alt Hacker News"If you want to try it, be aware that it requires Intel Pentium 166MHz or above."
Made me laugh. Fun article, also really love the genre of "bored smart person goes too deep on something that the end result is obvious by common sense but proving it requires surprising amount of ingenuity and scrappiness"
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Totally agree.
And a great example that truth is complicated, expensive and uncomfortable. It's much easier to postulate an evil nation-state entity with a bad plan (without evidence) than to dig through the thicket of this article. It's much cheaper as well, certainly in terms of time and knowhow. And it's also much more comfortable to claim you're the victim and have uncovered a conspiracy, rather than realize this was just the result of the patchwork typical of engineering.
Kudos to the author.
It's fun, but I think this kind of thing is important because it underscores the xenophobia in the original post. A flash chip on a circuit board? Hoo boy, must be Chinese spyware!
That isn't to say Chinese spyware isn't a problem. But, if you don't have the baseline technical competence to detect it, it's bad to go running around yelling "CHINA CHINA CHINA!" That's how our politicians pick up a bogus news story and use it as an excuse to enact stupid policies. It's bad for society.
Don't forget `I was ready to head over to the Dark Web (amazon.com) and purchase one of the dongles just to dump the contents of the memory chip.`