Microsoft Corporation ha riferito che l’Iran sta intensificando i suoi tentativi di interferire nelle prossime elezioni presidenziali americane. Il rapporto, pubblicato il 9 agosto, descrive come gli hacker di stato si stiano preparando a diffondere notizie false e cercando di accedere agli account dei candidati.

Uno degli episodi descritti nel rapporto è un attacco di phishing contro un collaboratore della campagna elettorale di uno dei partiti.

2 mesi fa gli è stata inviata una lettera per conto di un ex consulente il cui account era stato precedentemente compromesso. È stato effettuato anche un tentativo di hackerare l’account di uno degli ex candidati alla presidenza. Microsoft non rivela i nomi degli obiettivi.

In totale, il rapporto menziona le attività di quattro diversi gruppi di hacker, ognuno dei quali opera a modo autonomo. Una campagna di notizie false ha preso di mira entrambi i lati dello scacchiere politico.

Recentemente, uno dei gruppi ha violato le risorse interne della campagna di Trump e ha rubato documenti riservati, incluso un dossier su James David Vance. Inoltre si è verificato un caso di compromissione del conto di un dipendente a livello di governo distrettuale. Secondo gli esperti Microsoft, questo incidente faceva parte di un’operazione più ampia.

Gli analisti di Microsoft notano che la crescente attività degli hacker iraniani riflette la loro tattica caratteristica: iniziare a interferire nelle elezioni più tardi rispetto agli altri attori. Secondo il Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center, gli attacchi informatici dell’Iran sono più mirati a interferire con il processo elettorale stesso piuttosto che a cercare di influenzare le opinioni degli elettori.

Clint Watts, direttore generale del Centro, ha osservato che le azioni degli hacker iraniani possono essere divise in due tipologie. Il primo tipo prevede campagne che mirano a suscitare polemiche e influenzare gli elettori negli stati indecisi con questioni elettorali scottanti. Il secondo tipo di attività si concentra sulla raccolta di informazioni sulle campagne politiche, che possono poi essere utilizzate per affinare le strategie.

Il rapporto menziona che una delle piattaforme di notizie false scoperte da Microsoft si rivolgeva al pubblico liberale e chiamava Donald Trump un “elefante oppioide in un negozio di porcellane”. Un’altra piattaforma, rivolta ai conservatori, si è concentrata sulla riassegnazione di genere e su altre questioni LGBT. Entrambe le piattaforme sono state create da uno dei gruppi iraniani.

Watts ha inoltre sottolineato che un altro gruppo di hacker potrebbe prepararsi ad azioni più estreme. I personaggi politici o le comunità possono dover affrontare minacce e provocazioni. L’obiettivo finale di queste azioni sarà quello di creare caos, minare l’autorità e seminare dubbi sull’integrità delle elezioni.

In precedenza il governo americano aveva già accusato gli iraniani di aver tentato di interferire nelle elezioni. Uno dei più famosi è stato il caso del gruppo di estrema destra Proud Boys: per suo conto gli hacker iraniani hanno inviato lettere agli elettori democratici.

Altri rapporti Microsoft di quest’anno hanno evidenziato anche i tentativi della Cina di utilizzare l’intelligenza artificiale per influenzare le elezioni.

L'articolo Microsoft Avverte: L’Iran Intensifica gli Attacchi Hacker contro le Elezioni Presidenziali USA proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

A StreamDeck is effectively a really cool box full of colorful buttons that activate various things on your PC. They’re fun and cool but they’re also something you can build yourself if you’re so inclined. [Jason] did just that for his sim racing setup, and he included some nifty old-school tech as well.

An ESP32 is at the core of the build, listening to button presses and communicating with the PC. However, the build doesn’t actually use regular buttons. Instead, it uses infrared sensors wired up in a matrix. This was an intentional choice, because [Jason] wanted the device to be reconfigurable with different paper card overlays. There are ways to do this with regular buttons too, but it works particularly well with the infrared technique. Plus, each button also gets a Neopixel allowing its color to be changed to suit different button maps.

What’s really neat is that the button maps change instantly when a different overlay card is inserted. [Jason] achieved this with an extra row of infrared sensors to detect punched holes in the bottom of the overlay cards.

