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I once read Schneier pretty regularly - at least once a month. Somehow, I've gotten away from his site. William Barr made his "I'm a dummy" speech on encryption in July - https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/23/william-barr-consumers-security-risks-backdoors/

Schneier has made comments on that speech twice now.

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/08/the_myth_of_consumer.html

The thing is, that distinction between military and consumer products largely doesn't exist. All of those "consumer products" Barr wants access to are used by government officials—heads of state, legislators, judges, military commanders and everyone else—worldwide. They're used by election officials, police at all levels, nuclear power plant operators, CEOs and human rights activists. They're critical to national security as well as personal security.

This wasn't true during much of the Cold War. Before the internet revolution, military-grade electronics were different from consumer-grade. Military contracts drove innovation in many areas, and those sectors got the cool new stuff first. That started to change in the 1980s, when consumer electronics started to become the place where innovation happened. The military responded by creating a category of military hardware called COTS: commercial off-the-shelf technology. More consumer products became approved for military applications. Today, pretty much everything that doesn't have to be hardened for battle is COTS and is the exact same product purchased by consumers. And a lot of battle-hardened technologies are the same computer hardware and software products as the commercial items, but in sturdier packaging.

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/07/attorney_general_wil.html

Barr also says:

Further, the burden is not as onerous as some make it out to be. I served for many years as the general counsel of a large telecommunications concern. During my tenure, we dealt with these issues and lived through the passage and implementation of CALEA the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. CALEA imposes a statutory duty on telecommunications carriers to maintain the capability to provide lawful access to communications over their facilities. Companies bear the cost of compliance but have some flexibility in how they achieve it, and the system has by and large worked. I therefore reserve a heavy dose of skepticism for those who claim that maintaining a mechanism for lawful access would impose an unreasonable burden on tech firms especially the big ones. It is absurd to think that we would preserve lawful access by mandating that physical telecommunications facilities be accessible to law enforcement for the purpose of obtaining content, while allowing tech providers to block law enforcement from obtaining that very content.

That telecommunications company was GTE—which became Verizon. Barr conveniently ignores that CALEA-enabled phone switches were used to spy on government officials in Greece in 2003—which seems to have been a National Security Agency operation—and on a variety of people in Italy in 2006. Moreover, in 2012 every CALEA-enabled switch sold to the Defense Department had security vulnerabilities. (I wrote about all this, and more, in 2013.)

The final thing I noticed about the speech is that it is not about iPhones and data at rest. It is about communications—data in transit. The "going dark" debate has bounced back and forth between those two aspects for decades. It seems to be bouncing once again.

This 2016 essay 'The Value of Encryption' needs to be touched on if anyone doubts the necessity of encryption - https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2016/04/the_value_of_encrypt.html

And, finally, another 2016 blog that I'd like to see updated soon - https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/02/worldwide_encry.html

The findings of this survey identified 619 entities that sell encryption products. Of those 412, or two-thirds, are outside the U.S.-calling into question the efficacy of any US mandates forcing backdoors for law-enforcement access. It also showed that anyone who wants to avoid US surveillance has over 567 competing products to choose from. These foreign products offer a wide variety of secure applications­ -- voice encryption, text message encryption, file encryption, network-traffic encryption, anonymous currency­ -- providing the same levels of security as US products do today.

Details:

There are at least 865 hardware or software products incorporating encryption from 55 different countries. This includes 546 encryption products from outside the US, representing two-thirds of the total.
The most common non-US country for encryption products is Germany, with 112 products. This is followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, France, and Sweden, in that order.
The five most common countries for encryption products­ -- including the US­ -- account for two-thirds of the total. But smaller countries like Algeria, Argentina, Belize, the British Virgin Islands, Chile, Cyprus, Estonia, Iraq, Malaysia, St. Kitts and Nevis, Tanzania, and Thailand each produce at least one encryption product.
Of the 546 foreign encryption products we found, 56% are available for sale and 44% are free. 66% are proprietary, and 34% are open source. Some for-sale products also have a free version.
At least 587 entities­ -- primarily companies -- ­either sell or give away encryption products. Of those, 374, or about two-thirds, are outside the US.
Of the 546 foreign encryption products, 47 are file encryption products, 68 e-mail encryption products, 104 message encryption products, 35 voice encryption products, and 61 virtual private networking products.
The report is here, here, and here. The data, in Excel form, is here.

