bootload

VS

2002 “Companies spend millions of dollars on firewalls, encryption, and secure access devices and it's money wasted because none of these measures address the weakest link in the security chain: the people who use, administer, operate and account for computer systems that contain protected information.” — Kevin Mitnik

“Amateurs hack systems, professionals hack people.” — Bruce Schneier

My recollection was Thiel was injecting cash, a money deal. [0] There was another less advertised play. An established path for the Thiel “Boy Wonder Fellows”. [1]

“In addition to founding PayPal and Palantir and being the first investor in Facebook, Peter has been involved with many of the most important technology companies of the last 15 years, both personally and through Founders Fund, and the founders of those companies will generally tell you he has been their best source of strategic advice. He already works with a number of YC companies, and we’re very happy he’ll be working with more.”

Guess who was involved in the Thiel / YC deal? [2] You are not the only one seeing this as a reputation hit for YC. [3] Even I, disconnected across the other side of the world could see this as an issue.

“WiFi is still via SDIO on the Broadcom chip, IIRC.”

OBSD reports

> “The 4GB and 8GB variants of Raspberry Pi 5 are built around two key chips: the RP1 I/O controller, developed here at Raspberry Pi and providing the interfacing capabilities of the platform; and BCM2712C1, a 16nm application processor built by our friends at Broadcom. BCM2712C1 is a hugely complex and powerful device, with a quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 application processor running at 2.4GHz, and the latest iteration of the VideoCore multimedia platform. Alongside the features required to power a Raspberry Pi, it also contains functionality intended to serve other markets, which we don’t need. This ‘dark silicon’ is permanently disabled in the chips we use, but takes up die space, and therefore adds cost. The new D0 stepping strips away all that unneeded functionality, leaving only the bits we need.”

This is what Eben Upton reported on 19th Aug 2024. [0] and Geoff Geerling makes a comment on chip revisions. [1]

> “Steppings are basically chip revisions where they don't change functionality, and usually just fix bugs, or tweak the layout. But even tiny design changes could have unintended consequences.”

So the dark silicon removal step from BCC1 to BCD0, a cost cutting measure, killed wifi? Damn, I was hoping to use this for a obsd firewall.

Cf:

At this point I was working in an Internet startup building client-side side tools.

GeoCities did one thing really well, building pages on the Web. All you needed was a browser. Innovative.

Compare this to downloading, then installing software on a Win95 box. Work on some markup, FTP the HTML, graphics, stylesheets to the server. A hint to the future you’d see in 2003 with WP. [1]

Reference

Personal changes work to a point. Take for instance solar power in Aus.

“The sudden rise in solar PV installations in Australia since 2018 dramatically propelled the country from being considered a relative laggard to a strong leader by mid-2019. Australia has the highest per capita solar capacity, now at more than 1kW per capita.” €