> That "technology" included in Realtek is absolutely bonkers -- who asked for that functionality at a consumer level? No one.
What tech are we talking about? WoL is definitely appreciated in all devices, although the "RealWoW" thing is very much diminishing returns. Otherwise, everything is just normal programmable chips and DMA-type data movement, both of which are generally desirable.
nah. i'll take wifi hardware that doesn't have buggy layer 4+ features in firmware that hackers can exploit to turn my keystrokes into udp packets, thank you very much.
in fact, i think i'd prefer a computer that leaves all the layer 4+ up to the operating system as at least it has a chance of being audited.
that said, this raises an interesting point. the only way to really be sure is to sniff your own packets... but if everything moves to being encrypted that's going to get a lot harder...
The RealWoW stuff requires host cooperation to set the proper configuration fields. The card has very basic functionality to be pre-configured to respond to certain packets, but this needs to be set by the host - it is disabled by default and in fact the Linux driver doesn't even support it.
In addition if he could achieve code execution on the card it wouldn't matter whether the card has this functionality as he could implement it himself if needed.
sorry. regardless of whether or not you can change the firmware binaries to do what you want. i'm really not okay with half-assed remote management junk being baked into the nic of my personal laptop that bypasses any firewalls i can configure and is constructed from code i cannot review.
that is exactly the kind of crap that gets exploited.
This comment doesn't seem too related to the article except for the words "Jason Snell" and "Realtek", and both of those appear misused.
So I don't mean to be rude, but I'm guessing this is a chatbot? Skimmed for proper-nouns, then generic shrills about how the author and article are great and how technology's too complicated?
Oh no I mixed up social media handles I must be a chat bot
> Skimmed for proper-nouns
Oh no I mixed up social media handles I must be a chat bot
> then generic shrills
Huh? I'm complaining about the very real technology present in the Realtek chips that enables any moron with access to a web browser to send firmware-level commands anywhere in the world.
Did you even read the article?
> about how the author and article are great
Are you a chatbot? I didn't even sing about the article being great, I asked if anyone had a real consumer application for the tech presented as an attack vector in the article.
Go outside. Talk to a human being. I'm betting it's been a couple years for you if you're this bad at not only misjudging intention but going straight to "this must not be a human being, only a bot would respond with something I do not wholly understand".
I believe the post is from Juho Snell:
http://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/about/
https://twitter.com/juhosnellman