Tom7 is brilliant for anyone that hasn't seen him before. His Reverse Emulation video (<a href="https://youtu.be/ar9WRwCiSr0" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/ar9WRwCiSr0</a>) and Weird Chess Algorithms (<a href="https://youtu.be/DpXy041BIlA" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/DpXy041BIlA</a>) are a must watch. His dead pan delivery coupled with the ridiculous amount of effort he puts into things that don't _really_ matter is honestly inspiring.
Can anyone recommend other hidden gems like Tom's channel? I've been following him for years and still have not seen a merrier hacker. George Hotz's livestreams (<a href="https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzFUMGbVxlQs5s-LNAyKgcq5SL28ZLLKC" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzFUMGbVxlQs5s-LNAyKgcq5S...</a>) were as good perhaps, but the format is quite different, and he doesn't do them anymore.
I haven't finished the video just yet, but so far what he's describing is strange, weird, fanciful versions of Delay Line memory<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory</a>
When I think of "hack", these are what I have in mind. Completely bending something to a purpose never intended. Utterly bonkers. But the fact that he offers multiple concepts, implements them, and documents them in an ELI5YE (explain like i'm a 5th year engineer) is a true sign of genius.
Why limit ourselves to ping, when all of DNS is available for exploitation.<p>If we are willing to run an authoritative DNS server, we can simply find open DNS resolvers, then query TXT records from our own domain, with a suitably near-infinite TTL. It's free real estate^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H storage.<p>Perhaps that's not hard enough for harder drives. We can do the same thing, except use NX records from an arbitrary domain as the storage medium. We can query e.g. a01234-somedatahere.example.com, which will produce an NX record in the resolving DNS server. We can later "read" this data by issuing the same query and seeing that the TTL is not the original NX TTL of example.com. This is a destructive read process, so we will need to immediately write whatever we read, but suitably altered to avoid a collision, e.g. a01235-somedatahere.example.com.
I had a large collection of hard drives that had caused uncountable grief, we would relieve the stress by abusing the drives. Unfortunately they have long since been disposed of, but the collection included:<p>* subject drive to 100t press (it got thinner!)<p>* immerse drive in acid (little change) or base (drive dissolves!)<p>* subject drive to industrial guillotine<p>* warm drive with oxy torch<p>* drop from 300 ft tower (little change)<p>and so on. All good fun.
There's some prior art for the ping-based storage: <a href="https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs</a> , but the tetris storage is amazing.
The effort put into this video I’ve only seen matched by on YouTube by “Stuff Made Here”<p>While I can’t say I understand everything that’s going on, I am simply amazed by the creators talent and knowledge.
This video is hilarious, he has got such great sense of humor, I will be chuckling for a week... "harder drive"<p>And also infect all my peers.