mircea_popescu: contrary to your respective inclinations, you two'd actually make a great team. very bias-mismatched.

mircea_popescu: in more general terms, if you had to dismantle every organisation the moment it had a mole in it... there'd be no organisations ever.

mircea_popescu: i dunno, have the boot flash a pink pixel, put a number on screen, whatever. replacement boot sequence won't know to do it, will it.

mircea_popescu: anyway, can also prep a boot rom that has a canary.

mircea_popescu: so in a sense it's up to you. if you've lost the love of labour because of the cp50 issue, i guess it dies. but if not, i do not see it's a waste of time. make it boot cleanly, try see what happens if you remove the item, try see what happens if you fuzz the item, maybe more stuff occurs -- this is a productive line of research.

mircea_popescu: yes, but it seems to me it's basically a local rootkit. so it's not such an overwhelming concern for the contemplated usecase -- give iphone girly machine.

mircea_popescu: but yes, re the тяжело в учении -- легко в бою bit -- it comes as a shock generally that "your training must ~exceed~ actual usage, by a ~factor~. you don't train for 80% of what you'll do ; you train for 250% to 300%+ of what you'll actually do."

mircea_popescu: there is such a thing as ankle weights. my slavegirls should know, they get them lots.

mircea_popescu: point remains, two bit everything all around. that's your "short ooda loop". it's a lot closer to cocaine than the users realise.

mircea_popescu: and i was sitting there in disbelief, "dude, it's two milf lamers in a tub, what the fuck".

mircea_popescu: you know i recently googled a pic, and google helpfully informed me who the, and i quote, "reality television personality, model, entrepreneur, socialite, and social media personality" involved were ?

mircea_popescu: HOWEVER. she can dance. she can sing. because she's a 1950s actress, and that was a PROFESSION which MEANT SOMETHING.

mircea_popescu: i saw a terrible film recently, with doris day. something something bla bla bla. she spends the whole time in an ugly looking deerskin.

mircea_popescu: then they wonder why they don't ever have any gfs, these people. "i tried to evaluate whether she's my gf in a second or less, came out negative" "maybe give it i dunoo... FIVE DAYS ?" "omfg what ? i don't like... live that long"

mircea_popescu: hm, that's a thought

mircea_popescu: i've not thought a line in my life!

mircea_popescu: the worst case being what, a pile of useless data ? big woop, i have some of that myself, isn't killing me.

mircea_popescu: i'm telling you, building a fuzzing harness for a bunch of these may not be a bad way to lock down a machine (driving the fuzzing) for a week or two.

mircea_popescu: i'd love nothing more than qntra running a "google's ecc crypto defeated in field"

mircea_popescu: listen, my (often wrong, millitantly ignorant, whatever) intuition is that if oyu have an oracle in your hands (the chip after all DOES say yes or no) and all you want to do is produce a sig it accepts for an arbitrary string, you should be able to achieve this bit fiddling in less than 2^256 tries.

mircea_popescu: you know, it occurs to me... it it's a captive minichip. it should be... defeatable. keep feeding it bad sigs and measure the powerlines.

mircea_popescu: i mean, the backstop would obviously be "either follow spec as-is or get out of chan", i suppose. i don't specifically care either way, we already have plenty of proper loggers for one thing, and the original, "Hey, maybe someone exists on freenode that's both a) not totally braindead and b) hasn't heard of #trilema yet" was thoroughly proven wrong by now ; the intelligence flow is the other way.

mircea_popescu: anyway, back to it : the cp50's point of interest is, that it has a connection to power button. this is a single line, is it ?

mircea_popescu: asciilifeform, my suspicion is that your "no cr 50" will simply mean "they put it in the die of a diff ic, and you can't find it"

mircea_popescu: so no, you're not going to find "a board without". you might find one where it's poorly attached and can be hammered off. but that's all.

mircea_popescu: a de-alphabet'd item that has no functioning power button is actually acceptable.

mircea_popescu: oh, neoteny of postmodernism, how ye keep telling yourself you're ok and what a disgusting slimy maggot ye are...

mircea_popescu: wait, a ~plastic~ bottle was broken ?!