sweis

I don't think a balanced-ternary Setun was ever built in hardware. It was emulated on a base-4 machine according to this contemporaneous RAND report by Willis Ware [1]

The Setun creator N.P. Brousentsov made a lot of dubious claims, including that Setup "worked correctly at once without even debugging" [2].

Balanced ternary was never competitive in transistors. It was hypothesized to be more efficient for vacuum-tube based ring counters, and even that was "only approximately valid, and the choice of 2 as a radix is frequently justified on more complete analysis" [3].

  [1] https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM2541.html

  [2] https://www.computer-museum.ru/english/setun.htm

  [3] http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/era/High_Speed_Computing_Devices_1950.pdf

For context, this site was at Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church in West Oakland. It was intentionally located there to target the local underserved communities. At the time, California was in phases 1A and 1B. This was intended for elderly and essential workers.

There was misinformation that it was first-come, first-serve to anyone who wanted it. I looked into it at the time and it was easy to verify that this was not true. The CA State website, the church's fliers, and their help line were all clear.

Here's an example clearly listing who was eligible: https://twitter.com/SarahBelleLin/status/1370071520953835520...

They intentionally did not check eligibility to avoid putting barriers up for high risk people. It was effectively an honor system.

This site ended up being oversubscribed and most doses went to people outside the targeted area or demographic: https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/A-West-Oakland-chu...

There's also a web-based relay for magic-wormhole: https://webwormhole.io/ https://github.com/saljam/webwormhole

This book is mostly minimal examples in whatever Python library the author decided to use. There are some major gaps.

For example, the section on Python libraries doesn't even mention the most commonly used Python crypto library (cryptography): https://github.com/nakov/Practical-Cryptography-for-Develope...

Similarly, the Java section essentially mentions a single, obscure library besides the JCE and Bouncy Castle: https://github.com/nakov/Practical-Cryptography-for-Develope...

There's also no mention of libsodium besides a bullet list item.

"WHO Points To Wildlife Farms In Southern China As Likely Source Of Pandemic" https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/03/15/9775278...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/14/health/WHO-covid-daszak-c...

Historically, SARS-CoV-1 is suspected of being transmitted from bats to civets: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3291347/

In Feb 2020, China shut down its wildlife farming industry and sent out directions on how to kill and dispose of the animals: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00677-0

http://www.npc.gov.cn/npc/c30834/202002/c56b129850aa42acb584...

https://multimedia.scmp.com/infographics/news/china/article/...

Wildlife farming was a $70B industry that employed around 2% of China's workforce. There was a short-lived ban in 2003 in response to SARS-CoV-1, which was later rescinded.

The original statement I had disputed was "[Facebook has] the keys to decrypt [Secret Conversations messages]", which is false.

If you think the contrary, then the evidence is in the client.

It's a falsifiable assumption. Audit the binaries if you want to convince yourself. You will see code to generate and use keys locally, with no mechanism to fetch or share keys from a server.

If you want to go beyond generic concerns, there are plenty of academic papers that have looked at Facebook Secret Conversations, found actual issues, and helped get them fixed: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00145-020-09360-1 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-63697-9_... https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-96884-1_...

Your assertion is false. Please read the whitepaper.

Facebook does not have the key to decrypt messages sent with Secret Conversations. It is generated on-device. You can confirm that using simple reverse engineering tools on, say, the Android APK.

Yes, Facebook could subvert the binary by pushing an update. That is the risk you are accepting.

Also, ZuccNet is using RSA-2048-OAEP to encrypt each message: https://github.com/tomquirk/zuccnet/blob/master/src/util/cry...

This is not forward secure. It will also only work for messages under 256 bytes. I don't know what happens in this code if you exceed that message length.

You want to use ephemeral session keys here. Read the Secret Conversations whitepaper as an example.

Facebook Messenger already has Secret Conversations, which is end-to-end encrypted mode based on the Signal protocol.

Here's the technical whitepaper: https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/messenger-se...

Here's some of the academic work on messaging franking that it has driven: https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/664.pdf

Here's the instructions how to use it: https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger-app/1084673321594605

Of course, you need to trust that the client from the app store and no, the implementation is not open source.

This is brilliant unintentional parody.

You are right. I was ill-informed. This is for green cards.

My intent is opposite of nativist propaganda. I think the regulations are silly and companies are minimally complying with them.

I think you’re right. It’s for green cards and E visas.

OP here.

Yes, Apple is certainly saving a bundle on classified ads in the free community paper with circulation of 6,000.

These ads are just to go through the motions to get someone a visa.

They don’t actually want anyone to reply to the ad. That’s why they have mailing addresses in the ad instead of email addresses or URLs.

It not exactly a young research area. We have had post-quantum public key cryptosystems based on linear codes for over 40 years.

Classic McEliece (https://classic.mceliece.org) was created in 1978 and is in the 2nd round of NIST's PQ-crypto contest ( https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/post-quantum-cryptography/rou...).

The PQCrypto conference started 13 years ago: https://pqcrypto.org/conferences.html

Chrome ran large scale experiments with NewHope support 3 years ago: https://security.googleblog.com/2016/07/experimenting-with-p...

I'm part of the first cohort and the program is great. Highly recommended.

Before he even backdoored it, the lottery was using a Mersenne Twister?

The random number is called the seed, and the seed is plugged into the algorithm, a pseudorandom number generator called the Mersenne Twister. At the end, the computer spits out the winning lottery numbers.

Your friend is not going to get PhD thesis topics by asking his friend to post on HN.

Regardless, here's what I think are interesting areas in recent crypto:

- Performance improvements in fully homomorphic encryption, starting with Gentry's work in 2009.

- Practical applications of secure multiparty computation, e.g. Dyadic Security and Google's SMC work.

- Non-NIST standards with actual adoption like Curve25519 and Chacha20-Poly1305

- Functional Encryption: http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/543

- Post-quantum crypto like New Hope (https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1092) and Supersingular Isogenies (http://eprint.iacr.org/2011/506)

- Candidate functions for Multilinear Maps, e.g. https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/610

- Hardware-based secure enclaves like SGX

Nobody uses anything related Wolfram's cellular automata. I don't think there are any robust security proofs.

I went to the library and checked out books with code you would type in by hand, like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Computer_Games

I don't know if you've done it correctly.

You can use the built-in signature digest support and still add support for whatever you want in the future.

Why are you doing this instead of SHA[N]withRSA? https://github.com/KryptCo/kryptonite-android/blob/master/ap...

See also https://techsolidarity.org/

Did you ever notice the 5th Young Ones roommate?

Keyczar is no longer being maintained and should probably be deprecated.

Either that or someone can take the reins and update it to use modern algorithms.

This site contains little practical information about cryptography.

You don't know anything about their internal network.

TLS is not the only game in town.

Except that it works on Linux and Mac.

osquery originated with Facebook and Kolide was founded by ex-Facebookers.

This sounds like something you could have proposed 15 years ago. It assumes local, custom email clients for "enabled-by-default encryption" and XMPP support. People have moved onto web and mobile email clients, and you can only use whatever is compatible across all platforms.

I also think it overlooks mobile adoption. Many people using the internet today have only accessed it from a phone. They don't necessarily have email addresses. They may not have ever used a full sized keyboard.