So…
um…
How does 2kg of gold end up in a metric ton of human waste ash?
That’s a lot of Goldchager at .1gram/bottle…
BTW, that’s a placeholder question; insert any of the other assertions made in the article, e.g. 16.7grams of silver per metric ton of sludge, etc.
That video would have led me to think that makerspaces would have “Disassembly Committees,” and libraries of internal workings. DMS, though, isn’t so much about hacking existing devices, as it is creating our own devices, pretty much from scratch (and, therefore, the finished product is not too complex). Our attempts at hacking have mostly resulted in frustration, largely due to the reasons given in the video; modern goods are too complex, obscure and cheap to make modification practical.
That reference in the article apparently was to a region with a lot of manufacturing waste.
Some of that is from medicines. Some is just waste leaching out from our trash. More than that, I’m not certain.
Alright - back on topic.
“Because computer chips” is indeed a stumbling block for most. But I think that barrier is going to come down in the near to intermediate future. What got me thinking about this eventuality was this article. A private security firm - that presumably has limited resources - was able to dissect the secure chip, analyze it with a microscope, and using some optical trickery was able to extract the firmware. It’s possible that I’m behind the times on shoestring-budget espionage techniques, but I’ve always thought of those techniques as being solely the realm of multibillion-dollar industrial conglomerates and state-sponsored intelligence agencies, not small-ish private firms with (presumably) commercial-grade equipment almost anyone can buy.
Now imagine these techniques applied to more consumer-grade hardware. I doubt an ECU, video content-descrambling chip, or printer cartridge “authenticator” is going to go to the extremes that the lockmaker did in the article; they won’t let you siphon off the firmware via a handy RS-232 port, but odds are you won’t need to slice the chip and use optical trickery to make it give up its secrets. Once that firmware is out, it can be reverse-engineered then altered just enough to make it immune from copyright protection.
On the hardware side, it’s not hard to imagine emulation for proprietary parts should the OEM’s get greedy. Suspect that one could deadbug a cheap microcontroller in place of a number of proprietary designs. If you need something exotic, a FPGA could perhaps be fashioned or maybe something along the lines of an Arudino or Raspberry Pi.
Yes, the DMCA will stop commercialization of some of these techniques. But the information always leaks out somehow.
Reverse engineering is not as necessary today because so much software is open source. For example, I once had to decompile malloc and free in a compiler’s runtime library to make it quit doing some obnoxious things like fragmenting memory and trying to be helpful and dumping a list of memory blocks when it detected the heap was corrupt. Today, source code for the library is usually included as SOP.
Yep. DeCSS is a case in point.
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