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This all sounds like a wonderful way to write some truly annoying malware. I expect to see hidden mounts on SQL-escape-type-maliciously-named drives soon...

I understand your point; but I'm struggling to see how this could be weaponized. Keep in mind, that these Dos compatible drive letters need to map to a real NT path endpoint (e.g. a drive/volume); so it isn't clear how the malware could both have a difficult to scan Dos tree while also not exposing that same area elsewhere for trivial scanning.

I'm betting there's some badly written AV software out there which will crash on non-standard drive letters, allowing at least a bit of mayhem.

Not sure if it is natively supported, but the malware can just decrypt a disk image to RAM and create a RAM disk mounted to +. Or it can maybe have a user space driver for a loop device, so the sectors of the drive are only decrypted on the fly.

It would likely break a lot of analysis tools and just generally make things very difficult.


The recovery partition might work if it exists.

> This all sounds like a wonderful way to write some truly annoying malware.

AFAIK you need admin priviledges to play with drives in Windows.


Wait until your learn about Alternate Data Streams…

Decent writeup from CS with that evasion method described -

https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/blog/anatomy-of-alpha-spid...


They had their use when running Services for Macintosh.

They're still actively used to apply the Mark of the Web to indicate a file has been downloaded from an untrusted zone and should be handled with caution. I believe macOS also applies similar metadata.

There are a few other places where they also show up, but the MotW is the most prevalent one I've found. Most antivirus programs will warn you for unusual alternate data streams regardless of what they contain.


macOS uses extended attributes (can be manipulated with xattr).

ADS was originally designed to support the HFS resource fork.


I thought this article would be about freezing rights on either Godstow meadow or Christ Church meadow; both places where you can expect to see both horses and cows and places where it is not surprising to learn of medieval rules pertaining to the keeping of such...

Indeed. Martin's a great name in the field -- the thing that has actually made most clinical proton MRI substantially better over the last twenty years has been parallel imaging (acquiring the magnetic resonance signal from different spatially separated devices known as RF coils) and associated reconstruction techniques such as compressed sensing.

Given the fact that macrocyclic gadolinium complexes accumulate in the brain and the linear ones dechelate I think very few companies are pursuing new agents. I've done some work with different ions (like Dy, which has Curie paramagnetism) but a lot of focus in the field is trying to find alternatives to gad and reduce its use. There are plenty of great ways of getting more info out of a machine that spans quantum mechanics to medicine, from the established but now actually useful and routine (like advanced diffusion models) to the sort of utterly mad techniques I work on... [0]

[0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adz4334


Advanced diffusion certainly benefited from the acquisition speed ups. That is its biggest challenge in my opinion preventing it from wider clinical adoption. It takes too long to get enough images for the models. Hyperpolarized MR will run into issue of lack of expertise in clinical imaging centers. There is already a shortage of good techs and MR companies are working to further automate the workflows. Unless there is a major benefit of the advanced techniques, people will stick to the bread and butter FSE and DWI.

Funnily enough there's a different Martin (Martin Plenio) pushing the boundaries of MRI resolution using quantum effects (molecular hyperpolarization).

https://www.uni-ulm.de/nawi/institut-fuer-quantenoptik/ag-pr...

For a more technical intro, see https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.14521


Also cool, but it does not push the boundaries of MRI resolution. They try to bring a hyperpolarizer to market for a ¹³C-Pyruvate contrast agent, but it seems their hyperpolarizer is not yet certified. In any case, this will give metabolic information at low resolution so competes with PET.

It's perhaps worth linking to the official EC page on this proposal: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/faqs/digital-packag...


I sold an old Ultra45 from my lab on eBay rather than letting the university people scrap it.

It went for the equivalent of $2000 (which I later donated to a charity) and attracted quite a bidding war. Apparently at least one major airport (I won't say where or in which bit of the world) used one to control its landing light system and were, through a weird network of contractors, looking to buy more hardware for redundancy...

I have also put an IndyO2 SGI machine on eBay that similarly found a repurposed fate. We are now finally at the point where the machines I held on to as a teenager much to my mum's chagrin are now becoming highly valuable again!


Yup, the most desirable RISC systems are in the four figure range these days. SGIs have a zealous collector community and a long tail of applications like simulators keeping up demand.


I for one take every consumer survey opportunity to spell out why these things are a bad idea, and routinely contact my elected member of parliament to ask about this - she's sympathetic. The other opportunity to rebel is just to be difficult. Route all your traffic always through an anonymising VPN with defence against traffic analysis. If someone geoip blocks you from making a purchase, reach out to their customer support and gently reeducate them. Spend money on open source things, personally and professionally, and never buy DRM. Advocate for e2ee (I work partly in medicine - this is an easy sell) and highlight how decentralisation and encryption puts power in the hands of practitioners rather than big tech giants. If a large corporation breaks eg gdpr rules, report them to the regulator. Be the change you want to see in the world.

I don't like the way it's going either, but the array of technical solutions from mesh networks like zero tier and tailscale to briar, i2p and freenet right the way through to technologies such as wush, v2ray and x-ray, tor or daita all give me some hope that there will be a technological out for a long while yet. The social issues are best served socially though.


Well, I'd take that as an incentive to give your time and effort to another platform.


Yes I am thankful to them. I have been working on something for freelancers which I think will empower them and reduce their dependence on upwork.

This is a brilliant article from 2004. What a long way we've come with reserve engineering since then!


Even then, all of chemistry DFT is based on the idea that the electron density contains the physical observable information and you and I both know that the overall phase of the wave function isn't physical except through interference. There is plenty of useful qm without C already out there!


"except through the inference" is carrying a lot of weight there. That's pretty physical.


This is referring to the fact that overall phase is not real (no observable difference) but relative phase has. The word “except” is not downplaying its importance, but to emphasize the fact that overall phase isn’t physical.


That would be the browser fingerprinting in action. I often get a lot of requests to use widevine on ddg's browser on android (which informs one about it) for I suspect similar reasons.


Interesting, I'm on Brave and have never had a site request bluetooth access before, so much so that I'd never even granted Brave bluetooth access, hence why it popped up as a system notification this time around.


Doesn't Brave disable WebBluetooth by default via a flag?


Brave indeed does block WebBluetooth by default, but it can be turned on by the user using flags.

It's by no means a new feature, but the privacy concerns outlined in this post are still valid 10 years later: https://blog.lukaszolejnik.com/w3c-web-bluetooth-api-privacy...


Interesting. Is this fingerprinting in action? I have Widevine disabled on Brave desktop (don't recall if this is default), occasionally I get Widevine permission request on some sites.


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