asciilifeform: diana_coman: out of curiosity -- given what mircea_popescu said the other day re necessary speed of rsa ops, could potentially use the current (11) ffa ?

asciilifeform: 'rocket' had that enamel.

asciilifeform: possibly moar variants than i ever saw, who even knows how many

asciilifeform: in later years asciilifeform's folx got a 'rocket' , long streamlined sucker that looked kinda like naval torpedo. after 5yo asciilifeform visited naval museum, then eyed thing with suspicion..

asciilifeform: came in gold- and silvery- tint. ( who said sov konsoomer sector knew no decoration!11 )

asciilifeform: it did! with the brushed coating. there was a whole story re the d00d who came up with that, but i've sadly misplaced.

asciilifeform: i have a vaguely buran-like chinese thing, with 2 holes, but it eats paper filters, typical modern sad

asciilifeform: had, conveniently, 2 holes, suck hole and blow hole. dunno why this aint standard today.

asciilifeform: oh ha yea i recall old thrd nao.

asciilifeform: ( suxx when there is only 1 working example of a thing... )

asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-10-26#1866516 << this quickly led to dead end, incidentally -- the ice40 'icestorm' proggy dun seem to eat vhdl... ☝︎

asciilifeform: re those oaken tables, good as new 200+ yrs into their duty cycle.

asciilifeform: ( iirc there was an extended mircea_popescu piece re subj, but i cannot nao recall which )

asciilifeform: picture, ~60 y.o. vaccuum cleaners that still work, just like when new, and where filter washable and ~indestructible.

asciilifeform: when sov engineers knew how to make a konsoomer item 'eternal' -- they did. ( e.g. famous 'buran' vacuum cleaner, still shows up now and again on lulzbay, when i finally move my arse to 220v country, i'ma buy it ) . when they didn't know, they made eternally maintainable .

asciilifeform: was a sort of 'first swallow of spring' re asciilifeform's third eye opening .

asciilifeform: brittle stuff, and after coupla 100 'clicks', turns 'unclickable'

asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: funnily enuff, when i moved to usa, i briefly got hold of the 'genuine' lego, and was somewhat disappoint

asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: the cloned brix were amazing, survived all kindsa mechanical abuse without so much as a scratch, much less brea

asciilifeform: in retrospect i'm actually a bit surprised that they pulled off the fine molding

asciilifeform: ( in variant colours, but otherwise identical to the limits of naked eye comparison )

asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: fwiw the sov clone i had , had 100% interchangeable bricks.

asciilifeform: the current-day variant of the toy is exactly 'ruby on rails'-style abortion

asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: keep in mind that the lego you had as a boy, hasn't existed in decade+ , afaik, per http://btcbase.org/log/2017-09-02#1710146 ☝︎

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: even the fundamental shit-into-toilet-not-pants of 'run gedankenexperiment before actually building' seems to be going away in heathendom

asciilifeform not a great luvvver of symmetricipherism in general, as amply illustrated in the l0gz, for this and other reasons -- there is no known approach to bake symmetricism from any sort of rational angle

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: classical serpent eats 256bit key. but ( as illustrated in http://ossasepia.com/2018/02/22/eucrypt-chapter-11-serpent/ ) eats/shits 16 byte payload blox as it goes; a 4096 byte flash sector would need 8 of these, plus i suspect a 9th for the block # ( see earlier re 'known plaintext'ism etc )

asciilifeform: ( the https://blog.filippo.io/content/images/2015/11/Tux_ecb.jpg one )

asciilifeform: the 1 other tricky detail is that you gotta include block ~number~ ( or hash thereof, or some variant ) ~inside~ the plaintext for each block, or you get the penguin

asciilifeform: but if you actually touch the disk, it erases a 4096byte chunk

asciilifeform: linux goes along pretending that it's 512 for 'legacyism' , from userland pov

asciilifeform: the native one the korean nands give you is usually 4096 as it is

asciilifeform: ( in practice never tried anyffing but 512 , so whoknows )

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: two block sizes ?

asciilifeform: if, incidentally, somebody runs across the quasi-mythical src of the old attempts, potentially could decruft/fit-in-head . so plox to write in if find.

asciilifeform: and the q of 'would serpent fit in ice40' is imho also worth answering. i'ma put it in the pipe.

asciilifeform: vhdl is prolly worth a 2nd look, tho i currently suspect that it vs verilog aint a 'ada vs c' win, simply longer text that does same thing ( the only unit of data in fpgaism is really the bit, so 'types' dun exist )

asciilifeform: ( i was initially testing rk pilot plant to run off sd, discarded on acct of meh speed vs usb3 )

asciilifeform: sd can be had in half TB and moar

asciilifeform: one potentially interesting variation on the theme is if a key block contained an offset-length into the drive. so pluggin in diff keys could give you diff 'disks', which are normally indistinguishable from noise.

asciilifeform: could simply make it a serial input, and let user decide what he likes, e.g. he has a vt100 he can plug in, or tape reader, or which.

asciilifeform: the remaining open q re iron is 'how to throw in key', is separate q

asciilifeform: theoretically anyffing that eats normal block devices nao, yes

asciilifeform: and yes a ciphrator that gives you a disk that runs at speed of msdos 5inch floppy, aint very sexy.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: in re the disk thing ? depends entirely on the serpentron. so open q.