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Xerxes17 posted:Yeah that was more Beria's style. 
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Oct 3, 2018 12:49
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BIG HEADLINE posted:If Putin slipped in the shower and broke his neck, the world would be a demonstrably better place the millisecond after he suffered brain death. If Putin and Trump were having gay sex in the shower and both fell and broke their necks the world would be orders of magnitude better. Or, not. I'm sure there are groups who would spin that into, "Secret gay cabal ruling the world! We have obviously not gone far enough right!!!"
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Oct 3, 2018 14:51
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Murgos posted:If Putin and Trump were having gay sex in the shower and both fell and broke their necks the world would be orders of magnitude better.
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Oct 3, 2018 15:03
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If there's one thing Russia really does not need, it's more shock therapy.
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Oct 3, 2018 15:06
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hailthefish posted:If there's one thing Russia really does not need, it's more shock therapy. They should probably look into getting some sort of therapy tho
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Oct 3, 2018 16:49
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I mean Putin is a massive dickhole and hugely problematic in more ways than math has figured out how to count but you’re loving delusional if “Russia does 1990 again but worse” sounds like anything other than a nightmare.
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Oct 3, 2018 17:26
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Yeah so much of the country is warped around him it would probably be real ugly. Which is kind of an ongoing issue because nothing about him says one day he will go “boy I better give up power gracefully so Russia doesn’t implode if I just die”.
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Oct 3, 2018 17:36
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Russia should be considered part of the middle east since The Fundamental Theorem of Mideast Politics is clearly in play, namely, "The next guy is always worse"
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Oct 3, 2018 17:38
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Xerxes17 posted:Yeah that was more Beria's style. Had there been any, he'd have raped them and buried them outside his office.
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Oct 3, 2018 17:52
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hailthefish posted:If there's one thing Russia really does not need, it's more shock therapy. *slaps map of Russia* you can fit a whole lot of disaster capitalism in this baby
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Oct 3, 2018 18:14
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Alaan posted:Yeah so much of the country is warped around him it would probably be real ugly. Which is kind of an ongoing issue because nothing about him says one day he will go “boy I better give up power gracefully so Russia doesn’t implode if I just die”. He's in his mid-60s and from what I can tell, at least in reasonably good health. There's nothing stopping him from setting up a line of succession in a few years, but there is also nothing indicating he's even thought about it. Who knows.
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Oct 3, 2018 18:30
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He’s probably in good health but that’s the range where occasionally you just keel over from a stroke or something. Or the security web misses something and he gets bombed or shot or something. All pointless speculation though since any public declaration of his plans is basically declaring himself the dictator without any illusions to democracy still being in action.
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Oct 3, 2018 18:42
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Xerxes17 posted:Yeah that was more Beria's style. If by singing you mean chained to a wall, screaming to be left alone then yes!
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Oct 3, 2018 18:51
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Shooting Blanks posted:He's in his mid-60s and from what I can tell, at least in reasonably good health. There's nothing stopping him from setting up a line of succession in a few years, but there is also nothing indicating he's even thought about it. Who knows. If you don't think that there's a lab full Cybernetically Enhanced Putin Clones hidden away in the depths of Siberia then you're just naive. *Six Million Dollar Man noise*
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Oct 3, 2018 19:03
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Shooting Blanks posted:He's in his mid-60s and from what I can tell, at least in reasonably good health. There's nothing stopping him from setting up a line of succession in a few years, but there is also nothing indicating he's even thought about it. Who knows. Setting up a line of succession would be some sort of law, and that's against the grain in a regime that wants power relations doing everything
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Oct 3, 2018 19:38
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Just watched a bio on Beria, come here, and it's perfect in every way.
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Oct 3, 2018 20:50
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Tias posted:Had there been any, he'd have raped them and buried them outside his office. Hey now, occasionally he, if they promised not to tell, let them off at the side of the road with some flowers and then a day or two later, after people had seen them alive, they would disappear. Although that may have just been earlier in his career.
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Oct 3, 2018 21:10
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Nebakenezzer posted:Setting up a line of succession would be some sort of law, and that's against the grain in a regime that wants power relations doing everything
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Oct 3, 2018 21:17
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Yeah, Putin seems headed for something more in line with Alexander's death bed decree or the Roman model. It's like the end of Pilgrim's Progress. "My country I leave to to him that can get it."
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Oct 3, 2018 22:23
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Re: Putin succession, I think Shoygu could step up in a pinch if there’s some kind of leadership crisis. Probs as no more than as a transitional figure, but the dude’s a known face and has a pretty useful powerbase.
