576 karma · joined June 8, 2013
The original concern around RdRand is that the tiny on-chip random number generator might be compromised.
You are arguing that there might be implementation that uses code analysis to detect data flow from RdRand and mess with it. It sounds very far fetched.
When I read about the issue, I was little concerned but did not follow trough. It seems that the whole issue started from people who don't know what they they are talking and who did not check facts. More and more people join and take the SOME approach of enjoying the discussion but not doing the work. This causes FUD and is bad thing. People who do this should be burned just like Linus did.
Btw. Using XOR to mix two random streams is textbook correct way to do it. It's simple and correct .
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/renowned-security-expert-...
Programmers designing fonts is cute but it's not good idea. Lucas de Groot knew what he was doing.
Chinese are really going into Africa and it's priority to them. There is roughly million Chinese living and working in Africa already.
For 99.99999% durability their way of doing things is good enough to protect from HDD failures. Of course, there are other failure scenarios.
They have over 100,000 Syrian refugees, 750,000 Iraqi refugees and 1.9 million Palestinian refugees. That's a lot for small country of six million people.
It's easy to criticize Jordanians, but they have their hands full and are risking the stability of their country. If other countries would start taking more refugees from Syria and Iraq (like the coalition that toppled Saddam) that would be nice.
There will be new jobs, but fewer and fewer people qualify. Network effect and superstar economy mean that the distribution of workforce compensation will change dramatically. Majority of workers will be worth less. More of them will drop below the point where it's not worth to hire them.
PRISM program is for collecting intelligence within and with companies that have joined the program (including Google). Upstream is program is for collecting data directly from fiber. Analysts are free to use both.
>Since I started working with Snowden's documents, I have been using GPG, Silent Circle, Tails, OTR, TrueCrypt, BleachBit, and a few other things I'm not going to write about.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-how-to-rema...
For example banks and insurance companies want to know everything possible about you. So do potential employers. Profiling people and putting them into categories and calculating their risk profiles makes their position weaker.
For example: Google "lump in the testicles" and browse medical sites. Then wait one week and try to get mortgage or insurance.
An optimal strategy’s goal is to loose the least against any arbitrary strategy. It is a strategy that is impossible to exploit in poker because poker has antes.
Poker players must seek maximal strategy. A maximal strategy’s goal is to win as much as possible against a specific strategy.
You you can't do that assumption because you don't know what the strategy is. You can calculate Nash equilibrium only if you know the strategy your opponent is using. In full no limit hold em there is no single strategy winning strategy, so you don't know the strategy your opponents are using.
You can certainly use Nash equilibrium when you have figured out the strategies your opponents are using. This is what Bryce Paradis is talking about. It can have practical value when playing Heads Up.
But If we are talking game theory and "solving poker", there is no single winning strategy that works against all other strategies and you can't calculate single Nash equilibrium that would be optimal in actual game against specific strategies.
It's theoretically possible to find Nash equilibrium over all possible strategies but that's not winning strategy. You just lose as little as possible. You lose against most/all strategies.
Take for example Kuhn poker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuhn_poker). It's very simple but first player has several optimal strategies.
You can solve equilibrium for simplified poker games like just Heads Up with only shove or call an all-in options though.
Computers can easily calculate probabilities and expected values for every hand. So why they are not beating professionals?
Poker has no optimal strategy that wins against all other strategies. To play poker in higher level you must model the strategies of others, including them trying to model your strategy.
1. In the lowest level it's just maximizing expected value based on hand probabilities.
2. In the second level you try to learn the strategy of your opponents and maximize value against those strategies.
3. In third level you try to figure out how much your opponents have figured out your strategy and you change the strategy so that you maximize value when your opponents play against what they have learned from your strategy so far.
4. ... and so on. It' goes meta.
If you want to create ultimate pokerbot, it has to be able to model the minds of it's opponents. it hast to be able to detect leaks in it's own game and close them down. It must go meta all the time. It must learn how to understand how others think and how they think about it and change it's behaviour constantly.
Cringley thinks that Microsoft bought global brand.
1. Microsoft did not buy Nokia.
2. Microsoft did not buy Nokia's patents (it only bought licences).
3. Microsoft did not buy Nokia brand (it can only use the brand in smartphones for short time, in S40 and S60 longer time).
Microsoft bought only Nokia phone business. What is left is Nokia Networks and Solutions, HERE (maps) and Nokia Advanced Technologies (research and development arm of Nokia). Nokia is also prohibited of making it's own phones until 2015.
Nokia could buy Jolla (company founded by Nokia engineers) and be back in smartphone business with Nokia brand in 2015. I don't think it will be, but it could.