bcaa7f3a8bbc

> Maxim 6: Just because you’re a Windows application doesn’t mean that you have to be compatible with Windows.

This one is more hilarious.

    pushf
    cli
    ... five instructions later ...
    popf         ; BUG!  Does not enable interrupts

> What makes this noteworthy is not that it contains exactly the forbidden code sequence, it is noteworthy because this is not an MS-DOS application but rather a Windows application. It’s a Windows application doing something that doesn’t work under Windows. That takes nerves. A certain network driver does essentially the same thing.

And,

> Maxim 18: Do something that is supported only under Windows, and do it wrong.

> Memory lock calls are ignored in the absence of virtual memory, so make sure to abuse lock functions as much as possible. That way, when you are run in a virtual memory environment, strange and wondrous things start happening that never happened in real mode.

> Since none of the standard DOS extenders use virtual memory by default, this is an excellent opportunity to begin behaving randomly. This is so important it’s worth restating.

Summary of maxims: You can print out these two pages, fold than up, and keep then in your pocket. Well, maybe not, since nobody is really interested in writing MS-DOS-based games, anymore. But if you did, this would have been a handy guide to ensuring that your game doesn’t run on Windows 95.

1. The more confusing the error message, the better.

2. If it doesn’t run under Windows, then it’s Windows’fault.

3. Detect Windows, and crash.

4. Manuals are a waste of time.

5. Words in boldface don’t count.

6. Just because you’re a Windows application doesn’t mean that you have to be compatible with Windows.

7. Performance degradation is acceptable in the greater interest of not running on Windows 95.

8. If you’re going to do something wrong, do it wrong in as many different ways as possible.

9. Find a rule and break it as blatantly as possible.

10. The weirder your code, the harder it will be for the operating system to detect that you are about to do something stupid and rescue you.

11. Always look for the weirdest, most convoluted way of doing something. That way, you stand a good chance of doing it wrong.

12. It is better to be lucky than good.

13. Multitasking is for wimps.

14. Persistence may not help, but it’s fun.

15. Thrashing is good. It reminds the user that the computer is on.

16. Random addresses are harmless.

17. If you’re going to fail, do so as subtly as possible.

18. Do something that is supported only under Windows, and do it wrong.

19. Second-guess the specification whenever possible.

20. Knowledge of the English language is optional.

21. Well-behaved programs are for wimps.

22. Bite the hand that feeds you.

23. Words in italics don’t count.

24. If you can’t be subtle, then be blatant.

25. Intel will never release a new CPU.

26. Slower is better.

27. If you can’t convince the operating system to screw you up, take matters into your own hands.

28. Microsoft will never release a new version of the operating system.

29. The high words of 32-bit registers are always zero.

30. Even business applications can benefit from a boot disk.

31. Error checking is for wimps.

32. Don’t bother testing the error paths. The game is already over.

33. When faced with the unusual, self-destruct.

> Idiots don't write bot scripting operations.

My personal experience is: an army of bots is useful but the effectiveness is limited. The key is to activate and mobilize a group of crazy people, by influencers or bots - real humans, genuine citizens - who's willing to be the online warriors of an ideology to work for you, e.g. "We must stop the globalist", "They're taking away our guns", or "Impeach Trump". The ideology is not limited to a specific one, anyone can use this method.

The Russian seems to have developed a powerful strategy against the USA: actively promoting conflicting ideologies of all sides to increase political instability.

Marketing tech startups is (almost) an official purpose for Hacker News. I don't mind, as long as it's still largely community driven.

> would turn into serving up cute cat videos

Cute cats, per se, is not the problem. Did you know the "Cute cat theory of digital activism" [0]? Literally, the first online cat meme posters imagined the freedom and productivity that cats would offer to digital liberty.

> trying to prevent people from yelling at each other based on fake news

This turns out to be a much bigger problem that couldn't be solved using cat memes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cute_cat_theory_of_digital_act...