Once upon a time, even building your own keyboard was an uphill battle. Today, it’s easier than ever to whip up fun and unique interface devices that suit your own exact needs. That’s a good thing! Video after the break.

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Construction kit toys are cited by many adults as sparking great creativity and engineering talent in their youth. LEGO, Meccano, K’NEX, Lincoln Logs—these are all great commercial options. But what about printing your very own construction kit at home? Meet Stemfie.

Fundamentally, Stemfie isn’t that different from any other construction kit you might have seen before. It has various beams and flat plates that are full of holes so they can be assembled together in various ways. It also uses bolts, spacers, and small plastic nuts that can be tightened using a special hand tool. Think of a mixture between LEGO Technic and Meccano and that will get you in the ballpark. It includes neat motion components too, including gears, wheels, and even a large flat spring!

What can you build with it? Well, as every construction kit toy says, you’re only limited by your imagination! However, if your imagination is especially small, you can just use the Stemfie 3D YouTube channel for inspiration. It features everything from a ping pong ball catapult to a rubber-band driven car. Plus, since it’s all 3D printed, you can simply scale up the parts and build even bigger designs. Like a giant catapult that can hurl entire water jugs. Fun!

We’ve seen other projects in this vein before. One of our favorites is [Ivan Miranda]’s giant 3D printed assembly kit that he uses to build big monster toys.

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I want to introduce you to a project of mine – a portable router build, and with its help, show you how you can build a purpose-built device. You might have seen portable routers for sale, but if you’ve been in the hacking spheres long enough, you might notice there are “coverage gaps”, so to speak. The Pi-hole project is a household staple that keeps being product-ized by shady Kickstarter campaigns, a “mobile hotspot” button is a staple in every self-respecting mobile and desktop OS, and “a reset device for the ISP router” is a whole genre of a hacker project. Sort the projects by “All Time” popularity on Hackaday.io, and near the very top, you will see an OpenVPN &Tor router project – it’s there for a reason, and it got into 2014 Hackaday Prize semifinals for a reason, too.

I own a bunch of devices benefitting from both an Internet connection and also point-to-point connections between them. My internet connection comes sometimes from an LTE uplink, sometimes from an Ethernet cable, and sometimes from an open WiFi network with a portal you need to click through before you can even ping anything. If I want to link my pocket devices into my home network for backups and home automation, I can put a VPN client on my laptop, but a VPN client on my phone kills its battery, and the reasonable way would be to VPN the Internet uplink – somehow, that is a feature I’m not supposed to have, and let’s not even talk about DNSSEC! Whenever I tried to use one of those portable LTE+WiFi[+Ethernet] routers and actively use it for a month or two, I’d encounter serious hardware or firmware bugs – which makes sense, they are a niche product that won’t get as much testing as phones.

I’ve come to hate these little boxes with a passion. By [www.digitalpush.net], CC BY 4.0Solving these problems and implementing my desired features is quite motivational for me – it’s not just that I need my devices to work for me, it’s also that every time I tackle a project like this, I push some cool tech boundaries, find out a number of fun things I can share with you all, and I end up creating yet another device I use to significantly improve my life. What’s more, routers are a sea of proprietary hardware coupled to proprietary software, and it shows. The Pi-hole project is about cutting profit margins, and the Tor network, so you won’t see them on a commercial device. Your Huawei portable router’s battery died? Good luck sourcing a replacement. Router randomly shutting down because of overheating? Either do something and lose your warranty, or send it away for repair for weeks with no guarantee of having it fixed, and stars help you if it’s made by Asus.

Feature Plan

I need a router with an always-on WiFi AP, LTE, Ethernet and an optional WiFi station interface. As for software, I need it to run a lightweight VPN client like Wireguard and route my traffic through it, as well as run a bunch of quality-of-life features – from reasonable static IP allocation and DNS configurability, to captive portal auto-clicking and DNSSEC. The best part about building your hardware is that you can pick your batteries and can choose cells as large as you desire, so it shouldn’t be hard to make it last a day, either.

You also get to pick your own CPU, LTE modem, power management circuits. Thankfully, I have building blocks for most of these, and I’ve discussed them before – let’s talk CPUs first, and next time, go into LTE modem selection.

