asciilifeform: which terminal

asciilifeform waves to mp_en_viaje & co

asciilifeform: OriansJ: if you read today's log and genuinely found 0 to say, i cannot fathom what sorta 'mutually beneficial cooperation' you had in mind .

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: it saves many kilometres of length, nobody ever has to say anything twice.

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: 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: 'pray tell, mr babbage!'

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: 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: 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: there were actually iron makers demented enuff to actually bake that. iirc ibm.

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: believe or not, they had no porter or anyffing resembling.

asciilifeform: didn't want to break an otherwise perfectly working aboriginal gurl

asciilifeform: she must've weighed half of what 1 of the trunks weighed. so declined