gnode

The cold war isn't a great example. It encompasses violent proxy wars, involving plenty of ground combat (e.g. Korean War; Vietnam War).

Except Dyson's expertise is electric motors and aerodynamics. This is arguably somewhat transferable to electric cars.

I can believe that they designed a nice product, but it seems to me that car manufacture is very economically hostile to new entrants. The only place where new entrants typically succeed is super-cars, where money is no object.

Taking Tesla as example, they had a successful strategy of starting with the high-end Roadster, then developing their business until they could make the Model S then Model 3 economically viable.

It originates in the constraints of hardware, particularly 8 and 16-bit computers with typically 4K or 64K addressable memory. Starting with the modification of existing games, it became a challenge to push how impressive a program could be made (typically an audiovisual demonstration "demo"). Such hardware becoming obsolete added to the impressiveness.

Demo and game competitions without constraints exist, but naturally become a competition of art and design, where use of existing engines is rewarded, discouraging programmers. The constrained competitions can be more appealing to programmers, where programming creativity is better rewarded.

> I'll give you another video about Hong Kong protesters for a different perspective

The video shows one person being frustrated that a road is blocked by protesters: "if you kill people, set fires, I don't care. But you're blocking the road."

I'm sure if you look at any protest throughout history, you could find an anecdote of someone being inconvenienced by it.

Maybe this is because the Great Firewall doesn't apply in China's special administrative regions (Hong Kong; Macau), yet there are many Chinese speakers there. I'd expect this is the main audience for Chinese-language Wikipedia articles, and the PRC would want to control the narrative seen by them.

While companies should be held to account for caving to economic pressure, and boycotting them is justified, I think it's important to recognise that this pressure exists, and for all companies, not only those yet to have an infamous PR incident.

It is the responsibility of government to counteract such pressure and protect business from becoming proxy to foreign interference in domestic political discourse, not to mention protecting such discourse in itself.

"There is" is more accurate.

"There is a separate whitelist here (as link)" would probably be clearest.

> Up to 60+ FPS AAA gaming

Great marketing.

https://www.xkcd.com/870/

> never given Microsoft license to do so

It's possible that they don't need it. There are fair use exemptions for reverse engineering and automated analysis. These may be the legal basis on which anti-malware research can be conducted.

Same way as in the US and many western countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...

> DNS and caching services mean that broadband providers do more than simply move bits from place to place.

With widespread adoption of HTTPS, and now browsers pushing towards DNS over HTTPS, it could become harder for ISPs to argue they provide more than communication. Most customers will then not only not be using their ISP's hosted services, but avoiding them, and enforcing their non-use by means of public key cryptography.

> Hell, actually require you to wear a device at all times so all conversations can be recorded.

The government could similarly demand backdoors into people's private devices, so people can be listened to and their usage of the device recorded, in case they might be up to no good.

I see essentially no moral difference between banning E2EE and banning security of devices. If you have no right to communicate secretly with a person, why should you have any right to communicate secretly with a possession?

Very interesting. The article's "see also" references branch prediction. Given all the nascent security findings around cache security, it makes me wonder whether disfluency could be used to attack cognition, in interrogative techniques or subversive advertising, for instance.

"Doesn't sound like anything to me."

I'm not sure it's strictly necessary to have the tunnel be low pressure. It's nice for the sake of less resistance, but the speed of sound is actually lower at lower pressures, and so would more readily produce a sonic boom.

It can be; swap and suspend-to-disk / hibernation can cause tmpfs to be written.

I wonder if there's a way to execute from mlock'd or madvised memory. I can imagine this be particularly useful, if you wanted to prevent your injected program (malware? valuable IP?) from being written to disk or appearing in a core dump.

In the example given "We've managed to get access to a victim at 10.131.66.89", it's implied that nefariously injecting arbitrary binaries into a locked-down host is one use case.

> otherwise the API would not have been introduced

I don't think memfd_create was added specifically for the purpose of running binaries from memory; it's more generally useful in cases where you want a memory-backed file but don't want to rely on the presence of a memory-backed filesystem (tmpfs). Many programs create a file in a well-known tmpfs like /dev/shm then delete it, but memfd_create is a more sensible solution if you don't want to share memory via the filesystem. memfd_create eliminates concerns over naming and collisions.

1,000km/h is within what is conventionally considered transonic (965-1235km/h). I wonder how practical these speeds are without a containing tunnel, particularly on the ground where there is potential for damage to buildings, structures, wildlife, etc. from sonic booms. Additionally, as I understand it, reflecting objects and terrain at ground level increase the potential for generation of sonic booms at transonic speeds. Indeed, sonic booms are generated by trains today when going through tunnels where the air ahead of the train is constrained and compressed.

Developing a new kernel or operating system in Rust is a good idea, but a massive undertaking, and it's hard to see it gaining adoption quickly. I think a more credible way to benefit from Rust in the short term is to rewrite small but critical components of existing kernels, or adopt Rust components from experimental Rust OS projects.

