Besides... barrel rifling already makes a fingerprint-like marking on the shell/slug/bullet, and that's going to be a hell of a lot more useful in identifying the gun it was shot from than any other method thought up so far...
Only in TV shows and movies, fact is most handgun and rifle barrels today are mass produced on hammer forging equipment on a mandrel which makes all of them virtually the exact same on a run of tends of thousands of barrels. You can narrow down your suspect list using it, you can even match similar makes and models, but you'll never be able to prove it came out of the gun with serial number #24953 or #24954 or even #25953 for that matter.
The failure rate of human experiments is caused by the limited allowable variation of the drugs. While during now current computational analysis, small scale cellular testing using human cells and experimentation on mice, having 1 in 1,000 mice possibly have a adverse reaction from the administered drug is acceptable to continue experimentation to humans. Having a proven cause of a heart attack or other severe reaction to the drug with a limited study of 1,000-5,000 volunteers means failure.
Experimentation on animals today is nearly a stop-gap measure between testing on individual human cells today, and testing on actual people. Its nearly just to check that "it does something" for the problem in question and to develop LD50 values for the drug so they don't end up killing anybody by accident.
Not quite, they eventually made the first commercially viable integrated circuits, but their initial funding and build up of their company was for transistors. They built their first "integrated circuit" consisting of a mere 4 transistors 2 years later in 1960. At approximately the same time Texas Instruments did it in 1960.
The initial batch of 100 transistors was sold to IBM for $150 a piece in 1958. Prices for transistors fell to about $30 a piece by 1960.
Lots of neat stuff, including the original Op-Amps came out of Fairchild over the years. But my point still stands, nothing on a PC today can be traced back to original work done by Apple. Therefore, we owe Apple nothing today, and only the fan boys will continue to keep being ignorant of history such as the OP I responded to.
If, however, you're writing this from a personal computer, smartphone, tablet, or anything with a GUI, then you must be a huge hypocrite, since you owe it to Steve Jobs for bringing those tools to the masses.
William Shockley brought us the transistor in 1947.
Texas Instruments created the first silicon transistor in 1954.
The first computer meant to be small enough you could put it beside ones desk and have only one person operate it, was built by IBM in 1954, called the IBM 610.
A group known as the "traitorous Eight", of engineers and scientists left Shockley's company in 1957 to form Fairchild Semiconductor making some of the first commercially viable transistors.
Two from Bell Labs in 1960 created the first MOS transistor which would be the basis of digital electronics for many years.
Two of the "traitorous Eight" who formed Fairchild went on to create Intel in 1968.
Alan Kay, one of the people who designed the Xerox Alto, first proposed a "tablet" computer in 1968. Creating the concept that many would attempt over the years.
Intel created their first SRAM memory in 1969, created the first processor (the Intel 4004) in 1971.
Xerox Alto's created in 1973 was the first "desktop" computer to include a GUI and mouse, something both Jobs and Gates stole from to design their own OS's. Alan Kay by the way designed the GUI window system we still use today for this PC.
The first "portable" computer was the IBM 5100 series, which could be carried around in one piece. Introduced in 1975.
Intel created the Intel 8086 in 1978, which till this day its derivatives still dominates the computer processor market. Including the newest Mac Hardware.
The IBM PC was released in 1981. After that, the rest is history, both the Intel x86 architecture, and the MS DOS became the dominate way to build computers, eating up the rest of the competition till there was virtually nothing left.
Fast forward a few years...
Compaq released the first convertible slate/tablet PC back in 2003, as the TC1000. Where you could dock the touch screen monitor to a fully functional keyboard/laptop base and use it both as tablet and as a PC.
Fujitsu ST5011D's came out in 2004 as a fully functional Windows Slate Machine.
Motion LS800 was introduced as a fully functional Windows Slate machine in 2005.
There are about a dozen more models that came out between then and now, but personally my first fully tablet PC, not a convertible or a docking model was the Archos 9, a fully functioning Windows 7 PC, first up for sale in October 2009 when I bought mine. Apple's initial iPad wasn't even for sale till April of 2010. A whole half year after I bought my first.
