15 Feb
2019
15 Feb
'19
7:29 a.m.
On Fri, 15 Feb 2019 at 14:59, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:
Speaking of sounds made by machines, there is a famous security paper from a few years
ago in which researchers read the encryption keys out of smartphones by listening to the
sounds made by the device while it was execution the crypto algorithms.
... wow.
These hardware wizard stories remind me of a legendary
repair wizard, non-computer industrial devices I think. He was called in to fix a tricky
problem at the customer site. Studied it for a while, took out a small hammer, whacked
the device at some spot, and reported "fixed". He then sent in a bill for
$500.
Customer challenged that with a demand to itemize the work. The itemized bill came back
like this:
1. Applying impact to the device: $5
2. Knowing where and how to apply the impact: $495
110 years old, and still apt.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/06/tap/
I first encountered it in the form of one of the AI Koans. I guess
these are probably familiar to all here, but in case:
http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~wiseman/humor/ai-koans.html
--
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