tptacek

This isn't true. You don't lose the security properties of WireGuard just because you wrap it in some other transport. There is no particular virtue to it "taking the packets first".

And even if you don't tunnel an existing WireGuard implementation (ideally, you would, to inherit the security track record of that implementation) you at least get the design right. Doing a brand new encrypted transport design for no good reason is a weird red flag for me.

I don't know, maybe I'm being imprecise? It doesn't much matter because the cold-winter hypothesis is specific, and we're just arguing over the specific shape the countervailing evidence takes. It's hard to find support for it in human history. It really does feel like it's based on a notion of evolution only starting 200 years ago.

Not sure why you'd vibe-code a new VPN protocol, double ratchet or otherwise, when you can just take WireGuard and make a new transport for it.

WireGuard by itself is not a stealth VPN, but the things that make a VPN "stealthy" are all things you'd layer on top of a WireGuard design, not thread through the middle of it. A datagram-based protocol can run under any obscured transport.

We did this at Fly.io when we discovered that, for one reason or another, 5% of our users simply couldn't reliably use UDP. It was a one-day project to run it under WebSockets instead, and that was before coding agents.

No, I said that there are long stretches of history where hot-weather civilizations outcompeted cold-weather civilizations, and that implied (correctly) that algebra was not the product of adaptations to harsh winters, which is what the cold winter hypothesis argues (generally, about selection for intelligence).

That 1500 BC Babylon was neither a cold-weather clime nor an arid clime is evidence against the cold winter hypothesis.

(To your point about intelligence vs. progress, it's suggestive evidence, not dispositive evidence, but the amount of suggestive evidence over the course of human history makes the cold winter hypothesis pretty funny.)

The "editorialized title" made up something that didn't happen. Cloud providers are constantly responding to newly disclosed vulnerabilities and every cloud provider using Firecracker had to firedrill this one.

Uh huh. Mesopotamia and Egypt might as well have been Norway. And clearly writing itself originated in Siberia, so the theory survives.

The claim is that severe winter conditions select for intelligence, not that intelligence grades continuously with average temperature!

You're far safer doing banking stuff on your phone than on a computer.

Right, that's my point. The hypothesis is specific to cold climates; it's a just-so story about why southern "races" are less intelligent, and it falls apart instantly on first inspection, unless you think evolution just started to happen 200 years ago.

No, the simplest (but far from the only) example is DNS injection.

All serious attackers are man-in-the-middle attackers (usually by tricking victims into diverting their own traffic, not literally by inserting themselves into the network path). Passive-only attackers went extinct along with the backbone-connected Sun servers that were used to launch those attacks.

I don't so much care about the rest of this analysis, but you can't call an unauthenticated TLS session "secure".

The "harsh winter hypothesis" is self-evidently risible. You have to ignore huge chunks of human history, during which the hot-weather civilizations did stuff like invent algebra while the cold-weather civilizations were barely worthy of the label "civilized", in order to take it seriously.

It's really weird that it ever became a serious talking point!

How?

Huh? Ukraine is an active cyber threat for Russia, and Ukraine's situation is far more dire than Iran's.

Our responses to state-sponsored attacks on our soil are perhaps best characterized as "unhinged".

There continue to be published studies suggesting group differences in intelligence, but the weight of studies over the last 10 years or so seems to be in the other direction.

The explanation for that is probably the "missing heritability problem"; twin studies in the 1980s and 1990s set extraordinarily high heritability statistics for intelligence that have been undercut by molecular genetics results. Put differently: there was an unreasonably high correlation established in the literature at the turn of this century, and it's had nowhere to go but down.

(In case it matters for the thread: I'm not an expert, but I do follow this area of research, and I've been pretty convinced for many years now that supposed race/IQ correlations are basically bullshit, and that science is really beating the crap out of the old Murray and Lynn numbers.)

I think the story is especially clear in Iran, though.

You want to talk about things that might spark an actual US land invasion of Iran? Seems up there.

They can't gain credibility with the Sunni world; Sunni Arabs are pretty close to their mortal enemies --- not in some dumb religious way, but in a modern geopolitical sense --- and that conflict is far more salient than Israel/Iran.

Iran trying to gain favor with the Sunni Arab world is somewhere in the same ballpark as Russia trying to gain favor with ethnic Ukrainians.

I don't think attacking France did anything to help that cause. Certainly we know from experience what attacking America would have done for them.

I'm really asking, by the way! If you meant to say "group differences in intelligence have replicated in other countries, like in Europe", that's noncontroversial. But if you mean to suggest that we have actual global data about IQ --- forget inter-group intra-country, just data for most of the world at all --- I think the story there is we do not.

There isn't a forum in the world without superiority, snark, self-importance, and toxicity; some of that is simply an artifact of communicating about contentious topics in the context-stripped medium of text messaging.

But Reddit's shitposting culture makes threads difficult to follow and powerfully impacts the culture there. On the better, closely moderated subreddits, threads are swiss-cheesed with deleted comments. It's just a very different reading experience.

HN comments are really nothing at all like Reddit comments.

I'm a (vocal) proponent of AI (as applied to software development) and even I think, and have been saying all year, that the amount of AI stuff on the front page is unfortunate. It's not a mystery why anyone would think 2-years-ago HN was more fun than today's!

But it's not an easy thing to intervene on. AI is neck and neck with "the Internet" for impact on technology.

I've written so many words about DNSSEC on HN that it's a running joke. The search bar will avail. I'm obviously not going to take seriously the argument that I don't share my rebuttals to these arguments.

As is so often the case, you and I are now the only two people reading this subthread, so if there's more you want to know from me, feel free to email.

Results in both directions are published all the time.

People tend to say this before citing "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" or something derived from it.

I don't think it's a US phenomenon in particular; I'm saying we have data about the US, and not about the rest of the world.

The jailer exposes neither /dev/mem nor anything you could use to make the device node for it.