If you read the article, you will see that the technology is specifically semiconductor design tools required for developing high performance computing that the PRC would use for nuclear weapons development. Can you do that with KiCAD? No.
The parent's question still seems applicable. Is this basically down to a judge to decide the line at which a certain technology is too advanced to export? Would open sourcing an EDA tool be illegal if it was sufficiently capable?
Licensing as "open source" wouldn't be illegal, but the act of exporting would be. I've certainly seen libre software downloads that have click-throughs where you attest you're not in certain prohibited countries, IP blocks (eg Github does this site-wide AFAIK), etc. No idea if this will continue to be "enough" under this new fascist regime that doesn't care much for institutions like the rule of law. Probably fine up until it isn't, at which point ceasing and desisting would probably be enough unless you're deemed "woke" or some other kind of unperson.
(I'm not a member of any guilds. And I guess the downvote is for the political incorrectness. Plus ça change)
It would be for indefensible decapitation strikes. A world leader who would launch a surprise first strike is almost certainly narcissistic enough to be susceptible to blackmail by a threat on their own life. A world leader who is not concerned with their own life but that of their countrymen will likely not launch a surprise first strike and so MAD still works.
The isotopic content of the water matters too. Boiling point are not used to calibrate thermometers though. Freeze points and triple points are used for temperature calibration. And outside of a primary standards lab, it’s usually just a transfer standard (another, more accurate thermometer).
Maybe I’m missing something but these USB attacks require interaction with kernel drivers so if you plug in a dock that then presents mysterious storage or HID functions, you’re going to know.
Does anything on your PC notify you about plugging in a keyboard? I know mine doesn’t, and it definitely doesn’t prompt me about whether to use it either.
You could check what devices you have connected but I doubt many people would do that every single time they come to work.
Yeah, this is more of a UI problem that could be solved with a little effort. I would be concerned about a device that replaced the hub itself rather than simply adding a function. The core issue is that a system can always notify the user of newly connected devices (Windows seems to about half the time). But a malicious MCU emulating a hub and compromising or stealing data at the USB protocol level could appear exactly as expected. It could key log, inject, etc., undetected because it doesn’t have to interact with kernel drivers as anything other than the expected hub.
MacOS has a pop up that tries to identify the keyboard layout. If this screen came up when I plugged something in that wasn’t a keyboard, I would assume the device was malicious.
It is probably possible to automate the keystrokes to quickly kill this screen though.
If I were a bad actor with the resources, I would dedicate more engineering effort to making the device subtle. It would try to remain invisible until a mouse/keyboard was plugged into the dock. The interceptor would then read that fingerprint and present that to the host OS, keeping the user unaware of the middleman.
My point is that no matter what you tell the OS, there will still be one more device connected than expected. If you plug in a keyboard and two are suddenly connected, it’s still very noticeable. This counting problem is occurring at the hardware level in the USB hubs and host. The attacker needs to compromise an external hub to behave like a USB protocol analyzer capable of intercepting and modifying data seamlessly in order for an attack like this to be anything other than trivially detectable. Fitting something like that into an existing enclosure means writing lots of low level code and embedded hardware design which is a different level of difficulty.
Sorry, I think I misunderstood your original comment - we’re having the same thought with MITM. Definitely more technically challenging but much harder to detect.
No, you are exactly backwards. Did the People’s Revolution win or did the students win? I seem to remember that the students were run over by tanks. Probably not being driven by highly educated PLA commanders.
With ST, specifically, I'm not seeing a lack of Silicon but a lack of lead frames. The recent shutdowns in China caused several batches of lead frames to expire unused, creating a big gap moving through the supply chain. Chip-scale packages have better availability.
What really kills me is that none of the complainers have any experience designing consumer hardware let alone running a business that sells those designs. Owning lots of hardware whose design is beyond your ken is not the same thing as designing hardware and running a profitable hardware business. Everyone will be sad when Framework doesn’t make it and no one will reflect on these BS comments and the unnecessary ill will they sow.
Sometimes there is no conspiracy to rip off all ten people off who want to repair their board. Like they’re going to spend any time figuring out how to make an extra $3k. They might just be trying to keep their IP and stay around long enough to make good on the things they did promise: modular hardware.
> What really kills me is that none of the complainers have any experience designing consumer hardware let alone running a business that sells those designs
This applies to the majority of people commenting about such things here on HN. To them everything is easy, manufacturers are just greedy, idiots, or both.
Do you really think triactual meant literally probably none, or do you think they were using a pretty common method of conveying their idea? Your comment actually supports what kayodelycaon and triactual are saying, that HN commenters can be so nitpicky and pedantic that they end up missing the plot entirely.
This is pure fantasy. Minimum wage in the US is 2-10x what it is in low cost regions. Not even touching regulations. US experts travel to those regions to hand-hold every step necessary in order to make any product not forced to be built in the US by taxes or regulation. I did this for years and I hate it. I have worked for years in both American and foreign factories and I can assure you that they can automate just as well so there is no hope without government intervention in the form of tariffs. US labor currently competes on a global market.
Sure, but the problem is it's not just minimum wages that are 2-10x higher in the US. It's all wages. I don't know the manufacturing sector personally, but I can look at the tech sector.
