It's useful, but systems programming languages shouldn't be used to create applications in the first place.
We're trying to solve a problem that shouldn't be solved. We're continuing and even confirming the usage of systems programming languages for application development.
I don’t think this delineation is that clear, unless by “application” you mean the app tier of a 3 tier app.
Postgres and Nginx make sense in system programming languages; they’re extremely performance sensitive and that granular level of control offers them features. Interpreters are sort of the same, they interact with the OS a ton, it makes sense to work in the same language as the OS.
I do generally agree for the app tier of a web app. I wouldn’t build a CMS in Rust, but I also wouldn’t build a reverse proxy in Python.
Writing an operating system kernel in C is valid usage since there's a great deal of thought going into it and it almost never changes.
EVERYTHING ELSE is invalid usage no matter how performance critical people claim their application is. These are just excuses for people to use a grossly unsafe language to get that last 2% of performance whilst costing the world trillions in lost productivity and security breaches.
It's a nuclear weapons thing. Basically you want your entire nuclear weapons supply chain infrastructure to be in your own country. These days that also includes super computers to do simulations on what happens with your aging asrenal (just look at how many Top 500 supercomputers are at national labs like Oak Ridge, LLNL, or Sandia). Japan doesn't technically have nuclear weapons, but they're rumored to be "a screwdriver's turn away", or practically within a few weeks of having a weapon. That posture itself requires even more simulation just to be sure you can make good on that.
The AI stuff is basically "well sure, these are really good at distributed matrix math, why not?" hoping to get better volumes and make the program cheaper internally.
And they're working on getting chips fabbed in Japan too now that IBM sold their 2nm process to Rapidus, but that's probably successor to these. Maybe 2028? In the meantime there's still more nuclear simulations to run than there is compute to run them.
« nuclear weapons » — They're science fiction, smoke blown around huge quantities of explosives still being produced at WW2 levels.
Michael Palmer, in his book Hiroshima revisited, doesn't go as far as to rule out “nukes” entirely, but damage assessment, medical evidence, witness reports and measurements show that no such thing as claimed by the US and Japanese governments happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Instead, there were other ingredients to the atrocities, like the usual napalm, so-called “pumpkin bombs” (the iconic Nagasaki model), flash bombs and coloured smoke (“special effects”), and mustard gas (to generate “radiation sickness”), which is a gel that can linger on and emit poison for weeks (depending on the weather).
Napalm and mustard gas are 100 % consistent with the medical record, which the author is professionally qualified to assess, citing academic literature (which is scarse in case of napalm, probably on account of its heavy use by the US against East Asian peoples in the “defense of democracy”).
The damage pattern is extensive rather than intensive (that is the military expert assessment), just as seen in other napalmed cities in Japan. Miraculous survivors at the alleged “ground zero” (no such thing can really be derived from the damage pattern) preclude any generation of heat drastically higher than what is attainable by conventional means (“victims were vaporized”). So do slender objects like antennas and trees (which blossomed again next spring, then interpreted as a “miracle”). The few stone buildings there were can be seen standing out among the remains of flimsy huts that were blown and burnt.
And of course there was no disruption in settlement, the cities were built up and inhabited again.
« simulations on what happens with your aging asrenal » — Swarms of red herrings to keep the myth alive. Surely other uses of supercomputers are conceivable, even for non-disclosed purposes.
Strangely, while the non-existence of such weapons is undoubtedly good news, there are many “nuke fanboys” (no girls, though – this is a male thing) who will get upset and even angry at this, as if the “atomic bomb” were some kind of god to venerate, when it really only is lies and propaganda that we've been fed when we were kids.
To be clear, this is not to dispute nuclear energy, just the claim that it may be used to obtain explosions, and even extraordinary ones.
Looks like it's licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Cool. Might be a fun read, might be a waste of time. I try not to dive into conspiracies after having wasted so much time on them in the past.
The whole reason why the Catholic Church doesn't allow priests to be married anymore was because it used to be that the individual churches were mostly the property of the priest, and would be passed down generationally (with some restrictions). The church phased in the ban on marriage so that over time, the churches would all in up in the estate of a priest with no heirs, where they'd become the property more formally of the Catholic Church proper. Today the Catholic Church is the single largest landowner in the world, with about 170 million acres.