Similarly, Firefox's Project Quantum seeks to bring Rust to Firefox from the more experimental Servo project.

I can't help but feel most of these bugs and vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel could be avoided with a more robust foundation than C. It's nice to see that Rust is starting to be tolerated in the Linux kernel for modules.

It would be nice to see an effort to migrate some of the kernel core, but I can't see Rust gaining widespread acceptance in the kernel development community any time soon.

I wasn't suggesting that you need to run your own email or web servers. It's easy (albeit costly) to pay a service to host your email (e.g. Protonmail; Rackspace; many domain registrars), and there are countless web hosting providers. However, this isn't identity (the identity is still yourdomain.net), and you don't need the hosting provider to be well-known. As I understand it, acceptance by the likes of Gmail is a case of jumping through technical compliance hoops, rather than brand stature.

I wouldn't consider DNS names as brands. Brands are names which become identifying through familiarity, whereas DNS names become identifying simply by purchase; they're more similar to land registration: you are identifiable by a street address because you own / rent / lease it, not because it is widely known.

My point is that I can buy a domain, buy some email and web hosting, then masquerade as i@myself.me, put up whatever files on my website. Nothing about this requires me to build a brand, any more than buying a house to which I can invite people requires a brand. We visit websites we have never heard of all the time.

Bewilderingly, many people believe in and have expectations of genuine corporate social responsibility, and view profit-incentive interpretations of public relations as cynical. Arguably, if this were not the case, much of PR as practised would be ineffective.

This article seems to present the state of the Internet as a kind of feudalism, where one must swear fealty to an established "brand", and carving out a life as a freeman is practically unattainable. I'd say the reality is that it's easy to join the Internet land-owning class (buy a domain; get a cert; run services), yet most people prefer to rent because they are not so inclined.

Email is widely used, HTTPS is widely used, and they don't require you use a gatekeeper brand. Many instant messaging platforms, while run by brands, allow you to bring your own email address as an identity.

I don't think authentication of identities is a feature that ties people to brands. A phone number is pseudonymous, and acts as an identity for many mobile messaging applications. Authentication in many cases is performed socially: you got the number from them, from a mutual friend, or they told you who they are and you were convinced.

> They intend to realize George Orwell's 1984.

With advancements in technology (particularly machine learning), I'd say more like a cross between 1984 and Minority Report. E.g. https://mashable.com/2017/07/24/china-ai-crime-minority-repo...

It doesn't get much worse than thought-pre-crime.

> Is there any other serious argument against encrypting DNS?

In DNS over HTTPS, requests are still going to a single, potentially untrustworthy entity. Encryption by itself only offers privacy against eavesdroppers, and can give a false sense of security to the unaware. Although not a fault of the technology, people in the EU have been encouraged / defaulted to use DoH provided by US companies on the grounds of privacy, where data privacy law in their own countries may be relatively strong.

I think we should be working towards DNS with a stronger privacy model than DNS over HTTPS. There is no need for centralised resolvers which get to see who are making which requests. Name resolution is a service which could be provided by a distributed network, with authority provided by cryptographically signed records.

Perhaps more significantly: there are around 1.3 billion PC gamers out of a larger 2.5 billion video gamers globally. Around 35% of Americans are PC gamers, although the largest market region is now Asia-Pacific.

Amongst people most likely to care about the concerns raised here, the proportion is likely even larger.

From my personal experience, there is a large overlap between people who like to play PC games and people who are interested in and curious about computing technology, and would otherwise be inclined to use Linux.

Although the trend appears to be changing with the likes of Proton, the lack of Linux compatibility for games keeps these people tied to Windows, and keeps them from adopting Linux.

Maybe this campaign was as primitive as they let on. It's likely that bringing down a terrorist group's marketing campaign didn't need or warrant a sophisticated attack, like sabotaging Iran's nuclear programme with Stuxnet did. A concerted attack effort using public knowledge techniques may have been enough.

It's in the interest of cyber-warfare actors to not expose their capabilities unnecessarily. Although efforts are taken to prevent malware from coming to the attention of enemies / rivals, or even being adopted by them or criminals, deployment always comes with that risk.

The raytracing is, but you don't see the result of the raytracing, you see the output of a neural network inventing detail based on higher definition training data. It's like seeing some blurry dots through a microscope, then drawing a sketch of detailed cells, based on your memory of pictures you've seen. The microscope is an optical system, but the sketch is the result of memory and style transfer, not simulation of optics. Hypothetically, you could have no understanding of the behaviour of light in producing the detailed sketch.

Techniques used to create realism with rasterization (e.g. normal mapping; shadow mapping; screen-space anti-aliasing) are still simulations of optics, just not entirely faithful ones.

Generating visuals with an autoencoder, albeit hinted by noisy physically-based raytracing, is not an optical technique; detail is generated from a visual statistical model, not an optical simulation.