PaX

Kaepora Gaebora posting on main :did-you-get-all-that:

Artist is "Hail-NekoYasha", source at https://www.deviantart.com/hail-nekoyasha/art/O-RLY-NTNDO-33158110

can someone else use my machine as a router to forward traffic to anywhere else on the internet?

I'm not entirely sure what the security implications of that would even be if true but probably nothing good

I don't have any other routes in my routing table other than my "default" route and this machine is reachable via a globally routable IPv4 address. Also I think there are probably other machines on the same subnet (cloud VPS)

The nurse practitioner I'm seeing about my ADHD diagnosed me with bipolar disorder

She literally could not have surprised me more if she tried

This makes no sense to me but it's scaring me a lot :(

I don't really remember having manic episodes? Depressive maybe but it's usually after something bad happens to me and not really consistently....

I told her I put off making this appointment cuz I've been feeling really bad recently, then she just asked me a few questions like if people say I talk too much sometimes or if I do things impulsively and prescribed me an antipsychotic (aripiprazole) wtf

I asked some family and they haven't noticed anything like this... idk :(. Has this happened to anyone else? Am I just in denial? I'm afraid to take this drug she gave cuz I really don't need to be even more tired all the time... or tardive dyskinesia or something (unlikely, worst case)

Posting here cuz this rant that is coming together in my head is too long for the megathread and these events interact too much with my ADHD lol.

I have been off of the site for a bit just cuz I've been feeling so awful :(

Sooo I have some kind of unmanaged ADHD thing that's been wrecking my life for the last few years (it's a long story). The way I mildly kinda cope with it is huge doses of caffeine that sometimes give me the ability to get things I've been putting off (everything) done. But it also destroys my sleep and stresses me out so much I actually think it's starting to kill me lol. I have this issue with my eyes where I get random blind spots that develop and last for like a few minutes to an hour and no doctors have been able to tell me what it is. Stress makes it worse which makes me even more stressed and anxious about it :(

It's hell but somehow I'm still alive even though I feel like I'm nearing death every day. Also developing hypertension lmao. Recently, I actually got my ADHD certified as actually real and existing (diagnosed) but this shit they gave me (atomoxetine) cuz I made the mistake of telling them I've used recreational drugs before just makes me feel more depressed, wrecks my sleep even more, and makes me even more stressed-out lol. Idk I'm looking forward to trying all manner of blood pressure drugs and whatever else they can dig out of the pharmacopoeial backlog that makes me feel worse when I probably just need healthier stimulants to make me more able to deal with living in hellworld. I suppose I could ask but that probably won't go well considering the nurse practitioner who gave me this stuff was dismissive and mean toward me without me even asking for drugs lol. I have met like... maybe 2 nice mental health ""professionals"" in my life? (and I've seen many and not one seriously considered my concerns about ADHD until I met the first good one lol)

Anyway, this brings us to the real topic of this rant: I finally got a shitty, cheap, used MSM8916-based (Qualcomm system-on-chip (derogatory)) Moto G4 Play off of the the Internet after being without a working phone for like the last two weeks. The reason I got this phone in particular is because I deluded myself again into thinking postmarketOS was worth another try and this phone seemed to have decent support. It came yesterday and yesterday I was feeling particularly bad :(

I slept even worse than usual so I thought I would forego the usual caffeinemaxxing, drug myself with this kinda bad-feeling research chem GABAergic I have to calm down, setup this new phone quickly, and go back to bed. Yeah, and then I ended up staying up for the next 18 hrs trying to make this fucking awful phone work with my fucking awful... phone service provider (I'm gonna say PSP from now on) or whatever they're called. The initial setup was easy and fine but the phone had no service in either Android or postmarketOS. I had forgotten my PSP has some kind of rage-inducing IMEI allowlist system where if you're not using a specifically approved phone they won't allow your phone to register with their network regardless of if and has the capabilities they expect from an 4G LTE-speaking phone and it would have worked fine. I tried talking to customer service and they basically said "nah, we're not letting you use your phone, wanna buy another one? If not, get out of my face you disgusting removed modded phone user. I was gonna say you belong in prison for owning that but Linux phone users like you should go to a death camp. We're working on that :)". I had forgotten that this happened last time I got a phone like this and the only way I got around this was by changing the IMEI to an old iPhone. OoooOOOoh, IMEI changing, the forbidden topic of the XDA forums, yeah it's illegal in some places, which is fine because lying about your phone to your PSP is cool and good. Unfortunately, changing the IMEI of this phone was not as easy as with a Pinephone Pro (just one unsanctioned AT command! <3 <3 <3).

