dtfgator

I lived nearby your office last year and would frequently park in your lot on the weekends - 10/10 would vote for you again.

Is your name Huck or Jim?

Electrical engineer here. This is all great info.

One thing that's important to note is how easy it is to add a "backdoor". If you even mildly WEAKEN the random number generators (reduce the level of entropy, etc), you can make it orders of magnitude easier to break the crypto. This could be done simply by disabling random number units, or even more easily, by selectively removing logic gates that comprise the gens.

This kind of backdoor could be implemented easily after the entire design is finalized by making minor changes to the layout, or possibly even changed entirely at the fab level (ie don't etch or dope certain gates), making the compliance of engineers a non-issue. It is also extremely hard to test for this kind of "backdoor" and it can easily be swept under the rug.

Its pretty scary how easy this could be to do - not at all a huge "oh, we have to leave an open 50uM² on the die for some undisclosed NSA layout that ties into our main buses".

Google self driving car.

Kidding, I bet its just GPS based and has a preprogrammed route that it follows. Since it doesn't need to worry about traffic laws or hitting anything, its a pretty simple automation task.

Have you ever rotated wigs so they are drastically different colors / styles every day for a week to see how your friends respond? I'd imagine it would be quite funny.