cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

  • 27 Posts
  • 142 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: January 17th, 2022

help-circle





  • Funny that blog calls it a “failed attempt at a backdoor” while neglecting to mention that the grsec post (which it does link to and acknowledges is the source of the story) had been updated months prior to explicitly refute that characterization:

    5/22/2020 Update: This kind of update should not have been necessary, but due to irresponsible journalists and the nature of social media, it is important to make some things perfectly clear:

    Nowhere did we claim this was anything more than a trivially exploitable vulnerability. It is not a backdoor or an attempted backdoor, the term does not appear elsewhere in this blog at all; any suggestion of the sort was fabricated by irresponsible journalists who did not contact us and do not speak for us.

    There is no chance this code would have passed review and be merged. No one can push or force code upstream.

    This code is not characteristic of the quality of other code contributed upstream by Huawei. Contrary to baseless assertions from some journalists, this is not Huawei’s first attempt at contributing to the kernel, in fact they’ve been a frequent contributor for some time.






  • The headline should mention that they’re breaking 22-bit RSA, but then it would get a lot less clicks.

    A different group of Chinese researchers set what I think is the current record when they factored a 48-bit number with a quantum computer two years ago: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.12372

    I guess the news here is that now they’ve reached 22 bits using the quantum annealing technique which works on D-Wave’s commercially-available quantum computers? That approach was previously able to factor an 18-bit number in 2018.

    🥂 to the researchers, but 👎 to the clickbait headline writers. This is still nowhere near being a CRQC (cryptanalytically-relevant quantum computer).













  • This video is full of jarring edits which initially made me wonder if someone had cut out words or phrases to create an abbreviated version. But, then I realized there are way too many of them to have been done manually. I checked the full original video and from the few edits i manually checked it seems like it is just inconsequential pauses etc that were removed: for instance, when Linus says “the other side of that picture” in the original there is an extra “p” sound which is removed here.

    Yet another irritating and unnecessary application of neural networks, I guess.