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Physical possession of a machine is pretty hard to make secure. It's a different level of secure, an order of magnitude less secure than remote attackers. This is expected?

Tony Chen from Microsoft gave a talk called "Guarding Against Physical Attacks: The Xbox One Story" and he explains that they want any sort of physical attack to cost at least the price of 10 games ($600 at the time).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo&t=715s


Depends on the size of the system you need to secure.

If kilobytes of storage and very limited computing power works for your use case, you can get very secure (smartcards and secure elements remain essentially undefeated at the hardware level; all attacks I know happened via weak ciphers).

For an entire current-gen gaming console, you'll have a much harder time.


I'll guess at the future of this technology. They'll produce things that looked like old extinct things, and get a lot of press. Then the administration will say, well, things are never really extinct, so it's ok to quit protecting stuff. Just record the dna and put that dam in place, or strip-mine that ecosystem, no problem, we can get it back if we want so no loss.

Welcome to the future.


I'm surprised he spent a day in jail. People with big money generally have far less trouble with the law, than that.

Hard enough to get a person to vote once. Probably not a big problem.

The big problem is, the folks who count the votes and cheat. They can invent an arbitrary number of votes to swing their guy.

Let's worry about the problems that matter.


Science fiction has thought of this decades ago. Possibly the most drastic environmental effects that any human activity has wrought so far.

Consider - sunlight duration is a critical trigger in the lifecycle of many, many species, most very tiny. Insects and smaller. They can time dormancy to day length. Not the average, since weather is so fickle: even a flicker of sunlight means daylight because, only the sun can do that so it must be up there.

Bring a species out of dormancy at the wrong time of year, and it'll probably die. Do it over a broad area and it becomes an extinction event.

What micro-biomes can we do without? Who knows. These guys aren't even talking about it, I imagine. Just a gee-whiz thing - We can make it as bright as day, during the night! Wouldn't that be cool?

Not cool.


99 percent of everything is crap. SF is no worse than anything else?

I haven't gone deep on enough things to know whether science fiction is worse than anything else in that regard. But science fiction is largely trope-ridden young adult male power fantasy emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually bereft pulp. It's also my favorite genre.

Digression: a file system is a terrible abstraction. The ceremonial file tree, where branches are directories and you have to hang your file on a particular branch like a Christmas ornament.

Relational is better. Hell, and kind of unique identifier would be nice. So many better ways to organize data stores.


Filesystems have a property that changes preserve locality. A change made to one branch of the tree doesn't affect other branches (except for links). Databases lack this property: any UPDATE or DELETE can potentially affect any row depending on the condition. This makes them powerful but also scary. I don't want that every time I delete a file it potentially does a rm -rf / if I mistype the query.

The best compromise is what modern OSs have: a tree-like structure to store files but a database index on top for queries.


You can create the tree structure from a relation. Not a primitive data store operation at all. Just add the attribute: parent directory and voila.

So often we want to look up 'the last file I printed' or 'that message I got from Bob'. Instead of just creating that lookup, we have to go spelunking.

Hell, every major app creates it's own abstractions because the OS/Filesystem doesn't have anything useful. Email systems organize messages and tags; document editors have collections of document aspects they store in a structured blob. Instead of asking the OS to do that.


NTFS has a database, the MFT. It can index attributes, such as file names, which are a b+tree. A file's $DATA is also placed into the MFT, unless it doesn't fit, then NTFS allocates virtual cluster numbers (more MFT attributes) which point to the on-disk data structure of the file.

All files are represented in a table with rows and columns. "Directories" simply have a special "directory = true" attribute in a row (simplified).

The hierarchy is for you, the human.

Like many file systems, NTFS also contains a log for recoverability/rollback purposes.

It's not quite relational but it doesn't make sense to be relational. Why would you need more than one 'table' to contain everything you need to know about a file? Microsoft experimented with WinFS, which wasn't a traditional file system (it was an MSSQL database with BLOB storage which sat ontop of a regular NTFS volume). Performance was bad and Skydrive replaced the need for it (in the view of MSFT).


The newest Microsoft filesystem, ReFS, remove the MFT. Because it created a lot of problems.

> Because it created a lot of problems.

Please elaborate.

NTFS is still the better choice for common desktop usage. ReFS goals are centered around data integrity but it comes at the cost of performance.


Files in most file systems are uniquely identified by inode and can be referenced by multiple files. Why does everyone forget links?

