As George Costanza used to say, "You know, we're living in a society!", but just in case we don't, remember this website has a mirror on the Tor network, so bookmark it for safekeeping. RSS feed is here and so.cl feed is here.

RISC-V SoCs and SBCs

March 7, 2023 Post 1588 words 8 mins read

RISC-V is an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) based on established RISC principles. Unlike most other ISA designs, RISC-V is provided under open source licenses that do not require fees to use. A number of companies are offering or have announced RISC-V hardware, open source operating systems with RISC-V support are available, and the instruction set is supported in several popular software toolchains.

Below is a small list of some of the most important RISC-V SoCs (System on a Chip) and their development boards. I chose not to list the prices of the SBCs (Single-Board Computer) because they shift quite a bit depending on availability, location and the current Moon period.

StarFive JH7110

JH7110 is equipped with a 64-bit high-performance quad-core RISC-V processor core sharing 2 MB of cache coherency, whose working frequency is 1.5 GHz. JH7110 has a rich high-speed native interface, supports the Linux operating system, and has powerful image and video processing system. The StarFive ISP is compatible with mainstream camera sensors, built-in image/video processing subsystem supports H.264/H.265/JPEG codec. The integrated GPU makes its image processing capabilities stronger, such as 3D rendering. With high-performance, OpenCL/OpenGL ES/Vulkan support, JH7110 can further enhance intelligence and efficiency. JH7110 can complete a variety of complex image/video processing and intelligent visual calculations. Also, it meets multiple visual real-time processing requirements at the edge. source

manual
four RV64GC SiFive U74 application cores, one RV64IMAC SiFive S7 monitor core and one RV32IMFC SiFive E24.
1.5GHz
28nm

Is Your Son a Computer Hacker?

March 3, 2023 Link https://gwern.net/doc/cs/2001-12-02-treginaldgibbons-isyoursonacomputerhacker.html

BSD, Lunix, Debian and Mandrake are all versions of an illegal hacker operation system, invented by a Soviet computer hacker named Linyos Torovoltos, before the Russians lost the Cold War. It is based on a program called “xenix”, which was written by Microsoft for the US government. These programs are used by hackers to break into other people’s computer systems to steal credit card numbers. They may also be used to break into people’s stereos to steal their music, using the “mp3” program. Torovoltos is a notorious hacker, responsible for writing many hacker programs, such as “telnet”, which is used by hackers to connect to machines on the internet without using a telephone.
Your son may try to install “lunix” on your hard drive. If he is careful, you may not notice its presence, however, lunix is a capricious beast, and if handled incorrectly, your son may damage your computer, and even break it completely by deleting Windows, at which point you will have to have your computer repaired by a professional.
If you see the word “LILO” during your windows startup (just after you turn the machine on), your son has installed lunix. In order to get rid of it, you will have to send your computer back to the manufacturer, and have them fit a new hard drive. Lunix is extremely dangerous software, and cannot be removed without destroying part of your hard disk surface.
T. Reginald Gibbons

The alt.cyberpunk FAQ

March 2, 2023 Post 15897 words 75 mins read

Note

This compilation of Cyberpunk resources is not my work (unlike this one), I just converted the HTML format to Markdown so people can change it easier without knowing HTML. It would be a shame to lose such an amazing Cyberpunk resource that is part of our history. The Markdown file can be found here (it’s work in progress, not all the links are converted yet), if you want to change things please mail it back to me (I will do the diffs myself, don’t worry about it). The original HTML file can be found here.

Background

The legendary newsgroup hierarchy alt.cyberpunk has been hibernating for a few years now, but that is no reason why this FAQ should not be useful. Usenet itself is rather dormant and not all ISPs provide access. Google Groups, formerly Dejanews, provide web access to the alt.cyberpunk hierarchy.

So here it is, dusting off the info dump and readying it for a world that is like the 1980’s all over again. This means much of the content is radically reorganised.

This is Version 5.1 preview 3 of the alt.cyberpunk FAQ. History is a little foggy, but it appears that previous maintainers/editors and version numbers are as given at the end. Presently, the maintainer follows alt.cyberpunk (which is easily done) and 4chan.org/g/cyb/ when operative and also anon.cafe/cyber which is a more recent hangout.

Sam Wills: Breathe

February 25, 2023 Music 112 words 1 min read

Resource monitoring with collectd

February 20, 2023 Post 1355 words 7 mins read

Telemetry is bad. Everybody knows it. However, monitoring the health and performance of one’s server is critical for preventing unnecessary problems and it is important to have a system in place that can collect system and application data accurately and display it in an understandable manner.

What is collectd?

collectd is a daemon which collects system and application performance metrics periodically and provides mechanisms to store the values in a variety of ways, for example in RRD files. collectd gathers metrics from various sources, e.g. the operating system, applications, logfiles and external devices, and stores this information or makes it available over the network. Those statistics can be used to monitor systems, find performance bottlenecks (i.e. performance analysis) and predict future system load (i.e. capacity planning). Or if you just want pretty graphs of your private server and are fed up with some homegrown solution you’re at the right place, too ;). homepage

This configuration monitors the following:

basic system resources (load, processes, CPU cores)
swap and RAM
disk(s) usage
networking on ports 22 (SSH), 80 (HTTP) and 443 (HTTPS)
number of logged-in users
sensors data

TSA No-Fly list download

February 16, 2023 Post 194 words 1 min read

As you already know if you are reading this article, the TSA No-Fly list was exfiltrated by a Swiss hacker from the U.S. national airline CommuteAir servers a while ago. After it was put up for sale on the breached.vc forums by someone, that someone made the list(s, because there are two .csv files) free to download.

Long story short, here it is the list, in all its glory, no strings attached.

Hidden IRC server over Tor

February 14, 2023 Post 456 words 3 mins read

Mixing Tor and IRC is a bit more complicated than simply downloading the Tor Browser, so I will explain how to install/configure an IRC server, connect this server to the Tor network and connect to the server as a client.

What is IRC?

IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. The process of IRC is based on client-server networking model. You might want to read more about IRC in the RFC-1459, RFC-2813 - Server protocol and RFC-2812 - Client protocol.