asciilifeform: the question of 'how do i know this candy dispenser contains candy and won't simply eat my key' is to be resolved using popescutronium (substance which powers atomic dirigible)
asciilifeform: very often, the secret in question is in possession of folks who presently have ~no~ way to monetize it - i am speaking specifically of amateurs who pwned, by way of idle exploration, the target - but are not in a 'k00l d00dz wot' where they can safely sell the result to anyone
asciilifeform: whereas u.s. corporate monkeys ~will~ sell their login for a chocolate bar (empirically proven)
asciilifeform: woman is terrible metaphor here - there's ancient (pre-mammalian, even) 'egg defense' firmware at work
asciilifeform: a monkey working at $vendor fires string, gets coin. for virtually no effort of his own.
asciilifeform: say i have a chip, from a certain vendor, for which no public documentation is known. it nominally allows firmware to be written, but not read back (most microcontroller vendors feature this.) i connect it to a programmable i/o board, and say 'supply the signals that cause it to spit out fw.'
asciilifeform: 'if you can supply a bitstring that makes mechanism x do y, get coin c'
asciilifeform: really? i'da thought human power is too expensive
asciilifeform: i.e., if some bozo announces the box, no one plays, but if mircea_popescu does - possible
asciilifeform: i was speaking specifically of an automated system (riding on wot, naturally, for the 'why should i potentially waste valuable $secret' bit)
asciilifeform: where, e.g., 'get btc if you can get this chip, connected to the net, to execute undocumented instruction'
asciilifeform: the reason i asked is not that i was whacked with a club over the head and turned into a tard overnight, but that instead i was thinking of certain very limited special cases of jurov's suggested '0day prize box'
asciilifeform: and yes, it'd be a kind of 'assassination' and therefore doesn't work in a public wot, and therefore - at all...
asciilifeform: and so more or less what mircea_popescu said
asciilifeform: it is trickier than first appears, because 'i want the s00p3r-s33kr1t floor plan for $fpga' is turing-complete (that is, whether the trade was an honest one is not resolvable by machine)
asciilifeform: i'd -like- to think there is a connection. just not sure what it is, quite yet.
asciilifeform: not related except in a hopelessly vague sense
asciilifeform: ;;later tell mircea_popescu who was that fella a while back who wanted to set up a btc-denominated market for reverse-engineered/leaked specs? (think, easily verifiable...!) and did it go anywhere ?
asciilifeform: mats: good intro to subj. recall, perhaps in childhood, drawing 'random' pixels to screen, with atrocious prng ? could see pattern with naked eye.
asciilifeform: from link, 'RUSSIA and China have cracked the top-secret cache of files stolen by the fugitive US whistleblower Edward Snowden, forcing MI6 to pull agents out of live operations in hostile countries, according to senior officials in Downing Street, the Home Office and the security services.' supposedly.
asciilifeform: danielpbarron: generally, i won't even keep a laptop in the house unless i have several 'organ donors' for it
asciilifeform: '-- my tyre has a nail in it. car won't go straight. -- have you tried finding a swap? -- haven't looked'
asciilifeform: danielpbarron: what laptop is it you have where you can't find a new kbd on, e.g., 'ebay' ? a 'tadpole' ?!
asciilifeform if knew how to program gurlz, would be doing it now, rather than writing a list of items to fetch from maths lib. before it closes for the night
asciilifeform: (iirc it was 'if i had read them, why would i park them in my shelf')
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: good question. do you remember what u. eco said when asked how many of the books in his library he has read ?
asciilifeform wonders in what part of the world gurlz are into archaeohardware
asciilifeform: the 'unlikely in the future' thing is why i view the present situation as a dire one. at present, 'we' don't have access to any of these things.
asciilifeform: it isn't a '500 trillion collider' but definitely more than '500 printer'
asciilifeform: better example of 'middle'. my local uni has a 1980s-style ic fab. just sitting there.
asciilifeform: most practical work in experimental-anything actually happens on the 'middle' (as in, 'more than a car, less than a house' (tm) machinery)