So again other then the headaches of dealing with tech support issues on Mac's, how do I owe Apple anything?
So all his money goes to his friend or his family. If they're so concerned about helping us plebes why can't they just give that money to existing charities and foundations rather than to friends and family? It's a scam, imo.
Do you understand how these foundations work? They act as intermediaries instead of Gates, or Buffet having to look at and approve each and every charity, the foundation handles the grunt work. And as long as they like where the money is going, it means neither of them really have to do much to distribute their donations.
The Person -> The Foundation -> The Charities
I know its a hard concept for some people to understand, if it involves more then one thing you end up losing half of the people in the discussion to confusion.
Plus, imagine how expensive maintenance is going to be without Shuttle.
The military's fleet of a total of 15 to date (4 operational, 10 decommissioned and one failed to reach orbit), doesn't get "serviced" by the Shuttle. Although they are similar in respects to the Hubble, none of them were launched by the Shuttle (they were launched by Titan-3Ds for the most part, a few with Titan-IV's and the most recent one with a Delta V Heavy), nor has the shuttle or ISS service them.
NASA tries to fix them, the NRO tends to make their satellites crash into the atmosphere when they reach their end of life regardless if its a design flaw or its just a old bird in the sky.
Regulated products are easy to attach taxes to, as shown with Ontario's "sin tax" on tobacco and alcohol. Don't kid yourself if you think other places wont do the same if they think they can turn a profit and make their books looked balanced by taxing anything they may make legal in the future.
Averaging it out, yes 2kW is probably typical in most homes. As gas furnaces are typical, and if you eliminate your stove, and instead use a natural gas stove, 2kW as a ceiling would be easy to maintain.
Personally for my own uses, 2kW/h nearly excessive, due to my gas furnace, gas water heater and gas stove, I'm averaging out approximately 1.25kW to 1.5kW per hour with a ceiling of 2kW. That includes running 2 TV's, a PC I set up as a file server, 2 other PC's, 2 fridges in the home and the Microwave running for me to hit that 2kW ceiling.
If the government legalized it and even limited to purchase in gov only stores, they could at least kill off most of the issues related to the drug trade
In Ontario, they have put so much sin taxes on alcohol and tobacco products, that our prices for them reach 2-3 times more then the US and other Provinces near us who do not tax the hell out of them.
While there are no criminal gangs actively distributing black market alcohol and tobacco, there is however a rather large black market for Native tobacco products that do not get taxed this way, and home distilled alcoholic beverages. As well as the importing of tobacco and alcohol products from places where these sin taxes do not exist.
Making something legal and then regulating it to death just invites more illegal distribution of the products in question.
I said "Common Law" because that's what the US uses. Naturally, most civli law jurisdictions use it too.
Not really. Most Civil Law jurisdictions its on the defendant to prove he or she is not guilty, through the use of interpretation of the Law. Only in Common Law does it become a natural right. Even in Europe, until they ratified the UN Declaration of Human Rights, most of them, being Civil Law countries did not follow the thought of "Innocent till proven guilty".
And many of these countries that only really applies till the Prosecutor decides to charge you with something and go to court. So until you see a Judge, your innocent, once you do, its your responsibility to prove your innocence.
You need to realize, your ideals and beliefs are not shared with the entire world. Your arrogance is showing.
One is a legal charge to be proven in court (under Common law, it's not disproven; the prosecution has to make the case that the accused violated the law, not the other way round)
1) Common law is a British thing exported to large amounts of the world due to the British colonization of those areas. It is not existent in 2/3rds of the world, including the vast majority of European countries.
2) Your not talking about Common law, your talking about the Latin "Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat" ("Proof lies on him who asserts, not on him who denies"), Common law is simply a legal system where as instead of just government laws being considered in court cases, court cases can call upon other previous court cases as precedence when considering whether or not something is a crime, and how to punish someone for it.
So in effect you were "burning up mod points" to argue that the entire World should use the British system of Government and court? Something that was imposed on most of the world initially by the British through colonization and therefor force?
