Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion

[jbreher]

Indeed, I’ve shipped devices that provided canned boot sector data before - not as an exploit, but because the operating environment needed such in order to function. Of course, that was a ‘from the factory’ thing, not a field exploit.

Yeah, that's exactly what THEY wanted you to believe

Just kidding. Or maybe not... Was that "canned boot" somehow easily replaceable with a different one afterwards? Ie: the canned boot residing in another area of the HD which could be updated or using a custom tool? Or just reusing all the developed firmware, replacing the "canned boot" and generating the payloaded firmware?

Well, the canonical example would be to package a disk with a 'paddle card' protocol converter which sits between the drive and the system's SCSI | ATA | Fibre Channel | 1553 | Ethernet | InfiniBand | whatever bus. The canned boot sector would be resident in the FW of the paddle card. Used for things such as allowing contemporary HDDs to be used as boot devices on legacy systems built before the dawn of large HDDs.

[Elwar]

When did scientists stop working to cure diseases?

Is it because they can make more money injecting the 99.99% of people that do not have the disease than they can make curing the .001%?

[bitserve]

Indeed, I’ve shipped devices that provided canned boot sector data before - not as an exploit, but because the operating environment needed such in order to function. Of course, that was a ‘from the factory’ thing, not a field exploit.

Yeah, that's exactly what THEY wanted you to believe

Just kidding. Or maybe not... Was that "canned boot" somehow easily replaceable with a different one afterwards? Ie: the canned boot residing in another area of the HD which could be updated or using a custom tool? Or just reusing all the developed firmware, replacing the "canned boot" and generating the payloaded firmware?

Well, the canonical example would be to package a disk with a 'paddle card' protocol converter which sits between the drive and the system's SCSI | ATA | Fibre Channel | 1553 | Ethernet | InfiniBand | whatever bus. The canned boot sector would be resident in the FW of the paddle card. Used for things such as allowing contemporary HDDs to be used as boot devices on legacy systems built before the dawn of large HDDs.

Yeah, well, THAT doesn't look like it would be so easily repurposed for malicious intents. But anyways, the point stands, not only it is theoretically possible but also psycodad has provided some links that would suggest it being exploited in the wild.. even if rare and requiring the exceptional talents and resources of the Equation Group (the malwaretech PoC was not even close).

[Searing]

Feels good being invested in the safest haven there is as the Stock Boyz meltdown continues.

Bitcoin 'the merciless bitch' is still thinking about following the stock market..or more likely is just messing with our minds for a few days.....

When did scientists stop working to cure diseases?

Is it because they can make more money injecting the 99.99% of people that do not have the disease than they can make curing the .001%?

here ya go..what they have been discussing..buying back their own stock or cures the last few years

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model.html

[Lambie Slayer]

Feels good being invested in the safest haven there is as the Stock Boyz meltdown continues.

Bitcoin 'the merciless bitch' is still thinking about following the stock market..or more likely is just messing with our minds for a few days.....

When did scientists stop working to cure diseases?

Is it because they can make more money injecting the 99.99% of people that do not have the disease than they can make curing the .001%?

here ya go..what they have been discussing..buying back their own stock or cures the last few years

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model.html

Bitcoin has performed much better than gold, silver, and stocks since Cornavirus became news on Dec 31. Stocks just had their worst day in years today and Bitcoin was not phased. Stocks are in a bubble. Corn is cheap.

Bitcoin is the superior safe haven and has proven it for two months straight. Dont get fooled by profit taking or technical dips.

[bitserve]

When did scientists stop working to cure diseases?

Is it because they can make more money injecting the 99.99% of people that do not have the disease than they can make curing the .001%?

Scientists need resources. The time to discover pennicilin with a simple experiment and a microscope is long gone.

Pay them and give them resources for whatever you want and they will try their best. In the meantime they will work on whomever sponsoring their investigation asks them to do. There's nothing evil in that, it's just how the world works.

If any big pharma stopped thinking in optimising the profit from their I+D they would soon stop being a big pharma and replaced by a more efficient one.

