#Next-generation computing

[feather-softares]

Neuromorphic Chips

These are chips that are inspired by the human brain's neural networks. Like the brain, neuromorphic chips are designed for massive parallel processing. They also use spike-based communication, which leads to more efficient and faster information processing.

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[thebramblewood]

Little does Ulrike know Helena has the (vampire) sugar mommy from hell... and she's here to crash the party.

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Featuring a lot by @moonwoodhollow, gnome art by @pocketgnome, Leonor and Renzo by @nexility-sims, Rosella, George, and Jo by @aheathen-conceivably, and Nettie by @venriliz.

Ulrike: Did you know I would be showing tonight?

Helena: No. God, no. I wouldn’t have come if I knew… I mean, not that I wouldn’t want to see you, but… I promise I’m not, like, stalking y-

Ulrike: [laughs] Take a breath, Zhao. I didn’t mean to accuse you. But can you blame me for being caught off guard? Why are you in Windenburg?

Helena: Oh, I’ve been staying nearby with some… friends.

Ulrike: What friends?

Helena: No one you know.

Ulrike: Why didn’t you tell me? You knew I was doing the residency.

Helena: I just… didn’t want things to be awkward.

Ulrike: And bumping into each other like this isn’t?

[overlapping crowd chatter]

Ulrike: God, I can barely hear myself think. Let’s talk somewhere quieter.

-

Ulrike: Level with me, Zhao. Are you okay?

Helena: What? I’m fine.

Ulrike: You’ve barely even made eye contact, which I know means you’re lying about something. That dress looks expensive — and that jewelry. Your hair is so glossy I can see my own reflection. Your skin is clear as glass. I think I know what’s going on here.

Helena: Ulrike, I can explain-

Ulrike: You’re someone’s sugar baby.

Helena: [bursts out laughing] Oh my god, Faust. That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.

Ulrike: At least it got you to look at me. Helena, your eyes! They almost seem red.

Helena: [dismissively] It must be the lights. Now, tell me, how the fuck have those gnomes still got you in a chokehold after all this time?

Ulrike: There’s the Zhao I know, always asking the hard-hitting questions.

-

Lilith: Unhand me, you brute! You and your approved guest list can both go straight to hell. [to Caleb] Did you truly think not inviting me would prevent me from finding out about this delightful little event?

Caleb: [calmly] It wasn't meant to be a secret. I just didn’t think you’d care to come.

Lilith: [teasingly] Your thoughts betray you, baby brother.

Caleb: My thoughts betray nothing. You simply followed us here.

Lilith: Well, if only the two of you weren’t so obnoxious about occupying each other’s headspace. Admit it. You only keep me out to tip the scales in your favor.

Caleb: As though you wouldn’t do the same — if you could. But you hear only as much as she’s willing to tell you, and it drives you mad.

Lilith: [giggles] Oh, this is a fun game. We've never feuded over a girl before. I thought that sort of thing would be beneath you, considering your-

Caleb: Don’t be gauche, Lilith. It’s not a g-

Lilith: Yes, there they are — your hideously boring morals. [heaves dramatic sigh] I’d love to keep chatting, but I must take a look around. I’ve always been a patron of the arts.

[superbat-lmao]

The landscape of vigilantism and superheroism is forever shifting and changing. People die, get resurrected, betray their ideals, change their morals, go from hero to criminal to anti-hero, redeem themselves before death, it is impossible to keep track of everyone’s allegiances and fluctuating morals.

The only person able to keep all of that information straight, is Batman. He’s the only one who bothers to try. Everyone else relies on his files, the details and connections he makes sure to document, to leaf through. New people join every day and Batman learns as much about them as he possibly can.

There’s a day in the future when Bruce looks around at all the new faces in the Justice League, all of the new teams that feed into its recruitment, The Titans, Young Justice, The Outlaws, ect and realizes that his world has changed. His children are the structure of the vigilante/hero scene. He was a scaffold, allowing them to reach their potential where they would settle into place and become the structural supports for the rest of the community.

But there will always be a piece of Bruce that misses the beginning. When things were simpler and he was just settling into the League he was creating. When the faces went from new to familiar and hadn’t yet reached complicated. Some people called them the golden years or the good ol’ days, but Bruce couldn’t name them. He just missed the beginning when he hadn’t known the end.

And before anyone knows it, even Batman is gone. Finally passed on. And no one is able to recreate what he did, who he was. The way he held things together.