Not just electricity, but basic physics. Don't forget the Kepler architecture, named after the astronomer Johannes Kepler, and the Fermi architecture, named after the nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi (although the same physics is important in semiconductors). Although there;s also an odd exception, which is the Turing architecture.

Superhighway Valley. A good name to show its historical root on the Valley's current iteration of life.

+1 for Silly Con Valley.

It's a quite accurate name for its phony startup culture (no offense to real startups).

Note to other readers: It requires 2 hours to read.

This is a timeless classic from Wired, written by Neal Stephenson in 1996. I love this article not only because of the article itself, but its enthusiasm and energy from the age it was written in. It was an age with a bright future where everything seems possible. Back at that time, Wired represented the avant-garde of Silicon Valley (including the fact that Neal Stephenson being the author) that was going to revolutionize everything through computing and the Internet, the free and fast flow of information enables decentralization, and would liberate us from all the old forms of political control.

In particular, this article had a clear techno-libertarian overtone, about how authoritarianism and monopoly would be defeated through disruptive innovation. One goal of constructing FLAG (the cable) was explicitly to reduce the reliance of the infrastructure of the United States and to challenge the role played by traditional ISP over the control. The article even mentioned the early cypherpunk movement (in the mid of the first Crypto War), and acknowledged "Virtually all communications between countries take place through a very small number of bottlenecks, and the available bandwidth simply isn't that great. Even outfits like FLAG don't really grok the Internet." But FLAG was still seen as a step moving towards the correct direction and the beginning of the new network order.

The dream eventually came to an end. Wired-inspired DotCom bubble busted. Although FLAG was the first move to break U.S. and traditional ISP's monopoly, future projects in the next 10 years didn't quite accomplish this goal. Silicon Valley became the new giant establishment and monopoly (the critics say massive deregulation was partially responsible). Authoritarian regimes have done a good job preventing the information flowing online to bring liberal political changes. And the Internet has been seized as the means of mass surveillance.

Nevertheless, the late 90s was a great age to be alive with that dream.

Silicon refinery and wafer production are highly specialized industrial divisions. Most fabs don't produce their own wafers, although some of the biggest players have their own subsidiaries.

* TSMC / WaferTech subsidiary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC#WaferTech_subsidiary

WaferTech, a subsidiary of TSMC, is a pure-play semiconductor foundry located in Camas, Washington, USA. It is the second largest pure-play foundry in the United States. The facility employs 1100 workers.[citation needed] The largest is GlobalFoundries Fab 8 in Malta, NY, which employes over 3,000 workers with over 278,709 m2 (3,000,000 sq ft) under rooftop.

WaferTech was established in June 1996 as a joint venture with TSMC, Altera, Analog Devices, and ISSI as key partners. The four companies along with minor individual investors invested US$1.2 billion into this venture, which was at the time the single largest startup investment in the state of Washington. The company started production in July 1998 in its 200 mm (8 in) semiconductor fabrication plant. Its first product was a 0.35 micrometer part for Altera.

TSMC bought out the joint venture partners in 2000 and acquired full control, and currently operates it as a fully owned subsidiary.

---

Even before you start making wafer, you need to have pure silicon, which requires a massive industrial refinery operation. See:

* Silicon Production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon#Production

Silicon of 96–99% purity is made by reducing quartzite or sand with highly pure coke. However, even greater purity is needed for semiconductor applications, and this is produced from the reduction of tetrachlorosilane (silicon tetrachloride) or trichlorosilane. The former is made by chlorinating scrap silicon and the latter is a byproduct of silicone production. These compounds are volatile and hence can be purified by repeated fractional distillation, followed by reduction to elemental silicon with very pure zinc metal as the reducing agent. The spongy pieces of silicon thus produced are melted and then grown to form cylindrical single crystals, before being purified by zone refining. Other routes use the thermal decomposition of silane or tetraiodosilane (SiI4). Another process used is the reduction of sodium hexafluorosilicate, a common waste product of the phosphate fertilizer industry, by metallic sodium: this is highly exothermic and hence requires no outside fuel source. Hyperfine silicon is made at a higher purity than almost every other material: transistor production requires impurity levels in silicon crystals less than 1 part per 1010, and in special cases impurity levels below 1 part per 1012 are needed and attained.