So I started on this journey of great trial and discovery: changing the IMEI of the embedded MSM8916 modem. At first, I thought this would be easy... but I underestimated the frustration-power of an undocumented-for-working-class-people SoC meant only to deliver slop into the eyes of a waiting, captive user. I could go into great detail here about what I tried, so many, many things that simultaneously blur into a morass of (ancient (relative to how fast the phone market moves), arcane malware-infested tools and forbidden incantations) and it being so frustrating that I remember it all. Different modem firmware, different Android systems, wiping modem configurations in different orders, different uhhhh "Qualcomm HS-USB Windows diagnostic drivers", (soooo many different tools, first-party (leaked Qualcomm tools) and otherwise), editing the IMEI in backups from Qualcomm tools and trying to write them back, grepping the modem configuration in flash for the IMEI, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. I got so close sometimes but the attempt would always fail for some absolutely inexplicable, indecipherable reason.

For those not aware, this is just what phones are like. It all barely fucking works, any """"""consumer"""""" equipment may fall apart at any moment and be impossible to repair, it has a trillion mechanisms to prevent users from modifying their slop-feeder, data-collecting device yet is riddled with security problems for those with the time, energy, and money to find them (the state lmao), chips or whatever are undocumented except to those who can prove to Qualcomm or whoever that they're a servant of some capitalist who needs documentation in the service of their lord, infrastructure barely interoperates despite the great efforts of phone cartels to standardize because their members can't help themselves from introducing things like vendor-specific extensions or practices like carrier locking or IMEI whitelisting in the endless pursuit of higher profits

Unlimited destruction upon phones, computers are fucked now we need a Butlerian Jihad NOW!

We need to return to PDAs

Fuck it, I guess I just live without a phone now I sure hope no one needs to call me lmao

Am I really hitting post on this lol

I was thinking of getting one of these as a cheap replacement for my broken (and disappointing) Pinephone Pro.

What's the experience like?

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/1747735

CPU-posting on main

MTI = MIPS Technologies (company that made MIPS (Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages) processors, they make RISC-V processors now lmao)

At the time when the MIPS R10000, known as the "T5" while in development, was being designed, MTI had made a name for themselves as designers of high-performance computer microprocessors along the lines of the then-new philosophy of reduced instruction set computing (RISC). Actually, their R2000 design was the first commercially-available RISC microprocessor. By the time the T5 was being designed, they were no longer alone in the RISC microprocessor market. Several companies, including IBM and Motorola (joined together in the AIM alliance which produced PowerPC), DEC (who designed the Alpha line of RISC microprocessors after MTI owned them in the 80s when their radically simpler chips were performing better than VAXen), and Sun Microsystems (who were making the SPARC line of microprocessors) were now marketing RISC microprocessors. Not just even marketing but beating MTI in the market they had created. After trying and failing to develop their own complete computer systems alongside their chips, they were having financial difficulties until Silicon Graphics acquired MTI to secure availability of MIPS microprocessors for their famous ("it's a Unix system, I know this!") MIPS-based workstations and servers. Although their new (in 1993) R4000 and R4400 designs performed well compared to their contemporaries, they were quickly being made obsolete by MTI's competitor's new offerings and they were left with a problem:

