One of the worst security flaws ever...

By power666

^{Mon, August 3rd, 2009 at 3:12AM CDT}
One of the dreams of a malicious hacker is to find a way to compromise a system that'll survive a complete reinstall of software and get into the system stealthy. Well such a vulnerability has been found but in the most interesting place: a keyboard, in particular recent Apple keyboards. There is a highly programmable firmware on the Apple keyboards. Anything that is open to programmability is potentially a doorway for hackers to exploit a system. Once the keyboard firmware has been replaced, the hacker can install things like key stroke logger, insert commands directly into a command line terminal, enter settings for controlling how the system boots up and do everything during a period of inactivity by the user so everything will go unnoticed. The initial scope of this flaw is relatively small but it does allow itself to open the system completely to a remote take over.

The only thing protecting consumers from this flaw is the initial difficulty of flashing the keyboard's firmware. Once flashed though, it can install software on a system spread itself onto any other vulnerable keyboard that is plugged into it. No word if this flaw can be exploited from Windows but considering its nature it would not be surprising.

Linkage

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Welcome to Syzygyans

By NoOutlet

^{Tue, July 28th, 2009 at 4:03PM CDT}
Ahoy again!

So, a lot has happened since I last posted to the blog.
For one, I bought the domain syzygyans.com and got hosting services for it. I'll be adding a page to explain the meaning behind "syzygyans" at some point but for now just accept it as being based on a cool word: "syzygy".
And disregard any posts that call the site NoOutSite. That's not the name anymore.

I've also set up (and am still working on improving) an automated blog system which I'll allow anyone to use in conjunction with their own subdomain. In other words, anyone can have username.syzygyans.com and by default it will be a blog that automatically gets the blog posts from threads you post in your forum. You can request this by sending me a message on here or by asking in the IRC or by contacting me in any other way you can think of.

I'm currently going to be working on setting up pagination for the auto-blogs so that you don't get just one single page of dozens of posts on the blog.

Also, my sister just registered and it's a good thing she did because apparently registration was broken.

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Rumor: Apple to make a game console?

By power666

^{Thu, May 7th, 2009 at 1:39AM CDT}
Alright, Apple has been making various acquisitions and making several interesting moves of late in the corporate world. This has again spurred rumors that Apple will enter the console business. This rumor has appeared a couple of times before in the past but enough has happened lately to warrant another look at what Apple could be doing in this area. TheInquirer.net story goes into detail about some of their hardware acquisitions like PA-Semi and licensing of various microprocessor technologies. However, TheInquirer.net missed several key people joining Apple lately. The most recent and previous chief technical officers from ATI/AMD, Bob Drebin and Raja Koduri, have joined Apple. In a bit of an infamous move, Apple hied Mark Papermaster another big chip designser. A lawsuit had to be settled before Mark Papermaster could even start working for Apple. With the PA-Semi staff handling CPU and chipset design and the ATI/AMD guys handling graphics, Apple doesn't need any outside design resources to design, well anything. There is no doubt that Apple has the hardware talent to design a console right now but the initial speculation was that it was all geared toward future iPod/iPhone designs.

Hardware in all honesty is a minor aspect in making a console successful. The de facto important part for a console are the games themselves. Apple obviously has no internal game development staff (Chess for OS X does not count). This brings me to the bigger piece of this puzzle: Apple looking to buy EA. There are other big name publishers/developers looking to be eaten by a bigger corporate fish. EA made a bid to take over Take Two earlier this year. Microsoft was rumored to be interested in Take Two as well. It'd be my own personal speculation at this point but Apple may attempt to acquire Take Two if they were getting serious about gaming. Who knows, they could save 3DRealms so the world can wait another 12 years for Duke Nuk'em Forever.

Even with hardware and games, there needs to be some one to coordinate everything for Apple to pull it off. Another new hire, Richard Teversham, is a big name in the gaming industry. He was the person behind MS's Xbox and Xbox 360 marketing and strategy: a fancy way of saying he was in charge of selling MS's consoles to consumers and spurring developer interest.

An Apple console will not be just a gaming device much like the Xbox 360 and PS3 of today. Those consoles are doing things Apple already provides to desktop computers and mobile devices. Apple making a console would be to protect those investments and growth from MS and Sony in the living room. Apple wants to be making money on the hardware, the software you use, the developers tools needed to make that software, an online retailer for media and means to get the media to your hardware. Thus if you used a desktop computer, just an iPod/iPhone or a gaming console, Apple will be making money at several levels. Leaving out the living room would be a rather large piece missing from their overall strategy. Apple does currently offer the AppleTV device to download HD movies to but it has been criticized for not offering as much as the Xbox 360 and PS3 which offer the same services in a similar form.

So Apple has the engineering talent, hardware licenses, rumored to buy big game developers, and some one with experience coordinating an overall console strategy. Does this mean that Apple is going to be releasing a gaming console? No but don't be surprised if they did.

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Caustic brings hardware ray tracing to computers

By power666

^{Mon, April 20th, 2009 at 2:38PM CDT}
PC Perspective takes a look at a hardware ray tracing unit from Caustic Graphics. Ray tracing is being touted by Intel as the next big thing in computer graphics. Indeed, ray tracing graphics are impressive and the technique is used by Pixar for its movies. What keeps ray tracing isolated to Hollywood movies and not gaming is simple: the processing requirements are steep. Full programmability is needed on top of fast parallel hardware. nVidia had a demo six months ago with ray tracing running on its graphics cards but its performance and quality are behind that of Caustic's solution.

So what exactly is Caustic's solution? It is a hardware and software combination. The board, the CausticOne, features two accelerator chips, two memory slots using standard DDR2 SO-DIMMs, and a PCI-E bridge chip for developers. The software stack, aptly named CausticGL, works alongside OpenGL with a similar syntax. The software libraries do not need the hardware as they have a pure software fall back but performance suffers greatly. The other thing worth noting is that developers needs a traditional GPU alongside the CausticOne for rendering. Various texture and filtering functions are still performed on that card. While not mentioned by PC Perspective, CausticGL should work alongside of OpenCL as that too is an extension of OpenGL.

The CausticOne will be sold mainly to professionals and developers. Several cards can be daisy chained together to increase performance. With the level of performance demonstarted, five CausticOne cards would be able to achieve real time performance at decent resolutions and quality settings. The CausticTwo due out in 2010 looks to be the first consumer card. The company is claiming a 14x increase in speed which would allow a ray tracing game at 1080p resolution at 60 fps.

For course I can go on and on, but seeing it is much more fun:



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