Instead, his children share the role. They serve as the points of contact between so many interrelated and unconnected teams. They are the bridges of communication, of sharing intel, of laying inroads. No one man keeps track of what Batman was able to, but together, his children carry on his legacy.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Demon-haunted computers are back, baby

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

As a science fiction writer, I am professionally irritated by a lot of sf movies. Not only do those writers get paid a lot more than I do, they insist on including things like "self-destruct" buttons on the bridges of their starships.

Look, I get it. When the evil empire is closing in on your flagship with its secret transdimensional technology, it's important that you keep those secrets out of the emperor's hand. An irrevocable self-destruct switch there on the bridge gets the job done! (It has to be irrevocable, otherwise the baddies'll just swarm the bridge and toggle it off).

But c'mon. If there's a facility built into your spaceship that causes it to explode no matter what the people on the bridge do, that is also a pretty big security risk! What if the bad guy figures out how to hijack the measure that – by design – the people who depend on the spaceship as a matter of life and death can't detect or override?

I mean, sure, you can try to simplify that self-destruct system to make it easier to audit and assure yourself that it doesn't have any bugs in it, but remember Schneier's Law: anyone can design a security system that works so well that they themselves can't think of a flaw in it. That doesn't mean you've made a security system that works – only that you've made a security system that works on people stupider than you.

I know it's weird to be worried about realism in movies that pretend we will ever find a practical means to visit other star systems and shuttle back and forth between them (which we are very, very unlikely to do):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

But this kind of foolishness galls me. It galls me even more when it happens in the real world of technology design, which is why I've spent the past quarter-century being very cross about Digital Rights Management in general, and trusted computing in particular.

It all starts in 2002, when a team from Microsoft visited our offices at EFF to tell us about this new thing they'd dreamed up called "trusted computing":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/05/trusting-trust/#thompsons-devil

The big idea was to stick a second computer inside your computer, a very secure little co-processor, that you couldn't access directly, let alone reprogram or interfere with. As far as this "trusted platform module" was concerned, you were the enemy. The "trust" in trusted computing was about other people being able to trust your computer, even if they didn't trust you.

So that little TPM would do all kinds of cute tricks. It could observe and produce a cryptographically signed manifest of the entire boot-chain of your computer, which was meant to be an unforgeable certificate attesting to which kind of computer you were running and what software you were running on it. That meant that programs on other computers could decide whether to talk to your computer based on whether they agreed with your choices about which code to run.

This process, called "remote attestation," is generally billed as a way to identify and block computers that have been compromised by malware, or to identify gamers who are running cheats and refuse to play with them. But inevitably it turns into a way to refuse service to computers that have privacy blockers turned on, or are running stream-ripping software, or whose owners are blocking ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

After all, a system that treats the device's owner as an adversary is a natural ally for the owner's other, human adversaries. The rubric for treating the owner as an adversary focuses on the way that users can be fooled by bad people with bad programs. If your computer gets taken over by malicious software, that malware might intercept queries from your antivirus program and send it false data that lulls it into thinking your computer is fine, even as your private data is being plundered and your system is being used to launch malware attacks on others.

These separate, non-user-accessible, non-updateable secure systems serve a nubs of certainty, a remote fortress that observes and faithfully reports on the interior workings of your computer. This separate system can't be user-modifiable or field-updateable, because then malicious software could impersonate the user and disable the security chip.

It's true that compromised computers are a real and terrifying problem. Your computer is privy to your most intimate secrets and an attacker who can turn it against you can harm you in untold ways. But the widespread redesign of out computers to treat us as their enemies gives rise to a range of completely predictable and – I would argue – even worse harms. Building computers that treat their owners as untrusted parties is a system that works well, but fails badly.

First of all, there are the ways that trusted computing is designed to hurt you. The most reliable way to enshittify something is to supply it over a computer that runs programs you can't alter, and that rats you out to third parties if you run counter-programs that disenshittify the service you're using. That's how we get inkjet printers that refuse to use perfectly good third-party ink and cars that refuse to accept perfectly good engine repairs if they are performed by third-party mechanics:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

It's how we get cursed devices and appliances, from the juicer that won't squeeze third-party juice to the insulin pump that won't connect to a third-party continuous glucose monitor:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

But trusted computing doesn't just create an opaque veil between your computer and the programs you use to inspect and control it. Trusted computing creates a no-go zone where programs can change their behavior based on whether they think they're being observed.

The most prominent example of this is Dieselgate, where auto manufacturers murdered hundreds of people by gimmicking their cars to emit illegal amount of NOX. Key to Dieselgate was a program that sought to determine whether it was being observed by regulators (it checked for the telltale signs of the standard test-suite) and changed its behavior to color within the lines.