Then...

* Czochralski method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czochralski_method

High-purity, semiconductor-grade silicon (only a few parts per million of impurities) is melted in a crucible at 1,425 °C (2,597 °F; 1,698 K), usually made of quartz. Dopant impurity atoms such as boron or phosphorus can be added to the molten silicon in precise amounts to dope the silicon, thus changing it into p-type or n-type silicon, with different electronic properties. A precisely oriented rod-mounted seed crystal is dipped into the molten silicon. The seed crystal's rod is slowly pulled upwards and rotated simultaneously. By precisely controlling the temperature gradients, rate of pulling and speed of rotation, it is possible to extract a large, single-crystal, cylindrical ingot from the melt. Occurrence of unwanted instabilities in the melt can be avoided by investigating and visualizing the temperature and velocity fields during the crystal growth process. This process is normally performed in an inert atmosphere, such as argon, in an inert chamber, such as quartz.

By default it's not. However, if you join FAANG, chances are that you'll be required to sign a contract that basically says "I waive my rights of doing side-projects to to the greatest possible extents under the laws of California". When speaking of contributing to open source, Google generally has a more positive image, but there are still occasions that something could only be released after being reviewed by the legal department if it's work-related. On the other hand, Apple is known to have strict restrictions.

DAB+ was meant to deliver high-quality AAC above 128 Kbps, preferably 192 Kbps or higher, unfortunately it ended up being broadcasted using the lowest bitrate to squeeze as many stations as possible, usually at 64 Kbps, it's a total disaster...

And practically, all the data collected by private corporations can be obtained by governments via a subpoena. Until it could be changed, all corporate surveillance is ultimately government surveillance. And there's strong evidence suggests that it occurs at a routine basis. Although some companies like Lavabit showed respectable efforts to be independent and privacy-respecting, on the other hand, some companies actively cooperating with the government, or even oppressive regimes without regards of ethics. So yes, government surveillance is worse than corporate surveillance, but the latter can be seriously harmful in many cases as well.

> I don't use an add blocker, because I have a very strong mental add blocker not to buy anything I see on the internet.

Ad blocker is never about blocking the ads themselves since five years ago or so. Since then, the point is always to block tracker and fingerprinter scripts in the ads (sometimes these scripts are almost malicious [0]) to reduce the information collected by advertisers (and abusers of the ads system) while browsing the web. I actually miss the plain old banner ads without shenanigans, they need to come back.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20288768

It's also why a software algorithm that controls CPU frequency scaling is called a "CPU governor" [0] in Linux kernel. Although the mechanism is completely different, but the analogy is used here since it controls the speed.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CPU_frequency_scaling#S...

The title is highly misleading. First, it's the ancient GCC 4.2.1 from 2007. Next, it's removed from the FreeBSD build system, which means it's no longer used in the internal development of FreeBSD and you can no longer build FreeBSD with GCC. Meanwhile, GCC is still maintained for userspace and the latest GCC 9 is included in the FreeBSD Port [0], you can install it on your machine for your personal use. Finally, the commit message said "At this time all supported architectures either use in-tree Clang, or rely on external toolchain (i.e., a contemporary GCC version from ports)", so I assume even with GCC support removed, you can still build FreeBSD, if you insist, with an external copy of modern GCC.

Suggested alternative title: FreeBSD has Removed GCC from Build Infrastructure.

[0] https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ports/blob/master/Mk/bsd....

> This leads to a fracturing of consensus.

But is it necessarily a bad thing? I think whether the outcomes are good or bad is going to be highly subjective and debated ad infinitum. I, for one, welcome our new Internet overlord.

