Comment by emerged
6 years ago
The progression isn't particularly mind blowing, though. Once somebody notices a buffer overflow / register pollution of some sort, you note which area of memory it's executing and then reverse engineer how to modify that memory to execute particular instructions. I would expect a community like HN would consider this par for the course.
That said, what's impressive to me is the amount of time and energy individuals are willing to expend on this sort of thing. Speed runs in general, the sheer time investment and dedication. There's a sand mandala aspect to it all.
Yeah, it turns out the link I posted is from one of the people behind the discovery/application of the glitch, so it really seems to be the logical next step if you know what you're doing.
And agreed on speedrunners! It's not something I could ever do myself, but it's one of my favorite aspects of gaming.
I don't know if you've watched The Dawn Wall; it reminds me of speedrun grinding IRL.
I wonder how many of these people eventually go on to become developers and/or enter the (anti-?)security community, because finding and exploiting bugs in non-games also requires the same sets of skills.