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I had an intel MacBook that was a good fit for doing reverse engineering work on malware. I suppose this method would be kind of a compromise for those that still want to use Mac system, even know it is incompatible with most of their RE tools/virtual machines.

Anyone used Ghirda on a M1 Mac?


I’ve been using Ghidra on Apple silicon even before M1 came out, it works quite well. I’d suggest building it yourself so you can get native decompilers, though.


What Apple Silicon before M1? The Ax Processors?


A12Z on the DTK.


Plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest Ghidra works fine on Apple Silicon (I also haven’t personally run up against anything unexpected)


Yup, it works.


I had a coworker who was having some issues. I chuckled when he had an alias for history | grep when I was checking out his env


To be fair, I also have that alias and use CTRL+R. They are useful for different scenarios. CTRL+R when I know what command I'm looking for, but can't remember the full one. `history | grep -i $TERM` when I remember some part of the command, but not exactly sure. With that, I get a list of possible candidates to choose from, instead of having to do CTRL+R repeatedly to find the command I was looking for.


Is that why his Mercurial wasn’t working?


Did this years ago. I am very thankful I did. It has saved me a few times on cmd syntax. Seems like iptables is the one I always screw up. I recently started migrating the history across reinstalls.


> I haven't adopted a "never talk to the police" vibe, but I seriously think twice about talking to cops for anything that matters.

I was a police officer for a good portion of my life. The problem is you may not know what matters. I have a couple teenagers and I don't even let them talk to school administrators without me present if there was some type of trouble at school. I certainly would never let my children talk to the police and I myself, would never talk to the police. You may think what you are saying sounds innocent but you never know how the officer is viewing your statement or what king of evidence they are looking for.

For example, a few years ago my neighbor's house burned down in the middle of the night. He and his family had decided to spend the night elsewhere that night before the fire started. Apparently, he had some hotel points from work travel and they stayed the night at a fancy hotel -- locally. Investigators were suspicious of this so they brought him in for questioning. From his account, he said they were very friendly to him and sorry that his house had burned down. They jokingly asked if he had ever missed any payments on his house. He said actually he missed this months because of a illness in his family that required extra money. But that he had worked it out with the bank. Well the investigator ran with that statement and the fact that his whole family wasn't home and opened an arson investigation with him as the suspect. It took nearly a year to clear him and the insurance wouldn't pay until the investigation was done. He continued to pay for the house and had to live with relatives. The whole thing was crazy. If he wouldn't have talked to the police, they would have relied solely on the fire investigation report which didn't indicate arson.


So as an ex police officer, why do you think your ex colleagues did stuff like this? i.e. Intentionally twist someone's statement or lull them into a false sense of security to say something that will be intentionally misinterpreted?

I know policing is just a job, but given that the impact of your actions can and often screw the lives of innocent people, with no opportunity for recourse on top of that, why do (many?) police officers not feel any responsibility to do the right thing?

You don't hear of doctors and nurses being so callous in their jobs, or at least the rate of incidence seems to be orders of magnitude lower compared to law enforcement.

In your opinion, what can be done to improve the system? Would making it easier to file and win lawsuits against the police/prosecution for incompetence/malpractice help? (similar to doctors)


Not a cop, but it doesnt seem to be much of a stretch to investigate.

Neighbor knows he didn’t do it, but cops don’t. Their job is to collect information and be suspicious (at least to some degree). Detectives are probably rewarded in some way, their job is to deliver a case to a prosecutor.

DA/Prosecutors are rewarded by conviction rates, particularly those who are elected. Has nothing to do with justice or the truth. And ultimately most of them probably feel any injustice isn’t because of the way they did their job, but the Jury making the wrong choice.


I don't think the police took the wrong approach. It was just fueled by what the suspect said. If he would have went in and said "sorry, I just don't feel comfortable talking to you without a lawyer." There would have been no harm. The detective likely would have checked the alibi (ensuring he was at the hotel), relied on the fire investigator's report, and closed the case. But, giving the police more information is only giving them more to explore. Now they may want to look at his financials, did he recently update his insurance, what other debts does he have, are there any weird calls/communications to others, did he purchase anything suspicious, did he conduct any research about arson, etc - and that takes time.


From the one comment, it doesn't sound like the police were doing anything malicious per se. It sounds like the owner of the burned out house gave an investigator a reason to investigate. Imagine being a bored investigator looking for something to do, and then a set of suspicious circumstances falls into your lap. Of course there's going to be an investigation. And that's why you don't talk to the police casually without representation when you could be implicated in something bad.


two reasons IME. one is that it's easy to adopt a just world hypothesis and our biases as humans play it up. imagine doing this on the reg:

- detain someone for something e.g. traffic stop for speeding

- find probable cause e.g. alcohol on breath

- find other bad stuff e.g. a gun or meth

- arrest and mutter under breath "got the bad guy, he deserved it, saved innocent lives" or w/e else

- go back to first step with an additional data point that speeders may also handle drugs and be driving drunk

two, incentives are what they are. police generally aren't rewarded for doing high quality year long investigations that uncover every particular fact in a meticulous and honorable way - there isn't $$ or staff. incentives suggest that closing them gets you farther than "doing a good job, for certain values of good widely held by the public". for the district attorney, they largely have the same incentives (throughput) and so prefer open and shut type setups or plea deals so as to get things moving quickly. so they aren't helping the situation either.


