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Comment by kalium_xyz | Hacker News Reader

I wish we could get rid of this dependency on the natural world that computers seem to have. Sadly I cant of a way to implement computers outside of reality and have some safe interface to them.

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I always see computers as instruments for creating an approximation of a Platonist mathematical space from a physical space. Theoretically, digital computing can be done to any precision we want, until the non-ideal physical properties and constraints kick in, such as time, space, processing power, physics, in other words, leaky abstraction...

Check out Permutation City by Greg Egan for some inspiration ;)

The dependency comes from pushing the physical limits until the abstraction leaks. Older memory technologies were not vulnerable to rowhammer. But they were also a lot slower.

Is this unreliability being driven by newer DRAM being faster, or by newer DRAM being denser?

Denser & lower voltage

That's it, we're going back to core memory.

Core memory has temperature issues.

If you thought "cold boot attacks" were a problem with DDR, using memory that still holds data 50 years later might be an issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_boot_attack

Unfortunately, it looks like any interface is a potential for a side channel…

Is it? You can fix rowhammer by simply re-mapping all memory banks after executing every instruction.

That might mitigate Rowhammer, but does it really remove all side channels?

This is why I'm pleased to announce my new Petahertz Rock Computer line. Not only are they the fastest computers in the world, but they are also the most secure. No data will leak from a system implemented on a rock computer, ever.

Buy one now and it will ship with a complementary write only ssd for all your secure storage needs!

Terms and conditions apply.

Perhaps photonic computing?

I think there are still lots of advances in computing needed to eventually have security from the semiconductor level up.

There's an SCP article somewhere in this...

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