Re: Hackers hope to democratize laser-based processor hacking for $500

A fairly low quality article if you ask me.

If you can get close enough to get sufficient physical access. Not a worry to most of us.

If no-one did that, everything would be as f***ed up as Windows 3.0/3.1/95

In this context, making the world a better place requires demonstating to hardware/software vendors that they can't just cobble something together and hope it's secure.

Sounds absurd. Decap an expensive chip, set it up to run and analyze things, then bang one selected 20nm-square fet (out of a billion) with focussed 600 nm light.

I actually worked on a electron-microscope based electron beam tester in the late 1980's.

We weren't proposing to offer EBIC - electron beam induced change - though we had on an earlier tester, and nobody had used it (probably because it can permanently mess up the chip).

A laser-based microscope won't have the resolution to focus the beam on a specific transistor - and there were millions of transistors on the sort of chips we were expecting to test, even back then.

Electron microscopes do offer better image resolution. Optical lithography now depends on a 14 nanometer wavelength light source - a

And we expected that our customers would have access to the chip layout and schematic so that they would be able to work out which transistor did what.

The hackers might well be able mess up the operation of the chips that they point their laser-beams at, but they won't be able to do it in any kind of systematic way.

That does seem to be what the author of the article imagines to be on offer. It seems very unlikely to be something that the toys described could deliver.

If the electromagnetic field were strong enough to induce destructive currents in the metal links across the chip this could be correct.

It doesn't seem to be worth doing. Hitting them with a hammer works just as well, and it is lot cheaper.

Probably not. The Daily Telegraph is about as closely connected to reality as Russia Today.

Why on earth would the US want to invade Iran? The ayatollahs of Iran are wrecking their country quite as effectively as the religious right is wrecking America.

Probably not. Getting a nuclear weapon to actually explode needs more than a single digit IQ.

The Americans rely on John Larkin's laser timing hardware for their Nuclear Ignition Facility.

Unsurprisingly, the results are erratic. John Larkin thinks that Donald Trump has "common sense". One has to wonder how the Ayatollahs selected their hardware experts, and what absurd things they insisted they believe before they let them work on their nuclear weapons.

The real tragedy is that the 192 big lasers are modulated in quads, groups of four, so we only got to sell 48 modulator chassis, plus some spares.

John Larkin has made an unmarked snip here, which took out the bit the post that should have made it clear that this was part of an absurd proposition that I was using to send up Jan Panteltje.

How disappointing. Maybe if you had pirated an even earlier - and even more inappropriate - Hewlett-Packard concept, they might have bought more.