I am a senior software engineer in Romania working for an American company. I am well appreciated and currently have a significant hand in designing major pieces of one of our bigger products, working with a Romanian team, a US team and a team in India. I'm explaining this just to make it clear I am not some contractor code monkey working in a sweatshop. My salary though, which is quite good for my country, is 5-10x smaller than the kinds of salaries software devs expect in California, and even Atlanta or Austin. I am higher up the corporate ladder, and better appreciated, and have brought more value to this company than many of those people - and so have many of my colleagues from Romania and India.
You can't tell me that it's OK for software devs to make 150k+/year, for sales people to make similar salaries (with bonuses), for layers and layers of middle management (who often have negative value for the company when evaluated objectively) to do the same, for executives to make tens or hundreds of millions, for shareholders to make record profits; but then if the assembly line workers get 31k/year, THAT is what's bleeding the company dry.
You're not wrong about the lack of US manufacturing, and the lack of motivation for it. But you are dead wrong about the reasons behind it.
While I absolutely understand and sympathize with what you are saying, the issue cannot be analyzed by simply comparing executive pay to that of the lowest paid employees. I know it is popular to make these comparisons, I get it, one gets a sense of righteousness from discussing things in those terms. However, these comparisons make no sense at all.
Wage scales are what they are for a reason. Simple example, in the US an engineer might graduate with somewhere between $100K and $300K US in student loans. That, right there, starts to impose a baseline on what someone can reasonably earn in order for it to be worth it to have that job. Just like a business isn't going to exist to just break even, people tend not to work just to break even. Everyone has to make a profit.
To that you start adding professional and personal necessities and you might quickly realize that $150K a year living in Los Angeles might very well be equivalent to 1/2 or 1/5 of that salary elsewhere in the world.
I'll give you another simple example: It costs my family $1200 per month for healthcare. It used to be $600 per month. Then Obamacare was instituted --under the laughable "Affordable Care Act"-- and our healthcare tripled to $1800 US per month. We eventually moved to a $1200 per month plan where we accept greater risk and higher costs. I did the math, we have to spend somewhere in the order of $25K in a year before our health insurance really starts paying for things.
In other words, context is always important in judging how much people get paid.
An executive that is responsible for managing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue should make enough money to reflect the degree of responsibility he or she has. If they don't do their job, hundreds of people lose their jobs. You simply can't compare executive pay to that of a warehouse worker who is operating at an entirely different level of responsibility and accountability.
The problem isn't pay scales. The problem is the overall cost structure, which starts at artificially forced costs --be it wages or regulatory-- imposed in complete violation of free market principles.
Here's an example of these costs, something I learned about a couple of decades ago and just astounded me. In Los Angeles County (for those outside the US, the region where the city of Los Angeles is located) we have a tax called "Los Angeles County Business Property Tax". What is this? Well, to put it in simple terms, look around your office. The County of Los Angeles makes businesses pay taxes on everything you see: Your desk, your computer, your printer, fax machine, chair, table, lights, trash can, even any improvements you may have made to your building (dividers, painting, electrical, etc). LA County makes you pay a tax on every physical product the company owns. FOR FUCKING EVER.
This is some of the context that is missed from most of these conversations and the kinds of things only people who have to deal with them would know. As is always the case, life is a complex multivariate problem that is never well represented by a single simple variable.
It has been my experience that most folks commenting on this matter on HN have no clue whatsoever what they are talking about. None. They comment based on pure ideology or, possibly worse, a delusion driven into their heads by our lovely universities.
Those of us, like you, who actually have or had skin in the game --real experience actually trying to make real things in the context of the real world-- know better. We know and understand exactly what's going on and where this is likely headed. Nobody here wants to hear about it. The reaction ranges from the most uninformed comments to flagging and effectively cancelling what they don't want to hear.
The worse of it is that reality doesn't care about flagging comments and down-votes, reality keeps moving forward. The path we are on is 180 degrees from what we should be doing if we actually want to have a shot a maintaining a reasonable standard of living for generations to come.
To be fair, at this point, it is almost impossible. The kind of leadership and cultural shift we need in order to do the things we have to do might be impossible to achieve given what we have done to our society. This is the most disconcerting part for me. We have devoted years destroying this nation from the inside. Europe hasn't done much better than this.
It’s genuinely terrifying. There seems to be no recognition that you cannot have labor unions and environmental protections with out tariffs to even the playing field with less scrupulous countries. We are rapidly approaching a time where only the military industrial complex retains any manufacturing expertise.
I have designed and manufactured systems for aerospace applications. I spent months dealing with ITAR issues due to the reality that you simply cannot build almost anything out of US/European components. The metal and a few high-tech items, mostly in the materials domain. Almost everything else is not made in the US or Europe.
I thought that people were going to wake up to some of these realities when they finally saw reality in the form of not even being able to manufacture face masks in the US. We don't make the cloth and other materials, we don't even make the machines you need to manufacture them.
This and related realities should have been covered in great detail by our media. For people outside of manufacturing this was news. Most people go through life having no understanding whatsoever of how and where the stuff they use every day comes from, how it's made, etc.
The pandemic should have shocked everyone into pushing for massive changes that would, over time, increase self reliance. Yet, none of that happened. It was starting to, at the highest levels, but then political forces changed and now we are more concerned about giving people free money than actually securing their futures and that of the next generation. Brilliant.