You might have seen fun boards throughout the last decade – a half-a-GHz CPU, from 64 to 512 MB of external RAM, WiFi and Ethernet interfaces done in hardware, an SPI flash for firmware, a bunch of GPIOs, OpenWRT shipped by default, and no video output interface in sight. You might have bought one for a generic Raspberry Pi grade project, misunderstanding its purpose. It’s a a router CPU board, put into a maker-friendly form-factor – tt will work wonders for routing packets, but it won’t work well for streaming video. I know, because I bought my first board ever with the intention of running mjpg-streamer on it, and as soon as I set it to a reasonable resolution, the CPU went to 100% consumption in a heartbeat.

Perhaps one of the most promising “router CPU” modules to this day. By [Pinguinguy], CC0 1.0There are plenty of boards like this around – the VoCore, the Carambola boards, the BlackSwift boards I keep nostalgically remembering, LinkIt boards, and the Onion Omega modules. Of these, to the best of my knowledge, the Onion Omega 2 is the most up-to-date of them all, so I got one for cheap locally with a breakout – despite their name, they have nothing to do with Tor routing, though I do aim to change that. The Omega-designed breakout is underwhelming in my eyes – they used a powerbank IC to add battery backup functionality, with all the inefficiency and bugs that entails. As you might already know, you literally don’t need to do that.

Still, it ships with OpenWRT, it’s reasonably open, and it’s got everything I need. I started this project in 2018, but thankfully, I picked well – the Onion Omega repositories are active to this day, which means that, to this day, I can resume my project by just reflashing OpenWRT to a newer version; if you don’t do this, you can’t use the repositories meaningfully, which is a large part of the fun!
Want to prototype a project that contains multiple components? Just tape them to a piece of board while you map it out and test things together!
Could you pick something more powerful? Yes, absolutely – a Raspberry Pi would have a beefier CPU for anything I’d want to hack – in fact, many boards today can boast a faster CPU and better peripherals. My hunch, however, is that native WiFi and Ethernet are an important thing to have – I don’t want to go full USB for everything I need, lest I get throttled by the 480 Mbps restriction. Also, I do want to make sure the module I pick is well-suited for the task in aspects I might not even foresee yet, and it just feels right to use a router CPU.

In short, I’m cool with throttling my Internet uplink in some ways, as long as this gives me a bunch of cool features in return; later on, I can do a market review and see if there’s a more suitable board I could integrate, but until then, I see no boards like this. Do you have better CPU board suggestions for a portable router? Drop them in the comments down below.

Choice Outcomes

So, this is what I set out to do – use an Onion Omega as my personal WiFi repeater, for now, without an LTE uplink integrated. I’ve used it as my portable router, in a half-complete configuration, and here’s what I found. First off, the WiFi adapter allows combined STA (station=client) and AP (access point=hotspot) mode – something that might feel like a pretty nifty feature to you, and it did to me. Initially, I thought this would allow me to do WiFi forwarding easily – and it did, but as soon as I leave the house with the router in my backpack and the STA mode goes inactive, things break.
Test setup, creating an access point with an Ethernet uplink. With two 18650 cells, no LTE enabled, it works for about 20 hours.
Here’s a bug – if you expect an always-on AP and an occasionally active STA, your AP will be regularly glitching out, at least on the Onion Omega, and this is a fundamental problem that might translate into other hardware too. This is because, whenever the STA interface is disconnected, it needs to periodically re-scan the network to see if it needs to reconnect to an AP. Your WiFi radio needs to stop and drop what it’s doing, including any ongoing transmissions, and listen to the aether for a while – switching between different channels while at it. This is very noticeable when doing live audio or video streaming; if you do a local file transfer over the AP’s network and the transfer speed is plotted, there will be visible gaps in the transmission speed.

First lesson – scrutinize cool features like the combined STA+AP modes if you’re actually building a network you want to rely on, especially if you don’t see them – you will notice that many devices don’t come with STA+AP simultaneous connection support out of the box. Sharing an antenna for two different purposes at once feels like an error-prone situation, and if you’re having a connectivity problem, you will want to look into that.

