[HN Gopher] Memzoom - view/monitor the raw memory of processes/f...
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       Memzoom - view/monitor the raw memory of processes/files in your
       UTF-8 terminal
        
       Author : tsujp
       Score  : 136 points
       Date   : 2022-07-05 15:31 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (justine.lol)
 (TXT) w3m dump (justine.lol)
        
       | teddyh wrote:
       | /usr/libexec/xscreensaver/memscroller
        
       | DonHopkins wrote:
       | Oh cool! That would make a great screen saver, too. ;)
        
       | marcodiego wrote:
       | The code is interesting:
       | https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/tool/viz/me...
       | 
       | Feels really old school. Looks like something from people used to
       | write DOS programs.
        
         | chris1993 wrote:
         | It's a work of beautiful clarity
        
         | mcdonje wrote:
         | Really digging the retro vibe of the code, man.
        
           | naikrovek wrote:
           | if you mean the straight-forward nature of the code, I agree.
           | 
           | I think we over-complicate code today because we are promised
           | ease of maintenance, or high-level declaration, or something
           | else, and I don't think those promises have ever come true,
           | except in very small textbook-type examples.
        
       | atorodius wrote:
       | Looks pretty sweet. Not sure what I'd use it for but I love live
       | updating stuff
        
         | T3OU-736 wrote:
         | Hrm. As a half-bakes thought - if code handles sensitive data,
         | making sure it is correctly obfuscated in memory?
        
           | csdvrx wrote:
           | This. I'd be nice to have a list of strings to monitor (ex:
           | half of the ssh private key) and warn when they are found
           | somewhere, to detect data exfiltration.
        
         | fortyseven wrote:
         | Reverse engineering; getting an idea of what an unknown app
         | might be doing, and where, so you can trace it back in the
         | code. And so on.
        
       | jart wrote:
       | I'm loving how half the comments are, "I don't know why I'd ever
       | need to look at my program's memory?" And folks wonder why things
       | are so bloated!
        
         | jeroenhd wrote:
         | To be fair, memory profilers and analysers are probably much
         | easier and more accessible than just raw memory dumps. Modern
         | tools ranging from Valgrind to the web browser heap analyser is
         | a lot easier to master than scrolling through megabytes of hex
         | trying to find an area of memory that's not necessary.
         | 
         | Even if I were to debug memory using raw hex, I'd probably take
         | a snapshot and open that in a good hex editor instead of just
         | watching some blocks blink.
        
         | usmannk wrote:
         | I think the confusing part is the live view of utf-8 encoded
         | memory scrolling by. As opposed to samples or profiles, which
         | are more evidently useful to those who aren't doing systems
         | programming regularly.
        
         | naikrovek wrote:
         | I don't think one needs to view memory contents of their own
         | program to know what what the memory contents are, roughly, or
         | to know how to use memory efficiently.
         | 
         | Debuggers and profilers already exist for the developers of
         | applications to know these things.
         | 
         | this tool seems much more useful for the reverse engineer who
         | is watching memory of a target application visually while they
         | step in a debugger. this wouldn't even be for reading specific
         | values of RAM, again the debugger is usually quite good at
         | that, but instead would be useful to see how things change as
         | execution continues.
        
       | ahartmetz wrote:
       | I wrote a similar thing with a Qt based GUI that, I think,
       | exposes a little more information (more of the kernel's page
       | flags). It reaches a quite respectable update rate for what it's
       | doing (>=40 fps or so?) and it's fun to watch, though I haven't
       | found particularly useful, err, uses.
       | https://github.com/KDAB/QMemstat
        
         | jart wrote:
         | Please put screenshots in your README file. Especially if
         | they're GIFs. Contact me if you want to know the ffmpeg
         | commands I used for memzoom. https://discord.gg/thZ9mVu9
        
       | PenguinRevolver wrote:
       | someone's gonna recreate bad apple on this.
        
         | jart wrote:
         | New release of memzoom pushed to the website.
        
       | makeworld wrote:
       | Can anyone provide an example use case for this? Especially those
       | different curves.
        
         | zamadatix wrote:
         | The different curves do a good job of preserving locality when
         | mapping to 2d space.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | DrBazza wrote:
       | Reminds me of *mzap on the bbc micro 40 years ago.
        
       | ape4 wrote:
       | The one executable supports PE+ELF+MachO+ZIP+SH
        
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       (page generated 2022-07-05 23:00 UTC)