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shriphani

1,063 karma · joined June 22, 2010

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/shriphani; my proof: https://keybase.io/shriphani/sigs/eeYMegwqkCbzp4R5n1cSxity28x-wGiq_7gUnyDM6bY ]

http://shriphani.com/

I am a cryptographer and I work on zero-knowledge proofs, and privacy

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shriphani··on Ember-1
Neat!
shriphani··on Ember-1
what hardware are you using to train?
shriphani··on Mountain of Ink
I carry a few pens with me - different color ink for different days of the week - so I can see how much I wrote in a single day. Started doing it after I read about Neil Gaiman's writing habits.
shriphani··on Willow, Our Quantum Chip
bitcoin proof of work is not as impacted by quantum computers - grover's algorithm provides a quadratic speedup for unstructured search - so SHA256 ends up with 128 bits of security for pre-image resistance. BTC can easily move to SHA512.

symmetric ciphers would have similar properties (AES, CHACHA20). Asymmetric encryption atm would use ECDH (which breaks) to generate a key for use with symmetric ciphers - Kyber provides a PQC KEM for this.

So, the situation isn't as bad. We're well positioned in cryptography to handle a PQC world.

shriphani··on Today is Ubuntu's 20th Anniversary
I still have all the CDs from the shipit program - such a great project.
shriphani··on Programming Zero Knowledge Proofs: From Zero to Hero
Yeah I think you are correct that the protocol isn't safe from traffic analysis.
shriphani··on Programming Zero Knowledge Proofs: From Zero to Hero
sender specifies recipient but the signal server cannot tell a group-chat message from a non-group chat message.
shriphani··on Programming Zero Knowledge Proofs: From Zero to Hero
Examples of things you can do with ZKPs:

- Anonymous credentials (this is what Signal does) - maintain an encrypted blob representing a group chat (members list etc all stay encrypted and Signal cannot tell who is in a group chat). A normal client can provide a zkp that they are in a particular group chat (the decrypted blob contains this member for example) and have a message delivered to other group members. Both the client and the recipient can keep their identities encrypted and the zkp proves the membership of the plaintext client / recipient.

- Encrypt some metadata of a message sent to someone. You can build a ZKP that the plaintext behind the encrypted metadata satsifies some properties such as recipient is not in some blacklist (and so on). All this can be done by maintaining privacy because the metadata stays encrypted.

- Given an electronic medical record, you can prove that the record contains a vaccine without sending the record over the wire to some other party.

Lots more such ideas exist.

zkVMs are a good place to start playing with things.

shriphani··on Poor Richard's Almanack
He was a towering intellect - there's this book I got as a gift: https://www.amazon.com/First-Scientific-American-Benjamin-Fr...

He was an towering intellect and positively influenced any situation he was placed in - the odometer, the mapping of the gulf stream, counterfeit detection for paper bills are so far removed from his background in publishing, and later role as statesman - I can't think of anyone since who had such an striking impact; certainly no contemporary leaders who will be remembered so fondly 200 years from today.

shriphani··on I couldn't escape poison oak, so I started eating it
would love to see some pics of your work. Since you seem to know about Japanese craft techniques - do you know what sort of adhesive is used in Japanese gold leaf application? I am not able to use bole or animal hide glue due (vegan) but was curious if the Japanese have some rice-paste based method.
shriphani··on (next Rich)
Thank you very much for your work Rich. I've seen your talks in person a couple of times and really admired the immense clarity of thought in every one of your ideas. And thank you very much for giving us Clojure - lots of fun memories.
shriphani··on How Lee Valley built a cult-like following
LV is a very solid brand. I used them a lot but once I discovered Japanese tools I did a total switch and won't look back. Lots of Japanese stuff is entering the US market and the tools are very serviceable - I can easily take apart and sharpen, clean, tweak the planes for example.
shriphani··on Apple Pay’s long road to paying off is getting shorter
isn't there a 20k per week withdrawal limit?
shriphani··on I still Lisp (2021)
I love clojure but do a lot more Rust now. I feel the language leadership is from the information-systems universe - thinking about databases, schemas that sort of thing - and I feel the language and tooling are very good for those sorts of things but there is really no energy or interest in expanding beyond those use cases so it feels like things are settled now and wont change.