Is the hardware support ideal? No. Is this fun so far? Yes, absolutely, and it gives some cool insights into features you might consider worth building your project around. Does this router beat the performance of a Huawei battery-powered router I used to carry in my pocket? Yep, it already has quite a few important features I always wanted to have, like static IP assignments and an Ethernet port I can use for an uplink. Now, it doesn’t have LTE just yet – let’s talk about that in the next article, showing you how to pick an LTE modem, and what can you do to make the process significantly easier for you.

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installance n. : # 0189type : asemic square size : ~ cm 6 x 6record : lowres shotadditional notes : abandoneddate : Aug 6th, 2024time : 4:31pmplace : Rome, via Lancianofootnote : ---copyright : (CC) 2024 differx
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#000000 #0189 #abandoned #asemic #asemicSquare #card #i0189 #installance #installance0189

installance #0189: asemic square

  installance n. : # 0189 type : asemic square size : ~ cm 6 x 6 record : lowres shot additional notes : abandoned date : Aug 6th, 2024 time : 4:31pm place : Rome, via Lanciano footnote : — c…

^slowforward

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bopsecrets.org/

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_
e ci sono anche…

Testi in Italiano

(Text in Italian)

Riflessioni preliminari sulla Guerra del Vietnam (Ngo Van, 1968)
Sulle lotte del Terzo Mondo (Ngo Van, 1968)
In questo teatro… (1970)
Ode sull’assenza di vera poesia oggi questo pomeriggio (1970)
Doppia riflessione (1974)
Avviso riguardo la società dominante e coloro che la contestano (1974)
I ciechi e l’elefante (1975)
La società del situazionismo (1976)
La realizzazione e la soppressione della religione (1977)
Lettera aperta al gruppo “Libertaire” di Tokio (1977)
La breccia in Iran (1979)
Banalità (1979)
La guerra e lo spettacolo (1991)
Sul film di René Viénet: Può la dialettica spezzare i mattoni? (1992)
Due saggi critici sul buddismo impegnato (1993 & 1999)
Confessioni di un garbato nemico dello stato (1997):
parte 1
parte 2
parte 3
Corrispondenza sulla questione della religione (1997-2000)
Riformismo y politica elettorale (2002)
Introduzione ai film di Guy Debord (2003)
Risposta ad un liberale del Midwest (2003)
Porta d’ingresso ai vasti domini (Introduzione) (2004)
Comprendere Debord dialetticamente (2005/2010)
Riflessioni sulla sollevazione in Francia (2006)
Documenti della sollevazione anti-CPE in Francia (2006)
Opinioni francofone sull’Ufficio dei Segreti Pubblici (2007-2008)
Ken Knabb, l’Internazionale Situazionista e la controcultura nord-americana (Jean-Pierre Depétris, 2008)
Introduzione al libro di Ngo Van In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary (2010)
Nota sullo stalinismo e sul trotskismo (2010)
Il risveglio in America (2011)
Al di là del voto (2012/2016)

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#000000 #anarchy #archive #bureauOfPublicSecrets #dance #durruti #ffffff #internationalSituationist #KennethRexroth #Situationism #situationistInternational #Situazionismo

the ‘bureau of public secrets’: an astounding (situationist) archive

_ e ci sono anche…

^slowforward

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bopsecrets.org/rexroth/prelite…

bopsecrets.org/rexroth/prelite…

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#000000 #anthology #KennethRexroth #poems #poetry #preLiterate

the poetry of pre-literate peoples

 

^slowforward

Gaming laptops often tend towards implementing more desktop-like hardware in the pursuit of pure grunt. But what if you were to simply buy desktop hardware yourself, and build your own gaming laptop? That would be very cool, as [Socket Science] demonstrates for us all.

The project began with lofty goals. The plan wasn’t to build something rough and vaguely laptop-like. [Socket Science] wanted to build something of genuine quality, that for all intents and purposes, looked and worked like a proper commercial-grade laptop. Getting to that point took a full 14 months, but the final results are impressive.

Under the hood lies an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X and a XFX Radeon RX6600, hooked into an ITX motherboard with some low-profile RAM sticks. Those components were paired with a thin keyboard, a touchpad, and a portable gaming monitor. Getting all that into a thin laptop case, even a custom one, was no mean feat. Ports had to be cut down to size, weird ribbon cables had to be employed, and heatsinks and coolers had to be rearranged. To say nothing of all the work to 3D print a case that was strong and actually worked!