The MIPS R4000 and the R4400, which is essentially an R4000 with bigger on-die caches, were more or less just an architectural evolution from the R2000. The R4000 made its performance in much the same way as the R2000 did, the classic RISC design process mantra: "let's make it simpler" and thus be able to run it faster. In particular, what this means for the R4000, and what is a key difference from its predecessors and its contemporaries, is a technique called superpipelining. In an instruction pipeline, the maximum speed at which your processor can issue instructions is set by the pipeline stage which takes the longest to complete. Superpipelining is one way of addressing this problem: you can subdivide each pipeline stage into 2 simpler pipeline stages that individually complete faster and thus be able to clock your chip faster without problems. However, this has its limits. Eventually, it becomes impossible to further "deepen" the pipeline like this or clock the processor faster in general without other problems. This is why MTI's competitors opted for the analogous superscalar approach: you can duplicate functional units of your processor and have multiple instructions "in flight" at the same time and usually this also involves multiple pipelines. At the time MTI thought this approach would result in more consistently higher performance (not to mention save die space) but were quickly proven wrong when their competitor's superscalar (and often with other architectural tricks) chips were outperforming the R4000 in spite of MTI's fabrication partners constantly improving their process and releasing chips that ran at higher and higher speeds.

Enter the MIPS R8000 (die not pictured here) in 1994, a weird and expensive 6-chip 4-way superscalar design meant for the high-end microprocessor market while the next-generation T5 (which would become the MIPS R10000, as mentioned earlier) was under development. It didn't sell well because of its high price and the fact that its integer performance, important for general-purpose computing applications, was lacking compared to the 200-MHz R4400 that was being sold by then. It did, however, have impressive floating-point performance, which landed many R8000-based systems in the TOP500 supercomputer list for a time. But this design could never be the high-performance and general-purpose processor MTI needed to compete with their competitor's offerings...

Introduced in 1996, the MIPS R10000 (die IS pictured here) was a significant departure from the architecture of the R4000 (which more or less was directly derived from the first research done at Stanford University where MIPS was initially created over a decade earlier). Dropping the superpipeline approach, the R10000 is a 4-way superscalar processor even capable of executing instructions out of order! Another big change is that it has a branch predictor and speculatively executes instructions after a branch as opposed to the R4000, which used the classic MIPS "branch delay slot" technique to schedule one more instruction in the pipeline after a branch and then stall lol (they should have added even more delay slots, caring about binary compatibility is liberalism). It's hard to find benchmarks for something this old but this design performed at least several times faster than an R4400 at about the same clock speed!

If you like my CPU posting and want me to post more in the future let me know

Also ask me any questions if you want too and I'll try to answer

Edit: the server is live at byond://157.230.217.31:9999 !

Brief instructions:

Get the BYOND client, make an account, and log in.

Click "Space Station 13" in the game list.

Click this gear icon in the top right of the window:

Click open location and paste in the link at the top of the post starting with "byond://" and press OK. Then you should connect!

Me and @[email protected] have been talking about running a Hexbear SS13 server for a bit and we just now got it in a working state for testing.

Around 4 PM US EST / 7 PM UTC I'll edit this post with the IP address so anyone who wants to play can join. It's okay if you haven't played before.

All you need to play is the BYOND client from here:

https://www.byond.com/

Come join us in running/blowing up our space station!

There may be a few technical problems we haven't foreseen yet but we'll deal with them if it happens.

Here is our Discord discussion group if you're interested:

https://discord.gg/Qcy6enC2h5

We are gonna replace it with something more secure and private sometime. Didn't we have a Matrix server once?

On this day in 1983, a patent was granted to MIT for a new cryptographic algorithm: RSA. "RSA" stands for the names of its creators Rivest, Shamir, and Adlemen. RSA is a "public-key" cryptosystem. Prior to the creation of RSA, public-key cryptography was not in wide use.

Public-key cryptography

Cryptography is the study and practice of secure communication. Throughout most of its historical use, cryptographic techniques were entirely dependent on the involved parties already sharing a secret that could be used to reverse an encryption process. In early cryptography, the secret was itself the encryption process (for example, a Caesar cipher that substitutes letters in a secret message with letters a fixed number of steps down the alphabet). As cryptography became more systematic and widespread in use, it became necessary to separate cryptographic secrets from the cryptographic techniques themselves because the techniques could become known by the enemy (as well as static cryptographic schemes being more vulnerable to cryptanalysis). Regardless, there is still the issue of needing to share secrets between the communicating parties securely. This has taken many forms over the years, from word of mouth to systems of secure distribution of codebooks. But this kind of cryptography always requires an initial secure channel of communication to exchange secrets before an insecure channel can be made secure by the use of cryptography. And there is the risk of an enemy capturing keys and making the entire system worthless.