A dataset can persist across multiple file systems. A UUID is a way to know that one dataset is equivalent (identical) to another. Now you can cache, store-and-forward, archive and retrieve and know what you have.

UUIDs aren't very good for this use case, a sufficiently large CRC or cryptographic hash is better because it's intrinsically tied to the data's value while UUIDs are not

UUIDs are necessary. It's possible for file contents to be identical (e.g. short configuration files may coincidentally coincide over time and space). Would the hash then be unique?

Consider: you want a certain data object, with a given UUID. You can find it anywhere, even from a malicious server. Then look up the hash in a trusted database, verify it. Impossible then for the MITM to fool you. No more virus scanning executables.


I've been wondering this too: for us, UUIDs are super opaque. But for an agent, two UUIDs are distinct as day and night. Is the best filesystem just blob storage S3 style with good indexes, and a bit of context on where everything lives?

One thing directories solve: they're great grouping mechanisms. "All the Q3 stuff lives in this directory"

I bet we move towards a world where files are just UUIDs, then directory structures get created on demand, like tags.


Filepath is just unique name that model can identify easily and understand grouping. Uuid solves nothing but requires another mapping from file to short description.

UUID solve oh so very, very much.

You can have several versions of the same set of data object at once - an entire source set for a build, all the names duplicate but tagged with 'revision' so they can be distinguished.

Hard to do that without a UUID at root, to use for unique identification of the particular 'particle' of the particular data set.


Or, have to "Q" attribute and ask the file store for "Q=3"

All good.


That argument seems to be applicable to either party.

And I'm not sure we want to put our heads in the sand and say La-La-La, against the real possibility that everything is actually going to shit.


I'm not going to ride a bike to save CO2 when AI is allowed to build a whole datacenter. And yes the misinformation and dogma is used by both parties. And I am not a Trump supporter, I think he's an abhorrent human. But I think the environmental argument is propaganda. Trying to get us to sign away our rights but not doing anything that affects the rich (e.g. ban gas stoves but not private jets).

You've gone from hating the far left for trying to push their agenda via global warming to hating the Democrats for not targeting the rich to solve climate change within the span of two comments.

Perhaps you have cognitive dissonance because you've fallen for some very low quality propaganda.


I haven't "gone from" anything. I pointed out it's "regulations for thee but not for me". If the party cared about climate change, their actions would look much different. But instead they claim disasters (that have occurred for millennia) are caused by CC, then make it right by banning and regulating things as if it will prevent, say, a hurricane. That's akin to self pleasure, or religious dogma (you are "saved" if you give your life to Christ/drive an EV and recycle).

You know I agree with you, but I might be more hard line than you can stomach.

Policies are not perfect, and they will be created with input from all parties. What you highlight feels like an artifact of these policies not being hard line enough. You are of course right that it is effective to show natural disasters and explain that these will be more frequent if we do nothing, when you do that people will make the wrong conclusions how that effects their daily lives. We know that we use too much resources, and this is going to have catastrophic consequences in the future if we do not change how we use them.

It is not obvious who you are arguing against, it feels to me that you are against the people who make climate policies weak, and the very same policies.

Lets talk specific, we had a plastic bag ban here in Sweden. It was vilified as not efficient. In the end it was effective according to research after the ban was lifted and an even extreme approach would have been even better.


It sounds to me like the issue is you're mistaking the democrats for a left party.

An actual leftist party would ban private jets before it banned natural gas in homes.

The Democrats are a neoliberal conservative party. They'll always put the interests of Capital first.

I sympathize, I'm not sure what Americans are meant to do about their utterly captured government.


> I'm not going to ride a bike to save CO2 when AI is allowed to build a whole datacenter.

"The people with the most power and money are hurting the planet, so there's no reason for me to inconvenience myself for the sake of others."

It's a pretty weak justification for a selfish attitude.


Such folk (medical degrees; phd's) are notoriously hard to pin down and finish a product. Been part of more than one; after years of unfocussed effort they failed to deliver.


They seemed agile and capable. But not a lot of interaction with humans. Not sure they perceived their environment beyond simple gymnastics. So what use?


Agreed. While marvelous to watch, there's a big difference between "look at what I can do" and "let's move through the world together". I think it's just a matter of trust. I have no problem watching these perform in a public park or whatever, and admiring the awesome feat of engineering before me... I just don't want the damn things in my house, around my kids.


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