<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:10pt"><div><span><br></span></div><div><br></div> <div style="font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 10pt;"> <div style="font-family: HelveticaNeue, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, Lucida Grande, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> <div dir="ltr"> <hr size="1"> <font face="Arial" size="2"> <b><span style="font-weight:bold;">From:</span></b> brian carroll <electromagnetize@gmail.com><br> <br> </font> </div> <div class="y_msg_container"><br>>naive perhaps, though would it be possible to transmit such 'radio<br>>code' via a small transmitter, say at short range in another building,<br>>that could send a stream of infecting code into a building (and thus<br>>the infection could begin outside the USB framework), such as via a<br>>small programmed microcontroller with radio antenna, either
networked<br>>or running autonomously (or would this be a pirate radio issue,<br>>closed-in on quickly by HAMs monitoring misuse of spectrum).<br><br>>further, if this radio broadcast of code were possible, one-way or<br>>bidirectional, what would prevent this from scaling city or region<br>>wide if a transmitter were overtaken and sending out signals to<br>>computers en masse, to reprogram firmware, targeting via equipment<br>>statistics or OS/hardware demographics.<br><br>It has been about 31 years since I worked at Intel; at the time they were developing the first DRAMs with 'redundancy': The ability to swap out 'rows' and 'columns', or potentially blocks, of storage elements. This was done to be able to drastically increase the yield of such chips: Test programs were written to identify errors (single bits; bad rows; bad columns; bad blocks) and swap out with 'invisible' rows/columns/blocks with
others. Presumably, modern flash ROM has long used similar abilities. If that is the case, there is some kind of ordinarily-invisible storage areas (blocks, most likely) in those flash-drives. Such areas were sometimes 'activated' (made to appear/disappear) by out-of-spec voltages (above +5 volts), but it's possible also that reading or 'writing' combinations of pre-specified data would also do this. It's been too long for me to give detailed assistance, but I can well imagine that 'they' are taking advantage of such 'features'.<br> Jim Bell<br><br><br><br></div> </div> </div> </div></body></html>