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Just to level set here. I think its important to realize this is really focused on allowing things like search to operate on encrypted data. This technique allows you to perform an operation on the data without decrypting it. Think a row in a database with email, first, last, and mailing address. You want to search by email to retrieve the other data, but don't want that data unencrypted since it is PII.

In general, this solution would be expensive and targeted at data lakes, or areas where you want to run computation but not necessarily expose the data.

With regard to DRM, one key thing to remember is that it has to be cheap, and widely deployable. Part of the reason dvds were easily broken is that the algorithm chosen was inexpensive both computationally, so you can install it on as many clients as possible.


DVD players also didn't have a great key revocation and forced field updates of keys and software and such. Blu Ray did, and was somewhat more effective. I also imagine console manufacturers have far more control over the supply chain at large.

Consoles after the original Xbox (which had an epic piracy ecosystem) all had online integration. The Xbox 360 had a massive piracy scene, but it was 100% offline only. The Xbox One has had no such breaches that I am aware of.

RE: BOM - famously, with many of these examples, certain specific disc drives or mainboards were far more compromised than others.


> The Xbox 360 had a massive piracy scene, but it was 100% offline only.

You could play pirated games online with the 360. The piracy was at the DVD Rom firmware level, replacing the stock firmware with one that basically changed the book type of the media. (And in later versions also mimicked other security checks preformed by the console to validate the authenticity of the disk)

However the DVD firmware mod didn’t break any digital signatures. It just allowed signed code to be executed from unauthentic media, so it only allowed piracy/backups not a full jailbreak allowing unsigned code. That was more the jtag/reset glitch era. Which was more “offline only” as it was easier for MS to detect and ban your key vault from Xbox live, but because people were willing to pay for modded lobbies in games like Call of Duty (which allowed you to rank up much faster) and Xbox dying if you sneezed that them, there was a even a market for extracting the keys from dead consoles to sell to those selling modded lobbies.

You still ran a risk of getting your console hardware banned for doing the DVD firmware mod, but towards the end I believe MS threw in the towel (even after trying to embed the flash chip in the samr package as the DSP for the drive which resulted in the kamikaze hack before the drive got further exploited) because one method they tried to use to detect piracy had such tight tolerances that it caused legit customers with aging drives to be caught up in the ban wave and MS had to walk it back.

The head of Xbox security (who sadly is no longer with us, he was a good egg at heart) left Microsoft not long afterwards. Obviously stating he wanted to move on to other things, but the word around the community at the time was that he was shown the door.

Personally I don’t hold much to that story (of him being pushed), this was so late in the consoles life that it seemed like it was trying to patch the hole in the titanic after it already sunk.


Home networks have made this much easier. DVD players didn’t expect network access for software updates etc…

This is an exceptionally good point. For example, I suspect two major reasons DRM has been more successful on game consoles than video players are the much smaller ecosystems and much larger BOMs, not necessarily in that order.

How is searching encrypted data not going to be used for exfiltration? What a terrible idea.

I’m sure you can name benign useful things you could use it for. But it seems to me you’re blatantly overlooking the obvious flaw.

There is no getting around doing search on encrypted data reducing the level of secrecy. To have an even minutely useful search result, some information within the searched corpus must be exposed.


The large api/token providers, and large consumers are all investing in their own hardware. So, they are in an interesting position where the market is growing, and NVIDIA is taking the lion's share of enterprise, but is shrinking at the hyperscaler side (google is a good example as they shift more and more compute to TPU). So, they have a shrinking market share, but its not super visible.


> The large api/token providers, and large consumers are all investing in their own hardware.

Which is absolutely the right move when your latest datacenter's power bill is literally measured in gigawatts. Power-efficient training/inference hardware simply does not look like a GPU at a hardware design level (though admittedly, it looks even less like an ordinary CPU), it's more like something that should run dog slow wrt. max design frequency but then more than make up for that with extreme throughput per watt/low energy expense per elementary operation.

The whole sector of "neuromorphic" hardware design has long shown the broad feasibility of this (and TPUs are already a partial step in that direction), so it looks like this should be an obvious response to current trends in power and cooling demands for big AI workloads.


So the answer is yes, but not to a noticeable amount. Don't worry about protecting your battery life, and charge your phone as needed.


My anecdata fully supports that conclusion.

I tried very hard to keep my battery healthy by only charging my phone to 80%, which resulted in me running out of battery quite often throughout the day, interrupted charging cycles etc., which apparently all were worse than just charging to full (via "optimized charging" which finishes the charge in the later hours) overnight.

I lost about 10% of reported battery health that way in less than a year, switched to just charging overnight or whenever getting close to empty, and have lost all of 3% over the second year of using this phone.

On top of that, swapping an iPhone battery is annoying, but having to worry about all of those battery health concerns is much more tedious.


My understanding is that battery degradation is not linear with time.


So you're still 7% ahead of charging only to 80%.


Nvme pricing is pretty volatile in the past 2 years I’ve seen it move between 2-3x from its low post Covid.

I don’t think the prices have adjusted because of that. Additional during Covid the prices were very high and this is baked into the pricing.


Realistically groq is a great solution but has near impossible requirements for deployment. Just look at how many adapters you need to meet the memory requirements of a small llm. SRAM is fast but small.

I would guess their interconnect technology is what NVIDIA wants. You need something like 75 adapters for an 8b parameter model they had some really interesting tech to make the accelerator to accelerator communication work and scale. They were able to do that well before nvl 72 and they scale to hundreds of adapters since large models require more adapters still.

We will know in a few months.


I would think this is for rental fleets or bike share. The weight and design would seem to make sense for that. Though the single speed seems like and odd choice for that.


This is not true. Almost all firmware is signed by every vendor, and there are standards from Intel and amd on implementation of code signing.

Look up Intel pfr.


Signed ≠ enforced.

At least for 4677 Intel stuff, gigabyte & HP and others let you modify the firmware and flash it.


HPE at least makes you flip a DIP switch, otherwise it complains loudly and halts.


The one vendor mentioned in the comments, AMI, is switching this code base to openbmc. Also it should be noted that often this software is system specific.


The issues were durability, fire rate, and well power.

I don’t know that the first two have changed significantly.


I think that the private carriers are more likely to be helped by this, since they will manage the paperwork.

It’s more likely a set of products that were shipping directly from factories disappears from the market. For example, the direct from factory Halloween costume.

It could end up being a step backwards in living standards and access to daily luxuries.


Old man in a different country: we used to make Hallows'een costumes out of old shirts worn backwards and sacks and stuff. Yes, I'm going back half a century plus but it was fun and involved time with parents.

Best of luck.


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