There are two interesting articles on this topic, I strongly recommend everyone to read them. Gwern's article has interesting observations about politics, subculture, Unicode, and programming languages. David Perell examines the effect of the Internet in a bigger framework of world's politics, education, and commerce.

* The Melancholy of Subculture Society, by gwern

https://www.gwern.net/The-Melancholy-of-Subculture-Society

* What the Hell is Going On?, by David Perell (has a playful foreword, if it annoys you, ignore it and continue reading).

https://www.perell.com/blog/what-the-hell-is-going-on --

My perspective of the issue is, under the previous centralized system, the entire nation is subject to the identical propaganda. The effect of the system can already be seen from the extensive propaganda during Mexican–American War of the 1840s - nearly 200 years ago.

> You furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war.

And during the World War II, and later the Cold War, the power of state propaganda reached its height, and I'd say this system is responsible for the massive thought manipulation and greatest violence in the human history. But there are good sides as well - information authority, good writings, and strong consensus.

> We have had Edward R. Murrow talking straight at us and gripping the whole nation's attention, we have had Thomas Paine standing in the street, telling us common sense that changes our lives, we've had shots heard round the world, revelations shocking the whole nation at once. - said Shii, a early and influential 4chan moderator, also a major contributor of English Wikipedia.

Then came the Internet revolution. Sure, under this system, the absolute notion of truth is deteriorated. There would be Holocaust deniers, anti-vaccine activists, flat-Earthers, moon-landing truthers, foreign propagandists, wild populism, among other groups - heck, even a Facebook poster can start an absurd national hate movement (see my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20012564). But simultaneously, it's a feature as well, the same system also gave voice and self-determination to those who didn't have - although not in a totally egalitarianist manner, but at least a positive contribution, and brought democratization of communication, which ended, or greatly reduced the power of centralized propaganda.

> Getting your views on not just politics, but also physics, biology, economics and who-to-burn-at-the-stake from your local religious official. This was the default for most of human history. I’d much rather have flat earthers than the Spanish inquisition, thank you very much. - An author's response to the concern of Fake News and disinformation, who is working on replicating GPT-2.

It disintegrates physical and national barriers and identities. The horror of nationalistic violence had seen it better days, e.g. "the country I live in now is the best country in the world for people like me; I would be terribly unhappy if I was exiled", and now, it's something like, "‘Why, what’s so special about the USA? It’s not particularly economically or politically free, it’s not the only civilized English-speaking country, it’s not the wealthiest..."

And the subcultures rule. and in a sense, liberates individuals by giving one the option to opt-out. I, for one, welcome our new Internet overlord. As gwern said,

> If I’m a programmer, I don’t need to be competing with 7 billion people, and the few hundred billionaires, for self-esteem. I can just consider the computing community. Better yet, I might only have to consider the functional programming community, or perhaps just the Haskell programming community. Or to take another example: if I decide to commit to the English Wikipedia subculture, as it were, instead of American culture, I am no longer mentally dealing with 300 million competitors and threats; I am dealing with just a few thousand. It is a more manageable tribe. It’s closer to the Dunbar number, which still applies online. Even if I’m on the bottom of the Wikipedia heap, that’s fine. As long as I know where I am! I don’t have to be a rich elite to be happy; a master craftsman is content, and “a cat may look at a king”.

> Leaving a culture, and joining a subculture, is a way for the monkey mind to cope with the modern world.

But from another perspective, it's also harmful in some ways. It was once possible to leave or escape from one's tribe by physically moving, but now it's an iron cage that nearly impossible to escape. It may intensity the world's geopolitical conflict, as everything has been balkanized. On the other hand, perhaps the society can be better off by learning to operate without a strong consensus.

