This was a really great talk. Full of interesting things. E.g. his BIO system for replacing Raspberry Pi's proprietary PIO. It uses RV32E (16 registers) and then uses x16-31 as custom registers to directly control the pins so you can do GPIO without the usual delays from MMIO.

It's about providing the security benefits we get from MMUs (e.g. process isolation) to microcontrollers. There are no OSes for that space because basically no microcontrollers have MMUs. They had to make one for this OS.

I highly recommend watching the talk, it's very good!

Uhm obviously. It would be difficult to have a year from the future on record wouldn't it?

Banning CFCs. But that didn't require giving anything up really so it was an easier sell.

I seriously doubt any kind of DRM is going to dissuade bike thieves. It hasn't really worked for phones has it?

It has. Yes people still steal iPhones but not even close to levels pre-Activation Lock.

If you can't fence the product then there's no motivation to steal it in the first place.

Naturally, this is why we should add GPS and a network connection to every device in existence. /s

> If you can't fence the product then there's no motivation to steal it in the first place.

Couple of big problems with this thought:

* You have to know you can't fence it. Do you think bike thieves are following exactly which e-bike models have DRM, whether it has been broken etc? I doubt it.

* It assumes that the DRM is so amazing that nobody figures out how to defeat it.

So it might be true, but it also might not.

It's normally the company directors that are personally liable.

You don't think the political situation is a teensy bit worse now?

The west was enjoying the peace dividend while Russians were dealing with the collapse of the USSR so the answer to your question depends on who you ask.

The political situation is absurd, but its clear that people are far more resilient against state control, so in some ways its improving.

We were talking about big tech, not global politics.

There's a clear connection between tech (social media, loneliness epidemic, etc) and political decline.

If we're talking the 90s, No. The US is not at war invading another country (Iraq).

> brute force all possible combinations

Somewhat less impressive than I was expecting. The wire idea is neat though.

I felt the opposite. Sometimes figuring out a clever way to make the “dumb” thing possible is very impressive.

Human lockpickers use feedback when picking. I'm wondering if a bot could do the same - e.g. measuring the travel distance to find a binding pin, or the resistance to moving the wire?

> Human lockpickers use feedback when picking.

Or discover when locks are built really badly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeDcOhWvq7I

Possible, but to do it at the level of precision needed for lockpicking would be a very expensive piece of equipment.

The next step is to train an ML model on all videos of the lockpicking lawyer and it'll get a click out of one, three is binding every time.

Yeah, the problem with these mesh networks is that for them to work, you need high transmit powers typically not found in off the shelf stuf (because it would be illegal).

A would-be opressor can just have a van full of antennas drive through the neighborhood and triangulate all those transmitters, after which you'll get caught.

It's like using high-powered flashlights to covertly message each other.

I think if they took you to court for cloning someone's voice without permission they would probably lose because this conflict makes the terms unclear.

An unclear license would default back to full copyright protection I would think.