That being said, it is not that they do not work on cures. They do too.

[Lambie Slayer]

https://nypost.com/2020/02/27/pope-francis-sick-a-day-after-supporting-coronavirus-sufferers/

RIP Pope??

This guy shakes a few hundred peoples hands each day all over the world. He is the Earths nexus point for germ spreading. At 83 years old if he has it, well its not gonna be a walk in the park. 14 percent mortality at that age.

These are dangerous times and King Bitcoin is here to keep everyone safe.

[bitserve]

https://nypost.com/2020/02/27/pope-francis-sick-a-day-after-supporting-coronavirus-sufferers/

RIP Pope??

This guy shakes a few hundred peoples hands each day all over the world. He is the Earths nexus point for germ spreading. At 83 years old if he has it, well its not gonna be a walk in the park. 14 percent mortality at that age.

These are dangerous times and King Bitcoin is here to keep everyone safe.

He has top notch medical service you could only dream of. He will do well.

[Hueristic]

Exactly. I always do this, and also use VM to test-drive apps before installing on my main (host) PC. No viruses, no malware, no corruptions, no problems!

Edit: ...and always disable AutoRun after a Windows installation.

Always do ... what? Always attach found USB to a computer running Knoppix from write-only media? Always attach found USB to a computer running a VM? Always attach found USB to a computer running Knoppix from write-only media within a VM? Great.

What protects your BIOS/FW? What protects your hypervisor?

When I want to read a "dangerous" USB stick, I launch my "test VM" in VMware and mount it there. AutoRun is disabled on both the host and the guest OS. Never had any issues in 25 years of Windows computing.

How can mounting a USB stick on an AutoRun-disabled VM affect your host's BIOS? Honest question, I want to know.

BadUSB attacks through drivers vulnerability

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91lx4zv9Hms

and VMs can be escaped.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/hack-that-escapes-vm-by-exploiting-edge-browser-fetches-105000-at-pwn2own/
https://securityboulevard.com/2018/11/zero-day-exploit-published-for-vm-escape-flaw-in-virtualbox/
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3182816/pwn2own-hacking-contest-ends-with-two-virtual-machine-escapes.html

[jojo69]

CP/M here i come (again). RS232 and a terminal emulator is all i need. stocking up on 8" and 5 1/4" floppies now

I really regret not keeping my Osbourne...like really

I still own a pair of (working) Compaq 'sewing machine' 8088-based PC clones. DOS on floppy, store to floppy. Woo-hoo!

cool

I'm watching ATARI 800 setups on ebay.  I don't know if anyone here is hip to M.U.L.E. but it is one of the best games of all time IMO and that is the best system for it.

[goldkingcoiner]

When did scientists stop working to cure diseases?

Is it because they can make more money injecting the 99.99% of people that do not have the disease than they can make curing the .001%?

You realise that scientists who do research usually don't care about money? The ones that do, go work for industries that pay them giant sums of money to tell people about how healthy their product is. Also you will not find a real researcher who earns a fair wage. They spend too much of their time begging and kissing ass for tiny scraps of funds to get their own research off the ground. Once one of these billionaires dies of the Coronavirus, you will see a cure, very fast.

[Lambie Slayer]

https://nypost.com/2020/02/27/pope-francis-sick-a-day-after-supporting-coronavirus-sufferers/

RIP Pope??

This guy shakes a few hundred peoples hands each day all over the world. He is the Earths nexus point for germ spreading. At 83 years old if he has it, well its not gonna be a walk in the park. 14 percent mortality at that age.

These are dangerous times and King Bitcoin is here to keep everyone safe.

He has top notch medical service you could only dream of. He will do well.

LOL, an 83 year old with all the medical service in the world is nothing compared to a young healthy immune system the pope can only dream of. The pope already has sciatic nueritis. All the doctors in his Papal Kingdom can't cure it.

[Hueristic]

Well looks like Pence will be the person who will run point on the virus outbreak.

We're screwed. But at least he will prey for us.

We should just cut him out too and go straight to god, I don't trust him to pass on my prayers unedited.

