Google doesn't even respect it's shareholders, only the people who get awarded shares. Most of the share buybacks go to preventing the newly minted shares from dropping the stock price.
Apple does actually respect it's shareholders...probably because it's hard to hoodwink Berkshire Hathaway.
From an industry standpoint, I think you are right in that most off the shelf microcontrollers have AES acceleration built-in, and that won't change anytime soon.
Ascon, depending on the implementation, requires far less logic gates than AES to implement in hardware and requires less power, which would be an eventual cost savings.
I think most importantly though is that by not going with an ARX-based design (Addition, Rotation, XOR), it's much easier for cryptographers to perform cryptanalysis, which is what the Keccak team attributes to why it took so long to find vulnerabilities with algorithms like MD5.
Congrats on the Ascon team for taking another win after CAESAR! I also thought the Keccak Team's (SHA-3) Xoodoo permutation was also quite clever, and a great optimization over SHA-3.
We adopted Asciidoc at work (migrated from Word and Markdown), and it has been a stellar tool for editing and reviewing our technical documentation, as it fits well into our code review process. We also use Mermaid and PlantUML for our diagrams, which the asciidoctor extension has handled well.
"The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority"
"The black-and-white character of these societal laws can be explained with the following. Assume that under a certain regime, when you mix white and dark blue in various combinations, you don’t get variations of light blue, but dark blue. Such a regime is vastly more likely to produce dark blue than another rule that allows more shades of blue."
One of the bigger bangers from the chapter:
"Yes, an intolerant minority can control and destroy democracy. Actually, as we saw, it will eventually destroy our world."
It makes you wonder if the story of the Google employee who couldn't unlock their own account is actually true or they was just stonewalling to get rid of the customer.
> I eventually had to have a friend at Google contact the Gmail team to get my account lockout sorted out.
Reading this thread on HN, I started to panic thinking about what would happen if I lost my Gmail account, and then I saw this comment! What a reason to be a loyal googler until the end of the world!
I haven't had much of a chance to look through most of these but the one I'm most interested in and the one which stood out from the submitters is Xoodyak, created by the winners of of the SHA-3 competition.
It's a sponge construction like SHA-3 but the "volume" is 384-bits which is designed to fit inside 12-32-bit registers which is now more common for Cortex-M embedded microcontrollers.
I have a cousin that used to work there years ago when social media was still in its infancy. He was part of the initial wave of layoffs when they weren't able to get traction against Facebook.
He's doing well for himself now, Director of Engineering at a FAANGM company, but it did cause him to abandon the startup game.
Apple does actually respect it's shareholders...probably because it's hard to hoodwink Berkshire Hathaway.
https://www.epsilontheory.com/stock-buybacks-and-the-monetiz...