asciilifeform: OriansJ: plz know that if you're waiting for mp to wake up and repeat what he has prev. said, you will be quite disappointed. nobody repeats; and failure to address prev comments in the log, is the height of ill manners: can be forgiven a noob once or twice, but one gets with the program and starts using the log , or loses voice fast.
asciilifeform: OriansJ: if you answr mp's comments in today's log, tomorrow he can answer back, etc. this is typically how it worx here, rather than waiting always for folx all over planet to be awake simultaneously
asciilifeform: ~that~ is how sane folx build irons. and not idjit intel's 'i'ma happily execute this random pile o'bits as a cpu instruction anytime' nonsense.☟︎
asciilifeform: ( and currently i suspect that there's 'majority' logic in the PALs, also , tho as of yet cannot say where )
asciilifeform: thing has 2bit ecc on errything that hangs off the bus, even the little boot rom.
asciilifeform: 1st time i booted up that 'ivory' bolix, it actually listed a coupla 'and here ecc triggered, corrected x to y' when revving up
asciilifeform: incidentally, ddr 'hammer' and similar 'induce random bit flips' are only interesting on idjit pc iron, which lacks ecc and bounds checking . on sane iron, flippin' bits blindly gets you a halted machine and a handy printout telling the operator which stick to replace.
asciilifeform: i would not classify this as 'clever attack'
asciilifeform: sorta like where asciilifeform one time found that an ancient box he was using as www toilet, would overheat an' shutdown when visiting particular sites; found in the end that they contained 'js miners' and the thermal grease had dried decade ago
asciilifeform: mp_en_viaje: dram ( at least such as sold as 'ddr3' and above ) is actually a scam, i.e. 'works unless the access pattern revisits $row 'too often' ) , this is moar of a shoddy konsoomer rubbish masquerading as deterministic component than an 'attack'
asciilifeform: he can work with douchebags for pennies
asciilifeform: if yer using idjit softs, enemy has no need to build custom factory for to slip you a subtly mined part
asciilifeform: cuz, elementarily, it would have to contain coupla 10k actual transistors inside, and impose their propagation delay on the output.
asciilifeform: fughetting for a moment fpga : consider ordinary transistor, or even diode. it is not physically possible to bake a 'secretly smart' transistor that does s/mp-pubkey/gavin-pubkey in hopes of being put in somebody's serial port 1 day, and for it to have same analogue characteristics as genuine diode (not even speaking of what it'd look like under microscope)
asciilifeform: mp_en_viaje: asciilifeform does not and at no point did posit a 'magical amulet' iron that somehow cures the effects of throwing in braindamaged softs
asciilifeform: conversely, one who is satisfied with the analogue boards, but not the vonneumanizer, can use the former and discard the latter, replacing with own
asciilifeform: ( observe that a hardline skeptic who cannot be satisfied with the 'rngicity' of the analogue boards, can replace'em with hand buttons, or roulette wheels, if he is willing to live with smaller bit rate )
asciilifeform: sorta why asciilifeform separated fg into 3 individually-auditable components
asciilifeform: then and only then it is meaningful to try an' audit the logic payload as a separate entity.
asciilifeform: the ~substrate~ gotta be a physically auditable object tho.
asciilifeform: mp_en_viaje: i say that vlsi circuit whose functionality cannot be established optically, is intrinsically 'tower of shit' just like e.g. linux kernel.
asciilifeform: i say that this is roughly equivalent to 'enemy will sell you a pen that writes gavin's pubkey if you sit down and try to write mp_en_viaje's '
asciilifeform: this is the definition of the desired mine. but does not describe how one could actually fit such 'recognizer' inside without it physically dwarfing the rest of the item.
asciilifeform: gotta flesh this one out tho, cuz as written it posits the conclusion. how does the raw device know that it is being put to use for tcpip ? rather than e.g. to control aquarium temp.
asciilifeform: keep in mind plox that the 'mine' cannot be bigger than the intended 'mine field' tho.
asciilifeform: i.e. where the part is for all purposes a working one, except in specific condition known to enemy apriori
asciilifeform: mp_en_viaje: it is entirely possible to sabotage fpga in the e.g. 'philips light bulb' sense, where it burns out after 5000 hrs. or shorts + to - erry month. or similar. these are 'physical' sabotages, and imho uninteresting because indistinguishable from simply shoddy part. the interesting hypothetical mine is a ~logical~ mine.
