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   ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 04-Sep-2025 21:51:13 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

   apparently there is a special type of Flash (presumably) memory for pachinko machines that guarantees the checksum will not change over machine lifetime

   presumably because of gambling regulations requiring these machines to be externally verifiable to have untampered with firmware!

   • Embed this notice
     poleguy looking for lost tools (poleguy@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 04-Sep-2025 22:07:57 JST poleguy looking for lost tools

     in reply to

     @whitequark Are you a gambling type? How much do you want to bet that the firmware developers' standard build process produces two or more images with identical checksums?

     I know if I developed the code I would do this on principle.

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     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 04-Sep-2025 22:08:32 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • Felix "tmbinc" Domke

     @felix they do imply that

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     Felix "tmbinc" Domke (felix@dom.ke)'s status on Thursday, 04-Sep-2025 22:08:35 JST Felix "tmbinc" Domke

     in reply to

     @whitequark Does “the same checksum is maintained” also imply “the same content is maintained”? Otherwise this would be very cursed. (Which I entirely don’t want to rule out…)

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     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 04-Sep-2025 22:08:56 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • vriska, thief of light :light2:

     @leo Switch is a pachinko machine?

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     vriska, thief of light :light2: (leo@60228.dev)'s status on Thursday, 04-Sep-2025 22:08:57 JST vriska, thief of light :light2:

     in reply to

     @whitequark i think this may be a translation error, this product is primarily used for Switch game cartridges

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     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 04-Sep-2025 22:12:41 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • Graham Sutherland / Polynomial

     @gsuberland oh makes sense!

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     Graham Sutherland / Polynomial (gsuberland@chaos.social)'s status on Thursday, 04-Sep-2025 22:12:42 JST Graham Sutherland / Polynomial

     in reply to

     @whitequark it's not just gambling regs. a lot of these machines are rented out to licensed venues like pubs, bars, snooker clubs, or those little gambling stations you find in service stations. the company who owns them gets a cut of the profits, so they have a strong incentive to ensure that the machines can accurately record the takings. there's a grey market in hacks that let less scrupulous venue operators cheat the numbers and skim money off the takings.

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     poleguy looking for lost tools (poleguy@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 04-Sep-2025 23:34:02 JST poleguy looking for lost tools

     in reply to

     • Simon Brenner

     @olsner @whitequark Personally I wouldn't want to work writing code for a casino.

     If I were, hypothetically speaking, I'd expect the boss at the casino to be very incentivized to add cheats.

     I imagine they would tell me to do it. I'd quit. I'd rat. I'd be killed.

     But if I were not asked to do anything illicit, I'd routinely build an alternate image with innocuous changes to 'enable debugging' or some-such to make a point about how useless checksums are as a solution to proving immutability.

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     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 04-Sep-2025 23:34:02 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • poleguy looking for lost tools
     • Simon Brenner

     @poleguy @olsner i would imagine that by "checksum" they mean "sha256"

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     Simon Brenner (olsner@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Thursday, 04-Sep-2025 23:34:03 JST Simon Brenner

     in reply to

     • poleguy looking for lost tools

     @poleguy @whitequark twice to verify reproducibility? Or once with cheats and once without but carefully engineered to produce the same checksum? 😁

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     poleguy looking for lost tools (poleguy@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 04-Sep-2025 23:38:43 JST poleguy looking for lost tools

     in reply to

     • Simon Brenner

     @whitequark @olsner possibly... but I do wonder... usually if it is not advertised as "military grade encryption" I'd bet it is just a literal sum or a crc. Sha256 would make the build process more fun. :-)