--

To start fresh and frame the topic differently, we can use decentralized systems as an analogy, the traditional mass media is like the Certificate Authority model. It guarantees absolute truth on whether a public key is real by providing a central consensus, but on the other hand, when things go wrong, the entire public key infrastructure is vulnerable to rogue actors, especially state actors. In comparison, we have the PGP web-of-trust model - although the actual implementation turned out to be a total failure due to legacy code and design issues, but the ideas remain valid - that iut derives the trust not from an authority, but from the collective opinion of a group of people in a community you know. The good thing is that anyone is free to make one's own judgements, and the system is resistant from a central rogue actor, the bad thing is that there is only localized consensus, not centralized consensus, you cannot surf the web using this model.

Recently, there was a chaotic argument online about on how to scale a Bitcoin-like decentralized, P2P protocol. Two authors purposed the DCS theorem an an analogy of the CAP theorem. It's not really a theorem or a research paper, I'd say it's just a personal opinion, but somewhat interesting [0]. Basically it says, a decentralized system cannot simultaneously satisfies the three properties: (1) Decentralization, (2) Consensus, and (3) Scale. A traditional bank is C & S: having a global consensus and no scaling difficulty, but it's centralized. The original Bitcoin achieves D & C: decentralization and global consensus. Everyone knows every transaction - by running a blockchain, but it must come with an extremely high cost. On the other hand, Layer-2 solutions bypasses the blockchain, thus it achieves D & S: decentralization and scale, by avoiding to broadcast the transaction to the blockchain and use P2P communication instead, thus abolish global consensus. Using the same line of thinking, I think this conclusion can be applied to a lot of other systems, not only blockchains, for example, the Certificate Authority is C & S, and the web-of-trust is D & S. The mass media is C & S, the Internet is D & S. Doing D & C requires everyone knows everything, which is simply not the Internet.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that the pros and cons are inherent in each paradigm, you cannot both have your cake and eat it, and whether the outcomes are good or bad is going to be highly subjective.

And back to the issue of biases of mass media, one possible idea is to impose some limitations on the freedom of the press to the mass media as a counterweight to the freedom of speech: In the age when everyone can say everything online, perhaps the mass media establishment should be forced to engage in a journalism with a higher standard, serving as a reliable reference source.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.04335

For those who are not aware of the issue, the Smithsonian Magazine has a comprehensive introduction of this issue, I recommend to read it.

* There Are Still Thousands of Tons of Unexploded Bombs in Germany, Left Over From World War II

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/seventy-years-world-w...

> China will have huge social reform in favor of citizens

What is your rational? All the current signs showed the opposite tendency. On my first thought, I'd say it's the Cold War that is coming, not any social reform.

But on second thought, there are indeed possibilities, if you follow the argument, that lead to a social reform in favor of citizens, is either (1) The state believes the nation is powerful enough (in terms of politics, economy and culture) so the rulers can launch reforms without threatening their own powers, or (2) The current political-economic system is unsustainable, reforms must be done.

Both are possible, but I'm still in favor for the prediction of an upcoming Cold War, or at least an intensified international conflict.

> Blocking ADs in browser will not be possible anymore.

It's possible.

> Oracle buys IBM

Let's hope for the best.

> JulianMorrison on Jan 1, 2010: Ubiquitous mobile/wireless internet integrated into even very trivial consumer goods, with close to 100% coverage across the civilized world. A significant fraction of ordinary consumer goods simply won't work in "dark" zones. The gap between 1st and 3rd world countries will widen as a result - take a modern computer into backwoods Africa and it's a paperweight.

It's not wrong. But I guess he didn't foresee the Internet of Useless Shit. It matters if you tablet doesn't work without Internet, but doesn't matter if it's your refrigerator, or so we hope.

> Electric cars become fairly common. A destructive feedback loop starts for gasoline fuel: lower demand, lower profit, vendors go bust, less availability, monopoly prices, lower desirability. The gasoline economy is brittle because it has high fixed costs, a complex supply chain, and its power source isn't fungible. As with film versus digital cameras, the result is an exponential crash in the desirability of gasoline cars

Exponential crash? Didn't see it yet.