Software that is seeking to harm the owner of the device that's running it must be able to detect when it is being run inside a simulation, a test-suite, a virtual machine, or any other hallucinatory virtual world. Just as Descartes couldn't know whether anything was real until he assured himself that he could trust his senses, malware is always questing to discover whether it is running in the real universe, or in a simulation created by a wicked god:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/28/descartes-was-an-optimist/#uh-oh

That's why mobile malware uses clever gambits like periodically checking for readings from your device's accelerometer, on the theory that a virtual mobile phone running on a security researcher's test bench won't have the fidelity to generate plausible jiggles to match the real data that comes from a phone in your pocket:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/01/google-play-malware-used-phones-motion-sensors-to-conceal-itself/

Sometimes this backfires in absolutely delightful ways. When the Wannacry ransomware was holding the world hostage, the security researcher Marcus Hutchins noticed that its code made reference to a very weird website: iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com. Hutchins stood up a website at that address and every Wannacry-infection in the world went instantly dormant:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#the-matrix

It turns out that Wannacry's authors were using that ferkakte URL the same way that mobile malware authors were using accelerometer readings – to fulfill Descartes' imperative to distinguish the Matrix from reality. The malware authors knew that security researchers often ran malicious code inside sandboxes that answered every network query with fake data in hopes of eliciting responses that could be analyzed for weaknesses. So the Wannacry worm would periodically poll this nonexistent website and, if it got an answer, it would assume that it was being monitored by a security researcher and it would retreat to an encrypted blob, ceasing to operate lest it give intelligence to the enemy. When Hutchins put a webserver up at iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com, every Wannacry instance in the world was instantly convinced that it was running on an enemy's simulator and withdrew into sulky hibernation.

The arms race to distinguish simulation from reality is critical and the stakes only get higher by the day. Malware abounds, even as our devices grow more intimately woven through our lives. We put our bodies into computers – cars, buildings – and computers inside our bodies. We absolutely want our computers to be able to faithfully convey what's going on inside them.

But we keep running as hard as we can in the opposite direction, leaning harder into secure computing models built on subsystems in our computers that treat us as the threat. Take UEFI, the ubiquitous security system that observes your computer's boot process, halting it if it sees something it doesn't approve of. On the one hand, this has made installing GNU/Linux and other alternative OSes vastly harder across a wide variety of devices. This means that when a vendor end-of-lifes a gadget, no one can make an alternative OS for it, so off the landfill it goes.

It doesn't help that UEFI – and other trusted computing modules – are covered by Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which makes it a felony to publish information that can bypass or weaken the system. The threat of a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine means that UEFI and other trusted computing systems are understudied, leaving them festering with longstanding bugs:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/09/free-sample/#que-viva

Here's where it gets really bad. If an attacker can get inside UEFI, they can run malicious software that – by design – no program running on our computers can detect or block. That badware is running in "Ring -1" – a zone of privilege that overrides the operating system itself.

Here's the bad news: UEFI malware has already been detected in the wild:

https://securelist.com/cosmicstrand-uefi-firmware-rootkit/106973/

And here's the worst news: researchers have just identified another exploitable UEFI bug, dubbed Pixiefail:

https://blog.quarkslab.com/pixiefail-nine-vulnerabilities-in-tianocores-edk-ii-ipv6-network-stack.html

Writing in Ars Technica, Dan Goodin breaks down Pixiefail, describing how anyone on the same LAN as a vulnerable computer can infect its firmware:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/01/new-uefi-vulnerabilities-send-firmware-devs-across-an-entire-ecosystem-scrambling/

That vulnerability extends to computers in a data-center where the attacker has a cloud computing instance. PXE – the system that Pixiefail attacks – isn't widely used in home or office environments, but it's very common in data-centers.

Again, once a computer is exploited with Pixiefail, software running on that computer can't detect or delete the Pixiefail code. When the compromised computer is queried by the operating system, Pixiefail undetectably lies to the OS. "Hey, OS, does this drive have a file called 'pixiefail?'" "Nope." "Hey, OS, are you running a process called 'pixiefail?'" "Nope."

This is a self-destruct switch that's been compromised by the enemy, and which no one on the bridge can de-activate – by design. It's not the first time this has happened, and it won't be the last.

