normm

glfrost said:

I wonder if it wasn’t another Clapper and Brennan psy-op designed to cause harm to Chinese trade negotiations and harm Trump administration. Bloomberg reporters said most substantial info came from Obama Admin Sources in an interview I saw!

I'd like to see this interview -- where can I find it?   It seems much more consistent that the Trump administration would want to sow distrust of Chinese tech, since they have repeatedly voiced a zero-sum view of economics: for the US to succeed, China must fail.

JWSC said:

Oh Intel.  What happened to ya?  Apple will be migrating away.  Don’t need to be a fortune teller to see that in the cards.

The A Series was designed from the ground up to tightly manage power consumption.  I wonder what the implications are for the A Series architecture when it doesn’t need to worry about power requirements.  If you wanted to crank up the clock speed you’d likely have to move back up to 10-14 nm wafers.  But I suspect that more fundamental architectural changes would need to be made to realize the full potential of plugged in A Series power.

Smaller feature sizes allow shorter signal paths, lower parasitic capacitance, and lower voltages, all of which reduce power dissipation per transistor per clock cycle.  So whether you clock slower for low dissipation, or faster for best performance, it seems to me that small features help -- but there are undoubtedly subtleties as we approach physical limits.  Of course higher performance chips also use more parallel circuitry, which means more transistors to clock, but this is true regardless of the feature size. 

I could imagine complicated schemes, with key-splitting and key-escrow and k of n escrowed keys required, etc.  But all of this just adds inconvenience and vulnerabilities for ordinary users, while criminals will simply use their own secure encryption.  Even ordinary users would start using third party encryption, since it would be safer and more reliable.  So the net effect would be to wreck the built-in convenient encryption, for no lasting benefit.  So just don't do it!

Soli said:

3) Instead of paying for a service like LoJack I've wondered if just using an old iPhone that has Find My iPhone on it and then hiding it in the car and wiring it so it can get continuous power. What I don't know is if I can wire it directly to the DC with a properly spliced USB connector or if I'll need an inverter. So far all the inverters I've sen need to be switched on after the car losing power and they do tend to give off some heat due to the conversion. Is there any solution here that would allow a $10/month cellular charge for a DIY "PoJack" setup?

You need 5 volts DC, and a car battery supplies 12.  Recent cars have built-in USB ports.  If yours doesn't, you could use a cigarette-lighter USB power port, which contains a voltage regulator (rather than an inverter).  If you only charge the phone when the car is running, there's no concern about constant power drain (which is tiny anyways).  If someone steals your car, the car will be running.

I use Time Machine plus Backblaze.  Time Machine continuously copies my current info--over the air--to a local network drive, keeping multiple versions of each file, which gives me protection against both hardware failure and corruption of current info.  I never have to plug in a Time Machine disk.  Backblaze gives me offsite storage--over the air--of all current files (encrypted).  The offsite storage protects me in case something bad happens at my location such as my house burning down or thieves taking my stuff.  I don't need a clone of my Mac.  If the hardware fails, for example, I can buy a new one and use Migration Assistant to copy all my stuff from Time Machine to the new machine.

It isn't clear from your description whether or not the programs you recommend other than Time Machine are true backup programs.  A true backup gives you multiple historical versions of files so that, if your disk gets corrupted or you mess something up yourself, you can get a good version back, even if you don't notice the problem for a while.  By this criterion Backblaze by itself is not a backup, since it just keeps the current version of all files.  It is really just the offsite component of a backup.