## Is it safe to disable SATA ports in the BIOS to isolate the corresponding hard drives from malware?

I have three SATA hard drives that I use every day. Suppose I disable the corresponding SATA ports of these hard drives through my BIOS, add another storage device to my PC, install another instance of Windows 10 and run unsafe executables on it – would my three SATA hard drives be completely isolated and safe?

As I understand it, unmounted partitions are at risk, but not partitions that I exclude by disabling the corresponding SATA ports.

Is this correct?

## Is there a function that is hard to find elements not in its image

I posted that in theoretical CS, but perhaps it is also relevant here.
Informally, a function $$f:\{0,1\}^* \rightarrow\{0,1\}^*$$ is one way function (OWF) if it is easy to compute, but difficult to invert.
Assuming the existence of OWF, is there a function $$f : \{0,1 \}^* \rightarrow \{0,1\}^*$$ such that it is hard to find $$y$$ which is not in the image of $$f$$, i.e. $$y : \forall x, f(x) \neq y$$, given that such $$y$$ exists? Does it necessary to assume the existence of OWF for such $$f$$?
Formally,

1. $$f$$ can be computed in polynomial time.
2. For every algorithm $$A$$ in $$BPP$$, for all positive integers $$c$$ and large enough $$n$$, $$\Pr(\exists u:f(u)=A(x)) \leq n^{-c}$$ Where $$x$$ is chosen from the uniform distribution over $$\{0,1\}^n$$.

## Why is it hard for theoretical computer scientists to find funding?

From Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research,

funding for theoretical computer science has declined as a percentage of the NSF budget for computing research (it constituted 7 percent of the budget in 1996, down from 20 percent in 1973)

I have heard quite often that theoretical computer scientists are starved for funding. I don’t see why, if the theoretical CS includes work relevant to all computing disciplines, that such research would not be prioritized. Are the implications of TCS research not clear or immediate enough to attract investment?

## [ Politics ] Open Question : Do Republicans realize how hard it is for Los Angeles homeless?

Jobs & housing are being taken daily by young kids looking for the Hollywood dream. There are around 10 million people in Los Angeles county alone fighting for housing and jobs and they have what employers and renters want.  (a) You have to scrap for every meal, every day. Even with each other. (b) You can’t legally stay at one shelter every night. So you’re constantly on the move.You have to fight to find a decent shower and a bed.  (c) if you magically afford to leave, people in other states have programs that will pay to send you back.  All that and people expect you to collect enough money to afford a minimum 1k per month apartment (including security deposit) AND still provide your own transportation to and from work. That’s IF you can find either. That’s IF you know how. It’s not IMPOSSIBLE. It’s tough for around 300k homeless to do without help.  Do people really think the homeless are just lazy if they’re laying around? Do you ACTUALLY think they woke up this morning homeless?! and didn’t walk everywhere, on little nutrition, and are in bad health for months (at the very very least). It’s weird what people will call lazy.

## Change NFC SAK Hard Coded to 08h

I am trying to copy some NFC card; however the SAK returned is always 08h using the command nfc-list. However looking through the actual content of the card, I can see that the byte associated to the SAK is different (88h).

After making a full copy of the card, doing a full copy of both shows the exact same content, except when doing nfc-list the SAK of the newly copied card displays 88h instead of 08h as the original card does.

Is there a way to emulate or circumvent this issue in order to make both cards indiscernable one from another ?

## Can the following problem be reduced to each other to show that the satisfiability of the given boolean formular is NP hard?

Inspired by this problem: MIN-2-XOR-SAT and MAX-2-XOR-SAT: are they NP-hard?

I am interested to know whether or not if the satisfiability check of the following boolean expression is also NP-hard:

$$\bigwedge_{a\in V}\left(\bigvee_{b\in N[a]}(x_a\veebar x_b)\right)$$

In the formula above $$V$$ are formulas, $$N[a]$$ is the set of neighbours of $$a$$ a node from $$V$$. $$x\in\{0,1\}$$ the formula above is satisfied when each node of type $$0$$ is adjacent to atleast one node of type $$1$$ and vice versa.

## What can a victim company do when it’s hard to differentiate between a Physical Pentest from a Criminal Physical Penetration

Hypothetical Situation:

The company Blue hires the company Red to do a Red Team engagement on Blue. Here, I’ll be discussing only the physical part of the engagement, not social and cyber.

