alethiophile

9 ms·

31.
by alethiophile 9y ago
...So people experienced a feeling of a presence behind them... when something behind them touched them? That would seem to be pretty robust evidence of a presence behind someone, really. (the bit with the sensorimotor lag is necessary for
32.
by alethiophile 9y ago
I mean, that's true, but it's also very limiting. Everything is a tradeoff between security and functionality; the only perfectly secure computer is one turned off and embedded in a concrete block. In particular, a whole lot of pe
33.
by alethiophile 9y ago
Fair. But most schools aren't, and they aren't going to roll out those procedures unevenly.
34.
by alethiophile 9y ago
In most any kind of disaster, secondary effects kill way more people than primary effects. Even if it seems silly, taking effective measures against the secondary effects is very worth doing. (Also, for nuclear bombs specifically, hiding un
35.
by alethiophile 9y ago
This is pretty classic nuisance extortion through the courts. What were the oil companies meant to do in order to avoid this lawsuit? Shut down their entire businesses? So that instead Oakland could sue the new oil companies that would inev
36.
by alethiophile 9y ago
This kind of thing is good, but I would definitely characterize going all-in on walled gardens and creating ecosystems where only approved code can run as "evil". That certainly characterized Apple/iOS when last I looked, whi
37.
by alethiophile 9y ago
In practice, you'd have techies with the bit between their teeth passing magnet links around, and media companies playing whack-a-mole with anyone who hosts it too visibly. Meanwhile, anyone who makes a modest effort can get a DRM-free
38.
by alethiophile 9y ago
If you're paying that particular nanny for exceptional value that is provided on the basis of her individual relationship with you, that's great and a good idea. If you're paying it to whoever the nanny happens to be because
39.
by alethiophile 9y ago
Do Google ad tracking cookies actually live on the google.com domain? Seems like an ethical violation of some kind if so.
40.
by alethiophile 9y ago
She's presumably paying the nanny some kind of market rate. If instead she were to bump the pay up well above market rate, she would either attract significant competition over that particular nanny job (presumably not the goal), or be
41.
by alethiophile 9y ago
The same temperature is far less tolerable indoors than out. Particularly in modern buildings, which are designed for total reliance on central air systems and so don't have organic airflow. (Which also has advantages, mostly better us
42.
by alethiophile 9y ago
The exact same set of moderation actions will look like a necessary and correct restriction on bad actors to one group, while looking like a choking echo-chamber imposition to another. The reality is that any social space needs to have a se
43.
by alethiophile 9y ago
I'm as happy as anyone to screw over Facebook, but this is actually really bad. I run a forum with ~1000 users. It costs us ~$60 a month and the corporate infrastructure is me and one other guy. If we were vulnerable to actually being
44.
by alethiophile 9y ago
If the original files weren't under the control of the adversary, that's a preimage attack, not a collision attack. No hash that's ever used for file authentication, even MD5, is vulnerable to second preimage. If they were, t
45.
by alethiophile 9y ago
I am also not a lawyer, but if the government really just wanted their conviction of this one guy, the obvious path seems to be to abandon the court order to decrypt the drive, and just move forward with trial based on the forensic evidence
46.
by alethiophile 9y ago
If it's a hash without known collision vulnerabilities, then it's 2^80 proof at least. This is definitely "beyond a reasonable doubt". Even if there were, what's the threat model? "Government creates colliding
47.
by alethiophile 9y ago
This whole endeavor was fairly ill-starred from the beginning. Looking at their list of arbiters, they're pulling in places like Politifact whose bread-and-butter is in parsing out politicians' statements themselves and ranking th
48.
by alethiophile 9y ago
If they've linked specific hashes to known CP content, then presumably they have those files available. They can still present that as evidence, then have the experts testify that those specific files are known to have been on the driv
49.
by alethiophile 9y ago
This is interesting, because the case is clearly being structured (intentionally by the government, one presumes) to force the test case of "is compelled decryption legal" onto the most unsympathetic possible defendant. If the gov
50.
by alethiophile 9y ago
I feel like this entry should have a different title. I passed it over at first because it looks like it's just a primer on how to implement ls -v, or something, when it's much more interesting.
51.
by alethiophile 9y ago
How would it ever work any other way? Someone needs to run the trunk lines, and you will always need to talk to these people to get yourself connected.
52.
by alethiophile 9y ago
Web code is only allowed to send TCP packets (websockets go on port 80 by default, just like HTTP). It also doesn't allow crafting special packets. pwnat's method relies on being able to send ICMP and UDP, which the browser won&#x
53.
by alethiophile 9y ago
That is an awesome tool, but it requires a cooperating server inside your NAT; for security-breaching purposes, if you've got code execution on a machine inside the firewall, you've already won (against the firewall, anyway).
54.
by alethiophile 9y ago
The default configuration for many firewalls (software, at least) approximates "allow all outgoing connections but no incoming". Assuming all your connections pass through the same box (which they usually will, for a home network)
55.
by alethiophile 9y ago
It would certainly be interesting to hear some evidence or justification for this position, given that the record of governments with respect to privacy over the Internet era (at least) has been uniformly dismal and getting worse. It certai
56.
by alethiophile 9y ago
Innovation in specific areas slows or stops all the time. The general run of technical progress in a specific area shows an S-curve, in which initial discoveries are made slowly, later progress accelerates as synergies are exploited and gre
57.
by alethiophile 9y ago
See also, the related phenomenon of a company introducing a new, notionally superior product line at a higher price than the original, then somewhat later discontinuing the original, while never reducing the price of the new one. This resul
58.
by alethiophile 9y ago
This doesn't prove that it's sustainable in principle, only that the time to inevitable collapse is greater than the ~80 years since it's been widely implemented. In practice, ever-increasing debt absolutely requires ever-i
59.
by alethiophile 9y ago
One of the major underlying issues people are calling out with the indictments of "smartphone culture", and trying to fix by going offline, is a sort of progressive shrinkage of the attention span. It involves progressively less c
60.
by alethiophile 9y ago
This is pretty wrong. Hierarchical relationships exist all over the place, and it's still generally fine to trust your boss, or your teacher, or whatever. And in fact you can't run any kind of large organization without hierarchie

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