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hypervis0r

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The problem with this 'it is relative' line of logic is that everything can be relative. We need terms that describe stuff regardless of how people perceive it.

Otherwise, as you said, 'bricked' can mean almost anything. So what's the point of using a word without any particular meaning?

The author disabled resizing (zooming) on mobile, leaving the text unreadable. Why do people do this at all? I've seen it happen so often.

Not really. A skilled reverse engineer does not find/replace any certificates, or anything like that. They just debug the app, stepping over all the code, instruction by instruction. There's no way you can beat that. I'm a malware reverse engineer - I work with this kind of stuff every day. And I'm pretty sure there's no 'game': once the binary is in my disassembler, it's over.

You don't see .jpeg because people are used to .jpg. There's nothing incompatible with long names that we care about.

Also, that Windows feature you mention is called ADS - alternate data stream.

The only tricky part is the message-sending routines, since they have to be written in assembly

Why? (context: never touched Objective-C)

You're talking about AMT (which runs on the Intel ME - Management Engine). The ME itself, however, is on every CPU (running Minix on Skylake and later CPUs, ThreadX on earlier models), because one of the responsibilities of the ME, apart from being a backdoor, is to manage the CPU: power it on, handle power signals, etc. The CPU wouldn't run without the ME, so it's necessary that it's on all CPUs.

That security bug you're talking about can be patched the same way it's exploited. No source code doesn't mean "all is lost". Instead of writing a payload that steals your private keys you just write one that patches out the vulnerability.

Sure, but that's open source and you can disable automatic updates, meaning they can't change the code whenever they feel like doing so. And if they do, the code will be kept in the source code control history, and will eventually be caught.

It's wildly different from a JS file that's loaded every time you visit the website.

It's not like editing a value in the registry is "going out of your way", it's almost standard Windows practice by now.

Do you honestly believe that Linus would accept core kernel changes for the sole purpose of supporting Windows on Linux? It would NEVER. HAPPEN.

Kinda off-topic, but, isn't Linus basically a Microsoft here? Does it matter if Linux's forkable and open-source, if nobody ever forks it to do what the community wants instead of what Linus wants? (e.g. stable kernel ABI, Windows support, etc)

I've got a laptop and desktop that have been running Windows 10 since launch and they work just as well as my Mac does. I've never re-installed any of them, and never had them "go nuts". That story reads like someone who last used Windows98 and thinks it still applies.

I agree so much with this... last time I installed Windows, it was Windows 7 in 2013, haven't touched it since then, and it works perfectly. Of course it requires a bit of maintenance, but what doesn't after so many years.

So you're refusing to have a basic update installed? Let me guess, you're going to complain and say Windows is insecure because you got WannaCry'd because you didn't update your system and blame it on MS instead?

(you = whoever "doesn't care" about updates)

Literature: sorry no, I didn't read anything; everything I know is from practice.

As for the tools: just IDA Pro, really, if you don't count the standard stuff: a VM to avoid getting the host infected (VirtualBox), Burp (to analyze malware HTTP traffic), etc. Nothing too fancy.