That would be nice, but no, at least not unless NSA or similar has some non-public knowledge that enables them to model the confusion and diffusion precisely enough to estimate bounds. That's not impossible, but it doesn't seem very likely.

According to NIST and the AES designers, the round count was selected by breaking reduced-round variants and then choosing a high enough round count to provide a "safety margin". How much safety margin was needed was a subject of much debate, and there was some criticism that AES's margin wasn't large enough. AES-128's 10 rounds give about a 30% safety margin, and AES-256's 14 rounds give about a 40% margin. The article doesn't say what the "weakened" variant here was, so we don't know if those margins have been eroded.

Yeah, I think what we're seeing here is that attackers are resource-constrained, and that the hard part of creating an exploit isn't finding the vulns (there are tons of them), but figuring out how to turn the vulns into a working exploit chain. Merely having more fodder for crafting exploit chains doesn't necessarily make them easier to build... and keep in mind that the vast majority of attackers are glorified script kiddies. So the small number of really capable black hats may not have seen much benefit from AI yet. Probably not none but not enough to make a measurable difference.

If this theory is correct, when AI gets good at piecing together robust exploit chains, then we'll see the explosion in attacks, because all those glorified script kiddies will be able to get high-quality exploit chains cheaply and easily.

Note that none of this is applicable to nation-state attackers. They have plenty of smart, capable people, and plenty of money to buy chains. They weren't resource constrained before AI, and aren't now either. But they don't generally engage in mass attacks, so they don't register in the statistics.

Interesting! I've never read about that. I know a lot of the value was tied up in the adjacent land grants which represented incredible value eventually, but was nearly worthless in the short term.

What kinds of government shenanigans?

No, they didn't. You're judging based on a successful recovery they made in the subsequent 30 years. They really missed the boat, and lost the lock they once had on computing in general. Those who didn't live through it don't realize how Windows was synonymous with "computing". MS had the only real consumer computing platform (Apple existed but it was noise, relegated to a particular niche and lots of people with Macs had to have a PC, also). The web fundamentally changed that.

Abi Platock is in NYC. Your point about healthcare coverage makes logical sense, but I'm not sure it holds, statistically. Some of it may be that most influencers are very young, and you can stay on your parents' insurance until you're 26 (Platock is 25... so check to see if she's still doing this next year, and the year after).

This whole article is based on the suppositions that (a) the AI bubble is going to burst and (b) it's going to take down Apple's competitors. I don't think that's a likely sequence of events.

I do think we're in something of an AI bubble, and that it will burst... but it won't burst in the sense of "All this AI stuff will go away and no one will need data centers", it will burst in the same sense that the dotcom bubble burst, or the railroad bubble burst. What happened in those cases wasn't anything remotely like "and the hyped technology became unimportant".

I think the railroad analogy is the most interesting because while a lot of railroads went under and a lot of railroad investors lost their shirts, it wasn't because railroads -- especially trans-continental railroads -- were just as huge a game-changer as everyone thought they were, it was just because the capital investment required was massive and the payback didn't come as fast as the financial structures built to fund the construction required. What happened was that those with the money snapped up the failing railroad assets and made a lot of money as the massive economic growth unleashed by the railroads was realized, over the course of a few decades.

Similarly, the dotcom bust famously left a lot of "dark fiber" laying around... but all of that fiber got lit up within a handful of years, plus we've added a ton more.

AI is looking like it will follow a similar path. It absolutely is a revolutionary technology, it will upend the structure of our economy -- even more than railroads did -- and there is a lot of money to be made. And even if AI gets much more efficient and doesn't need all of those data centers, they're still going to get used. The problem is just that some of the early investors pushed so hard trying to out-grow the competition that they've built some unsustainable financial structures, and there's a good chance that AI won't generate payback fast enough to keep those cards from tumbling down.

This probably won't be because AI doesn't advance fast enough, but because it takes time to figure out how to integrate any new technology, to make the business and even social adaptations to make use of it. I suspect those things will happen far faster then they ever have for such a large shift, because AI will actually help to accelerate them, but they still probably won't happen fast enough.

OpenAI has the most exposure. Anthropic has done a better job of figuring out how to monetize AI and is a little less exposed, though still quite exposed. I don't think Google, Amazon or Microsoft have significant exposure, mostly because they all have very large non-AI revenue streams and large piles of cash, both of which can help them survive heavy investment. For example, although Google did post its first quarterly net loss in forever, thanks to heavy data center investment, it was only a $6B loss, and for a company that would otherwise be generating $80B per quarter in net profits and has a $130B cash warchest, that's nothing.

As for Apple? Well, Apple might be able to sit cagily on the sidelines, waiting for the crash so it can use its pile of cash to snap up the assets and buy in. But it's also very possible that they're going to miss the boat. Not completely, of course, but somewhat like Microsoft missed the boat on the Internet. I do agree that really making something like the Vision Pro work really well would be huge.

I dunno. Given all the non-nerd news that shows up here, it's refreshing to see something more deeply technical, even if most of use who don't spend a lot of time thinking about VMs in Linux aren't directly affected.

I'd be fine with a bit more coverage of possibly-interesting kernel changes. I mean, /. shouldn't cover all of them; we have LWN for that. But picking the occasional random change of significance to highlight is worthwhile. Maybe one per week or something.

Typical roads are not effective firebreaks in dense, tall forests. The general rule is that you need 1.5X (minimum) to 3X the height of the surrounding vegetation. In a forest with 100-foot trees that means you need firebreaks 300 feet wide. In areas that are sloped or often windy, the width needs to be increased.

The kind of 'forest management' you're describing is great when practiced around your settlement location, but nobody has ever practiced anything even approaching the concept of 'forest management' to the entirety of the Boreal Forests of Canada.

Hire that one. Proofreading AI output is quickly becoming the core skill a college grad requires.

IBM's instructions? Of course they said the licensed compiler is required :-)

Those are all part of gcc.

My guess is he read the first half of the first sentence of my response and concluded that I was just repeating what Google says about the issue, that I mindlessly believed the company line.

Never mind that I personally designed and implemented the feature, so if there's any official Google PR on the issue, it's based on what I told "them", not what "they" told me.

Thanks. There were good reasons to move on from Android, but it was pretty cool being able to work to improve the world's most-used operating system. Relatively small impacts get multiplied by a big number.

Also 100 miles from any international airport. This covers huge swathes of the country.

Atlanta, GA isn't US soil?

But even if this were one of the overseas CBP checkpoints (the ones that do pre-clearance, so you don't have to go through CBP after landing), I think those are considered US soil as well, under an agreement with the host nation.