The full journey is quite the ride. If you want to go right back to the start, you can find part one here.

We’ve seen some builds along these lines before, but seldom few that get anywhere near this level of fit and finish. Oftentimes, it’s that kind of physical polish that is most difficult to achieve. All we can say is “Bravo!” Oh, and… video after the break.

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Numerose vulnerabilità nell’utilità di trasferimento dati Quick Share possono essere utilizzate per eseguire attacchi MiTM e inviare file a dispositivi Windows senza il permesso del destinatario, hanno affermato gli specialisti di SafeBreach.

Quick Share è un’utilità di condivisione file P2P disponibile per gli utenti di dispositivi con Android, Chrome e Windows. Ti consente di inviare file a dispositivi compatibili nelle vicinanze, supportando Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, WebRTC e NFC.

Sviluppata originariamente per Android con il nome Nearly Share e rilasciata per Windows nel luglio 2023, l’utilità è stata ribattezzata Quick Share nel gennaio 2024 dopo che Google ha unito la sua tecnologia con Quick Share di Samsung. Google sta inoltre collaborando con LG per preinstallare l’utilità su alcuni dispositivi Windows.

Gli specialisti di SafeBreach hanno studiato il protocollo a livello di applicazione utilizzato da Quick Share per trasferire file tra dispositivi e hanno immediatamente scoperto 10 vulnerabilità, inclusi problemi che consentono l’esecuzione di codice remoto in Windows.

I bug rilevati includono due errori di scrittura di file remoti non autorizzati in Quick Share per Windows e Android, nonché otto problemi in Quick Share per Windows relativi alla connessione Wi-Fi forzata, all’attraversamento di directory remote e al Denial of Service (DoS).

Questi errori consentono la scrittura di file sul dispositivo in remoto (senza l’autorizzazione dell’utente), causano l’arresto anomalo, reindirizzano il traffico a un punto di accesso Wi-Fi specifico.
Catena di attacco sviluppata dai ricercatori
Ora tutte le vulnerabilità sono già state corrette con il rilascio della versione 1.0.1724.0 e agli errori rilevati vengono assegnati due identificatori comuni: CVE-2024-38271 (5,9 punti sulla scala CVSS) e CVE-2024-38272 (7,1 punti sulla scala CVSS ) nella scala CVSS.

Secondo SafeBreach, il protocollo di comunicazione Quick Share è “altamente generico, contiene classi astratte e di base, nonché una classe di gestione per ciascun tipo di pacchetto… Inoltre, abbiamo scoperto che funziona in qualsiasi modalità. Pertanto, anche se il dispositivo è configurato per accettare file solo dai contatti dell’utente, possiamo comunque inviargli un file che non richiede conferma”, affermano i ricercatori.

Pertanto, una volta installato, Quick Share crea un’attività pianificata che controlla ogni 15 minuti per vedere se l’applicazione è in esecuzione e la avvia se necessario. Gli esperti hanno utilizzato il CVE-2024-38271 per creare una catena RCE: l’attacco MiTM ha permesso loro di rilevare quando i file eseguibili venivano scaricati tramite il browser, quindi gli esperti hanno sfruttato il problema di path traversal per sovrascrivere il file eseguibile con il proprio file dannoso

Attualmente i ricercatori di SafeBreach hanno già pubblicato informazioni tecniche dettagliate sulle vulnerabilità scoperte e ne hanno anche presentato una presentazione alla recente conferenza DEF CON 32 .

L'articolo Attenzione a Google Quick Share! Delle Vulnerabilità Critiche Consentono RCE proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Thomas White, uno dei fondatori dell’organizzazione Distributed Denial of Secrets ( DDoSecrets ), ha recentemente rivelato informazioni sul suo passato criminale. Dopo aver scontato una pena detentiva di cinque anni, White ha condiviso i dettagli delle sue attività con 404 Media.

DDoSecrets, che White ha co-fondato con Emma Best nel 2018, è diventata una piattaforma chiave per la pubblicazione di fughe di dati su larga scala, riempiendo la nicchia precedentemente occupata da WikiLeaks. Tuttavia, è stato rivelato che prima di fondare DDoSecrets, White era profondamente coinvolto in attività criminali sul dark web.

