Having not been to a Burger King in North America, this actually surprises me. Burger King vs McDonalds in most of the world that I've seen, Burger King is the one more likely to offer diet/low-calorie drinks and EVERY fast food place I've ever been to has offered water as an option.

I confess I eat at McDonalds relatively often (between once a month and once every two months) but my standard meal there is generally a McChicken with a side salad and a diet coke (I like colas in general).

For reference: the countries where I've had the most experience with fast food are New Zealand, Australia, Netherlands and Germany.

I came here to say "Ok, so they discovered the JTAG port." Seems that blog was already on it.

Now, the researchers claim demonstrate that, via the JTAG port, they can subvert one form of Actel's AES security (but not all--see below) on someone's design to allow reverse-engineering a circuit design loaded into the FPGA. That's fairly interesting. I know that there's a fair bit of business in claiming an FPGA is invulnerable to such snooping, so that vendor A can ship a prototype design to customer B without worrying that customer B might rip off vendor A's design. For example, vendor A might ship an FPGA-based version of a chip they're designing to customer B, so they can design/debug their system while vendor A finishes the design, so both A and B can ramp their products more closely together.

Here's Actel's pitch on design security. The hack claims to expose the AES key for at least one of their encrypted modes, which implies that that particuler security feature is busted, and the guarantees against counterfeiting, reverse engineering and overbuilding it provides are also busted. According to the (occasionally somewhat breathless) claims in this draft paper, that is indeed what they've accomplished. Even then, they didn't break everything:

There are several security protection levels in the PA3 devices according to the manufacturer's datasheet [14]. The Passkey offers the highest level of reversible protection mechanism. Various DPA techniques were attempted to extract the Passkey, however, we were unable to get even a single bit in two weeks time using our off-the-shelf DPA equipment (oscilloscope with differential probe and PC with MatLab). The Passkey hardware security had robust countermeasures that proved to be DPA resistant. In addition to the unstable internal clock and high noise from other parts of the circuit, the Passkey access verification had its side-channel leakage reduced by a factor of 100. Only noise can be observed in the power traces without any characteristic peaks in the frequency domain. This was likely to be achieved through using a well compensated silicon design together with ultra-low-power transistors instead of standard CMOS library components. In addition, the useful leakage signal has a spread spectrum with no characteristic peaks in frequency domain, thus making narrow band filtering useless.

It'll be interesting to see how Actel responds.

As for "ZOMG, the Chinese can infect all our nukes! RUN!" that seems unlikely. To perform this analysis, you need to be able to isolate the FPGA and its bitstream in a circuit where you can observe all the pieces functioning together. This is trivial in the "vendor A / customer B" scenario above. It's not so easy to do without a specimen of the system you're trying to hack, though.

It's where your lunch money went . .v. :)

hawk

Bah.

Including a keyboard, case, and power supply.

computers for sissies that can't handle a soldering iron.

What's next--put a program in rom so you don't hae to key it in???

humbug

Hawk

If you look at people from almost any perspective, you get a bell curve.

If you separate people into male/female, you get 2 bell curves... but are they the same?

It turns out that the bell curve for women is, comparatively speaking, tall and narrow, while for men it's more squat and spread out.

This means that there is less variation in women than there is for men. There are more women are average height (for women) than there are men of average height (for men). More women of average intelligence than men, and so on.

This also means that there is more variation in men than there is in women. More men are at the upper end of the curve than women, **but at the same time** there are more men on the lower tail than there are women. More men have the highest level of income than women, but at the same time more men are homeless than women.

This is a reflection of basic biology. Because women bear the biological expense of childbirth, they tend to be conservative and take fewer chances. Because men have to compete for women, they tend to take chances in an attempt to succeed.

This is reflected in the bell curves - women have less variation than men. This is why more boys are born than girls - more boys die because they tend to take chances growing up.

So if success in business requires risk, it's no surprise that there are more men than women. It doesn't mean that men are in general better businessmen, because at the same time more men are unsuccessful at business too.

Prejudice against women shouldn't be allowed, of course, but thinking that women are equivalent to men in abilities or temperament and legislating around it is a losing proposition.

Women are equal to men in the eyes of the law. Women can be firefighters so long as they can beat other candidates (both men and women) in the physical endurance trials.

Says who? Did they receive formal training in doing so? Why should they be better at it than someone who has?

As a father who loves his daughter dearly and would do whatever it takes to make sure she has the best life possible; I will gladly concede that I am not necessarily the best person to help her under all circumstances. I allow the state to take some of the responsibility (while keeping a very large chunk of it myself) and, with every other member of society, keep an eye on the state to make sure it's correctly doing the job that we've asked of it.
My daughter is a human being with her own rights, and even if I wanted to, I should not be allowed to limit those rights beyond what society has deemed is acceptable for her own well being.

So does Germany. Just our Federal laws here tend to be broader in scope than those in the US. We do however also have State laws (in each of our 16 states), so something allowed here in Lower Saxony might for example be disallowed in Bavaria, or vice-versa.

Eh, for manned landing missions, I'd rather that the historical preservation zone extend to the horizon (inclusive of the skyline). The desolation they encountered is important, IMO. Otherwise you'd have something like the Eagle descent stage surrounded by the Tranquility Mall food court someday. The moon is big, and they never went very far, so this isn't a big deal.

Let the rule apply to anyone's first manned landing site (unless they waive it), and all manned landings prior to the beginning of real industrial development. Unmanned probes need only a small area around them, though, I think.

There is still a market for creative labor. There is still a market for some goods which happen to embody creativity, eg original works of art (as distinguished from copies; the original Mona Lisa is worth more than a poster of it). But it seems that the market for many creative goods that was enabled by copyright and certain technological advances in mass reproduction and transmission, is dying.

So be it. For most of human history that last market didn't exist, and yet there was art, and we got by. Copyright as we knew it may have been an aberration. I think we can save some of it, but we must remember that copyright isn't worthwhile on its own; rather, it's a means to an end. If our priorities change, so must copyright.