If you read TFA, it's an Intel-made chip with the ARM architecture.

As a big holder and long-time user of bitcoins, I'm in favor of the price not being pushed down. That said, TFS is inflammatory. TFA, which is open access, is actually an interesting read, and it's a clever attack. They also discuss possible mitigations. It's worth a read if you're into bitcoin.

Read the article. They have a way of forcing disconnection of a server from the Tor network. They concede it's quite noticeable and it may not work if no non-tor fallback is used.

$25k / year?! Fresh grads in silicon valley can get $100k / year jobs at good tech companies - and the median salary is way higher.

Not really. Random jitter can be dealt with statistically: collect more data, compute the mean, and use the mean where you would have used the exact timing.

In order to defeat timing analysis through noise injection, you need to introduce a large amount of variation compared to the number of packets being sent; for any realistically-sized data transfer, this requires jitter on the order of minutes to hours.

Bonus points if you can re-nounify it.

Google did this about seven years ago. Of the stats, a drive with a non-zero scan error count has a 70% chance of surviving eight months, one with a non-zero reallocated sector count has a 85% chance of survival, and one with a non-zero pending sector count has a 75% chance of survival. For comparison, a drive with no error indications has a better than 99% chance of surviving eight months.

Overall, 44% of failures can be predicted with a low false-positive rate, while 64% can be predicted with an unacceptably high false-positive rate. 36% of drive failures occur with no SMART failure indications at all.

If you go by Google's definition of failing (the raw value of any of Reallocated_Sector_Ct, Current_Pending_Sector, or Offline_Uncorrectable goes non-zero) rather than the SMART definition of failing (any scaled value goes below the "failure threshold" value defined in the drive's firmware), about 40% of drive failures can be predicted with an acceptably low false-positive rate. You're correct, though, that the "SMART health assessment" is useless as a predictor of failure.

They did a study on this a few years back. It comes to about the same conclusions that Backblaze's study does, but with more numbers (and a larger data set).

There are some issues with wifi drivers on the various surface pro models, but if you turn off secure boot it should boot and install. The latest kernels have pretty good support.

Oh, and I need a tablet with an active stylus, so that's a big part of what drew me to the Surface line. I tried the Note 10.1 and the Note 10.1 2014 and wasn't happy. S-Note on those devices is a joke. OneNote is a really well-done serious note-taking application.

I am picky about keyboards, and the type cover is adequate for me while out and about. It's definitely the best tablet keyboard option I've tried, not that I've tried a ton. I do a lot of command-line stuff on it. The keyboard backlight is nice. It even senses when your hands are over it and turns the backlight on.

It's an ultrabook with no (default) keyboard. Despite being a long-time MS-hater, given my current needs the Surface Pro 2 is an excellent device. It's the only "tablet" I've ever succeeded in traveling with without regret. I've tried that with multiple Android tablets, and the one-window (or even two on Samsung) format + non-standard-keyed bluetooth keyboards always ended up causing problems.

The scorecard gives negative marks for both PGP for Mac and PGP for Windows, for both "Are past comms secure if your keys are stolen?" and "Has the code been audited?" Both negative marks are quite wrong!!

I don't know about the auditing, but the negative mark for "Are past comms secure if your keys are stolen?" is quite right. They're talking about forward secrecy, and PGP doesn't implement it. The basic idea of forward secrecy is that even if all the long-term secrets (passwords, keys, etc.) involved in a conversation are stolen, the person who stole them cannot go back and decrypt the encrypted messages.

I disabled Javascript on Slashdot. The site suddenly became far more usable, and the clickbait ads went away.

(I also disabled images, and the usability shot up again.)

called it dark matter, where 'dark' is a fancy word for 'nobody knows what it is'

Actually, "dark matter" was originally called "dark" because it wasn't hot enough to emit light (the Earth, for example, would be considered "dark matter" under this definition). Dark matter was originally thought to be things like stray planets, cold gas clouds, and the like. People only started looking for exotic dark matter once they realized there wasn't enough ordinary matter to do the job.