Alla fine del 2013, dopo che l’FBI ha chiuso il famigerato mercato della droga Silk Road e arrestato il suo creatore Ross Ulbricht, White ha assunto il ruolo del suo successore. Sotto lo pseudonimo di Dread Pirate Roberts 2.0, lui, insieme all’utente Defcon (in seguito identificato come ex dipendente di SpaceX Blake Bentall), ha lanciatoSilk Road 2.0. L’investigatore della National Crime Agency Paul Choles ha detto che White “era il capo” dell’operazione.

Le attività criminali di White non si limitavano al traffico di droga. È stato arrestato nel novembre 2014 e, quando la polizia ha perquisito il suo appartamento di Liverpool, ha trovato un laptop contenente 464 immagini di categoria A di abusi sui minori, la classificazione più grave. Inoltre, si è scoperto che White aveva discusso con l’amministratore di Silk Road 2.0 l’idea di creare un sito web per pedofili, sostenendo che avrebbero potuto ricavarne dei soldi. Successivamente ha chiarito che le sue parole erano state dette più come un processo di pensiero provocatorio e non riflettevano le sue vere intenzioni.

Nonostante i suoi trascorsi criminali, White ha iniziato a collaborare con Emma Best nel 2015, utilizzando lo pseudonimo di The Cthulhu per vari progetti di archiviazione e fuga di dati. Questa collaborazione ha infine portato alla creazione di DDoSecrets nel 2018, con White che si è occupato degli aspetti tecnici, tra cui la registrazione del dominio e la configurazione del server. Ha detto che le forze dell’ordine e le agenzie di intelligence erano probabilmente a conoscenza del suo coinvolgimento perché il server era inizialmente registrato a suo nome.

Emma Best ha confermato che tutti i membri di DDoSecrets conoscevano il passato di Thomas White. Informazioni al riguardo non sono state rese pubbliche in precedenza per garantire la sicurezza del lavoro del team e per evitare possibili problemi legali per White legati alla sua partecipazione al progetto.

Il caso di White è rimasto soggetto a rigide restrizioni sulla copertura mediatica fino alla sua conclusione. Nel 2019 è stato condannato a cinque anni e quattro mesi di carcere dopo essersi dichiarato colpevole di traffico di droga, riciclaggio di denaro e creazione di immagini indecenti di bambini. Afferma di non aver avuto alcun coinvolgimento diretto nell’operazione DDoSecrets mentre scontava la pena.

L'articolo Il Passato Segreto di Thomas White: Da Criminale del Dark Web a Fondatore di DDoSecrets proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

While CDs were still fighting for market share against cassettes, and gaming consoles were just starting to switch over to CD from cartridge storage, optical media companies were already thinking ahead. Only two years after the introduction of the original PlayStation, the DVD Forum had introduced the DVD-RAM standard: 2.58 GB per side of a disc in a protective caddy. The killer feature? Essentially unlimited re-writeability. In a DVD drive that supports DVD-RAM, they act more like removable hard drive platters. You can even see hard sectors etched into the media at the time of manufacture, giving DVD-RAM its very recognizable pattern.

At the time, floppy drives were still popular, and CD-ROM drives were increasingly available pre-installed in new computers. Having what amounted to a hard drive platter with a total of 5 GB per disc should have been a killer feature for consumers. Magneto-optical drives were still very expensive, and by 1998 were only 1.3 GB in size. DVD-RAM had the same verify-after-write data integrity feature that magneto-optical drives were known for, but with larger capacity, and after the introduction of 4.7 GB size discs, no caddy was required.

So why didn’t DVD-RAM completely take over removable storage? The gigabyte-size MO drives in 2002 sold for about $400 in 2001 (roughly $721 today), whereas the first 4.7 GB DVD-RAM drives sold in 1998 for $500-$800, with blank discs costing $30 for single-sided and $45 for double-sided, which would have been 9.4 GB total per disc. Around the same time, MO discs with 1.3 GB capacity were often around $20-$25, though they varied widely. So we can see the up-front cost for a DVD-RAM drive was higher, with the media cost per megabyte lower.

