There is a shred of hope left. I have a friend that has not offered me work personally but he says he loves the "Google reject engineers". Meaning he loves to hire the people that are phenomenal and confident enough to compete in the big league but are defeated by some small technicality such as checking the wrong box on a web based job application or in your case failing at "side channel" communication. That's probably more of a good quality for you rather than a failure.
“Your ideas are stupid and your goals are meaningless” https://medium.com/@megamindbrian/your-ideas-are-stupid-and-...
There is a shred of hope left. I have a friend that has not offered me work personally but he says he loves the "Google reject engineers". Meaning he loves to hire the people that are phenomenal and confident enough to compete in the big league but are defeated by some small technicality such as checking the wrong box on a web based job application or in your case failing at "side channel" communication. That's probably more of a good quality for you rather than a failure.