Critical thinking would have taught you that not everyone in this world believes the same way, nor does it mean that they want to think the way you believe they should. Last I checked the sun set on the British Empire, and it will not come back.
moral or mental strength
capacity to persuade or convince
People who had never done anything else wrong, other then believed in the wrong political party, distributed information about their political ideology were deemed a threat and charged under this section of US law. Without violence or other physical harm being done. Read some history, it will do good for you.
Sorry to disappoint you, but I'm not Chinese. Hell I've never even been to the country.
Fact is, in the US for example,
18 USC 2385 - Advocating overthrow of Government
Whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States or the government of any State, Territory, District or Possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein, by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government; or
Whoever, with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any such government, prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates, sells, distributes, or publicly displays any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence, or attempts to do so; or
Whoever organizes or helps or attempts to organize any society, group, or assembly of persons who teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of any such government by force or violence; or becomes or is a member of, or affiliates with, any such society, group, or assembly of persons, knowing the purposes thereof—
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.
And to think, that makes the Arab Spring style of government change illegal in the US, even though the US supports such means in the ME, and tends to call the kettle black when it comes to China and their own internal censorship.
It also means spreading false rumors that the government is being over thrown to support and make people want to revolt, such as what happened in China illegal in the US as well.
Spreading of unfounded rumors of a coup in Beijing on Social media, means more restrictions will come into play. It was to be expected. After all, libel and other forms of lying are illegal in most of the world. So is attempting to incite rebellion illegal in just about every country in the world including China. Its obvious that the Chinese would do something about it eventually.
Not quite complete computers, but microcontrollers, and there are development kits that will allow you to read them without disassembling the entire card. The hardware and software are rather open standards that are publicly available. Just as your phone can read the contents so can said development kits, if they were unreable and unwrittable they'd be rather useless.
I haven't look at your profile, but this is the sort of mentality I see in the US. Guns kill people no matter how you look at it, and less guns will only lead to less deaths.
Someone should tell the British that, their crime rate with firearms nearly doubled in the 4 years after they banned, and confiscated all the handguns and semi-automatic firearms in the country. From 13,874 in 1998/99 to 24,070 in 2002/03.
Firearm regulation has never worked. Law abiding citizens who will surrender a firearm that is banned, isn't the person who'd go out and shoot someone before or after the laws are passed.
Hence why if you sell a source code license it should be for more then you expect to make out of the software till end of life. Once it is out of your hands, its no longer your own product.
Giving away code is never a smart idea no matter how much you think a single license is worth.
My post wasn't about if it was good or not, my post was simply the fact that just because tiny little countries do not have active militaries does it mean that everyone can forgo one, since clearly neither can they when they use defense agreements with larger and richer countries to protect themselves.
Not being readable even when someone has the device in hand is exactly what these secure FPGAs are meant to protect against!
It's not a non-issue. It's a complete failure of a product to provide any advantages over non-secure equivalents.
You clearly have NOT used a FPGA or similar. First the ProASIC3 the article focuses on is the CHEAPEST product in the product line (some of that model line reach down to below a dollar each). But beyond that...
Devices are SECURED by processes, such as blowing the JTAG fuses in the device which makes them operation only, and unreadable. They are secureable, if you follow the proper processes and methods laid out by the manufacturer of the specific chip.
Just because a "research paper" claims there is other then standard methods of JTAG built into the JTAG doesn't mean that the device doesn't secure as it should, nor does it mean this researcher who is trying to peddle his own product is anything but biased in this situation.
Lets assume that the FPGA's were actually made in China used for DoD requirements... the actual end use of the devices is in the USA, the boards assuming they are not also made in the USA, and then programmed in China, then yes your point might be valid.
However, Microsemi claims to make their Mil-Spec stuff in the USA, which is one of the reasons many tech companies still have manufacturing plants and fabs in the US.
More then likely, to prevent ITAR regulatory problems, and to ensure their own trade secrets are safe, the Defense contractor, would produce the PCB's in house, or inside the United States so that it can keep a tighter eye on their product.
