Category: Mike Jurney

I am so glad I resisted pressure from Intel engineers to let /dev/random rely only on the RDRAND instruction. To…

I am so glad I resisted pressure from Intel engineers to let /dev/random rely only on the RDRAND instruction.   To quote from the article below:

“By this year, the Sigint Enabling Project had found ways inside some of the encryption chips that scramble information for businesses and governments, either by working with chipmakers to insert back doors….”

Relying solely on the hardware random number generator which is using an implementation sealed inside a chip which is impossible to audit is a BAD idea.

This morning I visited the Creationism Museum.

This morning I visited the Creationism Museum.

I’m finding it hard to even explain how bad I felt. The only time I’ve ever felt this bad because of somewhere I visited was a concentration camp. I’m not comparing the crime, only how it affected me. The juxtaposition of lies, smiling children and a gift shop freaked me out.

Emptiness, sadness, a cruel parody of museums. Children running around, enthusiastic to learn, parents proudly reading lies to them. Children gathered around the animatronic Noah enplaning how there was room on the ark for all the dinosaurs.

I felt I was at a funeral for someone I loved and everyone else wanted dead.

Relentless, creepy disembodied voices “The lord said…”, “Eve was created as man’s helper”, “dragons are dinosaurs”. It was soul destroying.

Museums scream of progress to me. They have problems (Anyone seen the receipt for the Elgin marbles?), but they are cathedrals to learning. They show how far we’ve come. They promote and value education. To sit in one with such a corrupt purpose is obscene.

Nobody got a t-shirt. I couldn’t do it. I needed to leave.

I remember way back in the late 90’s when Intel was considering including a unique, accessible identifier in each of…

I remember way back in the late 90’s when Intel was considering including a unique, accessible identifier in each of its CPUs.  The Internet community was up in arms over the insanely huge breach of privacy this represented.  It would became programmatically possible to tie executing code to a distinct physical core, and that core almost certainly had a purchase record associated with it that pointed back to, if not the individual, the organization which had purchased it.

Responding to the furor, then Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy said “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”  He was blisteringly criticized for suggesting such a thing, and in no small part for having done so so dismissively and with such arrogance.

Given the all of the recent revelations related to governmental and corporate monitoring of the communications of specific individuals – regardless of the devices they’d been using – the Internet community’s concerns at the time seem almost quaint.

Maybe we owe Scott an apology.