> Driverless cars will appear. As they move down from the high end to the mainstream, they'll make taxis cheap enough that private car ownership starts to become quaint. Eventually, driving your own car will be considered selfish risk-taking, and banned on public roads.

Not yet.

> DrJokepu on Jan 1, 2010: Still no fusion power.

Haha!

> During the second half of the decade, the Chinese bubble will burst. This will be a quite heavy shock. A lot of people will lose a lot of money. A younger/more populist group of politicians will assume power in China.

The unsustainable early economic growth has came to an end and there was an economic crisis, but there was never a major "burst". And the power was not assumed by a younger group, but a more conservative group. Not sure if's populist or not though.

> Hugo Chavez & his friends will be removed from power in Venezuela.

Still not completely fulfilled, but probably soon.

> Google will experience change in management. From there, it will be downhill for them (at least for the rest of the decade).

Accurate?

> Surprisingly enough, Apple will still stay relevant even though Steve Jobs will have to leave his position due to health problems or something else.

Accurate!

> adw on Jan 1, 2010: Network analysis and data mining will claim their first major political scalp. That'll be a watershed moment: the politics of information are going to start being the kind of core liberal issue that environmental issues currently are.

Accurate.

> jacquesm on Jan 1, 2010: [...] the end of 32 bit computing for consumer pcs and server platforms. So all mainstream machines not being mobile or embedded devices will be 64 bits by the end of the decade (and plenty of those will be too, but you are right, not all of them).

Accurate.

> artagnon on Jan 1, 2010: [...] 3. By 2020, Chrome and Firefox each have 35% market share. Internet Explorer becomes insignificant.

It's wrong, it's more like Chrome has 66% and Firefox has 33% (just an example, the "real" number shows Firefox's market share is even less than that). While the death of Internet Explorer was certain, it was hard to imagine that Google Chrome would be a monopoly.

I've heard this argument often, but I don't buy it.

1. The environmental cost of ineffective software is negligible, when compared to Bitcoin mining or other forms of hardware planned obsolescence.

2. By using more efficient software, surely, you can save a lot of CPU cycles, and it can improve the energy efficiency of some specific workloads under some particular scenarios. However, on a general-purpose PC, the desire for performance is unlimited, the CPU cycles saved in one way will only be consumed in other ways, and in the end, the total CPU cycles used remain a constant.

Running programs on a PC is like buying things, when you have a fixed budget but everything is cheaper, often people will just buy more. For example, I only start closing webpages when my browser becomes unacceptably slow, but if you make every webpage use 50% less system resource, I'll simply open 2x more webpages simultaneously. LED lightning is another example, while I think the overall effect is a reduction of energy uses, but in some cases, I think it actually makes people to install more lightnings, such as those outdoor billboards.

This is called the Jevons paradox [0].

For PCs, certainly, as I previously stated, in specific workloads under some particular scenarios, I totally agree that there are cases that energy use can be reduced (e.g. faster system update), but I don't think it helps much in the grand scheme of things.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

A radioactive-based random number generator surely is fun. But a friendly reminder to those readers who want a quantum device but prefer a low-power, solid-state implementation: A "quantum" random number generator doesn't always have to be fancy, it can be as boring as a diode. Diodes only allow current to flow to one direction, but if you reverse bias a diode hard enough, they'll eventually breakdown, conduct, and produce a fixed voltage drop across it. This principle is used to make voltage references and regulators. But on a closer look, the diode also produces a significant amount of random noise in this process. And the mechanisms responsible for the breakdown of a diode, either Zener Effect or Avalanche Effect, although are semi-classical, but ultimately quantum mechanical in nature - the electrons received enough energy to randomly pass through the forbidden bandgap, and the noise is effectively unpredictable. (There are also tunnel diodes that use real Quantum Tunneling, which doesn't have any classical explanation, fancier than Zener or Avalanche Effect, but general-purpose tunnel diodes are no longer in production of large quantity.)

