cyphar

51 ms·

601.
by cyphar 6y ago
> The real question is why negative times negative is positive - I had this doubt in school. I am a bit ashamed to admit that I still don't know any "from first principle explanation" for this fact. Don't sweat it, he
602.
by cyphar 6y ago
Kieth Packard did a talk this year at Linux.conf.au about the history of X[1]. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj02_UeUnGQ
603.
by cyphar 6y ago
My rice cooker has different buttons for different kinds of rice (because they require different cooking times and temperature gradients), and rice porridge is quite nice for when you're sick -- I guess you thought I meant oat porridge
604.
by cyphar 6y ago
I take it you've never used a Japanese rice cooker? They have far more than one function -- aside from making steamed rice, you can make rice porridge, congee, steam other foods, and some can even be used to bake cakes. Not to mention
605.
by cyphar 6y ago
You're quite right that CH is not an example of a Godel sentence which demonstrates incompleteness (examples of that are given in the linked article) -- I didn't mean to imply otherwise. I just wanted to share that this was a more
606.
by cyphar 6y ago
Others have explained why you can't wave away inconsistency (principle of explosion) nor incompleteness (adding new axioms just creates a new axiomatic system with its own Godel sentences). However you might also find it interesting wh
607.
by cyphar 6y ago
Matrix isn't peer-to-peer, it's federated . Messages are stored on "homeservers", which is similar in concept to an email server except it's much easier to host your own Matrix homeserver. Only the homeservers whic
608.
by cyphar 6y ago
I think the Matrix folks shoot themselves in the foot each time they mention identity servers and how they're "not decentralised yet" because it just leads to confusion and makes it sound like their architecture is half-baked
609.
by cyphar 6y ago
Greenpeace opposes GMOs under the pretense that they are unsafe for human consumption. They may have scientists on staff, but that doesn't make them immune to spreading unscientific opinions.
610.
by cyphar 6y ago
Have you personally done that? Do you know of anyone who is doing that and publicly tracks said verification? It doesn't matter how trivial it would be to verify if nobody is actually doing the verification (not to mention you'd a
611.
by cyphar 6y ago
Do you personally do that with every release (which happens every few weeks or so)? Do you know anyone who does that who is trustworthy? If not, it's a fairly useless form of protection.
612.
by cyphar 6y ago
If you want a more data-heavy version go to the graphs, then click on the "electoral votes" tab. The shaded part is the 80% confidence interval of each prediction. This is the historical graph form of the "every outcome in ou
613.
by cyphar 6y ago
We're not in agreement here -- the solution to uncertainty in statistics is to model the uncertainty and treat them as confidence intervals, not throw your hands up and give everything a coin-flip probability. The probability isn'
614.
by cyphar 6y ago
That's what confidence intervals are for. You cannot condense both your expectation value and uncertainty in a single percentage (it is not correct to say that the probability of an outcome is 50% if 80% of likely outcomes result in on
615.
by cyphar 6y ago
The statement you quoted from the article (which is basically Taleb's criticism of Nate Silver) is not correct, the FiveThirtyEight prediction models are explicitly not answering the question "if the election was held today, what
616.
by cyphar 6y ago
A state-level actor can get the Signal key either covertly or by simply marching into the Signal offices with either a warrant or (if that fails) guns. Now, whether that will actually happen is a secondary issue -- but I submit that you hav
617.
by cyphar 6y ago
The CFAA has nothing to do with copyright and that finding would only be relevant if the youtube-dl authors (or users) were being criminally prosecuted under the CFAA.
618.
by cyphar 6y ago
NewPipe doesn't use youtube-dl, they have their own implementation of the stream extraction code[1]. Unless that codebase also has test cases which specifically try to download RIAA content, they would need to find a different justific
619.
by cyphar 6y ago
I assume GP just used CRC as an example everyone is familiar with. A more modern non-cryptographic hash function like FNV or MurmurHash can produce more output bits (up to 1024 and 128 respectively), reducing random collision probability to
620.
by cyphar 6y ago
But there are even better choices for non-cryptographic hash functions (FNV and MurmurHash for instance) because they were designed without the need to have a tradeoff between cryptographic security and efficiency.
621.
by cyphar 6y ago
There are hashes which require much less computing power and thus have better throughput if you don't require cryptographic security (examples include FNV-1 and MurmurHash). Using SHA-1 because you "don't need it for security
622.
by cyphar 6y ago
To be honest, I'm not convinced that this is practically true in Matrix except in cases where you wish to argue that the homeserver operator is "in on it" to create fraudulent messages (the same goes for Signal -- though in M
623.
by cyphar 6y ago
What is taught in school is generally a simplification of the truth. However just because that is the case doesn't mean that the "answers still aren't clear now" -- it's just the reality of the limits of the educati
624.
by cyphar 6y ago
Signal and other OTR-derived systems actually cannot cryptographically prove that someone sent a message (the recipient can forge the message because the message is authenticated via HMAC not a signature).
625.
by cyphar 6y ago
There is no solution because by definition any solution must be some kind of backdoor -- the explicitly stated goal is to allow retrospective access to encrypted communication without the consent or knowledge of the parties involved . To
626.
by cyphar 6y ago
Do you not see how that is effectively identical to any other backdoor? Just because the mechanism you describe is slightly different -- it's not a third-party master key, nor a clipper chip, but instead some kind of protocol to reques
627.
by cyphar 6y ago
Reminder that the NSA is basically collecting all of the internet traffic it can get its hands on. They didn't build a data centre in the middle of the desert for the fun of it.
628.
by cyphar 6y ago
Users can explicitly send SMS messages (long press the send button and select "insecure SMS"), but this option isn't sticky -- I think if the app restarts it will again default to Signal messages. As you say, unregistering yo
629.
by cyphar 6y ago
> But update or no, it's irresponsible to proffer these scenarios as relevant to the typical westerner, especially given the abysmal privacy of the popular alternatives. Have you considered the (sadly) common case of an abusive part
630.
by cyphar 6y ago
It should be noted that (while cool from a cryptographic perspective), this security primitive is practically useless in any scenario where you might think it would be useful: * The burden of evidence to introduce chat logs in legal proceed

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