452 karma · joined February 19, 2016
Remember the hassle WhatsApp got for failing open?
The Blackphone+SilentOS is an actual crypto device for people who believe they need crypto. It needs to fail closed. This may cost some people $100, but save their lives.
This also gives the customers the ability to sue the sellers, or at least push for refunds via the sales platforms.
Unless you've got a password type and a regular string type, how's the compiler to know you've swapped the password with a config string?
Joel on Software wrote an interesting article that's related to this, oddly about Hungarian notation.
His point was that *lwistrp = "foo" tells you meaningless stuff (lwip and str) about your data. That's what the compiler is supposed to track. But 'u_pw' and 's_pw' (unsafe/safe) for pre and post-processed user-input tells you something meaningful the compiler has a harder time tracking. (Not impossible with taint-tracking, but ...)
The relevance is that types tend to be based on the implementation details instead of the higher-level facts. For this sort of function to be actually safe, not just compiler-safe, it would need higher-level types and to be compiled into your language (not called via an opaque FFI) to check them.
In that case, where you don't have false goals of runaway success or anything, and aren't gambling the farm on it, yeah you should throw a few bucks into it. If you read up on what the differences between currencies are and how that's likely to impact survivability, you'll be able to pick fairly well.
BTC, Ethereum, and Monero look good, but do your own research. Scams abound.
The most critical thing to remember is that if your currency is "in an exchange" it might as well not be yours. Funds only become yours, meaningfully, when transferred to an address whose keys you generated and which have never been online on an insecure device.
Ideally repurpose an old phone for a wallet and keep it in airplane mode. You can browse the chain with your regular phone, including monitoring incoming transactions, all you won't be able to do is sign an outgoing transaction. Then you either turn on the wallet-phone's connection when it's safe, or implement a paper-wallet system between the online and wallet phones.
That's overkill for what you'll probably put in right away, but good practice.
So no, I can't switch to your side because you literally don't have one. A side would be defined as people who think/believe as you do and nobody from the alt-right agrees. You all hate different people for different reasons. Watching your politics is hilarious because you're all each other's normal greatest enemies - religious conservatives with racists with UFO cultists, etc. You're only united by your common hatred of successful happy people.
You think the Trumps of the world are your savior and instead they're the greatest predator of fools like you. The religious right aren't going to get an effective block of abortion, because Trump doesn't care. The bigots aren't going to actually get racial purity because the banning immigration thing is just about appearing tough. Business-first people aren't going to get fiscal policy because Trump's an idiot whose sole trick is reneging on contracts. You won't even have a military in a few years because it has to be paid for. Good luck with your borders then, but it'll be Russia calling.
The rich and successful can leave, you're going to be mired in whatever nonsense you vote for and quickly at each other's throats over it. Any rich and successful jews left Germany long before it fell, but millions of "good germans" were killed in what should have been so easy for an actual master race. <Cough> losers.
> I think you don't understand how not merely democracy, not merely human society, but the whole game theory works.
And yet you just declared your intent to be non-democratic. To deny some people rights that your ancestors enjoyed. That's why we aren't going to ask - we don't intend to sink to your illegal/unconstitutional depths.
> Yes you're going to eventually hold a referendum about CERN if it will continously raise worries
Worries among reasonable people, sure. But not intentional ignorance. And how would you even know if we turned it off. It's a complex machine and you're race-baiting idiots. The results are published in the type of books without pictures.
> you don't get to "discount" anything.
We were trying not to. Diversity even included those such as yourself and people cared to try to understand what made you tick despite it being irrational and hateful.
We don't have to discount you though, you try getting a hundred people from your side to work together on something other than tearing things apart. I dare you. You couldn't produce anything worth counting. You're breakers, not makers. Takers, not workers.
The only reason you have a voice is that things larger than you stopped to ask your opinion. It was odious and we won't make that mistake again.
> Let's just make a vote on the issue.
We heard and discounted the opinions of those who though CERN would create a blackhole, or summon Cthulhu, why do your prejudices deserve a referendum?
Ehh, or to seeing mal-intent where it isn't.
> I'm fighting hard to justify something incorrect, which is quite frankly insulting
I don't tell you if I feel insulted, and if I did I wouldn't expect you to care. Part of having a chip is showing it off.
> (and, as I said, an incorrect thing to say in its own right, since the dictionary agrees with me,
Yes, and the dictionary (Merriam Websters) can't tell the difference between centi and centa, so it's not an authority.
> regardless of whether or not you think I have an ulterior motive).
I think this paragraph is you agreeing that you do have an ulterior motive, and explaining it as getting back at jerks like me.
