GoKawiil
Tech News
After a four-year effort, researcher DiscoStarslayer, working with developer Libby, successfully decapped and optically dumped the firmware of the PS2's MechaCon chip, a feat no one had achieved in the console's 26-year history. The pair used an exploit Libby discovered to extract the firmware and are now documenting metadata and hashes, with a full technical write-up promised soon.
Canadian retro hardware enthusiast DiscoStarslayer has successfully reverse-engineered and dumped the CXP102064 MechaCon chip found in the original 1999 PlayStation 2 console. The process involved chemically decapping the chip to expose its die, then using microscopes and optical dumping techniques before a software exploit finally allowed extraction of its data. The entire effort took four years to complete.
Cody Ho and Niklas reverse-engineered Apple's AGX GPU firmware and user-space stack to create a fully OpenGL ES 3.0 compliant Linux driver for the M4 Mac Mini and MacBook Neo, a project completed in roughly a month rather than the years such work typically requires. The driver already runs Chrome, Firefox with WebGL, and Minecraft at 200fps, though it remains unready for general users.
Anthropic researchers introduce a mathematical approach to mechanistic interpretability, aiming to reverse-engineer the internal computations of transformer language models. Their initial study focuses on small transformers with two layers or fewer that use only attention blocks, deliberately simpler than models like GPT-3, in order to identify basic patterns before tackling larger systems.
A developer who abandoned reverse-engineering Apple's Neural Engine (ANE) three years ago has resumed the project, this time focused on mapping its full internal architecture rather than making it usable via a Linux driver. The renewed effort was prompted by Apple's M5 chip, which emphasizes LLM performance and integrates ANE cores directly into the GPU, signaling the decline of the standalone neural processing unit design that began with the A11 Bionic in 2017.
Engineers building the ArcBox sandbox platform used standard Linux debugging tools like strace and objdump inside a live Claude Code Web session to inspect its runtime. They discovered the environment runs on Firecracker microVMs, identical to the technology behind AWS Lambda and Fargate, complete with hardcoded ACPI signatures, minimal 4-vCPU/16GB instances, and an unstripped Go binary called environment-manager pointing to a previously undocumented Anthropic internal deployment platform.
A hobbyist took apart an Egret GT electric scooter, examined its Bluetooth app and firmware update mechanism, and discovered a way to bypass its PIN lock via a hidden firmware update mode. He also found the scooter silently transmits unlisted telemetry data, including driving-mode duration, motor current, battery voltage and charge history, and went on to write custom Rust firmware for the scooter's display unit.
An anonymous security researcher has reconstructed and released a reverse-engineered version of Stuxnet's source code on GitHub, complete with build instructions. Stuxnet was the malware that sabotaged centrifuges at Iran's Natanz nuclear facility by targeting Siemens industrial controllers while masking the damage from plant operators.
Malik Piara has released an updated version of LogiCola 3, a modern port of Professor Gensler's 2008 Windows-only logic drill software, after two years of work. The new release restores infinite translation drills for mastery learning and reintroduces the original's colorful, playful visual style, responding to feedback from Hacker News, GitHub and email.
Jane Street released a puzzle challenging participants to reverse engineer an ASIC chip from just two files: a GDS layout file and a VCD file with example inputs and outputs. Kjartan van Driel and Leander Post worked through the challenge, breaking down how the chip's physical layout, organized into layers and reusable cells representing logic gates, could be decoded to understand its function without access to the original Verilog design.
A blogger with an engineering background details how they spent about a month reverse-engineering an ASIC chip design as part of a public puzzle set by trading firm Jane Street. The challenge involved analyzing a GDS chip-layout file to determine the chip's function, first through an easier warmup version with more design information, then a harder unaided version. The author has published their code on GitHub and plans follow-up posts explaining each technical step in more depth.
A data team encountered CronosPro database files (CroBank.dat, CroIndex.dat, CroStru.dat) that existing tools, including the open-source Cronodump converter, could not properly parse. Using OpenAI's Codex to analyze the binary structure, they identified parser bugs and an obfuscated schema, then patched the Cronodump codebase to correctly extract records for their data lake.