bcaa7f3a8bbc

Pseudorandom parameter selection of NIST P-curves, including secp256r1 has created much controversy within the cypherpunk community in the early 2000s. the theory is that the NSA discovered a class of secret curves with an unknown special weakness, and then bruteforced the random seed that would generate the weak curve. [0] On the other hand, secp256k1's parameters were not generated by random seeds. [1]

I think the important fact is not whether secp256r1 has a backdoor, but the decision of selecting secp256k1 by Satoshi Nakamoto for the use in Bitcoin. At the time, secp256k1 was the only widely-implemented non-P curve in various crypto libraries, and almost nobody used it at the time. It seems the entire decision of using secp256k1 was made to avoid secp256r1. This is another piece of evidence that Satoshi Nakamoto must have beee active in the 1990-2000 cypherpunk community, so that he was well-aware of those discussions. This should shed some light on his possible identity.

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[0] DJB's paper how to manipulate curve standards [2] is DJB's attempt of creating the strongest argument for this claim. But even in his analysis, overall it's not too plausible, there's little evidence that such a class of secret curves exists and it required huge computation (2^80), it's on the edge of what was possible, but the pseudorandom parameter selection is certainly technically unfavorable as he demonstrated.

[1] https://safecurves.cr.yp.to/rigid.html

[2] https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/571.pdf

Yes, this is not what FCC means by interference, and no Part 15 regulation is violated here. But there's no need to downvote. If we review the terms of Part 15,

> (1) This device may not cause harmful interference

> (2) this device must accept any interference received, including interference that may cause undesired operation.

You'll see it's actually a general, universal principle of good communication, and applies to many cases other than RF spectrum. Internet pioneer Jon Postel once said TCP implementations should follow a general principle of robustness:

> (1) Be conservative in what you send

> (2) Be liberal in what you accept.

It's almost identical to the principles of Part 15.

A few years ago, when the Mirai botnet launched its massive DDoS attack, a HN user used Part 15 as an analogy of the future directions of IoT's security model. And in this example of protocol conflict between Pokemon and Roku, it also applies.

Because 50 ohms is an universal standard for most radio frequency equipment, not just microwave. It (often) doesn't make sense to invent your own coax, connectors, transformers, and chips. At the end of the day, the selection had its rational back in the days, but it eventually became an agreed convention that everyone just follows.

> responded in under 2 hours

and gave 3 different proofs!

It's also why ZFS requires the use of ECC memory in the official documentation - ZFS spent great efforts building redundancy and error-checking capabilities as part of the filesystem, especially for guarding against silent data corruption, even at the expense of performance. But it would be useless and greatly decrease the benefits of these features if the memory can fail silently.

Also, hitting by a beam of cosmic ray is not the only way that the bits in RAM can be flipped, dynamic RAM has inherent instabilities like row hammering, or can fail early due to manufacturing defects.

I didn't realize how broken Windows 10 is, until I tried it on someone else's computer... At this point, it's unsuitable for any computer without a SSD: M$ has made a huge amount of background system update & housekeeping activities as integral parts of the system and they will continuously SEEK your disk to death, it doesn't need to be 20 MB/s, just 2 MB/s random seeking will render it useless for doing any actual work at any time. It's laughable that high-end commercial laptops are still being sold with those 5,400 RPM, 1 TB HDDs, totally unusable.

You'll never see this kind of bullshit disk access on *nix (as long as you turned off your desktop search index service), or, for this matter, Windows XP...

The inevitable cost is zero security. Most desktop OS are not designed with security in mind and are vulnerable in different ways, but it's safe to say that Windows XP's security is effectively zero at this point.

Personally, I only use Linux and BSDs on my machines, haven't use Windows for years. But I keep a Windows XP VM, I only need to use it for not more than once or twice a month, sometimes it's ancient hardware supporting program, sometimes it's ancient government program. There's no confidential information in the VM.

Yes, one shouldn't use Windows XP. But it's still handy to keep a working XP virtual machine with some basic tools to run ancient programs that one encounters from time to time get the job done...

This is the wisdom from the old days, and it's still true in many cases.

But I believe compiler developers are trying to keep -O3/-Os working as advertised by their literal meaning, especially when it's combined with -march and -mtune, the cases of performance degradation should be fewer by now. For example, by using the knowledge of the subarchitecture, compilers can optimizing the code for Intel's MicroFusion rather than performing useless loop unrolling that actually degrades performance.

In all benchmarks on Phoronix since GCC 4.9, they showed -Os is almost always slower than -O2 and -O3.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=gcc_49_o...

Linux kernel used to prefer -Os at everywhere, but now it has -O2 and -O3 as well. I think there is a measurable performance improvement in benchmarks in some cases.

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/15f5db60a13748f44e5a1...

