Andrew "Bunnie" Huang's tutorial on Hardware Hacking

Here are my notes from Andrew "Bunnie" Huang's tutorial on Hardware Hacking from the O'Reilly Emerging Tech confernece. Bunnie is the hardware hacker who cracked the X-Box while at MIT; the presentation is a brilliant and inspiring call-to-arms to dig into the guts of our boxes.

Today with high-integration chips, it's difficult (not impossible) to manually
probe and modify. Optical inspection of chips ineffective when line widths are
smaller than visible light, aplus, it's really expensive to make your own.

Board speeds are astronomical: memory running at 200MHz, serial bus at Gb speed,
processor busses at 400MHz — these speeds require finesse.

The packaging is insane: chip-scale fully hidden connectivity, package pithces
of a few 100 microns.

Societal pressures have mounted against hackers, and state of the art hhacking
equipment is expensive. State of the art is defined in part by what gets thrown
out by corps and ends up in swapmeets.

But hardware hacking ISN'T impossible!

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