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Photon-Emission-Guided Laser Fault Injection Enables RP2350 Secure DebugDifferential photon-emission microscopy localized debug enable register activity before SWD-guided laser injection restored Secure debug on an RP2350 A4.
Ledger Donjon shows how photon-emission microscopy guided laser fault injection to set DEBUGEN bits on a locked Raspberry Pi RP2350 A4, then used rescue reset to recover an OTP challenge secret—requiring destructive access and ~$250k lab gear.
13 min · 3,017 words
ShapeLearn-Lite Held Up. ShapeLearn Did Better: Qwen 3.8 27B
ByteShape publishes full ShapeLearn GGUF builds of Qwen 3.8 27B, comparing quality and speed against ShapeLearn-Lite and other quants across RTX 3090–5090-class GPUs.
19 min · 4,316 words
Daniel Mangum digs into unexpected register values on Nordic's nRF54L while poking the Key Management Unit from a debugger, and explains how SoC security components can make the debugger's view of memory misleading.
11 min · 2,579 words
How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?
Daniel Lemire compares AMD Ryzen 7 X3D chips from Zen 3 to Zen 5: Geekbench gains of ~50% came less from clock and more from wider cores, larger caches, bigger ROBs, and 512-bit SIMD.
2 min · 468 words
Flock cameras are riddled with security vulnerabilities and hard-coded credentials
This morning, DDoSecrets published an exciting new dataset: Filesystem images of the partitions from an in-use Flock ALPR camera. 404 Media and Wired published a joint investigation into it. I downloaded the dataset and am now thoroughly nerd-sniped. Hackers from a collective called stegan0gram collected the data. “Why just destroy [Flock cameras] when we can reverse engineer them and find the secrets of those spying on us?” one of the hackers told 404 Media and Wired in an interview. “We liberated hardware in the field, disarmed them, and proceeded with reverse…
6 min · 1,438 words
Apple Copland D11E4 booting in your Browser
Michael Steil ships Apple’s cancelled Copland OS build D11E4 in-browser via improved DingusPPC wasm, with patch notes for unlocking the last developer build.
1 min · 161 words
Subnormal floating-point numbers are expensive… on Intel processors
Daniel Lemire benchmarks IEEE subnormal floating-point performance across Intel Granite/Emerald Rapids, AMD Zen 5, AWS Graviton 5, and Apple M4 Max, finding ~45–50× slower multiplies on Intel while AMD and Arm stay near full speed.
2 min · 466 words
The engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve
One of the most fascinating things I’ve learned about recently is the engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Here are the key requirements it’s designed to meet:
4 min · 939 words
“The Secret Life of Circuits” is hereWhy Michał Zalewski wrote a book about how circuits actually behave
lcamtuf (Michał Zalewski) announces The Secret Life of Circuits—why he wrote a hands-on electronics book focused on how real circuits behave, with notes on layout, endorsements, and who it’s for.
2 min · 442 words
Why Your Linux Kernel Starts With 'MZ' (Yes, the DOS/PE One)
A deep dive into why the Linux kernel image begins with the DOS/PE 'MZ' header—boot compatibility history, EFI stubs, and what the legacy magic bytes still do on modern systems.
9 min · 2,082 words
Don't Let Anyone Take Away Your Big Box of Cables
Jim Nielsen makes a short, affectionate case for keeping the time-honoured box of miscellaneous cables after digging out two needed cables that had sat in the box for over a decade. He commemorates the moment by taping a handwritten note to the box declaring its value.
1 min · 233 wordsagent-written
Serving LLMs on Tenstorrent Hardware: Inside the vLLM TT Plugin
vLLM and Tenstorrent introduce an out-of-tree TT plugin that registers Tenstorrent accelerators as a vLLM platform—covering mesh scheduling, single-process data parallel choices, and an unchanged OpenAI-compatible serving surface.
12 min · 2,863 words
The "$60 Gaming PC" — AMD BC-250
The AMD BC-250 is a single-board PC based on a binned PlayStation 5 APU (RDNA 2 GPU, Zen 2 CPU, 16GB GDDR6) originally designed for cryptocurrency mining. The post documents how to acquire one for roughly $60–100 and configure it under Linux to run modern games like Cyberpunk 2077 at playable framerates.
1 min · 268 wordsagent-written
This PCB is brought to you by Fable 5 — A6M-Zero
An experiment to design a cute PCB (without touching any tools) in plain English
5 min · 1,256 words
Can AI design circuit boards yet?
EEBench describes how it built a benchmark to evaluate whether AI models can produce correct, functional circuit designs, motivated by OpenAI's demo of GPT-6 Astra working in KiCad. Rather than having agents click through GUI tools, EEBench uses atopile, a code-based circuit description language, so models can work directly on components and constraints and have results evaluated programmatically.
1 min · 281 wordsagent-written
Retrospectively Reverse-Engineering Apple's Neural Engine
Eileen Yoon revisits the Apple M1 Neural Engine three years after abandoning an open-source driver project, motivated by Apple's decision to fold standalone ANE cores into the GPU in the M5. The post maps the full internal architecture—compute cores, DMA scheduling, memory layout, and execution model—to explain the design assumptions Apple committed to silicon in 2017 and how those assumptions collided with transformer workloads.
1 min · 305 wordsagent-written
Reverse Engineering the iPod Classic's Undocumented Mikey Chip
My iPod Classic (7th gen) runs Rockbox, and I love almost everything about that arrangement. But the inline remote on Apple’s wired earbuds (the center play/pause button and the volume clicker) did nothing. Never has, for anyone running Rockbox on this family of iPods. ``` /* TODO: * - detect jack accessory * - support for remote buttons */ ``` And honestly, fair enough. Rockbox on this iPod exists because volunteers reverse engineered Apple hardware with zero documentation, for free, since January 2011. Music, clickwheel, recording, all of it figured out the hard way.…
12 min · 2,803 words