uranium supply

Andrew "bunnie" Huang examines how realistic hardware supply chain attacks are, from rogue insiders to nation states, in the wake of the Bloomberg Businessweek report. He explains how undocumented components could be hidden on boards and how hard they are to spot.

NileRed makes radioactive uranium glass from scratch, showing the chemistry involved and the green fluorescence under a blacklight. The video includes warnings about handling radioactive material.

Sabine Hossenfelder weighs the arguments for and against nuclear power, covering waste, fuel supply and newer reactor designs. She is skeptical that fast breeders and thorium solve the problems.

A 36C3 talk by Bunnie Huang arguing that open source is necessary but not sufficient for trustworthy hardware, because verifying hardware is destructive and so creates a time-of-check/time-of-use gap. It surveys supply chain security and classes of hardware attacks, and presents the Betrusted approach to narrowing that gap.

Big Clive takes apart an IKEA Koppla USB power supply to assess its safety, looking at isolation and transformer construction.

Wendover Productions explains the wave of supply shortages in 2021, arguing the causes go beyond COVID. It covers how just-in-time manufacturing was applied, container imbalances and the chip shortage.

Electronics hobbyist bigclivedotcom tears down a cheap USB power supply with a manufacturing fault that carries full mains voltage to the USB ports, showing the risk of electric shock.

Peter Zeihan speaks at Iowa Swine Day 2022 on geopolitics, the end of globalization and agriculture. He argues that supply chains, energy and farm inputs are all about to be disrupted.

Asianometry explains that the worst of the 2021-22 chip shortage sits in trailing-edge semiconductors, not the leading-edge chips usually covered. It covers why those older-node fabs are so hard to expand and fix.

Rory McCune's AppSec EU 2015 talk on security risks in modern software deployment. It covers weaknesses in package ecosystems like npm, RubyGems and PyPI, and repository compromise.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day tries to manufacture a grill scrubber entirely in the United States. Along the way he runs into missing supply chains, tooling and institutional manufacturing knowledge.

A 38C3 talk on how advanced chips are made, centered on EUV lithography and the global supply chain behind it. It covers technical challenges from raw materials to finished chips and the geopolitical weight of semiconductors.

An 86-minute Milton Friedman talk arguing that inflation is a monetary phenomenon caused by money supply growing faster than goods, and that the cure is less government spending and money printing.

Jeff Geerling interviews Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton about the Pi shortage, the RP2040, RISC-V, the Sony investment and the origin of the name.

Designer Thomas Thwaites describes his attempt to build a toaster from scratch, from mining ore and deriving plastic from oil. It is a short TED talk on how much civilization a simple object depends on.

A two-minute clip in which Milton Friedman uses a humble pencil to show how thousands of strangers across many countries cooperate, without central direction, to make a simple product. It is a short visual version of the 'I, Pencil' essay's argument about free markets and dispersed knowledge.

A 35C3 talk presenting a proof-of-concept SPI bus hardware implant with capabilities like those alleged in the Bloomberg Supermicro story, plus countermeasures for detecting such modchips.

Veritasium tells the story of the XZ backdoor, how a patient attacker became maintainer and nearly compromised SSH on Linux systems. It also covers free software history and how encryption in SSH works.

Wendover Productions explains how overnight shipping works, covering the hub-and-spoke logistics of companies like FedEx and UPS and the use of cargo aircraft. It touches on the economics that make next-day delivery possible.

A long Gamers Nexus investigation into how volatile US tariffs affect the computer hardware industry. It interviews manufacturers and sellers about costs, margins and why moving production to the US is hard.

Ben Felix explains how central bank money creation and quantitative easing actually work, and what they do and do not imply for asset prices and currency. He addresses the common belief that the Fed prints unlimited money and props up markets.

FortNine explains the economics of the dealership model, arguing that dealers absorb inventory risk and help manufacturers' finances. It looks at whether cars and motorcycles could be sold more cheaply without them.

A short film from the Competitive Enterprise Institute adapting Leonard Read's 1958 essay I, Pencil, showing how no one person knows how to make a pencil and how many people cooperate without central planning.

Wendover Productions explains how the US military moves people and materiel worldwide, including prepositioned equipment, sealift and airlift. It shows the scale of the logistics system behind US force projection.

Kenneth Finnegan shows how USB-C Power Delivery trigger boards like the ZY12PDN negotiate 5V to 20V so you can power projects from a USB-C charger, including the color coding for each voltage.

An expat YouTuber in China shows how dockless bike-sharing, once loved, has been flooded by competing companies. Bikes pile up, get abandoned in odd places and are vandalised, with footage from around the city.

Linus Tech Tips warns against cheap Android TV boxes, many of which ship with preinstalled malware. It looks at several boxes and suggests safer alternatives such as Chromecast and Nvidia Shield.

A three-minute excerpt from Milton Friedman's Free to Choose in which he uses a pencil to show that no single person knows how to make it. He argues that the free market coordinates countless strangers peacefully.

A man spends six months and $1500 making a chicken sandwich entirely from scratch: growing vegetables, making salt from seawater, milking a cow for cheese, grinding wheat, collecting honey and killing a chicken.

Dave Jones of EEVblog tears down a fake Apple A1265 USB charger and shows the shortcuts that make it unsafe, such as poor isolation.

Tom Scott visits the US National Helium Reserve in Amarillo, Texas, and explains why headlines that the world is running out of helium are misleading. He covers the Federal Helium Program and its planned privatization.

Bryan Cantrill's Uptime 2017 talk on the engineering challenges of the stateful data path, including storage, firmware and hardware bugs. It uses the 'zebras vs. horses' diagnostic heuristic to explain why rare failures keep appearing.

The first episode of James Burke's 1978 BBC series Connections traces modern dependence on complex technological networks, starting with the 1965 New York blackout, and moves through ancient agriculture to Kuwait's oil-driven leap.

An 11-minute clip of Milton Friedman explaining the incentives of unions and how they affect employment. He argues unions restrict labor supply, raising pay for some workers while hurting low-skill workers.

Veritasium explains how ASML's EUV lithography machines make the most advanced computer chips, covering the engineering of the light source, mirrors and the supply chain around them. It is a long-form explainer on the world's most complex commercial machine.

ElectroBOOM's Mehdi Sadaghdar explains how a full bridge rectifier works, the building block of AC to DC converters, with his usual humor and a demonstration of the circuit.

About Here looks at the housing crisis and argues for non-market solutions such as co-op and social housing, drawing on Vancouver's situation. It discusses how public supply can hold down rents.

CityNerd Ray Delahanty explains induced demand and what happens when freeways are widened. He walks through the economics of supply and demand applied to traffic and asks how much new traffic appears and whether congestion returns.

Practical Engineering gives a short introduction to concrete, covering the difference between concrete and cement, the ingredients, and reinforcement. It includes a hydraulic press demonstration of compressive strength.

Christopher Domas's Black Hat talk demonstrates a hardware backdoor in a third-party x86 processor, a hidden core that grants root from userland. He uses it to discuss how feasible broader hardware backdoors might be.