More recent religious organizations have taken note of that, with LDS owning about 2.4M acres.
Your comment dragged me into a rabbit hole, which is always a welcome surprise.
From my readings, one can always debate whether this reason for celibacy is whole or not (of course, more holy reasons were given, like purity of the ritual among others), but avoiding inheritance from father to sons was certainly a big factor. By barring heirs from the equation, it solved the whole dispute over inheritance. Yet, when it comes to clerical office and priesthood, "property" is not quite right, since it's mostly about usufruct and benefices, moreso. Which can be significant assets, that goes without saying, hence the Church did everything it could, for holy and not-so-holy-reasons, that traditional generational transmission does not apply. No next generation, no problem.
Quite importantly to the Roman Catholic Church, they wanted to avoid dynasties of priests that would grow in importance and out of their control, so they did whatever they could (ban marriage and fatherhood) so that a mis-aligned priest would only be a temporary nuisance to the Institution.
A lot went into this short burst of investigation, like the fact that early Churches were private property of land-owners, building churches for indulgences and power, reinforcing their ties with the Church, and I may dig deeper. Thanks for your comment again, if you have some references you recommend, I'd appreciate you share them!
I don't understand what you mean. Do you mean I or the GP used LLMs?
If you mean I did, yes, I have, to begin with, to get an overview and links. But to do any of the reading or to write my comment? No. What's wrong with that?
That does not sound correct. Priests in Eastern rite Catholic churches get married, but they do not own the land in which their parish chirch stands and they do not pass that land on to their children. Note that the Catholic Church itself does not own that land, either. As I understand it, in most cases the parish land is owned by a Catholic episcopal See or eparchia, as in Latin rite Catholic Churches, in which the diocese owns the land.
No, the default acid used is nitric acid. Which should definitely be treated with respect, but isn't nearly as nasty as anything with fluorine.
But if you have a few examples of the chip and can break a few eggs to make an omelette, there are techniques that just involve hitting the epoxy with a blow torch and/or opening it up with plyers.
Not just regular nitric acid either, but red/white fuming nitric acid in many cases!
Back during my teenage years I used to make the stuff for decapping projects and amateur rocketry by grabbing the ingredients from our local hardware store and distilling it in a make-your-own-moonshine kit I bought off of craigslist.
Worked great up until the police were called because the store employees thought I was making bombs. I hear heating up sulfuric acid is the better way to decap epoxy chips nowadays.
Nation states almost certainly have the ability to extract the private keys out of an image sensor and SEP. Outside of superpowers even if you're willing to do it destructively.
> Nation states almost certainly have the ability to extract the private keys out of an image sensor and SEP. Outside of superpowers even if you're willing to do it destructively. They can then sign their own fraudulent images.
That's not how this works.
Let's pretend they're able to extract the sensor key and the SEP key. Then what?
An attacker won't have the ECDSA P-256 over SHA-256 signed timestamp token from the Apple Push Notification Service.
When Reference mode starts, the operating system supplies a SHA-256 digest to be embedded at a fixed location in the captured frame’s metadata. The digest is computed from the most recent secure timestamp, the device manifest, and the device's secure boot manifest.
More encryption and checking happens until the secure digital negative is sent to Private Cloud Compute:
PCC recomputes the digest embedded in the frame and verifies the
sensor's signature over the pixels and that digest, verifying the
certificate chain back to the sensor CA. PCC also verifies the SEP
signature and chains it to the BAA CA, and it verifies the signature
on the device manifest and chains it to the CA that signs device
manifests at the factory. It then confirms that the sensor and SEP
named in those chains belong to the same device. Only if all these
checks pass does processing continue.
Only PCC can create an Apple Reference Image; an attacker having the image and sensor private keys doesn't enable them to create a reference image.
> An attacker won't have the ECDSA P-256 over SHA-256 signed timestamp token from the Apple Push Notification Service.
Sure they can, they have everything needed to prove to Apple's servers that they're a real iPhone since pulling the keys means they have the cryptographic root of trust, and Apple's servers will happily be a signature oracle for them in that case.
