I took the plunge and, at the risk of bricking my Verdex, updated u-boot. I can only begin to describe the improvements! The process was not nearly as perilous as I anticipated (though I did hold my breath when I rebooted the first time). Noteworthy improvements are the ability to load the kernel directly into the U-Boot environment, and the inclusion of ymodem file transfers over the serial line. The former reduces my boot time to a breathtaking 23 seconds, while the latter reduces rootfs flash time via serial connection by more than half!
With a lot of grunting and groaning, a good amount of grepping through forum posts, and gallons of patience (coffee), I have finally got my verdex board to acknowledge my Belkin F5D7050 and bring the interface up. Due to a small bug in the zd1211rw drivers, the device needs to be brought up before an ESSID can be assigned to it. Without doing so, I would receive a permission denied error for a majority of the iwconfig options:
This weekend I spliced together a couple of USB cables to allow me to attach my USB-A devices to the USB-B port on the Console-VX. I have successfully connected my USB thumbdrive, 60Gb iPod, and Vimicro webcam to the tiny board. I still need to compile the video drivers for the camera, but it was quite exciting to see the Verdex mount and search my iPod's 60 gig hard drive.
Ilfak Guilfanov of DataRescue Inc (the people behind IDA Pro) has posted an entry on his titled Decompilation Gets Real. In it he announces the beta testing of a tool which, when given a binary file, produces accurate and well formatted C code. The immediate consequence of such a tool is the further reduction of the level of knowledge which a would-be hacker must have. Since compilers and assemblers have a distinct optimization fingerprint, it should not be long before automated tools, build from this code regeneration tool, will provide reverse-engineers and crackers with the ability to quickly and efficiently scrub through code for security weaknesses; buffer overflow, format string attacks, and any number of other exploits will be trivial to discover.
The speed and easy in which Guilfanov is able to go through code is what scares me. Take a look at the Decompilation Demo.
