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(This concern also applies to secure comms apps, BTW.)
The hardest kind of attack to protect against is a security hole that is deliberately introduced by an employee who is actually a mole for a state actor. Frankly, I'm a little surprised that an attack like this has not yet been discovered because it would not be that hard to do (relative to the capabilities of state actors). (This concern also applies to secure comms apps, BTW.)
There are now trillion dollar corporations but the US government could shut them down tomorrow if they truly wanted.
The hardest kind of attack to protect against is a security hole that is deliberately introduced by an employee who is actually a mole for a state actor. Frankly, I'm a little surprised that an attack like this has not yet been discovered because it would not be that hard to do (relative to the capabilities of state actors). (This concern also applies to secure comms apps, BTW.)
The hole is that state actors can simply compel corporations to give up the data. There are now trillion dollar corporations but the US government could shut them down tomorrow if they truly wanted.
Security will play a huge role in obsoleting software development as a job. Monkeys in chairs papering over generic CPU design is pushing chip makers to consider silicon designed to workload spec; input parameter set, let it go. Chips are now undergoing their great decoupling like software. It’ll take a while as manufacturing process pivots but rather than 8 generic cores we’ll eventually have SOCs per application. S…
> pushing chip makers to consider silicon designed to workload spec Well .. the big one of these is GPUs, which started as fixed-function pipelines and turned into massively parallel execution systems repurposed to cyrptocurrency. Various people have tried to do niche things such as neural net coprocessors. General-purpose or GPU-like or DSP-like systems tend to win in the market ... because they're run on software,…
The goal of custom to spec silicon never went away it just had to bide it’s time, then Intel got taken over by MBAs.
Choices were made based upon real data. That generic CPUs “won” due to consumer choice; anything winning due to consumer choice is just a handy political meme. We get what supply side can sell for the most profit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So the whole reason we have general purpose CPUs is because in the 50's/60's they were hulking giant beasts both in size and power consumption - computing was only economical on these devices if shared. Things shrunk and now everyone has a computer in their pocket - which in most cases is a window to the next generation of hulking giant beast - the "cloud". So if I'm going to develop applications for the cloud instea…
It seems to me that "general purpose" was a big driver of PC's and phones. PCs are good for word processing, games, scientific computing, tracking satellites, etc. The appeal of a smartphone is that it replaces a dumb phone, a walkman, TV set, video game console, watch, and many other things.
Overtime the political story about market winners took over, and technology development became mired in MBA bean counting to extract wealth, as it became clear the public would happily consume what was fed them via PC screens like we did TV.
None of these textual objects or CPUs will mean anything in the future. Manufacturing technology will evolve to provide “end to end” computing gadgets, black boxes that need user interface code at most, to contextualizing outputs. We’re subsidizing a process of technical evolution at scale.
Describing this all through the words of contemporary political discourse is missing the point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The hole is that state actors can simply compel corporations to give up the data. There are now trillion dollar corporations but the US government could shut them down tomorrow if they truly wanted.
Different states exist. That is, supply chain security involves a lot of possible state actors trying to subvert other state and private actors for a variety of reasons, from ransomware to intelligence to simple opportunism for chaos.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Different states exist. That is, supply chain security involves a lot of possible state actors trying to subvert other state and private actors for a variety of reasons, from ransomware to intelligence to simple opportunism for chaos.
It has almost certainly already happened. If you program in C it is easy to introduce a buffer overflow and you can never prove it wasn’t an accident.
Yes, lets make simple chips and transfer the security complexity into the compiler. ARMed to the teeth, they shall be.