asciilifeform: observe that you can't do this for, say, cpu (even the simplest 1980s 8bit micros had all sortsa oddball unpredictability re context-dependent electrical characteristics)
asciilifeform: asciilifeform's fg test process for freshly-received boards, for instance, included an (unpublished, and won't be published any time soon) set of test circuits for the fpga , that characterized the propagation delays.
asciilifeform: mp_en_viaje: the q is not whether a human reverser can find nic stack with his eyes, but whether you can stuff a robotic 'finder-diddler' of same into general-purpose sea of gates fabric , and still have item that passes inspection (incl. having the expected homogeneous propagation delays b/w the gates)
asciilifeform: mp_en_viaje: this is correct and is isomorphic to above.
asciilifeform: the 2nd contention of asciilifeform's , is that the moar room victim has to permute ~his~ intended contents, the moar painful the job of the one laying the mine.
asciilifeform: ing of xray or neutronograph etc) vs 'honest'.
asciilifeform: item was re 'what computing device offers least room in which to hide a mine when you buy it from enemy'. asciilifeform contends that the moar homogeneous the fabric, the moar difficult to interestingly hide a useful mine. i.e. if you wanted to sell the victim an sram that replaces e.g. mp_en_viaje's pubkey with gavin's whenever it is loaded therein, the resulting device will look quite diff even on optical microscope (not even speak
asciilifeform: i'ma see if it can be tamped into 20m, lol
asciilifeform: tho at the risk of replaying the ancient thrd, if you prohibit byte-addressing , you lose the 'endianism' wank thereby
asciilifeform: me, the moar i work with arithmetics, the moar plus i see to the 'big' (where 'bignums' are printed correctly when raw hexdumped )
asciilifeform: mp_en_viaje: i suggest to look again at the endianisms , so to remember which 1 it was that you barfed on
asciilifeform: that one only does the americas tho, i cannot currently comment re europistani carriers
asciilifeform: incidentally even 'copa air' -- the only, afaik, co that was even willing to offer 100kg-per-man ~for extra charge~ -- still did not offer guarantee that they'd actually ~take~ the cargo ( answrd 'show up with it and ~probably~ it will get loaded , i.e. roulette )
asciilifeform: otoh a healthy d00d oughta imho be able to carry 100kg+ a reasonably small distance
asciilifeform: diana_coman: tlp had the piece re 'they get faux-brokerage acct to Feel Like a Trader'
asciilifeform: and what's moar, i've seen ~same nonsense pop up again an' again. 'we'll describe how satellite is launched , for audience of 8 y.o., this will SURELY put us closer to actually launching one' etc☟︎
asciilifeform: bigendian is sadly ~extinct on extant market iron tho. to the point that i haven't even a working one in torture room to test on presently.
asciilifeform: last i dun into subj in depth, formed impression that usg may have exterminated (and swallowed the bones of) all extant makers of antifuse rom, in early '90s . on acct of the intrinsic radiation resistance of antifuse vs flash.
asciilifeform: i.e. you can buy all the 'otp eprom' you want, but they're ALL ordinary flash with the write pin (promisetronically) nonworking
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-04-08#1907362 << funnily enuff, asciilifeform not long ago did the ~quarterly walk of parts catalogues, 'can haz genuine antifuse eprom?' (spoiler : 'nope' just like since when started lookin' in 2013 )☝︎
asciilifeform: !Qlater tell ben_vulpes is mimisbrunnr gone for good ?
asciilifeform: phf: hrm i missed the http://btcbase.org/log/2019-04-07#1907295 ln. on init. read. patients with this symptom have exceedingly poor prognosis (witness e.g. Framedragger , succumbed to torcancer year+ after init. remission..) but it aint like the triage queue is full , thought worth try.☝︎
asciilifeform: OriansJ: you may find it interesting that a number of noobs wrote own vtron, rather than bothering to audit the old; the former is generally easier than the latter
asciilifeform: iirc we encountered 1 of these at least 1ce before -- a fella who didn't want to keep either python or perl around on his machine, but wanted to v
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-04-07#1907304 << i formerly thought that this was obvious from the docs , but you ~can~ operate on vpatches without a vtron ( they're edible by trad. unix 'patch' util, and you can verify the sigs with anyffin roughly gpg-like , also by hand )☝︎☝︎☟︎
asciilifeform: OriansJ: i gotta take off shortly. you will definitely want to speak to mp, whose chan this is. ( he is travelling but i expect will stop by some time in next coupla d )
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu & diana_coman for instance have a multiplayer game. lobbes has various useful automata (e.g. auction bot) . http://therealbitcoin.org exists. and plenty else.
asciilifeform: other people have other projects, i was speaking strictly of own thus far.
