Well, to me it's funny to hitch this finding to post quantum as it is a totally orthogonal concern.

Along with saying RSA is *totally* useless because a rather niche application of it has an evident weakness, that is not claimed to be more generally applicable.

They may have an interesting and important finding, but are stirring up a bigger mess than is warranted by implying a broader impact to anything using RSA.

If you weren't considering migration from RSA an urgent issue before, this changes nothing.

Depends on what they mean by "the" cryptosystem. If they mean use of RSA in general, then not really, it narrowly only applies to a specific application of RSA allowing an authority to sign something without actually seeing the something, which almost never is done. It sounds like it does not speak to RSA more broadly.

Using a GPU versus a CPU (as was done here) increases how quickly you can churn through those remaining possible permutations (I read the actual paper.)

What was done on an academic CPU cluster could probably be just as easily performed on a well-tuned bitcoin rig at far far faster speed.

Call it what it is in reality, lies.

2048-bit RSA that protects an AES-256 key that actually does the encryption - those of you that ever had a ransomware hit you from a cock.li address might have hope of recovering your stuff, yet!

I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to. The three possibilities:

1) The training is distilling their own model? Yes, I guess you could argue that. It's even dumber than the argument about distilling other peoples' models though.

2) The contractor using a third party model to evaluate the output of the contracting company's model: yeah, you could argue that's distilling. That's on the contractor who's not doing what they're supposed to be though.

3) Or did you mean you're distilling the contractors' brains? You are doing that yes. That's explicitly what they're getting paid for.

A Merkle Tree is not a tree of hashes. Unless you want to say, hashkeys are sorted in a Merkle Tree as a set of hashes.

I have no idea what you're trying to say with this.

I did reread your original message and, minus the bullshit at the beginning, if your point is that Bitcoin's transaction tracking is novel, it's not. It was proposed by Hal Finney in 2004. Satoshi neglects to reference it.

I was also incorrect. Bitcoin didn't come up with the hash based proof of work concept either. That's reference 6.

Feel like that's not what is being said at all. It's saying in a world where they are willing to lie about capacity and have the technical ability to do so, they *certainly* would also have the ability to defeat this mechanism to lock out changing the RAM chips.

It just seems on the face of it a bit silly when the reporting is 'they are blocking supply chain BS by blocking ram modules' but at the same time 'but don't worry, you can easily undo the lockout'.

They probably never dreamed big companies would put these cheap boards in everything.

I'd be surprised if they didn't. Industrial computers were stupidly priced before the Raspberry Pi. Lots of them still are. And industrial customers care much more about whether the drivers work than whether they're open source.

"Word-guessing?" How does this naive notion persist?

It's true. Kind of. Just enough to make a catchy false premise.

Also, the human brain is barely comfortable with binary. It does not like probability, much less distributions. It especially doesn't like conditional distributions.

They don't need contractors for that

They do need contractors for that. That's what the contractors are doing. The model produces a couple of outputs and a human chooses which one they think is better. That goes in the training data. You can also ask the same or another model which is better, but that defeats the purpose.

One of the reasons I got on the OnePlus bandwagon years ago, was the ability to put CyanogenMod on it. Then the idiots there thought they could literally take on Google head on, and experienced on of the greatest blunders short of land wars in Asia and Sicilian with death on the line, without first immunizing against iocane.

My only hope right now, is Starlink/Spacex/Testa/xAI creates a whole new ecosphere for communications. Crossing my fingers Starship becomes fully operational sooner than later. Its the only real threat to Google and is likely big enough to take whatever Google tosses at them. Fingers Crossed.

FU to Micorslop, Google, Cell Phone INC (especially T-Maybe), Apple, etc, and their continued inshitification of everything.

Unsoldering the ram chips and replacing them takes some effort and skill, and then you end up paying for 2 sets of ram chips - the old ones (which you cant do anything with) and the new ones. Given the effort and cost involved, this is only worth doing if:

1) the higher ram model is heavily marked up vs the incremental component cost so buying the ram yourself is significantly cheaper.
2) the same ram is genuinely expensive, but much cheaper ram is available and still works without noticeable side effects

If it's all about markup then it's pure profiteering and screwing the users.

If the only way to undercut the official models sufficiently to make the whole operation worth doing is by using inferior components then there is *some* legitimacy to trying to stop this, but the approach is wrong.
If someone is going to the effort of replacing the ram chips with something inferior to resell the unit then they're not going to think twice about shipping with an old bootloader either, or modifying the bootloader to bypass the check, or working out how to get the bootloader from the genuine larger ram models to work on the lower ram models etc.
Sure the hacked/old bootloader might get noticed later if someone tries to update it and bricks the device, but low quality ram or a poor soldering job could just as easily brick the device too. By the time this happens the seller will be long gone anyway.

This DOES hinder repairs. For instance you might have multiple faulty units with different faults so you take the working RAM from unit A which has a faulty CPU, and switch it onto unit B which had bad ram.

So your argument is, "broken window theory applies to highly regulated nuclear waste"

Police generally don't need a warrant to request security camera footage or obtain it voluntarily. They need a warrant to compel the owner to give it to them.

Whether the owner volunteers footage and under what conditions they do so is pretty much up to them. Ring used to be pretty free about it but clamped down when it became controversial. Public sources like traffic cameras are likewise up to the public agency or government that owns them and they often have privacy laws or policies that might require warrants.

Flock is obviously motivated to cooperate with police requests since that's the service they're providing. It isn't "the way it's always been" but the OP's suggestion of requiring warrants could be easily implemented. Tapping phones without a warrant was perfectly legal in the US until it became a problem and a law was passed.