Hacker News Reader

Thanks for that! The lecture series is a true gem.

It has to be said, however, that this is NOT a "legal" qualified digital identity or signing scheme, conceptually similar to any other commercial authentication tools like PIN calculators, codecards or what not. It is actually marketed as such and provided by the private sector.

The security assumptions for Smart-ID are far weaker than MobileID or ID-cards and actually no government institution will accept such signatures. You can sometimes use it for identity, for example the Tax Board allows you to authenticate via your bank, which in turn may support Smart-ID: https://www.emta.ee/eng

Since offering Mobile-ID actually costs a lot of money to banks (since there is no direct connection to the card via browser and a USB cable, you have to pay to use some API-s across SK.ee & telcos), it is the main motivation for developing it.

clonon Estonia, the Digital Republic

The key regeneration is touted as a proper solution and the cards do not need to be replaced after the procedure. It takes advantage of ECDSA to circumvent the borked RSA.

https://github.com/open-eid/qesteidutil/commit/20ead85d31b0b...

There is a huge campaign going on with service points open even in shopping malls for people that do not manage the process at home. Initially there were some scaling problems, though..

Edit: to tell the truth, the information available in Estonia regarding the exact nature of the fix is still scarce. There has been some offhand remarks from RIA that the updater basically patches the microcode on the card to generate an EC keypair, but not a lot of details.. The basic premise that the new key is still generated on the card, still holds, apparently.

clonon Estonia, the Digital Republic

Most people I interact with (here in EE) were not too much affected by the problem, since a lot of people actually use MobileID, with the crypto chip embedded in the SIM card of your smartphone, which was unaffected and available for like 10€ from each telco in Estonia. Saves you from lugging around a smartcard reader. Depending on your threat model, the fact that the PIN never enters computer memory is an advantage for MobileID, unless you prefer a proper PIN-pad reader.

clonon Estonia, the Digital Republic

Not sure when physical replacements start shipping, but the latest companion software (https://id.ee) offers a pretty smooth online key regeneration feature.

clonon Preventing server overload: limit requests being processed

https://github.com/brandur/redis-cell

This is fast becoming my go-to tool for any sort of rate limiting at the application level.

clonon OVH Cloud Storage is inaccessible for 2+ hours

That x 1000

clonon OVH Cloud Storage is inaccessible for 2+ hours

  OVH PCS $0.0112/month/GB
  AWS S3  $0.0245/month/GB

Less than half the price, if you are willing to believe they are comparable products. Actually pretty great performance they offer as well for taking encrypted backups etc.

But I think your comment is still generally fair in terms of the quality of the rest of their offerings. I would also add one more strong point for OVH - kick-ass DDoS protection.

S3 has had it's own (catastrophic) issues as well. The failure mode for PCS so far has been more irritating, however - it will fail you every 1000'th request or so.

clonon OVH Cloud Storage is inaccessible for 2+ hours

https://www.ovh.ie/public-cloud/

Claims no less than 99.999% SLA:

  Daily: 0.9s
  Weekly: 6.0s
  Monthly: 26.3s
  Yearly: 5m 15.6s

clonon OVH Cloud Storage is inaccessible for 2+ hours

Also these:

http://travaux.ovh.net/?do=details&id=26479 http://travaux.ovh.net/?do=details&id=26481 http://travaux.ovh.net/?do=details&id=26475

The last one seems to have the most up-to-date information. Apparently the Keystone issue is unrelated to the WAW D/C prodding.

clonon Wendelstein 7-X stellarator getting ready for the next phase of operation [pdf]

From the source:

In preparation for the next operation phase (OP 1.2a), which is scheduled to start in late summer of this year, the limiter structures have been replaced by a test divertor and all graphite tiles on the baffles and wall protection elements have been installed. This will allow the use of more heating power and access to the required magnetic field configurations.

clonon A plane so good it's still in production after 60 years

This is a completely inaccurate statement. The lift produce by both wings remains unchanged regardless of the roll angle. It is defined in terms of relative airflow over the wings, being always perpendicular to the former. Lift is NOT (usefully) defined relative to terra firma, a common misconception.

So in the relative frame of the aircraft itself, the lift vector is unchanged in terms of the machine itself. Rolling the aircraft rotates the lift vector, causing a larger "sideways" component and reducing the "vertical" component. For example, at 45 degrees bank the load factor is, in fact, 1.41, meaning that the wings ought to produce 1.41 times the lift to maintain altitude.

So the real reason why a dihedral tends to "auto-correct" the bank angle is that if you rotate the airplane into a bank without adding power then you really are not going to maintain your altitude against gravitational acceleration and are going to descend through the airmass. Now, given that your airplane is now at a 45 degrees angle relative to the source of gravitational attraction, the aircraft is going to see (from it's vantage point) some"sideways" airflow over the wings. Imagine an airflow component originating from the tip of the wing, towards the fuselage.

What now happens is that the "falling" wing is going to work much more efficiently because a number of reasons, causing the aircraft to experience an aerodynamically stabilizing force.

The easiest way to see is that if you imagine a V-shape object moving sideways (let's imagine from right to left), the \ part of the V is going to deflect airflow and produce some "sideways lift" while the / part will not exhibit such a phenomena.

But in terms of the 172, it's high-wing configuration actually does not require dihedral because the actual fuselage of the aircraft "shadows" the high wing, making in naturally less efficient at producing lift, thereby again correcting the bank angle.

Airplane designers attempt to balance this out so that the final design not only is statically stable (correcting in the right direction) but also dynamically stable (the oscillations should be self-limiting).