THE VIDEO SHELF · firmware reverse engineering
My personal fight against the modern laptop
Hamish Coleman describes reverse engineering the keyboard controller in a Thinkpad and reflashing it with custom firmware. He covers how Lenovo secures its firmware, and his ongoing work on the protocol between the BIOS and the vendor flash tool.
Why HN readers recommended it
HN people cite it as an approachable, hands-on introduction to hardware and firmware reverse engineering, and as the author's own account of the Thinkpad keyboard patch effort.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- linux conf au 2017 - Hobart, Australia
- Topic
- firmware reverse engineering
- Format
- talk
- Level
- advanced
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 2
- HN mentions in dataset
- 3
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2017–2025
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
For those who might want a somewhat indirect introduction to radare... Here's something from Linuxconf.au and hacking Thinkpads: [VIDEO]
josteink on Hacker News · 2017-03
In Iaito – A Qt and C++ GUI for radare2 reverse engineering frameworkI found this video on hacking old Thinkpad keyboards onto new Thinkpad models interesting. Required a lot of reverse engineering due to how the firmware in the Thinkpad maps keys: [VIDEO]
Klinky on Hacker News · 2017-09
In How I Fixed a 10-Year-Old Guitar Hero Bug Without the Source Code [video]
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.