> This very specific situation (when someone rebukes someone else because they think the other person is ignorant, when it is they themselves that are ignorant) is a huge pet peeve of mine,
I don't think you're ignorant. I think you know more than the average person. However I think it's functionally wrong for you to use something in an ambiguous way, JUST to prove a point - which is that you're technically right because an dictionary agrees, etc.
> Of course, they're the ones who have convinced themselves that it is the other person who misunderstood and is doubling down, so that just compounds the insult.
No, I get that the dictionary agrees. But I think if you weren't set on showing that you're just as allowed to use that phrase as someone else that you'd pick something else from the vast sea of words. Something that actually seemed descriptive.
> I think it's extremely silly to ask me why I used one word instead of another closely related word.
Why is it silly to ask? I like blue more than red for weird little personal reasons - how would you ever know without asking why?
> Yes, words have near-synonyms and I could just ask easily ask you why you're not using my word instead.
Right, and I'd tell you that the original meaning is as good as lost because few get it, and the secondary meaning is wrong because it directly conflicts with the other meaning and causes confusion, so I simply describe what I mean without having a pet phrase.
Why do you feel the need to own that specific phrase when I'm sure you could be more evocative, and thus understandable, by saying almost anything else that came to mind?
> but since far more people understand my meaning of the phrase than the "true" meaning, I'd say that the people using the idiom (rather than the words themselves) are the ones who have an ulterior motive other than understandability.
Frankly the original never meant much to me, the only reason I'm really aware of it is the continual use, misuse, and intentionally unintentional misuse of it. But of the users of those, I find the originalist far less unhelpful in a conversation. They're at least trying to help, as opposed to - what's the verb for exercising your chip?
If you let the phrase die rather than fighting an ideological war around it perhaps someone would coin something better.
Often for non-gun related threats. And also because they're probably in riskier demographics.
Or maybe because they just enjoy shooting.
> Just because heart disease is the most common cause of death doesn't mean concern about anything else is irrational.
Worry is zero-sum. The time you spend worrying about being shot is time you aren't spending worrying about your trans-fat intake, or simply enjoying life.
> I think being afraid of something that can kill you is absolutely rational.
Afraid of, or worried about in general? If a bad guy is swinging a gun around, yes you're right to be afraid. There's a direct action that will make you safer - leaving - and you should take that if possible.
But in general to worry about a bad guy with a gun is stealing attention from real problems with actual solutions.
But, Bitcoin is not an investment.
First, nothing you don't understand is ever an investment for you. If you don't know mining and I do, I'm investing by buying shares in a mine whereas you're gambling by doing it. (For instance, if you don't know, and really understand, why bitcoin tends to be used in a manner where you empty the balance from one address, sending some to the intended recipient, and the leftovers to yourself at a new address, then you're not ready to invest.)
Second, it functions as a store of wealth not capital. Its gains are partly from other currencies devaluing around it, not it being used to create more goods the way buying a piece of capital (shares in a manufacturing company) would.
That said, if you do any gambling (lottery tickets) you might as well put that into bitcoin, you at least might get something back.
Traffic fatalities do cluster around roads, yes, but those are harder to avoid for the average person.
While the base numbers are roughly the same, for the tragic death of someone who could be you or me (ie not robbing a drug dealer, etc) traffic accidents are the more likely cause of death.
Also, a lot of the low-hanging fruit is taken care of with guns. My colleagues who keep guns have locking holsters(?) that mount under the dash, gun-safes at home, etc. To reduce the deaths by much you've got to approach the hard area of intentional shootings, and you need to realize that those are people trying to kill another - many of those deaths will be replaced with stabbings, etc.
Whereas every day I'm on the roads I see drivers setup to kill those around them while they blithely text away. (Guy in intersection waiting to turn right through the crosswalk, wheels cranked hard over pointing to the pedestrians, and on his cell-phone.) Further, if and when he kills someone, he'll get some pathetically low punishment and probably remain a driver.
Many traffic fatalities happen "near home" and to anyone, pedestrian, driver, passengers in the other car. There's a ton of actionable things we could do, such as just make driver's license renewal require a retest.
We remember the unique, so a gun death stands out. We stoically ignore the everyday, so V2 bombings and traffic fatalities quickly just become a thing that happens.
If there really was a threat it would be reasonable for you to want less immigrants. But there isn't, that's straight up racism.
You might as well say you don't want a jew stealing your baby.
Not at all.
> The fact that ... is very different from playing the what-if game.
I was trying to speak broadly so as not to speak for you. How would you put it?
> No, neutral is letting others determine the law without interjecting my opinion.
For a pure observer, maybe. For a taxpayer, not so much.
> It was you who made the connection of science being rational and religion being irrational.
