💾 Archived View for midnight.pub › posts › 2117 captured on 2024-12-17 at 18:50:40. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Good evening ~bartender, a filter coffee please.
I wanted to try some distros on my pc today, but apparently I don't have any USB sticks at home. None with more than 1 GB of space at least. Because of this, I acquired the most cursed USB drive in my possession. I've found an old windows 10 installation USB stick. One of those official ones. APPARENTLY, they have some really annoying write-protection going on. Like, not even just a "oh, let's give the volume a read-only attribute" type of thing. The firmware straight up forces the volume to be read-only. I had to go *flash* the *flash drive* firmware through some shady software I found on a Russian website. Hopefully didn't get anything problematic from it.
On the upside, I now have a USB stick that says "windows" which boots up Debian :p
Oh hey Smudge! Did I tell you I'm like one of those lactose intolerant people that eat cheese anyways? Yeah, I pay the price of petting you with some scratchy eyes and sneezes but the that's well worth it. I think I'll chill in the corner with you for a while...
Now I hear that Windows is getting rid of the control panel. WTF Bill Gates?
Firmware, huh? One would expect a simple dd to be enough, after all, it's just a block device. How does one work around the firmware? I can imagine a rather simple C program should be enough, as long as one finds the appropriate entry point, do we have to write to some specific location within the device? VERY interesting.
A fun little bit, in my language 'to dd' translates into an obscenity. I always enjoy the very few opportunities I get to talk to people in my country to mention "dd'ing" a usb drive.
I went through a bit of a phase of buying old tech from pawn shops, I got a very little netbook with an ARM processor that ran some very watered down version of Windows, yes, I was amazed that there existed an ARM-based windows distribution! As you can imagine, it didn't have any BIOS, so the problem was, how to get linux to run on it to push out the windows? My idea was that I would have had to find an entry into the kernel, and once in kernelspace, I could just inject the code to write the new OS directly into disk, of course, making sure to know how that processor loads the OS from disk to begin with!
I never really tried, however, I could hardly find any info on that ARM-based windows, let alone find a vulnerability in it. The thing is still lying there, somewhere, probably, I think.
~bartender, a coffee, with some adderall in it if prossible, thank you.