Press articles are starting to come in. (Here are the previous blog posts on the effort.)

I know the database is incomplete, and I know there are errors. I welcome both additions and corrections, and will be releasing a 1.1 version of this survey in a few weeks.

I know there are those who believe that only the government should have access to ̶g̶u̶n̶s̶ encryption.

Rumor: AMD Zen 3 Architecture to Support up to 4 Threads Per Core With SMT4 Feature

This rumor has been around for months now, such as in this May 8th video.

One possibility is that Zen 3 Epyc gets SMT4 and Zen 3 Ryzen only gets the current SMT2, or maybe SMT3.

Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Little Endian

The other big thing to watch out for would be a large amount (at least 1 GB) of High Bandwidth Memory stacked on top of the I/O die, acting as L4 cache. This could happen with Zen 3, or Zen 4 at the latest. Compare to Intel's eDRAM which has been included on some of its chips with integrated graphics (64-128 MB). Ultimately, every chip should be getting some version of this in the years before the transition to 3DSoC designs.

Someone suggested that it was bad to put a bunch of DRAM on chips, since it is a single point of failure. But reducing the distance data has to travel on the chip is the way forward for more performance. You can still have DRAM DIMMs in addition to the CPU, but there will be a demand for as much DRAM or universal memory as possible near or inside the CPU. 1-8 GB is a good start, but it would be better to have room for the entire operating system, application(s), and full data sets. Meaning something more like 64 GB to 1 TB.

Iowa reporter who found a viral star’s racist tweets slammed when critics find his own offensive posts (archive)

King’s social media missteps came to light after Calvin, a trending news reporter at the Register, delved far back into the casino security guard’s old tweets. Calvin discovered two 2012 tweets, written when King was in high school, that the Register described as “racist jokes, one comparing black mothers to gorillas and another making light of black people killed in the holocaust.” When Calvin asked King about the tweets, he told the reporter seeing them made him feel “sick.”

Before the Register published its profile online, though, King held a news conference on Tuesday evening to apologize for the posts and to announce that Anheuser-Busch had ended its partnership with him. The beermaker still promised to donate the more than $350,000 it had already pledged to the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics.

King explained that the tweets had been jokes among friends watching Comedy Central’s “Tosh.0” and that he didn’t remember them until Calvin dug them up.

[...] Between 2010 and 2013, Calvin published tweets that used a racist slur for black people, made light of abusing women, used the word “gay” as a pejorative and mocked the legalization of same-sex marriage by saying he was “totally going to marry a horse.” The Register’s statement on Twitter was soon flooded with images of the reporter’s offensive comments.

Note that the reporter contacted Anheuser-Busch to share the old tweets before the profile even ran, flexing that "I'm about to end this man's whole career" spirit.

Des Moines Register hit after report digs up old, offensive tweets of local man who raised $1M for charity

After the piece stirred up controversy on social media, critics then performed a "routine background check" on reporter Aaron Calvin's social media footprint and found several insensitive tweets of his own.

In now-deleted tweets from 2010-2013, Calvin repeatedly used the N-word, and wrote posts attacking law enforcement like "f--- all cops," and in reaction to the legalization of gay marriage said he's "totally going to marry a horse."

Before locking his Twitter account, Calvin issued an apology for his own tweets.

"Hey just wanted to say that I have deleted previous tweets that have been inappropriate or insensitive. I apologize for not holding myself to the same standards as the Register holds others," Calvin wrote.

The Register later tweeted that it was "aware of reports of inappropriate social media posts" by Calvin and an "investigation has begun."

