Let's lay one thing out first: At some point you're going to have to start trusting your toolchain because it simply won't be possible to accomplish some of the necessary tasks yourself. The lowest possible level sseems as good a place as any to start. I mean silicon wafers, the basic component of integrated circuitry. Let's face it, nobody's in a position to turn ordinary sand and handfuls of trace elements into silicon wafers themselves. This is a very complex operation that you can't do in your basement these days. There are lots …
The sum total of the Edward Snowden revelations have pretty conclusively proved one thing: That we can't trust anything. The communications networks wrapped around the globe like a blanket are surveilled so minutely that Russian President Vladimir Putin has openly stated his admiration for the US getting away with it so successfully. Much of the cryptographic infrastructure used to protect our communications and data at rest is known to be vulnerable to one or more practical attacks that, in the end they can't really be called effective if one wants to be honest. The company RSA has all but admitted …
I won't tell you about Homestuck. That's not what this post is about. I will, however, tell you about the latest project to come off of my workbench, which was building as functional a replica of Jade's lunchtop computer as possible.
Cutting to the chase, after being infected with the Homestuck meme and searching for …
For those of you who watch the tech field, you've no doubt heard of Ray Kurzweil, the inventor, technologist, and futurist who's been promulgating the "The Singularity is near!" meme since the 1980's. Love him or hate him, he's a brilliant man who's invented some fantastic, practical things. One of the things he talks about a great deal is how strong AI, which many now refer to as Artificial General Intelligence (i.e., human-like intelligence and sapience) is just a few years away, and he cites Moore's Law as evidence of this. Of course, a lot of people think he's …
A couple of years back scientists at HP figured out how to make memristors viable. Memristors were first conceived of back in the 1970's and are components that remember (for lack of a better term) how much current passed through them for a particular interval of time. They've been compared to neurons in that the more often they fire, the more likely they are to fire in the future. On the other side of the house, scientists have been trying for decades to figure out the principles (and combination of mechanisms) by which organic brains operate. They're not binary devices …
I don't ordinarily write much about work, mostly because it's not that interesting but also because it's a bad habit to get into, lest I let something critical slip and get in trouble. However, the last two days were sufficiently rough (and strange) that I feel that I have to write something about it, if only to give my fellow BOFHes something to go on if they find themselves in the same particular position I was. The past two days have been by far the strangest problem I've ever run into working in IT or information security.
A dream many of us over the years had involve having head computers of one kind or another implanted. Augmentations of our existing capabilities, replacements for damaged sectors, direct neural interface with other computers, encrypted partitions for carrying data, brand new functionality - you name it, chances are there's a geek out there who'd love to beta test it. One of the problems at the moment, however, is a distinct lack of space inside the cranium. When you get right down to it there isn't a whole lot of wiggle room inside your skull. Layering circuitry on the surface of the …
As you no doubt have observed I've been conspicuously absent for the past couple of weeks, at least since returning from a long-overdue vacation with Lyssa in lovely Portland, Oregon. Much of my time has been spent at work doing the things that bastards like me get paid to do: run and fix backups, install software, patch systems, run audits, and generally keep things chugging along smoothly for the folks who do everything else. Due to the weather in the DC metroplex taking a turn for the rainy and cold (as it's wont to do every Samhain) my commute has …
