It's actually pretty hard to fake gold(only Uranium and Tungsten have the right density; but are wrong on everything else, the brasses and bronzes that tepidly approach 'gold' in color don't have the density or chemical properties); but it is much, much, less difficult to deposit it in very, very, thin layers.

Some newer PCs actually made things worse: with the adoption of better power-saving features, it became quite common for the CPU frequency to move up and down depending on whether it was idling or you were throwing something at it at the time, rather than always running at the same frequency.

I had one 'delightful' system where the lousy onboard sound chip was apparently using the CPU clock as a timebase, despite the system being new enough that dynamic clock speed adjustment had been routine for several years. Until the vendor eventually issued a BIOS update that allowed us to turn off clock speed adjustment, we had to rig a low-priority Prime95 process to keep the CPU from idling into a lower speed state if we wanted the playback speed and pitch to be correct. And I though that using the CPU as a timebase died out about the same time as the 'turbo' button...

Gold is a bit overblown in advertising; but (aside from its real physical scarcity, and the unfortunate competition from finance assholes who want to carefully dig it up, refine it, and then have it sit in vaults), it is a genuinely nice ingredient for electrical applications. Adequate thermal and electrical conductivity, immune to most common causes of corrosion, not too difficult to electroplate, fairly easy to tailor from 'shockingly malleable and ductile' to 'adequately hard' just by adding or withholding a few % copper... Good stuff.

The proposed mechanism is at least in agreement with the laws of physics(which is a nice change by audiophile standards); but I have to wonder what kind of terrifyingly awful crap people are playing music on if noise from the SD/SDIO bus is a large enough portion of the problem that even a 100% ideal perfectly silent microSD card would make much of a difference.

Higher end cards have pushed the spec a bit; but SD is not a particularly fast or high-energy bus. It's ubiquitous, cheap, low power, and fast enough, and thus wildly popular; but if somebody's SD interface is causing serious audio issues, the mere thought of what that designer's RAM bus looks like would probably cause the FCC to send out their crack team of death commandos.

Are you seriously telling me that if you slightly de-cripple a general-purpose computer that it can be used as a general purpose computer?

Truly, I am living in the goddamn future now...

"Parallel Construction"... What good is a cool, powerful, sinister toy if you don't have a cover story that allows you to lie about the origins of evidence that would otherwise be inadmissible?

You don't have to like or trust Google(and you shouldn't) to agree that "Hey, let's quietly change rule 41 so that all you need to 'remote search'(by means tactfully unspecified) a computer anywhere is the approval of a judge, doesn't much matter which, from one of the 94 federal districts, rather than one at least vaguely related to the matter at hand!" is...perhaps...a bad move.

I, for one, welcome this innovation!

As the US demonstrated during the recent massive-clusterfuck-in-a-casino financial meltdown, advances in technology and worker productivity now allow the production of enough fraud to supply the entire industrialized world by a relatively small number of highly trained knowledge workers!

Why, then, should we have an inefficient, unproductive, labor force of blue collar criminals laboriously committing fraud, by hand, like some sort of pre-industrial master/apprentice nonsense, when we have massively more efficient fraud production technology available?

Given the cost per gram of contemporary flash memory, I'm going to guess "Really, really, heroically expensive".

Some do, some don't. SSDs don't draw terribly heroic amounts of power, so shoving enough supercaps into the enclosure to let a drive put its affairs in order when power is pulled is conceptually unproblematic; but it does add cost and bulk, so if they don't promise that they do, they probably don't.

It's not something to freak out too much about(most HDDs have somewhere between 8 and 64MB of cache RAM, and make no particular guarantees about not just dropping its contents on the floor when the power goes out, and somehow we all survived); but a backup is never a bad idea.

The AC at the top specified SLC flash. I'm not sure that Apple even sells anything with an SSD based on that, and, among vendors that do, paying 3-5 times as much per unit capacity would count as a pretty good deal compared to MLC based devices, with higher prices being a definite possibility if the name on the sticker is right.

The odds that they could get paid better to do the same work if the business of crafting really neat attacks and managing defense ends up being handled by contractors?

I hardly theorize that geeks are just too edgy and anti-authoritarian to work for the man, man. That's nonsense. Some repulsive percentage of silicon valley is currently fighting like animals to see who can invade customer privacy faster, a markedly more sordid business; convincing them to supply services to the feds will not be difficult. I'm just not as clear on how enticing them to supply those services as enlisted personnel, rather than as contractors, is going to work; given both the substantial private sector demand for similar skills and the DoD's nontrivial problem with avoiding substantial overpayment for services it buys externally.

My skepticism is not that you'll be able to find people to do the job(outfits like Vupen already do, and I doubt such will become any less common); but that an armed forces recruiter would (barring substantial changes in what they are able to offer) have a particularly good time trying to poach the worthwhile talent from such groups.

That's exactly why I'm confused.

If you are of the necessary talent and expertise to be of use for this sort of work, why would you go for the relatively lousy salary, potential to have your career advancement tied to your perceived ability in infantry combat, and comparatively strict rules when you could do the same job for either some private sector outfit, or for the DoD; but as an expensive contractor?

I can imagine why the people hatching these plans might want to have a cooler 'cyber command' than one that simply writes checks to contractors; but I'm having a hard time imagining how they plan to get the people that they need to go along with the idea.

Are the armed services types swarming over this just because if it has 'warrior' in the name they have to get a piece of the action, or do they actually have something resembling a coherent plan for being able to make a convincing pitch to the people they are hoping to attract?

Buying their services as consultants, or as civilian employees of DoD agencies, sure; cut them a check and they'll show right up; but some of these plans actually seem to involve enlisted geeks wearing hilariously incongruous camo in front of banks of monitors and 'cyber warrior'-ing. How is selling that going to work?

Unfortunately, it does that by making Google a 3rd party(I think that they even handle the authentication) in every connection you make between two of your own computers. They aren't privy to the actual content of the interaction, to the best of my knowledge; but that still creeps me the hell out.

It's unfortunate, really. An architecturally-modern successor to VNC(ie. same platform-agnostic low level approach; but taking advantage of the fact that most devices can, often with dedicated coprocessors, pump out a very nice H.264 stream or similar as easily or more easily than retro JPEG tiling stuff, along with a dose of some sort of remotely modern authentication) would be fantastic; but CRD doesn't even offer a 'the host is right on the same damn subnet, no, I don't need Google looking over my shoulder to connect to it!' mode.