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Oct 3, 2018 22:34
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Yeah, Putin seems headed for something more in line with Alexander's death bed decree or the Roman model. Should've started thinking about this sooner unless he wants to end up like Augustus
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Oct 3, 2018 22:42
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MikeCrotch posted:Should've started thinking about this sooner unless he wants to end up like Augustus Revered for a couple thousand years? Edit: I glossed over too much of the conversation to figure out that you meant "having his choice heirs picked off and probably getting murdered himself." Godholio fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Oct 4, 2018 |
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Oct 4, 2018 01:39
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We've discussed ITT how LockMart, et. al using US sourced components (or a fully controlled supply chain) is a major cost driver, but why it's still important. Looks like the private sector (along with some number of other federal agencies) is now finding that out the hard way: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies quote:In 2015, Amazon.com Inc. began quietly evaluating a startup called Elemental Technologies, a potential acquisition to help with a major expansion of its streaming video service, known today as Amazon Prime Video...To help with due diligence, AWS, which was overseeing the prospective acquisition, hired a third-party company to scrutinize Elemental’s security, according to one person familiar with the process. The first pass uncovered troubling issues, prompting AWS to take a closer look at Elemental’s main product: the expensive servers that customers installed in their networks to handle the video compression. These servers were assembled for Elemental by Super Micro Computer Inc., a San Jose-based company (commonly known as Supermicro) that’s also one of the world’s biggest suppliers of server motherboards, the fiberglass-mounted clusters of chips and capacitors that act as the neurons of data centers large and small. The whole article is worth reading, I cut a lot of the filler but the short version is that the PLA infiltrated subcontractors at the largest motherboard manufacturer in the world and put custom, hardware based back doors onto some number of end user systems. It seems like the investigation is ongoing and I'm sure there is a ton of information being left out but drat. The potential ramifications here are pretty staggering.
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Oct 4, 2018 14:33
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Not surprised, tbh. The flip side is the other large server makers (hp, dell, etc) make their motherboards in china too so who knows how compromised they are. A device that size wouldn’t have much smarts but it could be something like a kill switch for the server or something hooked into the board management controller. It seems unlikely it would have the power (or pins) for actual snooping on data.
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Oct 4, 2018 15:15
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priznat posted:Not surprised, tbh. The flip side is the other large server makers (hp, dell, etc) make their motherboards in china too so who knows how compromised they are. It just needs to be able to make very small firmware changes to allow greater access. It could do that.
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Oct 4, 2018 15:30
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Shooting Blanks posted:It just needs to be able to make very small firmware changes to allow greater access. It could do that. It’s an interesting hack. What are the interfaces into it? Does it tap off directly from ethernet *mii lines? How does it connect to the bios flash? With secureboot the boot would fail if the bios code is compromised. Once a more technical minded publication digs into it we may know more. The data centre networks are pretty rigidly controlled so the biggest issue would be getting external commands to it/extracting data from it. Perhaps it was meant to work in conjunction with huawei switches which are almost assuredly compromised. In that case an IPMI backdoor becomes a real possibility with that device. Anyone putting wholly chinese designed and manufactured tech in their datacentre is definitely askin for it..
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Oct 4, 2018 15:44
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priznat posted:It’s an interesting hack. What are the interfaces into it? Does it tap off directly from ethernet *mii lines? How does it connect to the bios flash? With secureboot the boot would fail if the bios code is compromised. Once a more technical minded publication digs into it we may know more. Not that a mobo has one, but something like a FT232 that’s a big SOIC or QFN has a lot of space inside to add on an extra die. That’s nearly undetectable unless you are CT scanning the parts. Interfaces I would guess, Ethernet like you said (though the signal integrity of attacking a RGMII or SGMII link seems tricky), perhaps something sitting on LPC or the BIOS SPI lines. I assume they didn’t refab a whole new PCB...
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Oct 4, 2018 17:06
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Hmm actually they claim “Signal conditioning couplers” which really isn’t an actual thing, at least not by that term. And being difficult to detect via X-Ray, it would likely have to be chip-scale and have no bond wires whatsoever. Dropping something into a 3216 capacitor (maybe a X2Y to explain extra pins) would be nearly indistinguishable. I guess the vulnerable traces were on the surface of the PCB. If you used a 22ohm resistor pack / array on the SPI lines as series termination for 50ohm single-ended signaling, that would be a logical place to put “something”, but I don’t how that gets to the outside world unless it’s point was to inject rogue code for the other system elements to be compromised, kind of like an old PS2 modchip. Don’t those server mobos from Supermicro also have big Port 80/LPC headers? Maybe pictures will appear at some point.