-Ofast enables unsafe floating-point optimizations that might give a performance boost for applications which don't need strict compliance. For example, FP operations cannot be optimized by using the association rule due to various concerns, but -Ofast enables -fassociative-math and allows such optimization. If your program just computes a bunch of numbers and doesn't rely on some uncommon features such as NaN or signed zero, it would only slightly change the last irrelevant few significant digits of the result, and greatly speed up your program.

But the general rule-of-thumb is that -Ofast should not be used, unless you know what the program is doing and how the optimization affects it.

A more meaningful comparison is -O2 vs. -O3 vs. -O3 -march=native -mtune=broadwell. Or run the OpenJDK test suite with -Ofast and see whether there are failed tests.

Age of Empires 2 works under Wine, it just needs some minor hacks. Last time I checked, the game launcher has an embedded webpage, and if it doesn't load, the "game start" button won't be laid out properly. Installing Internet Explorer 6 under Wine (by winetricks) fixes it...

Thanks for the tip. I forgot the USB-FDD mode completely...

Consider the huge number of legacy industrial systems that are still using floppies today, the existence of floppy emulators is not a coincidence.

> Could a usb floppy drive work?

I don't have one. What kind of device interface do USB floppy drives use, and does Windows XP have drivers? I highly doubt it (edit: others have pointed out that they use USB-FDD mode and is supported by Windows XP, so yes.).

The reason I don't have one is that although I have floppy drives, but I cannot find a single working blank floppy anymore... A floppy emulator that uses an SD card and the identical floppy interface should have better compatibility (but without the convenience of Plug & Play like USB), and you don't have to find a source of working floppy.

Yes. I did mention this possibility in my original comment, however, don't expect to find a floppy drive on modern machines with AHCI...

Windows XP installation CD doesn't have AHCI driver and cannot recognize hard drives on most computers since 2008, and only allows you to load an external device driver via a floppy disk, which is obviously not helpful. You can set your SATA controller to IDE mode in BIOS to install, but there's a performance penalty, and because of how Windows XP handles disk drivers, it's difficult if not impossible to enable native AHCI after Windows XP is already installed, you are likely to get a BSoD after you flip the switch.

A better choice is patching the installation disc to bundle a AHCI driver in it, works like a charm.

First, download and install nLite [0], a Windows installation disc modding tool, and then download a copy of Rapid Storage Technology driver from Intel (in zip format) [1] and decompress it. Finally, open your Windowx XP disc image in nLite, bundle driver "iaAHCI.inf", and burn a new CD. You can find a lot of tutorials on the web [2]. You may need to bundle other essential drivers as well, USB and Ethernet comes to mind.

I still have a Windows XP SP3 CD in my CD collection, it is the original MSDN version with an AHCI driver bundled, although I haven't used it in the last 6 years or so...

[0] https://www.nliteos.com/

[1] https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/23295/Intel-Rapid-...

[2] https://www.prime-expert.com/articles/b02/installing-windows...

I think you don't need to use state-of-art node process to make an opamp, a battery-charging controller or a 8-bit microcontroller, and I guess the vast majority of chips we use are those things, not CPUs and GPUs, and it's reasonable to keep some old production lines and operate them.

The website's video cover is a remake of that classic photo by EE Times that shows the 6502 team members holding the chip layout, which is excellent. Unfortunately, it copied the original mistake by EE Times in print [0] as well: the image is improperly mirrored by the Y-axis, it makes all people left-handed and the flipped the layout as well!

If you compare the 6502 layout using the dieshot by the Visual6502 team [1], you can clearly see that the layout is flipped. Note the location of the T-shaped and L-shaped circuits at the bottom-left and bottom-right.

[0] https://research.swtch.com/6502

> An EE Times article from August 1975 shows a picture of the 6502 team, along with a caption listing Harry Bawcom as a “layout designer” and Bill Mensch as a “design engineer,” which seems to corroborate Bawcom's note. (Note that the photo printed in the article has been mirror-image reversed.)

[1] http://visual6502.org/JSSim/index.html

After watching Seconds from Disaster and Air Crash Investigation for many years, USCSB videos are now my favorite accident investigation documentaries.

Also,

> Errors in design may occur, but systems should be in place to catch those errors when they do occur. In this case, a firm was hired to independently review the bridge design for errors. However, [...] Although the design reviewer recognized that he should have examined the nodes and stages, he indicated that there was not enough budget or time to evaluate those factors. Contributing to this review failure was the reviewing firm’s lack of qualification to do this work.

Non-native English speakers whose native language doesn't distinguish countable and uncountable nouns is a possibility, but it's still very strange to say "two codes" in those languages, it doesn't have a clear meaning.

Until you see that "code" in ordinary-day language is an ugly word, it's ill-defined, and is used to refer to so many things, but usually with implications of secrecy or espionage. For example, it can refer to the combination of a lock, e.g. a password. It can refer to an encoding scheme or an encoder, e.g. Morse code, Pulse-Code Modulation. It can refer to a codename, e.g. Project X. And most commonly, it refers to an encryption algorithm (or its output), e.g. AES (or ciphertext), or a sentence of something written in a programming language, e.g. "one-liner".