Yup.
> I was merely pointing out that neither rational nor irrational bases can inform this issue. A position on this issue is strictly based on morality and philosophy.
Assuming you feel that a human should not be killed (without reason anyways) you can formally extend that reasoning to a baby, a fetus, and so forth. At some point, the initial reasoning may stop applying. Congrats, you've now derived an opinion on abortion.
You may feel that morality has a religious core, but that's a god of the cracks type thing. You can squish that bit away and analyze the rules systematically using the tools of logic.
> This contrasts starkly with other issues like climate change or tax policy where math and science can inform a more correct position.
There shouldn't be any contrast. What's the problem with runaway climate change? The suffering and death that it will cause. But that's the same ethical framework you'd use to analyze abortion. And it leads the same place - your basic value for the lives of others, which you may call religious or not.
I can see why circumstances make you feel that there's a special something about a fertilized egg, but we're really all in the same situation - but for a tiny difference someone else would have been born.
If your grandmother had a weapon she might have been able to prevent being raped, which would have been a positive spin on the same result as an abortion - you not being born.
> I'm neither pro-choice nor pro-life. I've chosen to remain neutral on the issue
Neutral is pro-choice. No law.
To justify a law, present a reason and a rationale. Otherwise why pass it, right?
> But to suggest that this issue is one where science and logic makes one position definitively correct and the other incorrect is wrong. It is an issue of morality and philosophical beliefs and, as such, science cannot decide it any more so than religion can.
That's a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is. There's no reason you can't apply science to religion.
If there were gods, and they had an impact on us, it'd be scientists who noticed it and performed experiments to quantify it. We'd even be doing cohort studies to see if the gods disapproved of being monitored, etc.
I'm not even against gun control. I'm merely against useless legislation and fear-based politics. The movement consistently fails to show interest in the results they're supposedly fighting for (less deaths) and just the means they propose (less guns).
Pft. I wish I lived in a world where Trump supporters lived in silence before the election. I don't buy this, at all. They were the loudest, most self-entitled, and they always represented themselves as victims.
Anyone looking at the numbers knew the election would be within 5% either way, so it's not like those 45M republicans were hidden, it was only a question of if the last 5M would get up on polling day. If they would, the conclusion was foregone because country-voters cast larger votes than city voters so they win all ties.
> if you keep demonizing people
You see - perpetual victims. Even though they won they're still going on about being hurt. If saying someone voted for a liar because they didn't bother to look up the facts is demonizing, then I don't know what you ever could say that they wouldn't complain about.
Heh, premium words. What good is a dictionary that only lists the common words? We know what those ones mean...
After piercing the paywall, I can see they've wrong. Centa, centi. Not the same.
And they charge for that?
I'm not sure how something can be irrational without also being unfounded.
Whatever validity there is to say "I hate X people" is lost when lies are used as the supposed justification. These people are already racist and are grasping at any straws (currently the fake rape-epidemic stories) as if that caused their racism, but next week it'll be back to mis-interpreted IQ tests, etc.
"Coins" aren't a thing, so there's nothing to be tainted, per-se. However, yes - if an address that ordered a murder sends you a lot of btc, expect someone to come by and discuss it.
Also, the waters are muddied now (intentionally), in a similar way to how every piece of American cash is rumored to have traces of cocaine on it. The theory is that the more this implicates everyone, the less it implicates anyone.
I also can't guarantee they won't get diabetes or heart disease, or fall off a ladder, or be hit by one of the passing cars. All of which are vastly more likely to happen than being shot, which itself is an order of magnitude more likely than an innocent person being shot. (ie, not robbing a drug dealer, etc)
Dead is dead, and a car gets you there just as quickly. Focusing on one is silly. (Unless you're a crossing-guard, for instance.)
I normally see the irrational fear (crypto-racism) argument from people who want to limit refugees. You've got a higher chance of dying from someone falling off a ladder onto you than being killed by a terrorist hiding as a refugee. I'm not saying you're a crypto-racist, I'm saying this sloppy thinking is used to support other nonsense arguments because it's so empty you can use it to support anything.
Your grandmother would have had a less assuredly bad life (no idea if it would have been better, but we can only hope...) and someone else would be having this anthropic discussion.
> But it really bothers me when people like you who've likely never had any personal connection to the issue
Cough.
> imply that only one side of the debate is rational.
Well, look around at those who believe what you do. Most of them do so because of religion, which by definition is irrational.
As an opinion, you're welcome to yours. As policy, it comes with all the rest of the baggage of the religious.
> But, like drugs, that doesn't mean that it's a fundamentally good thing.
But, like TV, that doesn't mean we should ban it. Control, control, control. Why the need to control?