There are some really expensive avalanche or tunnel diode noise sources you can buy, that are made by electronics giants like Keysight, that are designed to produce perfectly calibrated white noise across a few GHz of bandwidth for RF test, measurement, or cryptographic purposes. But you can build a simple one, the only problem is that the ordinary diodes are not designed to breakdown, they will, but it's thousands of volts and potentially a destructive event, thus they are not really useful. You can buy Zener diodes, but it's likely that you don't already have one and you don't want to wait for shipping. But there's another neat choice - use a transistor. The base-emitter junction of any bipolar transistor is effectively a diode for DC signals. And the most common transistors are small-signal transistors, it's easy to apply a low reverse voltage, typically 6.0 V [0] to make it go breakdown.

Then connect it to an amplifier and a ADC, you are done. And you don't even have to use an ADC, you can use a 74ALS04 logic gate (the faster, the better, 74LS is not recommended) and connect a feedback resistor to force the logic gate to work as an amplifier rather than a switch, and you get an amplified and digitized output. This idea was originally posted to the sci.crypt newsgroup. And many have built variations of this circuit with success.

Although some warned that this circuit is vulnerable to external radiofreqency interference, which can be used by the NSA to attack your generator, so good RF design practices, such as heavily shielding the noise source and the amplifier, good power supply decoupling and filtering are recommended. It's also recommended to add a builtin self-test routine to your microcontroller and disable the output in case the circuit fails the randomness check - it's an industrial standard safegaurd.

* https://www.csshl.net/sites/default/files/downloadable/hw/hw...

* https://makezine.com/projects/really-really-random-number-ge...

* http://www.cryogenius.com/hardware/rng/

On the other hand, readers who are interested in extremely fancy quantum number generators should take a look of the double-slit experiment, single-photon light sources, interferometry, and photomultiplier tubes. A simple idea would be making a single-photon light source first (e.g. adding a heavy attenuation filter in front of a dim laser, so at any time, it's very likely that only a single photon can get out on average, it's not strictly a single-photon source, but close). Then the single photon hits a beam-splitter (e.g. a half-silvered mirror), when the photon leaves the mirror, there are photomultiplier tubes working at a thousand volts and enormous gain to detect a single photon. There's a 50% chance that the photon will hit detector A, and 50% chance that it will hit detector B. Take notes of the result, and you have built an amazing quantum random number generator.

[0] e.g. See the datasheet of the 2N3904 transistor, https://www.onsemi.com/pub/Collateral/2N3903-D.PDF

If someone is building this device to protect one's private keys from the three-letter agencies, one may want to completely shield the Geiger counter and its radiation source with thick lead. Otherwise, the NSA may decide to remotely influence the behavior of the random number generator by beaming lethal level of gamma radiation toward the generator, and they would not care whether you are killed in this process. /joke

If Snowden has no chance of getting any income from his book, let's boycott the official book and download unauthorized copies from Library Genesis instead. And perhaps, donate to the Freedom of the Press Foundation. But at least, don't buy the official book and send money to the U.S. Government.

I noticed it as well. I first thought it was a result of using CDN services or recycled IP addresses, but gnu.org doesn't use a CDN, and its IPv4 and IPv6 are both served by Hurricane Electric, which never did any business in mainland China.

Must be a bug.

Note to readers: This is not civil forfeiture.

> There are two avenues available to the government for seizing items that were used to commit a crime, or cash that was made unlawfully. If a person is convicted of a crime, the government can use a legal tool called criminal forfeiture that allows it to confiscate property that was involved. Civil forfeiture, on the other hand, does not require a criminal charge—only a suspicion that a piece of property was involved in a crime, or that it was obtained illegally.

