Indistinguishable from a PRF A good block cipher satisfied this property, otherwise it's not a PRF and insecure.
Hair-splitting, really. Actual OTP is an imaginary construction that requires an endless supply of truly random bits that have to be securely stored or somehow recreated during decryption. It shifts the hard part to that fn, and just XORs the result with the pt or ct block.
If MAC is needed, that can happen after encrypting, before decrypting. (Needed if bytes traverse network, but maybe not for local disk or file encryption unless.)
TL;DR For random-seek block encryption, don't use XTS, use CTR.
It's simple. I like simple maths and code, it's less to screw up and less for implementations to screw up. For example, I don't trust EC or GCM, even if some people thinks they're the new hotness, because complexity creates more opportunities for obfuscation and puts the code further out of reach of the already few eyeballs actually (or not) looking at it.
"and the 'sploit can be mitigated before bringing it online to the outside world"
You should read more carefully.
Also, keeping people waiting without an ETA for a down service because you're learning isn't going to result in happy customers.
Furthermore, whomever is running these boxes needs to deploy NIDS and HIDS and properly secure their boxes, because clearly they don't understand what an attack surface is.
Edge cases. The big picture is that it's not happening fast enough, which is why the government will need to step in and will need to assume a leadership role to push hard on this.
Mountain View (for obvious reasons I guess): Google Express.
But really, what difference is there over just extracting the functionality of local courier into a stand-alone global service with an web presence, API, support, backoffice fleet management/dispatching and so forth? All FedEx and UPS have to do to compete with this is send drivers into stores.
Nope. It is what it is: capital-intensive research that is hard and it takes a long time to come up with a molecule that will stop an infection without killing or disabling the patient. That can't be done last minute like in the movies.
FYI: One of the last-ditch antibiotics (I forget the name) has a side-effect of permanently damaging hearing. I have to basically yell at 95 yo grandmother for her to hear me. :)
It's a way to take any block cipher and turn it into a stream cipher with the power of XOR.
(I'm only going to ask this nicely once: cease and desist stalking and harassment.)