Another benefit of DVD-RAM over MO drives was the ability to do hard-drive-like fast random seeks and support various filesystems, allowing non-contiguous data. MO drives were typically quite a bit slower, though they had a decent continuous write speed if writing large blocks of data contiguously. Around this same time, devices like the LS-120 and ZIP drive were trying to replace floppy drives, but their relatively small media sizes of 120 MB / 240 MB and 100 MB / 250 MB couldn’t do the same things DVD could do. Despite this, the Iomega ZIP in particular did have some breakthrough success. This was mostly because of the relatively low drive cost, and the price per 100 MB ZIP disk being $10-$15 on average. These were more expensive per MB than DVD-RAM or MO, but with lower overall consumer investment. So it really seems like the up-front drive costs for DVD-RAM kept them from becoming ubiquitous, though reviews at the time showed that those who bought and used the drives loved them and felt they were an economical way to store and transfer data.
A DVD-RAM disc, with its distinct hard sector pattern clearly visible

DVD-RAM, What’s It Good For?

One of the killer apps for DVD-RAM ended up being Personal Video Recorders, or PVRs. The TiVo introduced consumers to the idea of easy, high-quality timeshifting without having to faff about with the timer feature on their VCRs. A DVD-RAM-based PVR could easily record many shows in high quality, play them back instantly, and be used an essentially unlimited number of times. With the purchase of 3-4 DVD-RAM discs, you could easily record and store your favourite TV shows and later transfer them to another medium for long-term storage. Similarly, DVD-RAM drives in handheld camcorders made a lot of sense, but for various reasons, DVD-RW and some tape formats continued to dominate in that field.

For archival and backup purposes, CD-R, DVD-R and even LTO tape drives were still much more popular. Despite write-once optical media being single-use, the much lower media cost and the rapidly falling price of CD and then DVD burners meant they were much more popular. Many consumers didn’t even realize that their newly purchased DVD burner could almost certainly also support DVD-RAM discs. And for audio and video, write-once media made more sense for the vast majority of end users. Though CD-RW and DVD-RW weren’t quite as popular as the write-once media, they remained more popular than DVD-RAM despite lacking the extreme write endurance of DVD-RAM. It’s hard to say definitively why this is the case, though consumer confusion about all the different blank media formats likely played a part. People were already confused enough about the difference between DVD-R and DVD+R!

Of course, we can’t talk about DVD-RAM’s downfall without mentioning USB flash drives. First introduced commercially around 1999 in sizes of 8 MB, by 2002 drives in the 1 GB – 2 GB capacity were available. These were much smaller and lighter than optical media and had very fast read/write speeds (comparatively) — especially with USB 2.0 becoming popular. Their cost and ubiquity were the death knell not only for DVD-RAM as a portable storage format, but also floppies, magneto-optical, ZIP drives, and essentially everything except for CD-R and DVD-R for audio and movie burning, respectively. While USB drives didn’t have the write endurance of DVD-RAM drives, for most users this wasn’t a problem — they were just transferring office documents, pictures, and other files back and forth between computers. If one started to wear out, another could be cheaply purchased.

So in 2024, is there any use for DVD-RAM left? I recently purchased a pack of 6 brand-new, Japanese-made Panasonic DVD-RAM discs to test out with my USB DVD burner. Essentially all DVD drives still support DVD-RAM, though as Technology Connections discovered in his rundown on the format, the drive firmware support for DVD-RAM seems to be slapdash and lacking in many ways. Write speeds are nowhere near what they should be. On my Arch Linux laptop, I couldn’t believe how slow copy speeds were. iostat showed utilization of less than 1% of the available bandwidth, and with the disc constantly speeding up and spinning down, I was seeing speeds way under 50 kB/s most of the time. Considering DVD-RAM discs support up to 3x (4140 kB/s), something was clearly wrong.

I connected the drive to my Windows 10 virtual machine and saw mostly similar speeds, except when writing an ISO to the drive. Because this seems to be a firmware issue, the usefulness of DVD-RAM for doing backups of important files depends entirely on the drive you happen to own. My idea was to back up all my code, schematic, and PCB design files as they are the most valuable files on my laptop. If I can find a decent drive, I might still follow through — but with 128GB USB drives being less than the cost of the 6 DVD-RAM discs I bought, I can’t say it’s economical, more just for the nerd cred.