Rust OTOH feels highly malleable and the tooling is always improving. The community seems to care about a good user experience across several domains - web, systems, networking, cryptography, desktop gui, and over the last 2 - 3 things are really coming together as coherent whole.

shriphani··on Ask HN: What are you working on this year?
I draw and carve by hand - I don't like to use power tools (except drills).
shriphani··on Ask HN: What are you working on this year?
Besides day job (which I am excited about), I've been working on honing my zen buddhist woodworking skills this past year and taking on more complex projects.

This is a torii gate that has been in progress for a while: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cm7LNGRP8-r/?hl=en and I plan to finish it this year (painting + gilding + carving)

shriphani··on Kurt Vonnegut at 100
One of the greatest writers in history. An actual literary genius.

He (and maybe Mark Twain) have this ability to write sentences that burrow deep in your head and stay there forever.

A sample: "Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand."

shriphani··on 5.1 Magnitude Earthquake Near San Jose, CA
ios
shriphani··on 5.1 Magnitude Earthquake Near San Jose, CA
My garage door shook for a bit but I got none of these alerts. I'm on tTmobile, do I need to sign up somewhere ?
shriphani··on 'People were sucked into schemes': Inside Molly White’s campaign against crypto
the pki does make life easy - ethereum address as a global unique id + seed phrase around for recovery + integrate this thing with the rest of the ethereum ecosystem (e.g. other apps can require ownership of an account on this app by looking for a signed message on chain)
shriphani··on 'People were sucked into schemes': Inside Molly White’s campaign against crypto
- Ethereum's PKI allowed an e2ee messenger app to be built w/o a phone number https://twitter.com/dwr/status/1575248197454135296
shriphani··on We clone a running VM in 2 seconds
The bit about turning a dockerfile into a rootfs. A docker image is just a tarball of tarballs. We do something like this:

- you can dump the image using `docker save <name>`. - you can then get a list of the tarballs in this image by extracting this tarball and reading the file `manifest.json`; `Config` -> `Layers` will give you a list of tarballs (see undocker for how to do this: https://github.com/larsks/undocker) - Untar these in a directory and use linux tools to convert this dir to a rootfs.

shriphani··on Who do we spend time with across our lifetime? (2020)
One of the greats - Kurt Vonnegut - on this topic:

"A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The Navahos. The Kennedys."

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/300997-ok-now-let-s-have-so...

shriphani··on Instagram is shifting to videos – users aren't happy
It could be that the deep bench of high quality content is not there on reels yet. Most of the power user base of ig (horology, woodworking, crafts, fine arts etc) knows how to take high quality pictures and need to adapt to making videos (i don't think it is that easy to do - totally different medium + style + maybe your current followers wont like it).
shriphani··on Casio F91 smart watch reboot
Amazing project! Great tribute to one of the greatest timepieces ever made.
shriphani··on The Life of a Backpacker in Asia in the 1970s (2018)
There's a substantial Karen presence in MN now (I think these are Burmese refugees and not from the Thai side of the border).

Wonder what those areas were like pre-internet and pre-social media. Do you have a blog post or pics somewhere?

shriphani··on Bubble Tea: fun, functional and stateful way to build terminal apps
I've been using dialoguer [1], indicatif [2], and colour [3] for the rust ecosystem. Really high quality libraries:

[1] https://docs.rs/dialoguer/latest/dialoguer/ [2] https://github.com/console-rs/indicatif [3] https://docs.rs/colour/latest/colour/

shriphani··on Scapy: Low level packet hacking toolkit for Python
Scapy is an exceptional library that I enjoyed using for a recent project. However, I felt that the focus is entirely on capturing and analyzing traffic. If you want to manipulate the packets then the API is a little unsuited for that (for example recomputing packet checksums requires some invocation to pretty-print the packet which is weird).

OTOH, really amazing project to put together quick packet-level prototypes. Really shows the strength of the python ecosystem.

shriphani··on Yes, I can connect to a DB in CSS
I second this idea - perfect candidate for SIGBOVIK http://sigbovik.org/
shriphani··on Re: Moxie on Web3
People routinely run their own servers. A great example is bittorrent where the incentive design forces people to run actual file servers on their computer.

People will run servers on their computer if it is (i) motivated the right way, (ii) as frictionless as possible.

For the types of applications that web2 is great at (content creation / consumption), it makes no sense to run a server of course but computing is a lot bigger than that.

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