Red successfully infiltrates Blue and gives detailed reports of what was done in the engagement. Example part of the report:

... In building A:  At door A101, we picked the lock. Techniques used in picking: Raking, Bump Key. At door A102, we picked the lock. Techniques used in picking: Raking. ... 

The report includes details of techniques used to exploit and infiltrate.

A week after the engagement is done, Blue is attacked by real criminals and had their data exfiltrated from building A. They didn’t have camera footage of every door exploited. Installation of the doors and locks in building A are confirmed to be proper and most likely picked. However, those doors/locks have also been reported to be picked by Red during their engagement the week before.

The problem:

The locks being tested have been picked and exploited by both Red and the criminals. Forensics evidence would likely show traces of both or just Red‘s engagement. Since red team engagements are to simulate real criminals as accurately as possible, it’s hard to differentiate between evidence left by Red and those left by the criminals.

Blue is highly confident that those locks were picked by the criminals, and let’s assume they’re correct about that. Blue wishes to investigate how exactly the criminals got in and track down those criminals. Additionally, Blue also wants to claim insurance for those locks being picked. (I’ve heard we can get insurance from the lock manufacturer if the locks are picked and we take damage from that)

Question(s):

How can forensic evident on the locks be used in court (for insurance) and investigation? How should Blue use said forensic evidence to claim their insurance and track down the criminals when it’s hard to distinguish between marks left by Red and the criminals?

## How to check if hard disk was removed while in sleep mode?

Let’s say that some malicious person extracts my hard disk (HDD or SSD) from my laptop, while it is in sleep mode. Is there a way to check for that event?

I am mostly interested for Ubuntu OS, but if there are differences between other operating systems, feel free to note.

## Re-configuring PC to boot from hard drive

In Windows 10, I configured my pc to boot from a dvd containing the Ubuntu operating system. I now need to re-configure, in the BIOS, the pc to boot from the hard drive again. How do I do that? Using Windows 10. Thank you very much for your assistance!

## How do I get my Plex media server/Plex to find my external hard drive?

I will start off my saying I know there are many questions on this subject (just not my specific situation) and I thank you all for your help. Lets start from the beginning. I am brand new to ubuntu (I just installed Ubuntu to an old aspire laptop that I want to make a dedicated plex server). With this computer, I have a Toshiba hard drive with multiple personal files in it that I don’t want on Plex but a couple that I do. Also, just an FYI, I do have a folder in the hard drive called “Plex” and a couple sub folders that I want to use on plex (“kain” and “rob”). Now, I do understand some basics of this new OS. I know the 3 groups of users and allowing them to either read, write, or execute and Know that there is a need to mount (even if im not 100 percent sure how to). Finally, my plex is not seeing my hard drive. The computer sees it and it pops up on desktop but plex will not see it at all. From my research, I belive it has to do with permissions (which is a whole another monster lol). Also through research I found a few comments that seem to fit what I needed to do. I have attched a screenshot of what I did. EDIT:Apparently I cannot post a pic yet so I’m gonna copy paste what “SamWN” wrote:

“You have to make sure that the user plex has access not only to the drive, but the folder that the drive is mounted in. After a lot of tinkering I wound up going this route:

Edit the Mount Options (Disks -> “More Actions” (the two gears under the “Volumes” map) -> Edit Mount Options) such that:

nosuid,nodev,nofail is in the area for storing the options in the /etc/fstab file (the textbox under “Symbolic Icon Name”)

and set the Mount Point to be:

/media// and remount your HDD so that it will appear in the specified location.

Next, give all users on the computer read access to the drive by going to the Terminal and enter:

sudo chmod go+rx /media// sudo chmod go+rx /media//”

When it says:

“and remount your HDD so that it will appear in the specified location.”

I am not sure what they means.

Now, I did get up to : “sudo chmod go+rx /media// ” But when I put in ” sudo chmod go+rx /media/// ” it tells me that there is no file named that so nothing was done.

Well folks, thats where I am 😬😞. If I need to check permissions I don’t know the commant fyi. Again, thank you for helping this poor noob. I’m startimg to wonder if I should do another OS that might be better to use for Plex. I have tried to find info all yesterday. I tried I really did lol. Thanks.