I agree closing cases faster would be seen as favorable.


Good comment & question.

Reading it, it comes to mind that one difference between the medical profession and others is the Hippocratic Oath, starting with the promise to “first, do no harm”.

I don't know of any similar ethos in policing (and there's plenty of popular-culture/film glorification of extralegal means to get the bad guys).

Perhaps policing could benefit from such an approach?


Most departments have a motto. LAPD "To project and serve", NYPD "Fidelis Ad Mortem" (Faithful unto death). I worked in a large metro area and I generally got the impression that you do what is right and follow the rules. I still work in law enforcement, just not on the street anymore (computer crimes) and I still have the same impression with the officers I deal with.


I also have good friends who work in policing (and don't have a problem with most policing as some do).

I certainly would say that police have a solid ethos, which is indeed voiced in mottos like the ones you mention.

The distinction I'm making is that the "do no harm" goal at the top of the medical ethos is different, and wondering if that could help in the policing world.


OpenText also acquired Guidance Software a few years ago. They make EnCase which is one of the largest digital forensic software tools utilized for investigations.


And EnCase has promptly gone to shit.


I was a developer at Guidance from 2003-2010. I left because the future was easy enough to foresee. There might be one or two developers left at OpenText whom I know, but most have left. It’s all about milking that Enterprise SMS revenue.

X-Ways and Magnet are rightfully decimating EnCase’s traditional use in forensics.


Yes, I agree with you on that!


Wish they listed out how many installs.


At pypistats.org download numbers of the last half year can be found. * python3-dateutil has 271 downloads from non-mirrors in last month[1]

* jeilifish has only 106 downloads from non-mirrors in last month[2]

[1]:https://pypistats.org/packages/python3-dateutil

[2]: https://pypistats.org/packages/jeilyfish

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21702973



Twilio is making this pretty easy. I just ordered three SIM cards from them that I can provision, to see how it works. Their aim is for these SIMs to be utilized in IoT devices.

https://www.twilio.com/wireless


I didn't know that either. Here's a couple quotes from an article about how Mark ran MtGox:

> Beneath it all, some say, Mt. Gox was a disaster in waiting. ... A Tokyo-based software developer [says it] didn’t use any type of version control software [and] he says there was only one person who could approve changes to the site’s source code: Mark Karpeles. ... “The source code was a complete mess,” says one insider.

> The 1,719 lines of commented PHP code...include code to access individual customers’ Bitcoin wallets and to process transactions. ... Anyone who had access to the server running this code could have easily redirected transactions or pillaged the Bitcoin wallets.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2476003/the-php-that-s...


>didn’t use any type of version control software

What kind of incompetent fool doesn't use version control in this day and age?


avoiding linking usernames on different sites...


Okay, that’s a fine guess. The question I asked - “OP: Why?” - remains unaddressed.


OP: understands how easy it is to find accounts of the same username and writes tool as a result

OP: uses different usernames, for the same reason

I'm not sure what is "particularly odd" about this? Also, you have a very accusatory tone.


The question was for OP for a good reason. I’m not feeling accusatory, just disappointed in y’all. I received lots of “speculating about OP’s thoughts and feelings” replies that have not added anything useful to the discussion beyond the speculation that led me to ask OP to clarify in the first place.


> Data collected from your system is temporarily stored locally on your system before being uploaded to a secure cloud environment, which may be physically located in accordance with Intel’s Privacy Notice.

> Intel keeps the data for a maximum of seven years. Intel takes reasonable steps to reduce the risk that any data kept for over three years can be traced to a particular computer.

Tied to user for 3 years. From a law enforcement perspective I’m more interested in the ‘other devices in your computing environment’. They state they are generating a random UID tied to your system, so I assume if I know the UID from the suspect computer then a warrant could be issued to Intel for this information.


If it's kept over three years, you have to believe that there are backups of the data made, and that the backups are retained forever. So ANY persistent mapping from the data to a specific computer is effectively permanent the moment it hits their backend (maybe someone has to load a tape, so it's not instantaneous, but still available to a warrant or subpoena or shenanigans).

If there is any "risk that any data ... can be traced to a particular computer" on day 1 that the stuff is stored, then that risk never goes away.


They also keep it after you eventually opt out.


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