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spaqintoday at 12:50 AM1 replyview on HN

We were already there. For most people, we are still there. For most devices (especially popular ones, with enough manufacturing volume) there's just enough hardening, downgrade prevention, encrypted or signed firmware blobs, on top of already rare reverse engineering skills and patience, to make it infeasible for most people to give it a crack. Using an LLM for that also isn't a mainstream idea either (plus you're unlikely to have a Claude subscription if you're not a software developer in the first place).

Open systems are great and all in the idea, but the facts are that for profit companies do the research and produce most of the things.


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rustcleanertoday at 4:33 AM

>We were already there. For most people, we are still there. For most devices (especially popular ones, with enough manufacturing volume) there's just enough hardening, downgrade prevention, encrypted or signed firmware blobs, on top of already rare reverse engineering skills and patience, to make it infeasible for most people to give it a crack.

This should be illegal. Any politicians who run on [economically, financially] doing to these companies what is being done to Russia and Iran, if they refuse to immediately publish their hardware private keys, I will vote for. Up to and including jailing boards, stiffing bond and equity holders, and selling their assets as scrap, if they choose to purge their keys to prevent disclosure or if disclosure is impossible due to technical design. Maybe if a few trillion dollars worth of businesses suddenly vaporize into legal smoke, the remainders will start behaving for the next hundred years...