First, I'll admit I've not been here for a while, and am out of touch. There have been a few minor distractions this year. Second, beyond running folding@home on underused Linux machines to help with biomedical research, it is now possible to run rosetta@home under BOINC on a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4. It...

Almost anyone running powerful services on the Internet can figure out if you are a unique individual unless you take exceptional steps to avoid detection. If you do, you need to disguise them from various web sites you use, or the simple fact of taking special care will put you on a special list. H...

With all the concern about future deepfakes, and various politicians having problems with sexual indiscretions, it is perhaps natural that this would be the time when enterprising types would start selling an app that produces deepfakes undressing women in photographs. Naturally, this was covered by...

It would be nice if cthisbear's idea worked, but I'm afraid you are dealing with a bad flash of the SPI chip. There are clip-on programmers that might be used, though I don't have experience with them, particularly for laptops. I am not too bothered by buying a small cheap device to reprogram some s...

@TerryH, While repairmen are inside your laptop replacing the chip make sure they check the solder connections on the battery connector and the one for the power adapter. These are easy to touch up with a soldering iron, once you get to them. Rant: I keep finding laptops with soldered connections be...

Debugging tip: Don't always assume you are dealing with a single fault. The assumption that a broken system has only a single fault is only made for convenience, and is most likely to be true in systems that are very carefully maintained, so that you notice quickly when onset of a problem occurs. If...

Some success. I've succeeded in flashing the UEFI/BIOS and now pass the scan of the UEFI. Still have the problem of not recognizing a Dell battery. This machine has been running Windows 10, which naturally means you can't access the command prompt you need to carry out the instructions in that artic...

That sounds like the exact same laptop I was handed to fix. You really should check for people on-line who might know the problem and how to fix it quickly. I've sent a machine with a well-identified problem all the way to New York City for repair because that was cheaper, even with shipping, than t...

@Terry H, Ouch! You may need to replace the chip that holds the firmware. You might check on swapping the entire motherboard, if you can't find anyone who will do that repair. Bad flashes are known problems, and the main thing discouraging repairs is the limited value of the resulting repaired machi...

@Terry H, See if you can install the free trial version of ESET security under Windows, they have been detecting LoJax for several months. I think the failed update is caused by a false indication that the computer has no charged battery or official power adapter. The safe option to avoid bricking t...

The laptop is a 2016 model with service tag 3Q3KKC2, but I have no interest in taking it apart to access the SPI flash memory. If I take it apart I'll use it for parts. Using legacy boot isn't exactly a solution. Both UEFI and Legacy boot are performed by the same firmware, which we know is compromi...

Recently I was handed an old Dell laptop to find out why it was so slow. There was also a problem with it not recognizing that it had an official Dell battery or power adapter. Problems persisted after swapping the hard drive. I also checked for a memory configuration error that could cause a drasti...

While the two large companies involved deny any such thing happened, various people in IT security have said this would be devastating . Why the denials? Well, we are talking about two trillion-dollar companies who could lose many billions if their security is questioned, or their intellectual prope...

This article finally explains why a large number of perfectly good Supermicro motherboards suddenly showed up on surplus markets two years ago. A great deal has been left out for various reasons, but I can deduce a little more. The tiny size of these chips and the small number of leads means they w...

We have several different topics in this thread, like the GDPR, which belong in separate topics. What I'm adding to this is a mention of a new vulnerability in Intel processors due to caches used to implement hyperthreading . It does not depend on speculative execution, but it does use a timing side...

In the last two weeks I've made a couple of house calls to fix router problems for people I know. Meanwhile, I've been learning that the router malware VPNfilter is much more dangerous than thought. Cyber Threat Alliance Talos Intelligence This is now known to infect 71 different common router model...

Some time ago I bought a box of hardware tokens labeled PayPal and VIP. I figured this would enable me to add a one-time code from a physically separate device to my PayPal login, making it much harder to hack. My next problem was that PayPal did not want to admit they still supported this, though I...

Just when you thought you might be able to trust the hardware you are running, after patching for Meltdown, Specter and variants, there is a new exploit named SSB that finds timing differences caused by storing results of speculative execution . The problem comes from fetching things before you can ...

@purple379, I've told you my solution above. Use text email for security. Encrypt/decrypt in a separate application, so your email client does not have access to the keys. Also, run your browser in a sandbox, so it doesn't have access to sensitive data. Anytime you run unknown code with access to th...

Here's the official explanation for the "efail" exploits, as promised. As predicted above, it relies on HTML rendering in the same email client that performs the decryption. This only gets the plaintext into an untrusted process running on your machine. The next step is to "exfiltrate...