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Comment Re:What an insightful comment... (Score 1) 49

Today's "games" don't try to reward you in that classic sense anymore.

this still happens today. you have people competing to "platinum" a game and get all of their trophies. exactly the same thing.

if you prefer percentages, big open world games do the same. i recall working very hard to get 100% with gta 5 and rdr 1, the only 2 games i have ever gotten 100%

Comment the abandoned stuff...why is it never collected? (Score 1) 51

I get that the ancient (32-bit) PC computers are pretty much worthless now and that's mostly all of interest in the old IBM sites (wondering what the current state of the Sloatsburg location near NY 17/17A in Orange County is like - I drive past it at least once a year).

What gets me are the schools more than the malls or offices - all this talk of teachers having to buy school supplies (and now no longer getting a tax break for it), and yet every one of these buildings we see the reels walk through are full of things that current teachers could use. Why is nobody willing to connect that dot and save their county (and teachers) money?

Comment The challenge (Score 1) 102

Is to set coursework and exams that are specifically crafted to exploit where AI is weak or prone to hallucinate.

You do not ban cheating, because those who cheat will inevitably find ways to circumvent the ban.

Rather, you exploit the properties of the mechanisms of cheating to ensure that those who actually understand the ideas are marked relatively highly (regardless of whether they reach the textbook conclusion) and whose who do not understand the ideas cannot do well even if they give what is in the textbook.

The interest should not be in precise answers, but in precise use of tools of reasoning and analysis, because this is what actually matters when it comes to understanding. Yes, it means you can't standardise so easily, and you have to devise things in ways that don't penalise intuitive thinkers over methodical thinkers, but you cannot teach a subject properly if you are only concerned about the surface.

Comment Bleagh, (Score 1) 69

You can get Veracrypt to work with the Mac, via FUSE, but I don't know how safe/robust that is. It's probably more secure than anything Apple has. It's certainly more secure than anything Microspot has.

But, yeah, it's getting extremely irritating that useful stuff is being taken out of commercial OS' and junk put in.

Comment Re:The secret word is "trust". (Score 1) 2

The DoD is known for viruses transporting payloads across airgaps onto Internet-connected machines. One thing it isn't is "so secure".

But, to the extent that it IS secure, it uses pretty much what I outlined. They use Class 3 certs for all users and all machines, and have done since about 2001. The US Navy got to trial run thei system to shake down the defects in the design, before they rolled it out to everyone. Beyond that, they use segregated networks (in principle, physical separation rather than logical separation, but who knows?) and encrypted communications.

What I've done above is take what the US DoD uses today, threw in what the US DoD recommended but never actually implemented in the 70s to fill in some of the gaps, and also included what the US DoD implemented and actually used in the way of Trusted OS deisgns in the 70s and 80s. The NSA and IRS likely use some variants on the same techniques.

So, what I've got above is pretty much why the DoD is as secure as it is.

What I've done is augmented it to handle the fact that you need to verify the hardware and not just the endpoint, and that you need to verify the physical host independently of the logical host. But that's pretty much it.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Thoughts on confidential computing 2

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/07/04/confidential-computings-core-trust-mechanism-is-broken-the-fix-may-not-exist/5266056

The claim in The Register is that confidential computing might not be a fixable problem. I am not going to claim I have "the solution", or that the solution I have come up with meets either the requirement of being necessary or sufficient, but I would argue that it adequately challenges the assumption that the problem cannot be solved at all.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Thoughts regarding confidential computing

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/07/04/confidential-computings-core-trust-mechanism-is-broken-the-fix-may-not-exist/5266056

The claim in The Register is that confidential computing might not be a fixable problem. I am not going to claim I have "the solution", or that the solution I have come up with meets either the requirement of being necessary or sufficient, but I would argue that it adequately challenges the assumption that the problem cannot be solved at all.

Comment Re:Interesting and disappointing (Score 1) 19

That is true, but the archaeology shows that this won't work for all island-hopping or all river navigation.

For example, we have clear evidence of hominins not just living on islands across the Mediterranean when no ice was present (it was free-standing water) but commuting to and from shore. We also have evidence of technologies travelling upstream along river-based communities at speeds that cannot be accounted for by simply walking.

So we need a model in which they could actively navigate against the water flow AND across significant distances of open water.

Submission + - Fundamental architectural flaw in cryptographic trust

An anonymous reader writes: Confidential computing's core trust mechanism is broken. The fix may not exist

“Attested TLS: the handshake that can't prove who's on the other end”

“Muhammad Usama Sardar, a researcher at TU Dresden, has spent the past two years formally verifying whether that protocol, known as attested TLS, actually does what it claims. Using ProVerif, a tool for the symbolic security analysis of protocols, he and his co-authors discovered that it largely does not.”

Comment Re:Interesting and disappointing (Score 2) 19

We know that boats built 1.1 million years ago (so around the time of the split) were capable of going long distances up/down rivers between settlements, and across open waters beyond visual range to islands. This places certain language requirements on the hominins of the time, although we can't be sure hobbits had full access to all of those requirements. (There's not much evidence of boat building.)

However, they must have genetically had the capability, whether or not their brains were large enough to make any use of it.

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