of my data plan. I am on iOS...

nwh3• 12 years ago

Luckily no Flash to speak of there.

nwh3• 12 years ago

What the fuck? That is absolutely not cool.

aaronem• 12 years ago

Sure am glad I run NoScript.

userbinator2• 12 years ago

Given the content of the page, I found that rather ironic.

idlewan• 12 years ago

The website is wrong, because you are not currently helping people in censored regions with FlashProxy.

The proxy cannot work when the enclosing page uses https. See FlashProxy's FAQ: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/FlashProxyFAQ

yuhong• 12 years ago

Of course, I am not a fan of violating firmware standards like UEFI/ACPI and dislike it when x86 Chromebooks did this. Having different firmware for different OSes defeats the point of firmware standards. I think it is possible to run UEFI as a payload in coreboot.

userbinator2• 12 years ago

The idea of booting OS from ROM has been around for a long time; in the PC world, there's servers with a hypervisor in the BIOS. Interesting to see this being done as a mod, however.

16MB may not seem like a lot of space compared to gigabyte-sized distros, but if you look at things like TinyCore or even more extreme, the (non-Linux) MenuetOS, you can still put a lot of functionality in there.

With http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/ibm-lenovo-thinkpad-x60-c... and now this, and an (unofficial) schematic available, it seems the X60 is becoming a great platform for hardware hacking. I've noticed the prices for a used one have been going up.

Replacing a Thinkpad X60 Bootflash Chip

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