> When Reference mode starts, the operating system supplies a SHA-256 digest to be embedded at a fixed location in the captured frame’s metadata. The digest is computed from the most recent secure timestamp, the device manifest, and the device's secure boot manifest.
And when you know what is measured into those manifests and the keys at the root of trust you can manufacture those too.
The entire scheme is dependent on not being able to extract device specific keys. At the end of the day, those are almost certainly efuses burnt based on a on-chip HRNG as a manufacturing step which is intended to never leave the device, but instead only signatures and associated public keys.
But when you have chip development hardware of the kind you'd have at a decent fabless semiconductor company, you can very clearly see burnt efuses.
Apple would be legally restricted from disclosing any government compromises, while still claiming their systems are secure and operating as intended in general.
We already know it's happening right now, and they know we know, but we can't do shit about it.
> Apple would be legally restricted from disclosing any government compromises, while still claiming their systems are secure and operating as intended in general.
I'm aware. The point is they can't give the NSA something they don't have. The photo sensor generates its own ECDSA P-256 signing key pair and never releases the private half.
Every device has a unique key pair and the private key is unavailable… there's not a way to give the NSA that would help them. The system is setup so that the image data, meta data, etc can't be accessed by anyone including Apple.
I think the chart exactly shows the weakness that some people have pointed out. Apple's PCC servers at some point in time know the signing identity for a photo and Apple's generated replacement signature. The relevant steps from your chart:
- verifies each link and its certificate chain, sensor signature over pixels, SEP signature, device manifest signature
- PCC Submits the commitment (the JPEG hash) to Apple's signing service.
So, at some point in time, Apple's servers have both the original certificate chain and the new replacement signature. If this is recorded, Apple can deanonimize photos and check whether two photos were from the same device/sensor.
Apple's system protects against most state actors, except Apple and the US, unless you fully trust that their PCC is watertight.
(Remember that Apple was part of PRISM and probably also its successor.)
I don't think law enforcement needs it, because when sending/posting a picture, people leak so much metadata anyway.
But people outside the US should certainly distrust these systems.
> The NSA has probably already forced Apple to hand the keys over to them.
Again, that's not how it works.
There's no set of keys and certificates they could give to the NSA. Every iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max has a unique set of cryptographic keys, most of which can't be accessed by Apple.
The first thing that happens is when photo sensor is initialized at the factory, it creates its own ECDSA P-256 signing key pair; the private key is never disclosed. The public key is signed by the factory's certificate authority.
This ain't X.509 where VeriSign's key pair is sitting in a HSM at their HQ and in theory could be forced to sign a fraudulent certificate or revoke someone's valid website certificate.
They don’t need the signing keys though. Apple could roll out a separate version of sepOS to assist law enforcement that signs at they will.
Also, while the unique device ID is supposed to be burned into fuses by the SE during production, it is kinda hard to prove for anyone that is not Apple that this indeed happens in the way they state.
Personally I’m not a strong believer in such theories though. I think it’s more mundane and Apple helps law enforcement by having some weak defaults. Like how iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, but most chats are available to law enforcement because most people turn on iCloud Backups/Messages in iCloud and not ADP, resulting in chats only being encrypted at-rest in iCloud. This is only stated somewhere in a footnote in one of their security documents.
There are more weak defaults like that in various crucial apps (e.g. WhatsApp) that makes most important stuff available to law enforcement when needed.
That's what a lot of the right was banned for pre-Musk, but you thought that was bad, so isn't it also bad when it's done to the left, or is your definition of bad one-sided?
Andrew Anglin, the subject of the first article, was re-banned in 2023 for the same reason that crimethink, inc was banned.
The subjects of the second article are particularly odious right-wing conspiracy theorists and racists that lost their reach, which they believe was connected to arguing with Elon.
That seems like an action you’d be in favor of, and also it counters the propaganda claim — but regardless, their claim that they were shadow-banned, that the cause was direct intercession by Elon, and that the motivation was their merely disagreeing with him, is unsupported by any evidence.
> Ex-NSA Chief: 'We Kill People Based on Metadata'
> Hayden made the remark after saying he agreed with the idea that metadata - the information collected by the NSA about phone calls and other communications that does not include content - can tell the government "everything" about anyone it's targeting for surveillance, often making the actual content of the communication unnecessary.
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