The Defense contractor would be programming in the USA, transfer of the program outside of the US is probably illegal due to ITAR regulations, so its a good bet that this is the case.
If the requirement was of any sensitive nature, the fuse bits would have been set, and disabled any kind of programming, JTAG, or other interface to allow access to the native code residing on the chip. Hell cheap consumer electronics blow the fuses on their programmable IC's too for the protection. As do many commercial gang programers by default blow the fuses as its not a development system that was being built but a finished end product.
So the finished and programed board, would have to be taken from a Defense contractor, or the Military itself directly, flown to China, and then what? The fuses are blown and JTAG doesn't work anymore, back door or not.
Still seems to me like a non-issue. Even if the fuses weren't blown, unless they steal a physical device and send it back to China, or there is a bridge interface to connect the end products JTAG port remotely, seems to me there is a very low chance that the Chinese are going to get the program on the chips.
I don't think anyone fully understands JTAG, there are a lot of different versions of it mashed together on the typical hardware IC. Regardless if its a FPGA, microcontroller or otherwise. The so called "back door" can only be accessed through the JTAG port as well, so unless the military installed a JTAG bridge to communicate to the outside world and left it there, well then the "backdoor" is rather useless.
Something that can also be completely disabled by setting the right fuse inside the chip itself to disable all JTAG connections. Something that is considered standard practice on IC's with a JTAG port available once assembled into their final product and programmed.
Plus according to Microsemi's own website, all military and aerospace qualified versions of their parts are still made in the USA. So this "researcher" used commercial parts, which depending on the price point can be made in the plant in Shanghai or in the USA at Microsemi's own will.
The "researcher" and the person who wrote the article need to spend some time reading more before talking.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides... barrel rifling already makes a fingerprint-like marking on the shell/slug/bullet, and that's going to be a hell of a lot more useful in identifying the gun it was shot from than any other method thought up so far...
Only in TV shows and movies, fact is most handgun and rifle barrels today are mass produced on hammer forging equipment on a mandrel which makes all of them virtually the exact same on a run of tends of thousands of barrels. You can narrow down your suspect list using it, you can even match similar makes and models, but you'll never be able to prove it came out of the gun with serial number #24953 or #24954 or even #25953 for that matter.
The failure rate of human experiments is caused by the limited allowable variation of the drugs. While during now current computational analysis, small scale cellular testing using human cells and experimentation on mice, having 1 in 1,000 mice possibly have a adverse reaction from the administered drug is acceptable to continue experimentation to humans. Having a proven cause of a heart attack or other severe reaction to the drug with a limited study of 1,000-5,000 volunteers means failure.
Experimentation on animals today is nearly a stop-gap measure between testing on individual human cells today, and testing on actual people. Its nearly just to check that "it does something" for the problem in question and to develop LD50 values for the drug so they don't end up killing anybody by accident.
Not quite, they eventually made the first commercially viable integrated circuits, but their initial funding and build up of their company was for transistors. They built their first "integrated circuit" consisting of a mere 4 transistors 2 years later in 1960. At approximately the same time Texas Instruments did it in 1960.
The initial batch of 100 transistors was sold to IBM for $150 a piece in 1958. Prices for transistors fell to about $30 a piece by 1960.
Lots of neat stuff, including the original Op-Amps came out of Fairchild over the years. But my point still stands, nothing on a PC today can be traced back to original work done by Apple. Therefore, we owe Apple nothing today, and only the fan boys will continue to keep being ignorant of history such as the OP I responded to.
If, however, you're writing this from a personal computer, smartphone, tablet, or anything with a GUI, then you must be a huge hypocrite, since you owe it to Steve Jobs for bringing those tools to the masses.
William Shockley brought us the transistor in 1947.
...
Texas Instruments created the first silicon transistor in 1954.
The first computer meant to be small enough you could put it beside ones desk and have only one person operate it, was built by IBM in 1954, called the IBM 610.
A group known as the "traitorous Eight", of engineers and scientists left Shockley's company in 1957 to form Fairchild Semiconductor making some of the first commercially viable transistors.