[JSRAW]

Jesus hates you anyway...

[bitserve]

https://nypost.com/2020/02/27/pope-francis-sick-a-day-after-supporting-coronavirus-sufferers/

RIP Pope??

This guy shakes a few hundred peoples hands each day all over the world. He is the Earths nexus point for germ spreading. At 83 years old if he has it, well its not gonna be a walk in the park. 14 percent mortality at that age.

These are dangerous times and King Bitcoin is here to keep everyone safe.

He has top notch medical service you could only dream of. He will do well.

LOL, an 83 year old with all the medical service in the world is nothing compared to a young healthy immune system the pope can only dream of. The pope already has sciatic nueritis. All the doctors in his Papal Kingdom can't cure it.

He also has GOD help.

[estenity]

plot twist (((they))) had a head start

Just got lucky in the lab they said.  


"“Let’s call it pure luck,” he said. “We decided to choose coronavirus as a model for our system just as a proof of concept for our technology.”
But after scientists sequenced the DNA of the novel coronavirus causing the current worldwide outbreak, the MIGAL researchers examined it and found that the poultry coronavirus has high genetic similarity to the human one, and that it uses the same infection mechanism, which increases the likelihood of achieving an effective human vaccine in a very short period of time, Katz said.
“All we need to do is adjust the system to the new sequence,” he said. “We are in the middle of this process, and hopefully in a few weeks we will have the vaccine in our hands. Yes, in a few weeks, if it all works, we would have a vaccine to prevent coronavirus.”
MIGAL would be responsible for developing the new vaccine, but it would then have to go through a regulatory process, including clinical trials and large-scale production, Katz said.
Akunis said he has instructed his ministry’s director-general to fast-track all approval processes with the goal of bringing the human vaccine to market as quickly as possible.
“Given the urgent global need for a human coronavirus vaccine, we are doing everything we can to accelerate development,” MIGAL CEO David Zigdon said. The vaccine could “achieve safety approval in 90 days,” he said."

anyway i hope that they succeed.
from now they will be closely watched, and if good arguments, they will be quickly taken over.

[jbreher]

Indeed, I’ve shipped devices that provided canned boot sector data before - not as an exploit, but because the operating environment needed such in order to function. Of course, that was a ‘from the factory’ thing, not a field exploit.

Yeah, that's exactly what THEY wanted you to believe

Just kidding. Or maybe not... Was that "canned boot" somehow easily replaceable with a different one afterwards? Ie: the canned boot residing in another area of the HD which could be updated or using a custom tool? Or just reusing all the developed firmware, replacing the "canned boot" and generating the payloaded firmware?

Well, the canonical example would be to package a disk with a 'paddle card' protocol converter which sits between the drive and the system's SCSI | ATA | Fibre Channel | 1553 | Ethernet | InfiniBand | whatever bus. The canned boot sector would be resident in the FW of the paddle card. Used for things such as allowing contemporary HDDs to be used as boot devices on legacy systems built before the dawn of large HDDs.

Yeah, well, THAT doesn't look like it would be so easily repurposed for malicious intents. But anyways, the point stands, not only it is theoretically possible but also psycodad has provided some links that would suggest it being exploited in the wild.. even if rare and requiring the exceptional talents and resources of the Equation Group (the malwaretech PoC was not even close).

Also note that the malwaretech blog required one solder or otherwise affix a JTAG interface to the drive's PCB. And that it described -- in 2015 -- hacking 'an old drive' - which would precede the era of signature protected FW. Though admittedly, the JTAG exploit could sidestep the FW signature difficulty.

From psychodad's quoted article on the NSA:

The attack works because firmware was never designed with security in mind. Hard disk makers don't cryptographically sign the firmware they install on drives the way software vendors do. Nor do hard drive disk designs have authentication built in to check for signed firmware.

^^^Obsolete info. Again, (most? all?) contemporary drives do indeed implement FW signature schemes preventing installation of unauthorized FW.

Then again, if my past employers had some backdoor agreement with the NSA, I'd likely not know about it.

