Hacking old hardware by renaming to .zip [video] (opens in new tab)

On the one hand, every time I read an article like this I'm vindicated against astroturfed bots claiming that nothing ever happens and this isn't where we're headed.

On the other hand, I don't want to be vindicated.

It reads like a sarcastic post from 10 years ago ending in "Stallman was right"

The caveat here is that it needs to be local. I have a few things that work with HA, but they basically highjack the apps cloud login tokens ..

Don't want to remember how much money I spent on a Copengagen wheel for my wife when she was in school. At least some kind souls published a way to unbrick it.

It's a plus from the manufacturer side - kitchen gadgets you keep more than 10 years.

With required smartphone app, it is almost assured to not work in 10 years, and you have to buy another one. Just another method of planned obsolesence.

I've bought 4 internet radios over the last 25 years. They work for a few years, then are bricked because the remote server disappeared.

Needing an app for these things is stupid in the first place, but the real kick in the metaphorical nuts is that the needed app should be stored on the device. Want to use your phone to control the device load the program to do so off the device itself.

We really only have one tech stack where this actually works, the web. And I consider this to be either the great failure of the app ecosystem(why on earth do apps need a manual install step?) or amazement that the corporate overlords let the web slip through the gaps.

Is there a way to do web over bluetooth? or is that another missing piece?

If you're not cooking with WiFi, you need more key-down transmit power.

I'm currently full QRO on the 13cm band with something around 1600W EIRP CW, and will be for several minutes until the curry base defrosts.

And in a bold face font:

> You've always needed an account to operate your Joule Sous Vide with the Joule app. This is not a new requirement.

Absolute comedy.

I'd pay to cook with WiFi. Just imagine the signal strength!

Jack Donaghy would ride this pitch right up to the C Suite.

“Ambition is the willingness to kill the things you love and eat them to survive”

Super useful. I have a no-name USB microscope that only supported iOS and Android (just look up "USB microscope" on Amazon, there's like 500 versions of the same device). The device doesn't work like a normal webcam so you can't just plug it into a PC, and their mobile software is shady and low quality so I would only ever connected it to a GrapheneOS phone where I could prohibit their app having network access entirely because it gave me a bad feeling. As a result I underused the device since it was annoying.

I recently took their .apk and dropped it in a new empty project folder, instructed Claude Code w/ GLM 5 to reverse engineer the app, assess it for security and privacy concerns out of curiosity and then to probe the USB device to figure out why it doesn't work like a normal UVC webcam. After the investigation and planning I then instructed it to write a new app to use it on my desktop. I pretty much yolo'd it from that point and let AI drive the bus (I did the visual checks of the video stream in the app to provide feedback... while I watching a movie). I wound up with a working Electron app using libusb two hours later. With a Typescipt/C POC in hand as reference in another hour I had functioning Rust + egui application. Visually, both apps are rough around the edges but have complete functional parity with the mobile apps. It took 68 million tokens.

YouTube channel DextersTechLab was looking at a piece of retro tech, an interface box for an early broadcast painting system, it acts as a kind of hub for serial tablet, "rat" and other devices. It was built on an x86 microprocessor, some SDRAM and an EEPROM.

Mark gave me the ROM image, I tried using more conventional decompiling methods but the chips were exotic enough that I didn't get good results and as a last resort, I put it into Claude raw. Claude was actually able to parse the binary and sort of decompile it. It was able to tell me what the ports did and what the interfacing protocols were.

It then started making stuff up, clearly trying to impress me, but after a few rounds of reprimanding it and saying how making stuff up wasn't helpful, Claude stuck to facts.

Claude doesn't care as long as you aren't straight up asking it to write exploits. It's my go-to for reverse engineering tasks.

ChatGPT is full of refusals and has to be jailbroken out of it.

It is no questions asked. Even if you are reversing things like anticheats (I wanted to know the privacy implications of running the anticheat modules).

I use AWS Kiro, with the Claude models, and its only to happy to help. I give it the headerless ghidra, and decompilers etc... and away it goes.

Claude will opt to use a regular Java decompiler too.

It required a lot of manual work and for large apps like Minecraft it took teams of people to figure out what the symbol names should be slowly contributing a little bit every day.

Claude is quite skilled at using Ghidra, for example.

For RE cases where I know the original compiler used (a bit harder on C compilers due to huge number of obscure optimization flags), I give it a feedback loop to write a function that compiles to the original machine code.

While somewhat counterintuitive, I have found that Claude is better at decompilation than disassembly.

I've worked on docx and xlsx import/export and the public documentation for the formats was sufficient for normal documents (maybe excluding some very exotic features). That was ca 2010.

Even pk3 files from the id Tech engine are just zip files.

Well the executable binaries inside IPAs are encrypted, but the IPA bundles themselves are typically unencrypted. You should be able to see unencrypted assets inside of them

Even better, wait until people discover 7zip's 'parser mode' on Windows (especially). Right click a file -> 7zip -> Open archive -> #:e mode. Really fun way to quickly carve out files and snoop around. I use it like a poor man's binwalk to extract firmware files and updates and etc out of things to usual success.

(#:e Parser mode, ignoring full archives, and checks every single byte position of a file for 'start of archive' bytes to parse archives out of a larger file.)

You wouldn’t download a car

Before 1984 "take a taxi" meant you could actually take the taxi.

You're not taking all your shits in other people's bathrooms but soil your own instead? What a chump, lmao.

That's because zip is really just the first layer.