Two from Bell Labs in 1960 created the first MOS transistor which would be the basis of digital electronics for many years.
Two of the "traitorous Eight" who formed Fairchild went on to create Intel in 1968.
Alan Kay, one of the people who designed the Xerox Alto, first proposed a "tablet" computer in 1968. Creating the concept that many would attempt over the years.
Intel created their first SRAM memory in 1969, created the first processor (the Intel 4004) in 1971.
Xerox Alto's created in 1973 was the first "desktop" computer to include a GUI and mouse, something both Jobs and Gates stole from to design their own OS's. Alan Kay by the way designed the GUI window system we still use today for this PC.
The first "portable" computer was the IBM 5100 series, which could be carried around in one piece. Introduced in 1975.
Intel created the Intel 8086 in 1978, which till this day its derivatives still dominates the computer processor market. Including the newest Mac Hardware.
The IBM PC was released in 1981. After that, the rest is history, both the Intel x86 architecture, and the MS DOS became the dominate way to build computers, eating up the rest of the competition till there was virtually nothing left.
Fast forward a few years
Compaq released the first convertible slate/tablet PC back in 2003, as the TC1000. Where you could dock the touch screen monitor to a fully functional keyboard/laptop base and use it both as tablet and as a PC.
Fujitsu ST5011D's came out in 2004 as a fully functional Windows Slate Machine.
Motion LS800 was introduced as a fully functional Windows Slate machine in 2005.
There are about a dozen more models that came out between then and now, but personally my first fully tablet PC, not a convertible or a docking model was the Archos 9, a fully functioning Windows 7 PC, first up for sale in October 2009 when I bought mine. Apple's initial iPad wasn't even for sale till April of 2010. A whole half year after I bought my first.
So again other then the headaches of dealing with tech support issues on Mac's, how do I owe Apple anything?
So all his money goes to his friend or his family. If they're so concerned about helping us plebes why can't they just give that money to existing charities and foundations rather than to friends and family? It's a scam, imo.
Do you understand how these foundations work? They act as intermediaries instead of Gates, or Buffet having to look at and approve each and every charity, the foundation handles the grunt work. And as long as they like where the money is going, it means neither of them really have to do much to distribute their donations.
The Person -> The Foundation -> The Charities
I know its a hard concept for some people to understand, if it involves more then one thing you end up losing half of the people in the discussion to confusion.
Surface tension is a rather interesting study of fluids.
I thought anyone who has ever been fishing already knew that?
Fishing in light to medium rain still ends up getting you rather bitten at dusk and dawn during mosquito season.
None of the militarys KH-11's (the one NASA "cloned" the first time when they built up the Hubble) were launched using a Shuttle mission.
Plus, imagine how expensive maintenance is going to be without Shuttle.
The military's fleet of a total of 15 to date (4 operational, 10 decommissioned and one failed to reach orbit), doesn't get "serviced" by the Shuttle. Although they are similar in respects to the Hubble, none of them were launched by the Shuttle (they were launched by Titan-3Ds for the most part, a few with Titan-IV's and the most recent one with a Delta V Heavy), nor has the shuttle or ISS service them.
NASA tries to fix them, the NRO tends to make their satellites crash into the atmosphere when they reach their end of life regardless if its a design flaw or its just a old bird in the sky.
Regulating != artificially high prices.
Regulated products are easy to attach taxes to, as shown with Ontario's "sin tax" on tobacco and alcohol. Don't kid yourself if you think other places wont do the same if they think they can turn a profit and make their books looked balanced by taxing anything they may make legal in the future.
down to less than $3 a pack and the contraband stopped immediately.
And now a pack costs $10-13 and a pack of non-taxed Native smokes costs that $3.
Averaging it out, yes 2kW is probably typical in most homes. As gas furnaces are typical, and if you eliminate your stove, and instead use a natural gas stove, 2kW as a ceiling would be easy to maintain.
