Updates (September 1st, 2024)

Now that I finally have a good handle on things now I wanted to give a little update as I work my way back.

• I'm essentially working three jobs right now.
• I've left my former "main" job. Depending on how this works out I may have free time again as I'll be work from home, kinda... I'll be able to have a console/monitor with me at "work" at the least. As time goes on my free time will go up especially after next summer. The only issue is it's a HUGE, ~50%, pay decease which effects how bad the next two points hit...
• I may have ~$300k in taxes to pay to try and keep my late family's property in the family. That's not "tax on $300k worth of assets" but "owing $300k"
• My computer that's been on it's last leg for a long time. Now it is randomly crashing and it appears to be a hardware issue. It's an all in one device, a Surface Pro, that's all soldered together so I can't just start swapping parts. Because of the unknown bill coming up I can't spend any money on anything non-essential. I may be moving to an RPi I have laying around for a bit, but that'll make compilation/decompilation for stuff slow/a pain so things are probably going to be slower than I'm used to working.
• It can be up to six more months before the tax issues are 100% worked out. No new computer until that's worked out.
• Luckily(?), it doesn't look like I missed much here publicly so I don't have a ton to catch up on, but I kinda expected that with the developmental dead end that was created in the PS4 scene.
• Thanks to the GitHub sponsors nearly 80% of the monthly cost of the DNS servers were paid by them over the last few months, so they was able to keep running the whole time. If I haven't gotten a hold of a sponsor or something slipped through the cracks be sure to get a hold of me now (Even if you stopped sponsoring, drop me a line). I really appreciate this as it was something I didn't have to really worry about the last few months.
• If you pinged me on Twitter/Discord/Reddit during this time I didn't see it and you'll have to do it again to get my attention.

Original Post

Lots of stuff going on in my personal life the last few months. An immediate family member went from completely independent, at the end of February, to bedridden in a two week span and given a death sentence diagnoses. Part of their wishes was minimal people knowing/visiting during the process, but they passed this Monday and the obituary was published today (Some people I know IRL know *this* is me so I couldn't post any of this before). They were a huge part of my life, a central part of my entire family, all my friends knew them, and I had seen them nearly daily since I stopped traveling for work three years ago. So this is a huge event for me. A few people in the PS community knew about it because I didn't have time to try and make some made up excuse for my absence the times I was able pop online the last few months, I appreciate they kept it to themselves (If they did... I haven't been around to see if they did).

Add to this there's been a local "natural" disaster on their property, that I'm now partially responsible for getting things fixed, that's primary cause isn't completely known. Needless to say I have had no free time and responsibilities are still piling up in a back log and I've used up all of my PTO. Unfortunately PS scene stuff is always the first thing on the chopping block as it's the only non-work/business related thing I do anymore. It's become serious enough I actually need to step away. So for the foreseeable future I'm going to be unavailable, I'll be nearly impossible to contact as Al Azif.

I plan on returning, I have too much unpublished stuff to just forget it all, I'm just not sure when I'll be able to publish/support it. If this is still pinned to my Twitter(X) profile, I'm still gone.

Notes:

• My code that's public will remain public, nothing is being deleted/privated.
• The DNS will stay up but likely won't see updates until I'm back, luckily the new 11.00 exploit doesn't use WebKit as an entrypoint, so the DNS is just for filtering stuff vs exploits themselves for 11.00.
• I'm going to try to make some time within the next few days to make sure everything will continue to run in my absence, that I'll be automatically alerted if something breaks, and reply to private messages that have built up over the last little while.
• I'll contact anyone who've sponsored the DNS while I've been unable to get online to make sure they're all worked out. There's enough of my own money in the linked bank account, that with the current sponsorship supplementing it, it *should* be able to stay online nearly indefinitely.
• This is essentially last call for joining the DNS sponsorship to get IPs whitelisted before I disappear for a while.
• I had a big list of stuff I was hoping to publish at the end of May, I had freed up a bunch of time to try and accomplish this these last few months. The time I freed up obviously went to other things so basically nothing is ready.
• The main thing I was working on was something akin to coldboot exploit activation. It removes the "need" for the DNS/exploit host, persists over reboots, blocks updates, ete. You just have to run the install payload once... but it requires the entrypoint for the exploit stack to be within WebKit... so the new 11.00 one can't use it, so I'll shelve it for now. Works great on 5.05 though...