valentinej

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Commented on The latest news
Well, I totally agree with that. But as people were noting up above, an FPGA is itself a piece of modern kit, and might have been sabotaged in subtle ways (even if, as a programmable component, effective attacks are harder)....
Commented on The latest news
Would a box full of 8088's get you on the internet and provide secure encryption? Certainly. Well, let's work through this, then. In a little more depth: your goal here is to build a box that can utilize the...
Commented on The latest news
An FPGA certainly can have some sort of backdoor, but for the same reasons that a compiler isn't a very realistic target, an FPGA isn't either. As long as the creator of the backdoor doesn't know what sort of processor...
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Hey, you can do a lot better than that these days. Just get an FPGA setup, and design the CPU, GPU, and network host adapters yourself! The better FPGAs can support a fistful of PPC processors at a decent clock...
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Right! But that's the point: the news is about spy agencies hacking computers in the factory. Unless you know exactly what they did, pretty much the only thing left is unbounded paranoia and the assumption of constant surveillance through any...
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You can't hack any old computer through the power cable, but if the thing is already running hostile software (and worse, hardware), sure. For example: The NSA backdoor sits in the BIOS. It watches the charge system for patterns, and...
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Make sure you don't have any windows (or worse yet, charge the laptop using solar panels), lest there be any backdoors in the firmware watching your laptop's camera or charge controller. Watch for suspicious cloud patterns! On a more serious...
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If you want to wallow in paranoia, the government could have placed backdoors in your CPU or NIC as well. Note that wifi chipsets in particular are largely software driven these days, and there have been a number of documented...

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Bellinghman commented on The latest news
I think the right word for the Nara deer is that they are commensal with the tourists. They benefit from food, and the tourists don't suffer. Well, except that some of those deer are a bit thuggish. And some of them are definitely daft — we have a picture of one attempting to eat a sheet of cardboard that a sweeper was trying to lift into his dustcart. Anyway, tame rather than domesticated. Not at all biddable, they do what they want, and if they're lying on the steps in the sun, people will have to just step over them....
paws4thot commented on The latest news
My exposure to the sport is minimal (usually involving seeing warning signs); fortunately it doesn't invalidate the point that you don't go shooting "farmed deer" one by one with a rifle....
Chrisj commented on The latest news
It looks as though it's possible to take the hardware backdoor far beyond anything I'd imagined: you can insert trojans at the dopant level, making them practically undetectable....
basal-surge commented on The latest news
Give us time on the Red Deer domestication; here in NZ we've been farming them since the late nineteen sixties, and the current population is around 2 million (Compare to 10 million cattle and 40 million sheep.) We're not doing anything so silly as to try to breed out the antlers, mind - that's where most of the money is, selling deer velvet to the Chinese. We want them big. (Hence the popularity of crossbreeding with Wapiti, for the much greater weight of velvet) We're also partway into the domestication of fallow deer as well....
basal-surge commented on The latest news
Well under 200m, for the average shot. Hence "stalking" - getting to and staying within that 200m is the tricky bit. I seldom shoot red deer at more than 100m, and prefer my to take my shot at no more than fifty. However, I have the advantage of stalking in fairly heavy scrub and forest, so often the deer and I are basically on top of each other. I don't use sporting rifles, though, preferring peep sighted range rifles or issue infantry rifles pre-1945. Heart/lung shot is generally the most reliable, although if I'm at fifty metres or closer, I'll...

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Common Misconceptions About Publishing—a series of essays about the industry I work in.
How I Got Here In The End —my non-writing autobiography, or what I did before becoming a full-time writer.
Unwirer—an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction.
Shaping the Future—a talk I gave on the social implications of Moore's Law.
Japan: first impressions — or, what I did on my holidays
Inside the MIT Media Lab—what it’s like to spend a day wandering around the Media Lab.
The High Frontier, Redux — space colonization: feasible or futile?
“Nothing like this will be built again”—inside a nuclear reactor complex.
Old blog—2003-2006 (RIP)

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