I’ve been on the receiving end where hobbyists were trying (and eventually succeeded) to hack our DRM scheme.
It was really fun to read the forums and see how, day by day, they managed to get closer. Since it wasn’t really crucial IP to begin with, we were rooting for the little guys to see how close they would get, secure in the knowledge that our algorithm was solid. :-)
The final exploit that granted them access was due to a supplier who replaced an earlier validated random generator with something not quite as random, which enabled replay attacks.
Reminds me of comfort noise in the telephone system.
Even though the system encodes silences noise free (so improve compression), it deliberately inserts noise because otherwise people think the line is dead.
I’ve worked with many LCD panels: while they all support one of a few signaling standards, there is no standard for the cables and connectors. (Or if there is, nobody follows them.)
For each LCD panel, you need to make a custom cable.
So that part is not something that’s specific to Apple.
I assume that there might be technical reasons to do it that way.
For example: a soft delete may be just a stronger version of public vs private settings. The whole software infrastructure still assumes a link exists and doesn’t need to cover cases where it really isn’t there. I could see how that makes maintaining indexes etc easier.
Flipping a flag and then filtering out results down the line based on the delete setting is probably much easier than actively removing them from an index.
And if deleting is rare (it probably is), then the performance and resource impact should be minimal.
I don’t care at all if a photograph from a photographer whom I’ve never heard of is a composite, but today I learned about the location of the moon North Pole, moon libration, and moon roll, and that’s really cool.
There are only so many ways to accelerate a CPU by speculating.
I’ve written RTL that speculatively fetches data from memory in order to avoid bubbles in a pipeline. Not a CPU, but the concept is exactly the same.
If somebody had assigned me to a CPU project without guidance from a security architect and ask me to speculate reads, I’d probably have done the same as Intel.
The chance that the same guy did both CPUs is small. It’s just that it’s not an unreasonable way of doing thing if you’re not familiar with these kind of attack.
It was really fun to read the forums and see how, day by day, they managed to get closer. Since it wasn’t really crucial IP to begin with, we were rooting for the little guys to see how close they would get, secure in the knowledge that our algorithm was solid. :-)
The final exploit that granted them access was due to a supplier who replaced an earlier validated random generator with something not quite as random, which enabled replay attacks.