Aaron Calvin: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

King’s momentum came to a screeching halt when Des Moines Register reporter Aaron Calvin found some offensive tweets King posted when he was 16. The tweets reportedly compared black mothers to gorillas and made light of the Holocaust. According to King, he and his friends were quoting the TV show “Tosh.0.”

The Washington Post glossed over the "quoting" of Tosh.0, instead saying "the tweets had been jokes among friends watching Comedy Central's 'Tosh.0'". That's particularly relevant, because:

Some Twitter users were angry with Calvin for digging into King’s past and raining on the donation parade. So much so that they started investigating his old tweets. What they found was just as if not more offensive than anything King had said.

“too many of these n*****s bitch made nowadays, don’t pardon my french” read one tweet. He also said the word again quoting a Kanye West song. “They’d rather give me the ‘n**** please award’. I’ll just take the ‘I got a lot of cheese award’ Tell it like it is Kanye.”

He also tweeted “I just got hit on by Tori Amos’ makeup guy. Never talk to strange gay men.” and “F*** the NYPD” in response to a tweet about rapper Desiigner being arrested.

[...] According to his portfolio, Calvin started his career as a Staff Writer/ Social Media Coordinator for Buzzfeed. His portfolio for them includes articles such as “This Comic Perfectly Explains What White Privilege Is” and “Which “Friday Night Lights” Character Are You?”

He interviewed authors Claire Vaye Watkins and Padgett Powell for Vice and has also been published by Men’s Journal, Digg, and Catapult.

He did nothing wrong! He was just quoting Yeezus and trying to emulate his favorite rappers!

Not every Cancel Culture story has such an amusing ending, but the hypocrisy is probably more widespread than you think. Smarter reporters mass delete their old tweets before they attract attention. This action can be reflected in analytics data (e.g. SocialBlade). However, millennials and post-millennials who have lived their entire lives online are likely to have created a massive digital footprint, often using their real names, that can be used to hang them years later. Parents should probably give a crash course on using fake names and throwaway accounts before letting their kids loose on the spynet.

After Trump uses taxpayer money to extort the government of Ukraine for election assistance, a formal impeachment inquiry is announced.

Timeline:

Trump ordered hold on military aid days before calling Ukrainian president, officials say

Trump admits he discussed Biden in call with Ukrainian president
And, a cherry-picked and redacted transcript excerpt of one of the calls confirms this admission.

A whistleblower makes a formal complaint about these and other calls that Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined to be credible and of “urgent concern.” In violation of the law this complaint is witheld from Congress.

Pelosi pulls the trigger, announces formal impeachment inquiry.

The Whitehouse now claims it will follow the law by releaseing the complaint, but it will be redacted.

Surface Laptop 3 Specifications Mention Unreleased AMD Octa-Core CPUs & up to 16GB RAM

Rather than the chiplets used by other Zen 2 CPUs, this is likely to be a monolithic die. Graphics is probably Vega, not Navi. I have an aging AMD quad-core APU that would be blown out of the water by an 8-core Zen 2 Renoir.

I wouldn't pay much attention to the prices, that's just Microsoft emulating Apple.

Finally, this is worth a look:

Not worth it: AMD Ryzen 7 3750H is only 4 to 8 percent faster than the Ryzen 5 3550H

Ryzen 5 3550H = 8497 multi, 1886 single.
Ryzen 7 3750H = 9051 multi, 1962 single.

+6.5% multi, +4% single. Bad segmentation.

The chips aren't bad but Intel's do about the same (but better single-threaded) at lower TDPs, and Intel has options like the 6-core i7-9750H in $1,100+ laptops, or the 8-core i9-9880H in $1,800-$3,000 laptops. AMD Renoir could bring those core counts down to earth, and trade blows with Ice Lake.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I’m about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it’s gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is — fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.