Obviously their personal power was worth more than whatever platform they ran on originally. The entire party has no integrity.
> Anyone who would say this with a straight face isn't intelligent or isn't honest, so they can't speak for intelligent honest people.
Oh yeah? How many people were at the inauguration? Trump/Sean/Kelly's words are direct and obvious lies that contradict video of the event from multiple sources.
How's that a party for intelligent honest people?
> Identity politics and strong liberal populations in universities has made it social suicide for anyone to admit they have any doubts about the Democratic party.
Says the non-liberal who isn't at university and read it from a Facebook-linked news article. Alternate facts from an alternate universe.
I know you didn't pay any attention to the Democratic primaries but nobody holds the democratic party to be sacred. Nobody calls it the Grand Old Party or in any other way reveres the institution. That hero worship of the past is a Republican thing.
> WHAT definition? Where does it come from? Says who?
The literal meaning of the words. If you couldn't care less, your caring is at zero. If you could care less you must currently care more than zero.
But that's not even really our point...
Rather than playing this silly game where you declare the majority view (Yay 51%) correct, why not just avoid things that people use incorrectly? Why go our of your way to join them? Most everyone who'd use the incorrect form would understand the correct form, so you're not even making yourself more understandable to them.
Why are you so fixated on "Begs the Question" that you don't use any other combination of words from the entire language to describe that phenomenon? The odds that you independently arrived at this phrase are infinitesimal.
Yes, and does talking to hobos scale? Can you do that online? Wouldn't they rat you out? Don't they lounge in front of shops that would have cameras?
And if you decide to go through all this, why not ask them to receive money-transfers or something more profitable?
> And again, validation is not a job for one individual, imaginary million dollar bonds don't make that any less true.
No, validation isn't performed by the bond - the bond just gives the employee motivation to do their job. And a disincentive for selling out.
> Usually domain validation is automated
> Such an appliance, able to make a determination regardless of its environment, does not and cannot exist.
Yeah. I totally agree with one of your statements.
The CA system with shared authority over one big zone just can't provide a high level of assurance. The games we play to try to keep Chinese CAs from signing certs for our domains (pinning, etc) are ridiculous. People who try that are playing with fire, and all to avoid issues from the broken model.
The issue is that the CA system is fundamentally flawed. It'll never be that good so trying is like gilding a pig. It's good enough for the sort of system I'm describing, but the things you discuss are so over the top for a fundamentally flawed system. Which is why no CA really takes it seriously - they know they're just collecting rent. In the current system we'll either kill the CAs one after another as someone tricks them into creating certs they shouldn't, or we'll end up with a collection of losers we can't kill because we know the next ones would be just as incompetent. Much like the banks.
What we need to do is adjust our expectations to what we can actually deliver, and are willing to pay for. All we need is a small roadblock you can't accomplish online and certificate transparency to make sure you see everything the system signs.
When you increase the width of the aperture of a lens (your pupil) you decrease the depth of field in sharp focus. It's a fundamental limit of optics.
On a bright day you have a lot of light and your pupil is narrowest, bringing as much as possible into focus.
> So I think doing accurate 3D requires simulating the way in which the brain picks out objects at different depths, but this can't be done simply by offering one depth of field for all viewers, since our eyes can't bounce back and forth alternately focusing a near and far object and creating the increased acuity we get in normal vision.
I watched the Hobbit in 3d and thought it was awful. You had this tiny sweet spot right where the director intended you to look and everything else was a sea of blur.
I realized that I like looking at sets because I was frustrated every time I tried.
By letting it connect to the internet and check for its challenge number on the target site.
Also, I'm not imagining lawyers, but all notaries. I actually think a 7-11 clerk could handle the job.
> All of them today require the CA/B Baseline Requirements plus whatever else takes their fancy. Issuing these certificates violates the Baseline Requirements, because the subscriber did not in fact have control of example.com, and probably not of these testN.com domains either
Sorry, I missed the story about the bonded guy losing his million-dollar bond and not ever being allowed to have a similar job. They are bonded, right? Because if not all the yada yada is worthless.
> This is the Internet, nobody cares that you've shown some balding guy who works above a liquor store a fake driving license in the name Bob Smith
This is actually a large deterrent. Because of the notary actually checking ID you know you've got a picture of the bad guy. This is the part where we stop the attack from scaling.
> - we need to know if you're really ycombinator.com or hsbc.com.hk or a-eon.biz and so the BRs require that Certificate Authorities have an effective way to validate that.
Some things you say sound like you work in the industry, and some don't. Please describe the complicated cryptographic process you think a CA employee uses to personally verify ownership of a domain...