And most people who don't have an engineering background usually don't realize those are not the same thing, they think a telegram in Morse code, a ASCII-encoded string, the combination of their lock, an encryption algorithm, or a line of code in programming language are the same thing, they just picture it as a number (well, they are numbers, all information is numbers, but their visual representations and purposes are very different) - when you have this mentality, "a code" or "two codes" makes sense.

Some people prefer to do it due to privacy concerns. In the ideal world, I don't want others to deduce my identity solely from my opinions posted on a random Internet forum, too. If you can identify everyone's identity or background from people's post history on every random forum, I think it shows something is very wrong about the web. And I don't even mean controversial opinions, just normal talks.

In additional to concerns of mass surveillance and privacy, there is a also cultural factor, for example, members from the WELLs (a forum) or early Usenet are expected to post publicly using their real names, on the other hand, for example, privacy is highly valued socially in Japan, it's considered eccentric or offensive to reveal one's identity online when people are not speaking publicly. I remember reading a story of how an owner of a cat whose pictures went viral worldwide refused to reveal his/her identity to any journalist, not even interviewing the cat, including a U.S. journalist who perused the case sincerely.

It's discouraged by the HN Guidelines to make throwaway accounts constantly.

> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.

Since it defeats the karma system and leads to abuses, such as publishing defamatory comments in a hit-and-run manner. But personally, I don't have a problem with them, per se, as long as the comment is constructive.

Wikipedia. You can find respective sources from the claims in its reference.

On the flip side, at what point a heuristic optimization becomes computation?

Slime mold is an extremely interesting species that can perform computation, even without a nerve system.

> Ateam of Japanese and Hungarian researchers have shown P. polycephalum can solve the Shortest Path Problem. When grown in a maze with oatmeal at two spots, P. polycephalum retracts from everywhere in the maze, except the shortest route connecting the two food sources.

> When presented with more than two food sources, P. polycephalum apparently solves a more complicated transportation problem. With more than two sources, the amoeba also produces efficient networks. In a 2010 paper, oatflakes were dispersed to represent Tokyo and 36 surrounding towns. P. polycephalum created a network similar to the existing train system, and "with comparable efficiency, fault tolerance, and cost". Similar results have been shown based on road networks in the United Kingdom and the Iberian peninsula (i.e., Spain and Portugal). Some researchers claim that P. polycephalum is even able to solve the NP-hard Steiner Minimum Tree Problem.

> As the slime mould does not have any nervous system that could explain these intelligent behaviours, there has been considerable interdisciplinary interest in understanding the rules that govern its behaviour. Scientists are trying to model the slime mold using a number of simple, distributed rules. For example, P. polycephalum has been modeled as a set of differential equations inspired by electrical networks. This model can be shown to be able to compute shortest paths. A very similar model can be shown to solve the Steiner tree problem. However, currently these models do not make sense biologically, as they for example assume energy conservation inside the slime mould. Living organisms consume food, so energy can not be conserved. To build more realistic models, more data about the slime mould's network construction needs to be gathered.

[...]

> Moreover, it has been reported that plasmodia can be made to form logic gates, enabling the construction of biological computers. In particular, plasmodia placed at entrances to special geometrically shaped mazes would emerge at exits of the maze that were consistent with truth tables for certain primitive logic connectives. However, as these constructions are based on theoretical models of the slime mould, in practice these results do not scale to allow for actual computation. When the primitive logic gates are connected to form more complex functions, the plasmodium ceased to produce results consistent with the expected truth tables.

How does Noam Chomsky's work on linguistic contribute to computer science? And are there applications? He is always described in the popular media as a "linguist", although many works seem to be directly related to formal language in computer science to me, but I'm not sure.

The webpage has too much JavaScript and doesn't completely load under my slow network, so I'm not sure what are allowed to use in the game. But to an first impression, I think the game should encourage the participate to solve the problems in different approaches, although Unix pipe is powerful, sometimes a 5-line awk program or a "for loop" in bash is more effective.

I've also heard (pun not intended) that the ear itself and the sensory system has an inherent "noise floor", you can hear it when you are in an anechoic chamber.

> Electromagnetic field generator and method to generate an electromagnetic field

...like running a AC current in a piece of copper wire?

If you search the U.S. Patent system, you can find a lot of crazy things, because the patent office never actually verifies them. Take everything you read in patents like this with a grain of salt. One example I've seen is a mind control patent circulated in the conspiracy community.

> by displaying special images using Visual Basic, the CRT will emit electromagnetic waves at specific frequencies corresponding to the images.

This is real, many side-channel attacks use these techniques, you can even broadcast amplitude-modulated radio.

> And if we emit EM waves of a certain frequencies, mind control is achieved. It even has some code!

Probably bullshit. Even if it's possible for EM waves to alter the mind, a CRT doesn't work well. But you can say that it's easier to mind control someone using the web page displayed on the CRT, which is technically electromagnetic waves...