> But neither of those legal processes were used against Clavasquin, his coplaintiffs, and the estimated “hundreds if not thousands” of others just in New York City that they represent in the lawsuit. Instead, they got caught in legal limbo: When their property was classified as evidence after their arrest, slow-moving bureaucracy and red tape turned what should be a routine transaction—getting back personal property after the state no longer has any use for it—into a near-impossibility.

> [...] Even if a person is arrested but isn’t charged with a crime, his or her possessions can be seized. (In certain cases, police can even seize property without arresting its owner.) But the lack of criminal charges don’t make recovery any easier. In fact, in Washington and New York, it lands individuals in another gray area that can be even more difficult to navigate than the maze of red tape that follows the end of criminal proceedings.

Apparently, in addition to the much controversial civil forfeiture (which largely allows the police to confiscate things arbitrarily in a Stop-and-Seize scheme without charges or warrants [0]), the police can also keep your things confiscated without a charge by classifying it as "evidence"...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8280889

There are quite a few things in physics which didn't have direct experimental evidence, while most are convinced because the theoretical results and incomplete evidence are persuasive enough. If this Science article is accurate, there was no direct experimental evidence that proved the majority energy of the Sun comes from the fusion of protons into helium, until the neutrino experiment in 2014.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/08/underground-experime...

Interesting, I didn't know the existence of the quote or the mail. So... if what Satoshi claimed is true, this choice was actually a pure coincidence and doesn't really have any significance, hmm. I don't know what to say - yet another strange coincidence in history I guess?

Yes, it's another way to interpret his choice. "Satoshi being a member of the Cypherpunk" is only one possibility. It's entirely possible that he wasn't active at all, and his familiarity of Cypherpunks was from his learning, not from the participation.

Sometimes, people can make wrong assumptions by reading one's words alone. First, not everything is carefully worded, sometimes you choose the wrong words and didn't realize until someone responded. Also, not all context/information is necessarily expressed - for example, you know an argument, and you already know more information about your argument, you don't always write them down, because talking on a forum is not your exam. Another example is when you know an argument and its counterargument, and you talk about the argument, someone may come and say: "you are misguided, don't you know its counterargument"? Second, no tone, facial expression, or other social hints are preserved, when you talk about an argument casually, others may assume that you are serious.

When I claimed that Satoshi was active in the cypherpunk group, I didn't say that I was also thinking about the citations in the original Bitcoin paper, specifically, Wei Dai's "b-money" or Adam Back's "Hashcash", both came from the infosec community of the late 90s, and they are something that a member of the cypherpunk group should be intimately familiar with. An additional piece of information about his avoidance of using secp256r1 curve fits into the narrative well, and they can be circumstantial evidence if you buy into it. Also, I wasn't being serious at all, I mentioned it simply because it's just an interesting idea related to the original article and other readers may find the idea interesting as well, and I used the phrase "shed some lights", which, according to Merriam-Webster, is a phrase that means, "to make it possible to understand or know more about something", not a bad choice. Unfortunately, I misused the word "evidence", a pretty strong word. I should have used "circumstantial evidence" or "hints". while I was typing the original comment, I was also thinking about the possibility that Satoshi wasn't an active cypherpunk in the 2000s but simply a follower who had read the mailing list archive after the group became inactive, but I didn't mention either. I was not writing a background check for Satoshi, there's enough good articles on the Web.

When nonefromabove was replying my comment, nonefromabove, who was being unaware of anything of the above, must have deduced that I was fallen into the "connecting-the-dots" fallacy, or having a somewhat conspiracy theorist's attitude on Satoshi's identity, and I was being completely serious about it. Meanwhile, I was well-aware of the cognitive bias of overfitting data, and I was a fan of Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise when his book came out. Nevertheless, I was told that I was "reading too much into this", and how "my mind works with tiny information and how I confuse noise for signal".

Perhaps, to avoid misunderstanding like this, we may use a "confidence" label, inc. "almost certain, likely, possible, unlikely", and a "tone" label, inc. "joke, casual, argument, serious", and so on.