1. Squirrel holds up DisneyWorld mono-rail. (VIDEO) Eric Shelton, of the Handgun Show Podcast fame, shot this video of a squirrel holding up the mono-rail train at DisneyWorld.
2. Chinese Backdoors in Hardware. Bruce Schneier has a post up about some researches in Britain discovering a backdoor in military-grade computer chips manufactured in China. YIKES! And why are our military chips manufactured in China? That seems like problem #1 right there.
3. Greek Mythology: they work harder than the other Europeans. A new survey of Europeans reveals that the Greeks think they are the hardest working of the Europeans, while all the other Europeans think the Germans are the hardest working of the Europeans.
Hm. We know about Greece and entitlements. How does Germany look stability-wise?
ReplyDeleteI'll tell you after next week. :)
DeleteThe researcher who found the "backdoor" is either being misleading or conflating Taiwan with mainland China. There are a variety of legal restrictions that ensure mainland Chinese semiconductor foundries will not make chips for the military of ANY country. (I can go into more detail on this if you're curious.) It's also hard to believe that a foundry in any country would tamper with a customer's design--the loss of customers' trust could destroy the foundry's business.
ReplyDeleteIt's been awhile since I knew anything about the silicon business, but how many foundries exist in countries that are not China?
DeleteDepends on your definition of "foundry" and whether you count Taiwan as "China" (which you shouldn't, when you are talking about the "China threat"). Here are the rankings from 2011: http://www.electroiq.com/articles/sst/2012/03/top-10-semiconductor-foundries-in-2011.html
DeleteTSMC, UMC, Vanguard and Powerchip are Taiwanese and nearly all of their production is in Taiwan. SMIC is the only mainland Chinese foundry in the top 10. The rest of the top 10 are in the US, South Korea, Singapore, and Israel.
I misspoke. I should have said fab. See my post I just put up.
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