[xhomerx10]

Romanian TV faking up an 'empty shelves' story. Everything from the shelves is just piled up behind the camera

 Okay, I did some investigating and my initial presumption was correct.  Romanians would not do such a thing - they are honest people. (and easily panicked as they remember too well Ceausescu times when food wasn't rationed and was scarce; the waiting time in line for the basics was hours - people would start lining up at 3am to be sure to get something - some even sending their children to hold a place in line)

 So Antena 3 was the station filming the empty shelving which originally contained flour.  The food in the foreground is some organic shit on tables (ain't nobody on a budget got time fo' dat!) and also some palettes of food yet to be stocked on shelves (described as "prostii" (junk - nobody would stock up on) in the video below.

https://www.cronicipebune.ro/antena-3-nu-goleste-rafturile/

 after the base URL it translates to Antena 3 did not empty the shelves

 You see! I knew Romanians were saintly people.

[Lambie Slayer]

https://nypost.com/2020/02/27/pope-francis-sick-a-day-after-supporting-coronavirus-sufferers/

RIP Pope??

This guy shakes a few hundred peoples hands each day all over the world. He is the Earths nexus point for germ spreading. At 83 years old if he has it, well its not gonna be a walk in the park. 14 percent mortality at that age.

These are dangerous times and King Bitcoin is here to keep everyone safe.

He has top notch medical service you could only dream of. He will do well.

LOL, an 83 year old with all the medical service in the world is nothing compared to a young healthy immune system the pope can only dream of. The pope already has sciatic nueritis. All the doctors in his Papal Kingdom can't cure it.

He also has GOD help.

God doesnt seem to be helping him much. Perhaps God is punishing him for not buying Bitcoin.

[bitserve]

Indeed, I’ve shipped devices that provided canned boot sector data before - not as an exploit, but because the operating environment needed such in order to function. Of course, that was a ‘from the factory’ thing, not a field exploit.

Yeah, that's exactly what THEY wanted you to believe

Just kidding. Or maybe not... Was that "canned boot" somehow easily replaceable with a different one afterwards? Ie: the canned boot residing in another area of the HD which could be updated or using a custom tool? Or just reusing all the developed firmware, replacing the "canned boot" and generating the payloaded firmware?

Well, the canonical example would be to package a disk with a 'paddle card' protocol converter which sits between the drive and the system's SCSI | ATA | Fibre Channel | 1553 | Ethernet | InfiniBand | whatever bus. The canned boot sector would be resident in the FW of the paddle card. Used for things such as allowing contemporary HDDs to be used as boot devices on legacy systems built before the dawn of large HDDs.

Yeah, well, THAT doesn't look like it would be so easily repurposed for malicious intents. But anyways, the point stands, not only it is theoretically possible but also psycodad has provided some links that would suggest it being exploited in the wild.. even if rare and requiring the exceptional talents and resources of the Equation Group (the malwaretech PoC was not even close).

Also note that the malwaretech blog required one solder or otherwise affix a JTAG interface to the drive's PCB. And that it described -- in 2015 -- hacking 'an old drive' - which would precede the era of signature protected FW. Though admittedly, the JTAG exploit could sidestep the FW signature difficulty.

From psychodad's quoted article on the NSA:

The attack works because firmware was never designed with security in mind. Hard disk makers don't cryptographically sign the firmware they install on drives the way software vendors do. Nor do hard drive disk designs have authentication built in to check for signed firmware.

^^^Obsolete info. Again, (most? all?) contemporary drives do indeed implement FW signature schemes preventing installation of unauthorized FW.

Then again, if my past employers had some backdoor agreement with the NSA, I'd likely not know about it.

Yeah, that's why I say "would suggest it being exploited in the wild"... The NSA/EG articule has a lot of incoherences and none evidence either. However spritesmod did indeed work out a proper PoC (https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack) probably outdated though as the article is from 2013 and the research prior that.

Anyway, still theoretically possible... and practically possible for state-level or equivalent attacker. If there weren't plenty of other easier attack vectors that is.