The cynic in me also thought this right away. Github is an American company, subject to American data request orders. Iran would be better off not using github for private repos.
Absolutely. The state department only relaxes a "maximum pressure" regime if they think there's some way to spy or sabotage their stated enemies. However, this could still be a good thing for the Iranian people if for no other reason that they can download free and open source software.
A question: even if the source is open source, what prevents the vendor than sends it to the fab to insert back doors. Is there a way to verify that it is indeed the source in github that was used?
Yes and no. Sending a chip to one foundry to do the first few layers and taking the chip to a second or third foundry has been done at Stanford as a proof of concept to mitigate against this attack. Other attacks are still possible but likelihood of success starts dropping off a cliff.
Foundries will generally use different “standard cells” (ratio of dopant in silicon to make the basic building blocks of your “P’s” and your “N’s”) so this is actually a big ask and not trivially supported out of the gate.
This in turn can be worked around by double welling ones designs but it becomes a yak shave real fast.
With OpenTitan compiling on open synthesis tools we’re about 3 of 5 steps towards an open silicon root of trust.
I think the parent is asking about the different problem: how to verify when you are not the one sending it to the fab. (Just like how to verify binaries when you are not the one doing the build.) In both cases fab and compiler are trusted.
There's a way to verify it statistically but it will be very expensive. Perhaps the verification can be automated down to commodity price if it is done often.
Get your batch of 1000+ devices. Uncap, repeatedly etch and scan a random subset to check the circuit is what you expected. Make sure it's you that chooses the subset.
ps. I would love to implement this if someone thinks it's a serious proposition!
It's not like it's easy to verify that binaries from Linux distributions correspond to sources without back doors, although https://reproducible-builds.org/ is working on that problem. I am not aware of any similar effort for open hardware.
I personally use Rawtherapee which seems more advanced(but a little more difficult to use for beginners) than Darktable. Ιs there any reason to use Darktable apart from ease of use?
I haven't used Rawtherapee much. I liked the creative opportunities it offered.
Darktable's workflow better met my needs at the time I was picking between them. In particular, Darktable was better for processing a few hundred images in a couple of hours right after shooting. Darktable's integrated image management was the key difference. Darktable's ability to offload processing onto GPU's was also a factor. GPU's make Darktable much much faster than without.
Rawtherapee is what I use too. I like tools that I can just point at a random directory, and get to work on. There are a lot of photography/image-management tools which insist on importing images into a "library", which ruins my filing-system.
I've got a photoshoot booked for tomorrow, so I'll try this out and see how it compares. (An average shoot for me results in 200-400 CR2 images to examine/reject/process.)
Just based on looking at the sites, Rawtherapee appears to focus on RAW "developing", while Darktable appears to also do photo management and Lightroom-style non-destructive editing.
RawTherapee does photo management and is non-destructive as well.
Darktable supports masks and parametric masks for almost all operations. RawTherapee on the other hand has a wider range of tools and support for profiles and raw formats.
RawPedia's "Features" page (http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Features) doesn't mention photo management, and I didn't find anything by searching for "catalog" (Lightroom's name for a collection of managed photos), etc. It'd be great if the site had more info about that aspect of the app.
The equivalent functionality is the File Browser tab when you open RawTherape. You can filter images, assign ranks/color labels, create queues, do batch edits, assign a dark frame, etc etc.
It doesn't have "collections" or "catalogs" per se, if that's what you're specifically looking for.