Personally for my own uses, 2kW/h nearly excessive, due to my gas furnace, gas water heater and gas stove, I'm averaging out approximately 1.25kW to 1.5kW per hour with a ceiling of 2kW. That includes running 2 TV's, a PC I set up as a file server, 2 other PC's, 2 fridges in the home and the Microwave running for me to hit that 2kW ceiling.
If the government legalized it and even limited to purchase in gov only stores, they could at least kill off most of the issues related to the drug trade
In Ontario, they have put so much sin taxes on alcohol and tobacco products, that our prices for them reach 2-3 times more then the US and other Provinces near us who do not tax the hell out of them.
While there are no criminal gangs actively distributing black market alcohol and tobacco, there is however a rather large black market for Native tobacco products that do not get taxed this way, and home distilled alcoholic beverages. As well as the importing of tobacco and alcohol products from places where these sin taxes do not exist.
Making something legal and then regulating it to death just invites more illegal distribution of the products in question.
Face, meet palm!
I said "Common Law" because that's what the US uses. Naturally, most civli law jurisdictions use it too.
Not really. Most Civil Law jurisdictions its on the defendant to prove he or she is not guilty, through the use of interpretation of the Law. Only in Common Law does it become a natural right. Even in Europe, until they ratified the UN Declaration of Human Rights, most of them, being Civil Law countries did not follow the thought of "Innocent till proven guilty".
And many of these countries that only really applies till the Prosecutor decides to charge you with something and go to court. So until you see a Judge, your innocent, once you do, its your responsibility to prove your innocence.
You need to realize, your ideals and beliefs are not shared with the entire world. Your arrogance is showing.
One is a legal charge to be proven in court (under Common law, it's not disproven; the prosecution has to make the case that the accused violated the law, not the other way round)
1) Common law is a British thing exported to large amounts of the world due to the British colonization of those areas. It is not existent in 2/3rds of the world, including the vast majority of European countries.
2) Your not talking about Common law, your talking about the Latin "Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat" ("Proof lies on him who asserts, not on him who denies"), Common law is simply a legal system where as instead of just government laws being considered in court cases, court cases can call upon other previous court cases as precedence when considering whether or not something is a crime, and how to punish someone for it.
So in effect you were "burning up mod points" to argue that the entire World should use the British system of Government and court? Something that was imposed on most of the world initially by the British through colonization and therefor force?
Critical thinking would have taught you that not everyone in this world believes the same way, nor does it mean that they want to think the way you believe they should. Last I checked the sun set on the British Empire, and it will not come back.
Force
moral or mental strength
capacity to persuade or convince
People who had never done anything else wrong, other then believed in the wrong political party, distributed information about their political ideology were deemed a threat and charged under this section of US law. Without violence or other physical harm being done. Read some history, it will do good for you.
Sorry to disappoint you, but I'm not Chinese. Hell I've never even been to the country.
Fact is, in the US for example,
18 USC 2385 - Advocating overthrow of Government
Whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States or the government of any State, Territory, District or Possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein, by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government; or
Whoever, with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any such government, prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates, sells, distributes, or publicly displays any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence, or attempts to do so; or
Whoever organizes or helps or attempts to organize any society, group, or assembly of persons who teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of any such government by force or violence; or becomes or is a member of, or affiliates with, any such society, group, or assembly of persons, knowing the purposes thereof—
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.
And to think, that makes the Arab Spring style of government change illegal in the US, even though the US supports such means in the ME, and tends to call the kettle black when it comes to China and their own internal censorship.
It also means spreading false rumors that the government is being over thrown to support and make people want to revolt, such as what happened in China illegal in the US as well.
Probably has to do with this ( http://articles.cnn.com/2012-03-30/asia/world_asia_china-microblogs-crackdown_1_coup-rumors-coup-attempt-sina-s-weibo?_s=PM:ASIA )
Spreading of unfounded rumors of a coup in Beijing on Social media, means more restrictions will come into play. It was to be expected. After all, libel and other forms of lying are illegal in most of the world. So is attempting to incite rebellion illegal in just about every country in the world including China. Its obvious that the Chinese would do something about it eventually.
