How is the equipment that handles the FOUPs assembled? I assume in a cleanroom, or is in-situ cleaning good enough that you can still do maintenance in a class 10,000 room then after maintenance clean the tool to the required class 10 standards?

This article refers to a different incident where Google was explicitly blocked prior to a leadership change in China. The Pakistan routing screw up is completely different.

Case in point: Antarctica Journal of Mathematics.

You're taking me too literally. At that point in time Bitcoin didn't have any value for which to launder. Now of course it does, and doing that again now would be money laundering if you were trying to obfuscate illegality. All your examples can be money laundering because you're using objects with value. No judge would buy the argument I was money laundering by sending a chain email with a promise to pray for their soul for instance, because that email has no value.

It's well known that the vast majority of Bitcoin's created in the first half of the life of Bitcoin, back when they were totally worthless, are probably lost forever. This paper never even talks about that issue and assumes that every Bitcoin can still be spent.

In general it's a major flaw of the paper that they quote Bitcoin's in, well, Bitcoins everywhere, rather than talking about the value of the Bitcoins in USD for the transactions they're talking about.

Nov 8 2010 was about a month after Bitcoins had any value at all. If you look up the Mt. Gox prices for that time they were completely flat for ages with just a couple dollars a day of trading activity. Then they picked up a bit and by Nov 2010 they were looking at low hundreds of dollars a day. It was really early in Bitcoin history and that transaction was likely just someone playing around with transaction making code, who accidentally lost their wallet.

It's only money laundering if what you're laundering is money... at that time Bitcoins were just an experiment that didn't seem to be going anywhere.

Exactly. Even then people understood that you couldn't hide coins by moving stuff around. I like the analogy of trying to walk across a large desert. If you enter the desert, walk all over your tracks over and over again, then exit, anyone can deduce that the tracks entering and exiting the desert was the same person.

Real attempts at hiding the source of Bitcoins always involve swapping your coins for someone elses, and even then, that's a quite legitimate thing to do for privacy given that every transaction is public. It's only money laundering if you're trying to launder illegitimate funds, keeping privacy for legit transactions is not illegal.

If you go to the Tor website, you're presented with some software to download. Click on that, installed the software, and go. Sorry, but this is frankly very easy. There aren't solutions that "work better with the web"; HTML5 doesn't allow Javascript to open connections to arbitrary hosts on the internet, so any "web" solution would still require trusting a server run by people you don't know. Similarly the connection to that server can still be "man-in-the-middled" in a direct, but difficult to detect way. At least with Tor you can download the software on a different computer, unconnected to you.

Any technology-based solution is going to require some knowledge to use safely. Tor is already pretty close to the least-knowledge solution out there, and it has the advantage of being widely used for all sorts of reasons, so use of it doesn't raise that many red-flags by itself.

And how do you propose this is going to work, yet not require technological competence? At least organizations like Wikileaks and traditional journalism can provide things like maildrops, a non-technological solution that is accessible to people without security expertise.

Maybe this is why Openleaks hasn't released any code: did they go into the project with high hopes, and realized that there didn't exist technological solutions to the problems they were trying to solve?

Dead wrong. Intel drivers are excellent and I and many others have had great success with them. They also usually work quite closely with the kernel community as a whole to make sure things work as expected; that's why what this article is saying seems to out of character for Intel. For instance, try searching for "intel.com" in the git commit log. Lots of kernel developers are on Intel's payroll, including core people like Alan Cox.

You also gotta wonder, what exactly is that technology supposed to be anyway? Tor is readily available, as are file uploading sites and message boards accessible with tor. If you have the technical know-how to use the "Openleaks technology" to publish your leak, you probably already have the know-how to use Tor anyway. Wikileaks also offered "mail-your-leak" dropboxes, a very secure option that has nothing to do with source-code.

The real thing Openleaks could add is vetted technology to remove things like embedded tracking of documents, for instance the metadata in jpegs and word documents, as well as technology to defeat stenographicly hidden per-file tracking codes. I haven't heard of anything from Openleaks even mentioning that stuff, yet defeating can be vital if a leaker wants to remain anonymous. It's a much harder problem than the actual publishing as well. It's also a problem more easily solved by human efforts, such as trusted individuals that re-word and summarize documents and publish the summaries rather than the originals directly.

What Openleaks can't do with technology is vet the leaks to ensure authenticity. For that an organization like Wikileaks makes much more sense, as does traditional journalism.

What makes you think they never had that "critical mass of readership"? I'd argue their most important readership was other journalists, and pretty much every leak they've ever published has been picked up by the press in some form or another. That the general public can read the leaks easily is a side-effect, necessitated by the fact that they want to keep the journalists honest, and by the fact that the term "journalist" should be interpreted fairly inclusively.

It's better than that: sure helium can leak out of your hard drive enclosure, but it's also the only think that can leak into the enclosure as well. Helium is present in the atmosphere in small quantities, so the pressure in the hard drive will track atmospheric, albeit very slowly, yet still maintain a nearly pure helium atmosphere.

Linus Torvalds has an interesting comment regarding your style of programming: plain-old C can make a lot of sense precisely because abstractions wind up being implemented with relatively verbose code. Compare C++ code using operator overloading, vs. object-oriented C code using functions, or at the very extreme, lisp where the language itself is different due to heavy macro use. It's the C code that's most likely to be readable by other maintainers, even if it takes more lines and typing to do what it does. The Linux kernel has a lot of developers with relatively little management structure or co-ordination, as well as being relatively simple programming in the sense that they can avoid a lot of the more complex logic more often seen in, say, GUI code, so you can see why that kind of trade-off can make a lot of sense.

I'm an electronics designer and I'm in the exact same boat, although where I work we're pretty lax on all the other stuff, so often we just have schematics to work from. Granted I'm at a schedule-driven startup, so being lax can be a valid tradeoff between time spent on documenting stuff, and time wasted due to forgetfulness and the bus factor. Just like with programming (a former career path of mine) even just some simple notes on what equations you used to design something can be hugely useful I find.

Nah, that won't be an issue. The secret sauce of my plan is actually the marketing people; required to convince the business world that a shitty low-resolution black and white company logo and unreadable signature really is going to make a better "personal connection" with their customers...