It is much more than that; NK is China's "pawn which can be promoted to a queen" if and when a nuke war happens. That is the only aim of its existence.
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That is not accurate. Many state owned Chinese companies have been cutting ties, including off the top of my head, Bank of China. It is, without a doubt, driven by western sanction threats, but it does include state owned enterprises.
> The Israeli judiciary is unique in nominating itself and having given itself the power to cancel any law or demand any changes to laws/policy on any arbitrary basis;
1. Not completely. There are quite a few countries with fully independent judiciary, with judges appointing judges.
2. Courts with power to initiate, and prosecute a case by themselves also exist in other countries.
Preemptively posting what is people's biggest confusion:
Battery cell energy density is not the same as the whole battery pack energy density.
Western battery cell manufacturers chased the specific energy density figure, and in the process they decided to save weight on the casing, and electrodes as much as possible, resulting in very fragile battery cells.
To avoid 18650 cells being crushed, you will need a lot of structural reinforcements added to the battery pack, consuming weight.
Even with all of that, tiny, individually 18650 cells waste a lot of weight on the cell casing, on things like welds, terminals, relief valves, thermal interface material etc.
Bigger cells invariably have better casing to active material ratio, but the casing mass is still "useless.
Blade battery reverses all of above, and intentionally uses very strong, and thermally conductive case, to make the casing weight to contribute to battery pack mechanical strength.
LFP cathode feels very well at high temperatures, and has very high resistance to mechanical expansion during charge. This allows to make LFP cells much bigger than cells with other chemistries, and removes the need for liquid cooling system inside the battery pack, greatly saving weight.
> And that's the difference. When you perform TouchID authentication, the secure enclave can decide to release a secret that can be used to decrypt your keyring. We can't easily do this under Linux because we don't have an interface to store those secrets.
> The secret material can't just be stored on disk - that would allow anyone who had access to the disk to use that material to decrypt the keyring and get access to the passwords, defeating the object.
I'll provide a broader explanation: you cannot encrypt your key with a fingerprint.
A genuine "throw away the key" lock is only possible when the decryption key is completely erased from memory during the screen lock, and you cannot use your fingerprint or face image as a key by itself.
A screen lock using stored secret is inherently incapable of providing encryption at rest. It's like a password on a sticky note.
A "throw away the key" is only possible with a password, or a smartcard.
If you trust the hardware then it's entirely possible to tie the release of an encryption key to a fingerprint validated by that hardware. Hardware-backed keys are widely used (the entire WebAuthn ecosystem is predicated upon them being trustworthy), and having that hardware validate a fingerprint rather than merely physical presence is an improvement.
>> tpm-fido is FIDO token implementation for Linux that protects the token keys by using your system's TPM. tpm-fido uses Linux's uhid facility to emulate a USB HID device so that it is properly detected by browsers.
Partly that, and partly because they were/are built with constrained functionality (do one thing well) that significantly limits the interfaces exposed, and are designed to be secure under the assumption of physical attack (which most things aren't!)
Partly because many secure enclave type applications have undergone formal verification and verification through something like CC EAL, which should reduce the likelihood of glaring oversights etc.
One final aspect, more for hardware enclaves though, is that they're often designed specifically to resist the kinds of physical attacks people may try - as security products, they've very likely considered power rail glitching and how to reset the enclave if there's a glitch. Similarly, the physical ICs may be produced with physical features to try to prevent successfully decapping the chip, like sensing wires you'll disrupt, and inbuilt EM shielding.
In theory you could potentially decap the enclave and read data out of it but you would need extremely high end equipment to do that and it would be obviously destructive so it's not in most people's threat model
I don't know about French nukes, but French-affiliated aerospace has a general rep as being leakier than most. Eh, "leakier" is a negative way of putting it . . how about "loose-lipped"? One tools selection from a French-based vendor - a cloud option for uncontrolled data - was turned down by uniformed dudes from the program office, based on this prejudice. But a similar cloud offering from "Ze Germans"? Oh, that was A-OK. Both products seemed built from compressed pellets of Turkish dander - of course they did, this is DoD shopping - but one of them did have that snappy Aryan zing.
Most of the West has bailed out of the electronics race so long ago, that the experience gap in between practice, and what is told in universities is like 20-30 years now.
No university in the world will teach you how to make a modern stepper. Most of research in this space been going behind closed doors from the beginning of the semiconductor industry, and nearly completely closed since around 2010.
Only places like IMEC and few others are semi-public windows to what happens behind closed doors.
In principle, physics behind the operation of a stepper is nothing secret, components not secret, manufacturing techniques not secret, but the experience of how to arrange all of above in a way it is known to work is only available to, I would say, less than 100 people worldwide.
With "cloud" services being mentioned, they say hackers used cloud storage to evade detection, but what if the initial intrusion vector itself was planted by an AWS employee?
Saudis used their nationals inside Twitter quite brazenly. Imagine how many other rouge nation nationals are there being used by their governments.
these 3rd world authoritarian regimes try to do this all the time, for example Russia routinely tries to recruit russian-speaking engineers at US/EU companies for industrial espionage. for example [1]
there are more cases that nobody publishes about - a lot of "ransomware" incidents - are actually employee who suddenly received email with malicious URL and clicked on it infecting his work computer - gaining plausable deniability by being "dumb IT user" while collecting $$$$ from criminal org for granting them initial access.
a lot of smaller/obscure outsource IT companies can cause you ransomware incident if you decide to terminate software development contract with them, because these could be literally North Korean hackers working as your sysadmins [2].
1. Ordinary banks are not sued for absolutely the same thing, which probably occurs to much bigger extent in major banks which pass many times more transactions than Binance
2. Forget about Russian darknets, Russian mafia lives in London, and New York in the open to complete disregard of the same financial regulators.
3. It's practically impossible to catch people who can fake, or buy a passport to do small scale money laundering, but forget about the small fish.
BILLIONS of Russian money gets laundered through biggest US banks every day completely legally, through schemes known to all big banks, and financial regulators for decades.
> Ordinary banks are not sued for absolutely the same thing, which probably occurs to much bigger extent in major banks which pass many times more transactions than Binance
How Xi can "manage" Kim when Pyongyang already is a telephone government? North Korea is a Chinese proxy.
When China wants to increase badness against US, JP, SK, it pushes forward its pawn, and orders Kim to do something to spook them.
The independence of NK regime when it completely existentially depends on China for everything is a myth.