Quantum randomness and more

I have an ongoing discussion with my friend Weirdzo over at #dextrose (EFnet IRC) who pretty much disagree with me most of the time regarding science, this is also one of the reasons I respect him.  After thinking some things through I thought it was time to try and provoke people on a global scale for the sake of science and see how it pans out.  I’ll start out by humbly stating the following:

E = mc² E = mq (where q = quantum unidentified)

Yes, you read it right, I’m changing the mass-energy equivalence formula. This will be an attempt to back my theory by ramblings rather than concrete evidence, but don’t let that deflate your curiosity to read on. I don’t really believe in anything relying on time (perhaps related to my constant problem being “on time” in real life). However, I do believe in motion, everything around us is moving, especially on the scale of quantum mechanics. In my opinion time is a construct invented by us to cope with our limitations and means to experience the world around us. In that sense it is time (yes, I’m unfortunately as indoctrinated by the concept of time as the next person) to remove  c² (lightspeed squared) from the equation. If we necessarily need to stick with a constant (though lightspeed isn’t even constant since it is affected by gravity), why not use something that is faster than light to begin with instead of compromising it by a factor of two? I was reading about quantum entanglement and how it is at least 10,000 faster than the speed of light, that is better but still not good enough. What if we could rule out the speed factor entirely and just use a constant that makes sense in the quantum world? Keep that thought in mind, let me know when you figured out what to use.

This brings me to another matter which requires my immediate flame. Why do so many people in the quantum field of expertise seem so afraid of using the word random? Do we really need to invent parallel universes just to sleep at night knowing that nothing can be random? I tried to find the core of this unfunded fear and came up with two suggestions; first off it breaks the world of  determinism and then there is that old famous quote by Albert Einstein: “God does not play dice” which makes me think of the dark ages and how that affected science. While contemplating this I was reminded how the Roman empire lacked zero in their numeral system, and the effects it had on their math. I think it is high time we face reality and accept true randomness. We could always sleep comfortably at night knowing we invented a proper digit (or symbol) to represent it.

BTW: I’m a father of two wonderful kids and see randomness every day in their lives (while my own is getting way too predictable).

Console Déjà vu

I just got a request about scene releases of SNES (Super Famicom) games, unfortunately my file collection went into a dumpster in the form of quick-80 tapes a while back, though I did manage to find an old capture from one of my visits to the A K I R A board (multinode bbs  running AmiExpress /X) which was a Sneakers HQ back then.

Akira screen capture
Akira screen capture

Memories of US Robotics courier, blue boxing and failing calling cards comes to mind.

usr_courier_node1
US Robotics Courier – Best modem ever made

Ghetto Generator

Getting bored with the power outages lasting for several hours in Bangkok lately I thought of way to extend power beyond the UPS time limit.

it works!
it works!

This is the test setup shown above. I used an old UPS where the battery was bust and it happens to be 12V, same as the car. This is pretty far from a “green solution” since the engine is running (maybe I’ll try solar panels next). When the load increase so does the rpm of the car engine when the generator kicks in. I’m not sure how much I dare to hook up on this thing but should be enough to keep the essentials like the PC’s running, at least until the gas tank is empty.

TF2 dream session

Last night it was one of those dream sessions playing Team Fortress 2 for PC, loads of fun, bringing back memories from the good old quake Team Fortress days, and my clan period playing quake2 LMCTF. I play as a medic in TF2 and are slowly getting the hang of it.

in the heat of battle
in the heat of battle

If you care to join in I usually play on the servers with good ping in Asia, try ‘starhub’ in the  server search/filter field.

the <3 clan seem good
the <3 clan seem good

Marcan’s Wii Recovery Dilemma

This is what started it all, from Brakken’s post over at tehskeen.com:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIzNfVm54vk

Marcan, one of the members of Team Twiizers has discovered if a device present in the GameCube memory card port identifies itself with an unique ID that it will turn the Wii into recovery mode therefor allowing a user to run a recovery disc or even their own code.

I’ve talked with Marcan and he’s being very closed about the device and would not go into detail about it’s purpose, other then the fact that it lets you fix certain very specific cases of bricking. He wouldn’t reveal any other details and I was told to wait until it’s officially announced.

This ignited a quick reply from Marcan over at hackmii.com which boiled down to this:

Apparently tehskeen took a month-old video, coupled it with a paragraph of reality and a paragraph of rampant speculation and nonsense, and made it into a news story. This is undoubtedly going to spread around as these things do, so I’m going to stop it dead in its tracks.

Finally it ended up at Engadget where they first interpret the whole thing as a way to run backups, and then later updated the story. In a way this is funny, because I truly think it can be used to run backups, infact, it can be used to run pretty much anything you desire to code. To quote Marcan again:

To clarify, this won’t actually fix anything. It just lets you fix it, using homebrew tools and/or newer retail games, depending on what exactly you need to fix.

The way I interpret this running any unsigned code will work, which means anything is possible. Some of you might think this can already be done via the ZTP exploit so what’s the big deal? Well, I suspect the difference is that this way you don’t have to worry about any nintendo updates blocking the code, as it seems to be done in a stage before the Wii menu is fully loaded. This should make it theoretically possible with an interactive “modchip style menu” like the GC modchips qoob and viper provides, simply a menu accessible at boot with various settings. If you read the youtube comments of the video, marcan42, who also posted the video, writes:

It’s in the system menu (right in the startup part, before it tries to load any data).

We might end up selling them ;)

Where’s the market for a recovery dongle which only works in some obscure cases and the user has to write their own software? I think the downplay of the whole thing is to prevent others with commercial interest from exploring this route.

This takes me to another dear topic which is not related specifically to Marcan; the whole black/white hat schizophrenia (in the split personality sense) flourishing in the hacking community where some people appear in public as nice homebrew folks with strict ethical rules of conduct, lashing out at anyone mentioning backups, and then acting quite the opposite when addressing the close circle of friends (eg. via IRC or private forums) while researching new console exploits. In my humble opinion, be proud of who you are and stand up for it.