✧✦Catherine✦✧
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whitequark.treehouse.systems.ap.brid.gy
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@whitequark.treehouse.systems.ap.brid.gy
cat(girl) shaped object, hardware omelas kid

"A cat is valued for companionship and its ability to kill vermin."

✧ i have friends, and my purpose is […]

🌉 bridged from ⁂ https://social.treehouse.systems/@whitequark, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact
kill it!!!

(there are 51 instance of `killall something` in this .so, of which 23 are `killall -9`)
January 23, 2026 at 8:47 PM
to everybody suggesting other types of derangement: no, please understand, this is _specifically_ crackhead engineering
January 23, 2026 at 8:42 PM
i was going to register http://crackhead.engineering but it's already gone :(
Crackhead Engineering
Coding the absurdity into reality.
crackhead.engineering
January 23, 2026 at 8:38 PM
there's a hardcoded 32-byte AES key the firmware uses to encrypt passwords... except they fucked up (made an array of u32 and not u8) and 3/4 of the key is zeroes

not that it matters a lot given it's hardcoded
January 23, 2026 at 8:38 PM
vendor pointing at the end of an INI file (clearly containing C source code): indeed... why should I not put something that is _probably_ a CRC-32 here?
January 23, 2026 at 8:31 PM
🦋 vendor pointing at a C header: "is this an INI file?"
January 23, 2026 at 8:30 PM
at first i thought that u-boot on this device is uncharacteristically and unexplainably slow at updating from Ethernet, but no, u-boot finishes in like five seconds and then vscode adds twenty more on top

QA is dead
January 23, 2026 at 7:26 PM
January 23, 2026 at 4:13 PM
if you're wondering, the (fairly useless and clearly untrustworthy) device was put together after the... exploratory surgery. i try to avoid creating more e-waste. i mean it arguably already was when i bought it, but aside from that.

also, it's good practice to be able to put the erased chunks […]
Original post on social.treehouse.systems
social.treehouse.systems
January 23, 2026 at 1:47 PM
@charlotte can't argue with this now can i
January 23, 2026 at 6:41 AM
@charlotte ehh, CF is basically ISA which is basically PCIe which is basically NVMe _hits bong_
January 23, 2026 at 6:28 AM
look at it. this is so upsetting. gaze upon this awful firmware and despair https://upload.whitequark.org/1769145764-bk7252.bin

(this is the version with CRC-16 interleaved. you'll have to deinterleave it yourself to disassemble the bottle cap)
January 23, 2026 at 5:27 AM