There are models for helping your computer bust out of the Matrix. Back in 2016, Edward Snowden and bunnie Huang prototyped and published source code and schematics for an "introspection engine":

https://assets.pubpub.org/aacpjrja/AgainstTheLaw-CounteringLawfulAbusesofDigitalSurveillance.pdf

This is a single-board computer that lives in an ultraslim shim that you slide between your iPhone's mainboard and its case, leaving a ribbon cable poking out of the SIM slot. This connects to a case that has its own OLED display. The board has leads that physically contact each of the network interfaces on the phone, conveying any data they transit to the screen so that you can observe the data your phone is sending without having to trust your phone.

(I liked this gadget so much that I included it as a major plot point in my 2020 novel Attack Surface, the third book in the Little Brother series):

https://craphound.com/attacksurface/

We don't have to cede control over our devices in order to secure them. Indeed, we can't ever secure them unless we can control them. Self-destruct switches don't belong on the bridge of your spaceship, and trusted computing modules don't belong in your devices.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/17/descartes-delenda-est/#self-destruct-sequence-initiated

Image: Mike (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/stillwellmike/15676883261/

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

[the-leech-lord]

🤖Data Soong Stimboard🤖

⭐️⭐️⭐️|⭐️⭐️⭐️|⭐️⭐️⭐️

Part 3/7 of my Star Trek TNG crew stimboards

[ghostdnfie]

dream stans here who are multifandom, how do u deal with there being outspoken antis (whether its anything between a loud group to literal thousands of them) in ur other fandom(s) bc i feel like im walking on eggshells and unwelcome solely because of who i like and its beyond shit. i can barely interact with anyone like god i applaud your strength bc im literally about to lose my patience with the p.handom and its been just 5 months 💀

[meamiki]

[reverse entry AU]

so glad the work week is over!

no more meetings!

what do you mean its only tuesday.

[owl-paints-art]

just in: guy who doesn't draw robots/mechs/etc draws a robot pokemon

(request by @jessica199616) icons f2u (with credit) :]

[saltydog96]

Hello ? Hi, yes, is this the bandwagon ?

Decided to join in on @mostly-natm 's DTIYS ! What an amazing reference-- your style is great!

[chernobog13]

LCARS display for the original Constitution-class U.S.S. Enterprise.

[pushing500]

Hey! I just wanna say I binged the whole Mechanitor’s Message saga last night, I just forgot to like the posts as I was going through :P I love the Jones boys so much, I wanna draw Kwahu with his nice braid sometime <3

I'm so happy you liked the story, and I hope you'll stick around to see where things go!! ❤️❤️

If you do end up drawing anything, I'd love to see it if you're up to sharing! 😁

[badgopher]

"Saturdays by Twin Shadow (feat. HAIM)" is how I've mentally started every post I've made here on a Saturday for the past however many years that song's been out.

I decided I needed bath bombs so I set out to do that and only realized my error when I saw the traffic control person as soon as I turned into the mall. On the Saturday before Christmas. lol

My upstairs neighbor moved out a month ago so I no longer hear about their sex life through my ceiling. My next door neighbor moved out last week so I no longer have to wear my active noise cancelling earplugs to muffle their snoring. It’s quieter around here, but the hot water takes longer to find my tap in the morning.

I deleted a whole chapter about that computer case. You’re welcome.

Never did end up doing Christmas cards this year. I’ve got mixed feelings about that.

I want to do a bunch of dumb end of year data analysis things, but I have to pull a bunch of data to do it, and that’ll take me like a dozen minutes, and that's like a dozen minutes that I could spend not doing that thing. You see my dilemma. Stay tuned, I guess?

I’m the only one on my team not scheduled off on Monday and I think Tuesday next week (and, actually, most of the next 2 weeks). It’s easy enough to keep Teams active and my work email open while I tinker on side quests.

The checkout person at LUSH is always like “oh, are these a gift?” as I unload 9 bath bombs from my basket, as if they don't get many solo middle aged dudes stocking up on bath bombs on Saturday afternoons.

Turns out I miscounted and have 1 too many bath bombs so I’m taking a bath about it.

[frostbite-the-bat]

sucktacular!

[purplespacekitty]

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra

Gilgamesh and Enkidu at Uruk

Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel

[raurquiz]

#remembering #DCFontana #writer #startrek #tomorrowisyesterday #charliex #journeytobabel #fridayschild #theultimatecomputer #theenterpriseincident #tas #yesteryear #vulcansglory #thenextgeneration #encounteratfarpoint #heartofglory #deepspacenine #dax #ds930 #startrek58

[alllelements]

fighting for my life on wg-gesucht