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Oct 4, 2018 17:14
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Yeah I bet it it was in conjunction with something else on the board, the BMC being an obvious point. A lot of those are their own pcb modules, so they wouldn’t even need to have extra mods on the motherboard just get into those boards. They can expose a lot of stuff that way, but still getting data out would be very hard.
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Oct 4, 2018 17:47
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Shooting Blanks posted:We've discussed ITT how LockMart, et. al using US sourced components (or a fully controlled supply chain) is a major cost driver, but why it's still important. Looks like the private sector (along with some number of other federal agencies) is now finding that out the hard way:  BUT WE'RE TRADE PARTNERS
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Oct 4, 2018 17:52
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The plot thickens - Amazon, Apple, and Supermicro are all refuting the report. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/04/chi...eek-report.html
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Oct 4, 2018 18:39
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I’m glad I was too lazy to talk about the digital Chinese menace to anyone
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Oct 4, 2018 18:50
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Shooting Blanks posted:The plot thickens - Amazon, Apple, and Supermicro are all refuting the report. Of course they are; it's a massive slam to reputation and people will ask questions on how long their data was running on a compromised server / workstation. I want to see the versions of this post / this forum / discussion on the Chinese side about how US companies do this. The funny thing to me about all of this is people screaming to high heaven about HUAWEI BACKDOORZ and using a series of Qualcomm, Broadcom, Xilinx, etc. and other companies' hardware to transmit their thoughts. Of course, those good companies would never do something like that. A Broadcom Trident 3 (massive Ethernet switch ASIC found in core/trunk routers) probably has 2-3 billion transistors in it. There is no way the pressure to get to market compromised the security and auditing of that device, no sir. DoD has been freaked out about this for awhile now. They've spun up some new trusted ASIC / FPGA programs to ensure that the PA3s/other FPGA or ASICs that are going into our weapons systems have a verified design flow from start to finish. Their fears range from technically possible / practically impossible modifying semiconductor masks to add back doors to more reasonable threats like modifying the RTL at an off-shore design center to insert backdoors. Of course, they haven't held anyone accountable for sloppy test implementations where a test engineer (often the dumping ground for 'meh' engineers) adds a backdoor "just for test" but never once thinks about it as a backdoor or potential security risk — security through obscurity. I think the Google term if you want to find slides is "DoD Trusted FPGA Assurance" or "DoD Microelectronics Assurance". It includes the effort to prevent counterfeit chips that the media loves talking about, but has much more going on as well.
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Oct 4, 2018 18:56
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I won’t jump hard on either side but out of that Apple has a a pretty easy to verify claim about how many of those servers they have and what those servers did. If the story can’t get that right it definitely raises questions about the overall accuracy of the piece.
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Oct 4, 2018 19:13
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 I'd deny it right now, true or not.
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Oct 4, 2018 19:17
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Yeah that’s a paddlin, hot drat. My parent co makes stuff that is probably used in a lot of supermicro servers and is down over 5% today so far. Not that it matters since our black out periods SUCK as I just found out (sept 18-november  )Still I am having difficulty believing the PRC could get much of anything going in an IC that small. They are not cutting edge, they wait until western companies make something then reverse engineer it for domestic consumption, rinse and repeat. I am still salty at those Huawei/PLA fucks for essentially killing the crown jewel in canadian tech companies Nortel (along with horribly lovely management, but espionage played a major part).
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Oct 4, 2018 19:22
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priznat posted:It’s an interesting hack. What are the interfaces into it? Does it tap off directly from ethernet *mii lines? How does it connect to the bios flash? With secureboot the boot would fail if the bios code is compromised. Once a more technical minded publication digs into it we may know more. Listen, no hardware manufacturer specializing in high-end servers would do this, because if it came out they'd be ruined in the marketplace. It just wouldn't be rational.
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Oct 4, 2018 20:02
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I'm really skeptical of the story as-is. There are a number of aspects that Bloomberg gets wrong or at least incomplete, and in ways that go beyond trying to write for a non-technical audience. It's entirely possible they accurately represented what they were told by their sources. But frankly just because someone's a "senior intelligence official" doesn't mean they have the expertise to accurately describe something this technical, and the details matter enough that getting them a little off can have a big impact on the conclusions.
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Oct 4, 2018 20:18
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Yeah, the more I think about it the more skeptical I get too. You have Bloomberg reporting and both Amazon and Apple issuing strong denials so someone is incorrect/lying. Sucks for supermicro shareholders though, woof.
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Oct 4, 2018 20:20
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What kind of domestic capability does NATO have for motherboards and other computer parts in the event of the big whistle? ”A NATO member” and ”computer parts maker” feels like a non-existing Venn.
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Oct 4, 2018 20:23
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