Walter S. @walter@programist.ro

Last Saturday, I sat in a crowded ballroom at Caesar's Forum in Las Vegas and watched Sickcodes jailbreak a John Deere tractor's control unit live, before an audience of cheering Defcon 30 attendees (and, possibly, a few undercover Deere execs, who often attend Sickcodes's talks).

1/

Ok, I now have permission to talk about this project in full and in public. I'm working with Alan Kay to build six replicas* of a Xerox PARC Alto display for use in a museum exhibit**. Visitors will see a real Alto and then walk over to one of the replicas to futz with Smalltalk '78***.
Here's a nice writeup of a different project that rejuvenated an actual Alto.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/y-combinators-xerox-alto-restoring-the-legendary-1970s-gui-computer/

Calculation of π, from rain falling on two wooden plate sensors, one circular and one square: the number of raindrops that landed on each plate during a storm was counted with an Arduino and π was calculated as the ratio [source & credits: https://buff.ly/2Dqy0gN]

OK, this is hilarious (in German). Threema set up an ice cream stand with free ice cream, but the salesperson asks people intimate questions before they get the ice cream: your phone number, your best friend's name, your best friend's birth year, whether you're undergoing any medical treatments, who you chatted with last… I'm cringe-laughing-crying. Is there a word for this?
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=aoXRMEjOQcU
via @Seraina

But despite its long tenure, Cosmicstrand was only just discovered. That's because of the fundamental flaw inherent in designing a computer that its owners can't fully inspect or alter: if you design a component that is supposed to be immune from owner override, then anyone who compromises that component *can't be detected or countered by the computer's owner*.

21/

its weird having hobbies where you have nothing to show for what you've done.
"what have you been up to?"
"I can give you the just of what I've been doing but its all very technical and would bore any reasonable person."

Let me tell you, don't rely on flash for cold storage of important data. I learned it the hard way, despite knowing better.

A short thread. (1/n)

I'm a really big fan of how Norton has decided "political protests" and "private communication" belong on the same list as drug trafficking, crypto scams and "illegal activities".

Thanks for letting us know you've picked a side.

https://us.norton.com/internetsecurity-emerging-threats-deep-web-vs-dark-web.html

@mhoye, thanks for sharing.

These #Xorg vulnerabilities look like something that #QubesOS users should keep an eye out for.

I'm not sure what's exactly being mapped into that in-RAM virtual framebuffer driver, but this looks like a way to escape into DOM0 and wreak havoc on the system.

That GUI domain would have helped a lot in this situation. And also a way to "disable GUI" for particular VMs, like for the USB "firewall" domain.

https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2020/03/18/gui-domain/

Remember when I said update your windows machines today? Update your linux boxes tomorrow: https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/2022-July/061035.html

@devurandom, it seems that I'm late to the game, this was first proposed in 2001, and now: "The AMD Ryzen multi-core processor's Infinity Fabric and the Samsung Exynos processor include a perceptron-based neural branch predictor."

But we're still missing the software-defined silicone subscription and that distributed linked-list storage for improved performance after a cold boot.

Now, seriously, how can one trust those?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_predictor

@devurandom, no stress, we'll add a new generation of BPs, powered by new on-chip statistics co-processors¹, backed by a linked list E2EE³ memory², with optional distribution, opt-out, of course.

--
¹) AI in Software-Defined Silicon As A Service, of course.

²) with PoS not that PoW 💩. And all this for better performance on cold boots and offsite backups, of course.

³) E2EE is army-grade, developed in-house, we can't tell you more, of course.

new moore's law: every CPU will become twice as slow every two years from all the predictive branching mitigations

we have made machines with predictive branching, that peak beyond our reality into possible worlds to bend the present to our wills

and we have the hubris to think this wouldn't be a problem?

These Space Shuttle launch control center consoles, used at Kennedy Space Center in the 1980s or 1990s, had a mix of digital computers and analog controls such as switches, buttons, dials, and indicator lights.

I took these photos at the American Space Museum in Titusville, FL.

#space #retrocomputing