Only relatively recently has this fundamental problem been addressed in the form of public-key cryptography. In the late 20th century, it was proposed that a form of cryptography could exist where the 2 parties, seeking to communicate securely, could exchange some non-secret information (a "public" key) derived from privately held secret information (a "private" key), and use a mathematical function (a "trap-door" function) that is easy to compute in one direction (encryption) but hard to reverse without special information (decryption) to encipher messages to each other, using each other's respective public keys, that can't be easily decrypted without the corresponding private key. In other words, it should be easy to encipher messages to each other using a public key but hard to decrypt messages without the related private key. At the time this idea was proposed there was no known computationally-hard trap-door function that could make this possible in practice. Shortly after, several candidates and cryptosystems based upon them were described publicly 👁, including one that is still with us today...

RSA

Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman at MIT had made many attempts to find a suitably secure trap-door function for creating a public-key cryptosystem over a year leading up to the publication of their famous paper in 1978. Rivest and Shamir, the computer scientists of the group, would create a candidate trap-door function while Adleman, the mathematician, would try to find a way to easily reverse the function without any other information (like a public key). Supposedly, it took them 42 attempts before they created a promising new trap-door function.

As described in their 1978 paper "A method for obtaining digital signatures and public-key cryptosystems", RSA is based upon the principle that factoring very large numbers is computationally difficult (for now!). The paper is a great read, if you're interested in these topics. The impact of RSA can't be overstated. The security of communications on the internet have been dependent on RSA and other public-key cryptosystems since the very beginning. If you check your browser's connection info right now, you'll see that the cryptographic signature attached to Hexbear's certificate is based on RSA! In the past, even the exchange of symmetric cipher keys between your web browser and the web server would have been conducted with RSA but there has been a move away from that to ensure the compromise of either side's RSA private keys would not compromise all communications that ever happened.

The future of RSA?

In 1994, a mathematician named Peter Shor, developed an algorithm for quantum computers that would be capable of factoring the large integers used in the RSA scheme. In spite of this, RSA has seen widespead and increasing use in securing communications on the internet. Until recently, the creation of a large enough quantum computer to run Shor's algorithm at sufficient scale was seen as very far off. With advances in practical quantum computers though, RSA is on its way out. Although current quantum computers are still a very long way off from being able to break RSA, it's looking more and more plausable that someone could eventually build one that is capable of cracking RSA. A competition being held by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, similar to the one that selected the Advanced Encryption Algorithm, is already underway to select standard cryptographic algorithms that can survive attacks from quantum computers.

Megathreads and spaces to hang out:

• ❤️ Come listen to music and Watch movies with your fellow Hexbears nerd, in Cy.tube
• 💖 Come talk in the New Weekly Queer thread
• 💛 Read and talk about a current topics in the News Megathread
• ⭐️ September Movie Nominations ⭐️

reminders:

• 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
• 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes comments over upbears
• 💜 Sorting by new you nerd
• 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can reserve a spot here nerd
• 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog

Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

Aid:

• 🌈 LGBTQ+ Resource Post
• 💚 Resources for Palestine
• 🐌☕ Zapatista Coffee

Theory:

• ❤️Foundations of Leninism
• ❤️Anarchism and Other Essays

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/621898

In this photo, you can see how much the on-die cache has expanded compared to its predecessors and other contemporary embedded microprocessors. Really foreshadowing the kind of optimizations that would become commonplace today. In addition to its very large (for the time) 4-way set associative 256kb on-die secondary cache, it featured a 16k primary instruction cache and 16k primary data cache. It was fabricated at a 250 nanometer feature size and could be clocked up to 263 MHz. With its dual-issue superscalar 5-stage pipeline, it could achieve a Dhrystone score of 450 DMIPS at 263 MHz, a impressive score for embedded microprocessors of the time, although this benchmark really doesn't show off its cache performance.

Anyway, hope you like the pretty die shot of this forgotten microprocessor.