Not quite complete computers, but microcontrollers, and there are development kits that will allow you to read them without disassembling the entire card. The hardware and software are rather open standards that are publicly available. Just as your phone can read the contents so can said development kits, if they were unreable and unwrittable they'd be rather useless.
I haven't look at your profile, but this is the sort of mentality I see in the US. Guns kill people no matter how you look at it, and less guns will only lead to less deaths.
Someone should tell the British that, their crime rate with firearms nearly doubled in the 4 years after they banned, and confiscated all the handguns and semi-automatic firearms in the country. From 13,874 in 1998/99 to 24,070 in 2002/03.
Firearm regulation has never worked. Law abiding citizens who will surrender a firearm that is banned, isn't the person who'd go out and shoot someone before or after the laws are passed.
Hence why if you sell a source code license it should be for more then you expect to make out of the software till end of life. Once it is out of your hands, its no longer your own product.
Giving away code is never a smart idea no matter how much you think a single license is worth.
My post wasn't about if it was good or not, my post was simply the fact that just because tiny little countries do not have active militaries does it mean that everyone can forgo one, since clearly neither can they when they use defense agreements with larger and richer countries to protect themselves.
Not being readable even when someone has the device in hand is exactly what these secure FPGAs are meant to protect against!
It's not a non-issue. It's a complete failure of a product to provide any advantages over non-secure equivalents.
You clearly have NOT used a FPGA or similar. First the ProASIC3 the article focuses on is the CHEAPEST product in the product line (some of that model line reach down to below a dollar each). But beyond that ...
Devices are SECURED by processes, such as blowing the JTAG fuses in the device which makes them operation only, and unreadable. They are secureable, if you follow the proper processes and methods laid out by the manufacturer of the specific chip.
Just because a "research paper" claims there is other then standard methods of JTAG built into the JTAG doesn't mean that the device doesn't secure as it should, nor does it mean this researcher who is trying to peddle his own product is anything but biased in this situation.
Lets assume that the FPGA's were actually made in China used for DoD requirements
However, Microsemi claims to make their Mil-Spec stuff in the USA, which is one of the reasons many tech companies still have manufacturing plants and fabs in the US.
More then likely, to prevent ITAR regulatory problems, and to ensure their own trade secrets are safe, the Defense contractor, would produce the PCB's in house, or inside the United States so that it can keep a tighter eye on their product.
The Defense contractor would be programming in the USA, transfer of the program outside of the US is probably illegal due to ITAR regulations, so its a good bet that this is the case.
If the requirement was of any sensitive nature, the fuse bits would have been set, and disabled any kind of programming, JTAG, or other interface to allow access to the native code residing on the chip. Hell cheap consumer electronics blow the fuses on their programmable IC's too for the protection. As do many commercial gang programers by default blow the fuses as its not a development system that was being built but a finished end product.
So the finished and programed board, would have to be taken from a Defense contractor, or the Military itself directly, flown to China, and then what? The fuses are blown and JTAG doesn't work anymore, back door or not.
Still seems to me like a non-issue. Even if the fuses weren't blown, unless they steal a physical device and send it back to China, or there is a bridge interface to connect the end products JTAG port remotely, seems to me there is a very low chance that the Chinese are going to get the program on the chips.
I don't think anyone fully understands JTAG, there are a lot of different versions of it mashed together on the typical hardware IC. Regardless if its a FPGA, microcontroller or otherwise. The so called "back door" can only be accessed through the JTAG port as well, so unless the military installed a JTAG bridge to communicate to the outside world and left it there, well then the "backdoor" is rather useless.
Something that can also be completely disabled by setting the right fuse inside the chip itself to disable all JTAG connections. Something that is considered standard practice on IC's with a JTAG port available once assembled into their final product and programmed.
Plus according to Microsemi's own website, all military and aerospace qualified versions of their parts are still made in the USA. So this "researcher" used commercial parts, which depending on the price point can be made in the plant in Shanghai or in the USA at Microsemi's own will.
The "researcher" and the person who wrote the article need to spend some time reading more before talking.