It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers

'Shallow' hit-maker Mark Ronson puts brains before looks as he comes out as sapiosexual

Chart-topper Mark Ronson has come out as sapiosexual. In case you're not familiar with the term, it means being attracted to intelligence above other traits -- or, in other words, putting brains before looks or gender.

Ronson, 44, is known for a string of successful collaborations with A-list artists from Amy Winehouse and Adele to Miley Cyrus. This year, he won the Oscar for Best Original Song with "Shallow," interpreted by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper in Hollywood's latest reimagining of "A Star Is Born."

Speaking on ITV's Good Morning Britain on Thursday, he said: "I feel like I identify as sapiosexual." Anchors Ben Shephard and Kate Garraway congratulated him on being "out and proud."

Author Nichi Hodgson appeared on the show earlier, defending the term. "The definition of sapiosexuality means intelligence first," she said. "I have dated men, women, transmen, transwomen, and across the gender spectrum and identify now as bisexual," she added. "The thing that has linked all these people has been their brains."

[...] "It's always existed, we just didn't have a word for it," she said.

Brain in a vat, that's how I like 'em.

A U.S. drone strike intended to hit an Islamic State (IS) hideout in Afghanistan killed at least 30 civilians resting after a day’s labor in the fields, officials said on Thursday.

The attack on Wednesday night also injured 40 people after accidentally targeting farmers and laborers who had just finished collecting pine nuts at mountainous Wazir Tangi in eastern Nangarhar province, three Afghan officials told Reuters.

U.S. drone strike kills 30 pine nut farm workers in Afghanistan

For a long time now I've been for increased legal immigration and ease of legal immigration and just as strongly against illegal immigration. So you can see how I would be pretty big on border patrol being relatively heavy handed. That ended this afternoon.

I'm still just as strongly against illegal immigration but the border patrol being too aggressive is infringing on one of the most fundamental rights of the Mexican folks. Which is to say, catching the bigass flathead catfish that live in the Rio Grande. There's a lot of things I'm willing to allow for a solid border and rule of law but fucking with the pursuit of huge, delicious flathead is not among them. I'm going to have to revisit my views on river policy.

For them of you what ain't aware, most catfish over five pounds start getting unfortunate amounts of yellow, fatty meat that is other than the light, flaky, delicious meat that you expect to enjoy when experienced on a dinner plate. Now you can cut it out but that always seems wasteful, which is part of why a lot of catfish folks throw back anything over a certain size. Flatheads taste better than blues and channels (what you eat if you order catfish at a restaurant) to start with because they eat live bait almost exclusively and hardly have the yellow fat issue at all; if you catch an eighty pound flathead, you can expect to enjoy every bit of meat on it. They're also the most challenging to catch of the catfish in the US.

In less than three years, President Donald Trump has named more former lobbyists to Cabinet-level posts than his most recent predecessors did in eight, putting a substantial amount of oversight in the hands of people with ties to the industries they're regulating.

The Cabinet choices are another sign that Trump's populist pledge to "drain the swamp" is a catchy campaign slogan but not a serious attempt to change the way Washington works. Instead of staring down "the unholy alliance of lobbyists and donors and special interests" as Trump recently declared, the influence industry has flourished during his administration.

"An administration staffed by former industry lobbyists will almost certainly favor industry over the general public, because that's the outlook they're bringing to the job," said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the political reform program at the think tank New America and author of the book "The Business of America is Lobbying."

Former lobbyists run the Defense and Interior departments, Environmental Protection Agency and office of the U.S. Trade Representative. The acting Labor secretary, Pat Pizzella, is a former lobbyist and Trump's pick to run the department, Eugene Scalia, also is an ex-lobbyist. Scalia's confirmation hearing before a GOP-controlled Senate committee is scheduled for Thursday and Democrats are expected to grill him on his long record of opposing federal regulations.

A seventh ex-lobbyist, Dan Coats, resigned as Trump's intelligence chief in August.

Trump, so far, has named more lobbyists to his Cabinet than Bush, Obama did in 8 years