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There is a line of research according to which social media create addiction [0]. When we are addicted to social media, we have less and less time for tinkering and pushing the envelope, because a sizeable part of our time is claimed by such media.

[0] Griffiths, M. D. (2012). Facebook addiction: Concerns, criticism, and recommendations: A response to Andreassen and colleagues. Psychological Reports, 110, 518–520. https://doi.org/10.2466/01.07.18.PR0.110.2.518-520

Sun Microsystems could not have a more special place in my hacker heart. In my youth Sun was all over the place; I was dreaming working for them – as I would eventually did later in my life – and, admittedly, I would have done so even only on the basis of their uber cool logo. I remember working on their Sun Ray thin clients for a military contract. Good times. Thanks for sharing this video.

Not a big deal. You can edit a PDF programmatically, a la pdfcpu [0] or similar.

[0] https://pdfcpu.io/generate/create

In my opinion this could turn in a top seller – and I wish you so – if only you could add the means to sync Hyperpaper Planner to other calendars, such as Apple's and Google's ones.

I would typically need to quickly import calendar files related to the various online events I have to take part. And the planner should account for the differences in time zones, so that I do not have to.

That of which is actually provided are 125M partial pre-images.

A cryptographic hash function – SHA-256 included – is not inverted, because any "good" cryptographic hash function has probably infinitely many pre-images for any given hash value, if the input space is unbounded (i.e., {0,1}*).

It would be nice to have vanity URLs for the profiles. UUIDs are a no go in this application scenario.

It is worth to note that the users of such service can set an expiration date for linked resource access.

This can be used, for instance, by gig workers to deliver documents to their clients, while conditioning the retrieval of such documents to a payment.

The civil society would benefit, because it is hard to entrust our business and affairs to systems whose degree of trustworthiness is moot at best.

Counter intuitive, perhaps, but not necessarily purpose-defeating, because a stealth mode company can choose to release its open source components only a later moment in time, when it is ready to generate positive cash flow.

I would never read a book with any such incipit – How the heck somebody can even think publishing one!

I still remember from those days how sturdy was the metal plane encapsulating the keyboard. It was so rock solid that when it was decommissioned by my father, he gave them to a local blacksmith to serve him as working board... I know, I know. Sad and truculent epilogue for those poor machines – but that is what happend.

I have two huge boxes full of 8" floppies. They belonged to my father, who used them to work on two Olivetti BCS 2025. [1] Unfortunately the BCS units are long time gone. Needlessly to say, it would be nice to recover data from those 8" floppies...

BCS units were running Olivetti BCOS 5 on NEC 8080 (2 Mhz), 64Kb RAM.

[1] http://museo.dagomari.prato.it/singolo.php?cod=149&ord=1

Precisely because the linked essay puts forward "mediocrity as an aspirational design principle for computing systems", it is my contention that humans shall embrace excellence as their own aspirational principle, if they want to thrive.

Indeed it sounds hypocritical to state "Google and TAG will continue to take action against, and publish research about, the commercial spyware industry.", while not including Google itself in the said industry.

Given the proven track record of our community, it strikes me out how nobody commented about the pretty good replica of the HN's UI already. Sad.

On a related note, I will spend all night hacking CSS to prove myself I can do the same. Sleep debt does not scary me out.

Yep, and here it is one in Erlang – Taider https://github.com/secYOUre/taider

We would be better off reducing our carbon footprint rather than trying to offset it.

If we were to offset our carbon footprint, we would be in the market for offsetting strategies most likely in commodity form – which is to say products and services. But, wait, it was exactly swiping our credit cards that we got in this sorrow state for the climate. We have to rethink all of this. Indeed, 'Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.'; this applies also to market economies.

Thank you so much for sharing this. Simply stunning work!

We may not want to regard Knuth's latest volume, V 4B, in the The Art of Computer Programming series as a book authored only over the last couple of years, but, yeah, it has just gone into print [0]; HN reaction here [1].

[0] https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news.html#v4b

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33082128

This is all very interesting, thanks for sharing. While I am not familiar at all with such degree of wealth, the first thing I noticed while looking at this list is the absence of personalities from other regions of the globe, such as the MENA and Asia. I appreciate the histories and relevance of the people listed here, but I am reminded, at the same time, that the wealth of other key people is not fully understood and ascertained, due to a lack transparency – MBS and Putin come to my mind, among others. In a way this is the documented wealth, which is anyway key to understand the world we live in.

Thanks for sharing. These data date back to 2016. In the following years, Oxfam updated the report where they found this inequality to be further exacerbated: "Just 8 men own same wealth as half the world" [0, 1].

[0] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/just-8-men-own-same-...

[1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/worlds-billionaires-...

Hi! Thanks for your feedback, this is appreciated.

While there is no background information about the game in the DKC repository at the moment, the game comes with a set of cards where the equipment, rules, and finishing criteria are described [1]. If there is interested for that, I will add more context on the game and its contribution towards understanding secure multi-party computations for the youngest. I may still have the slide deck I used to present this work at the end of the hackathon, which may provide some further introductory material.

[1] DKC's rules https://github.com/secYOUre/DKC/tree/master/self-print/300-d...

I have designed one of such card decks and released it under an open source license at DKC - Dining Kid-Cryptographers [0]. This was done as part of an EU Hackathon at Google, Belgium.

[0] Dining Kid-Cryptographers, https://github.com/secYOUre/DKC

The proposal for a regulation on cybersecurity requirements for products with digital elements, known as the Cyber Resilience Act, bolsters cybersecurity rules to ensure more secure hardware and software products.

IMSI is not the only identifier available to mobile networks and attackers alike. Does PGPP provide IMEI randomization? What stops the mobile networks from tracking you using the IMEI associated to the ephemeral IMSIs?

Answer found in the linked paper:

"""

For many devices, the IMEI can be changed through soft- ware, often without root access. We envision a PGPP MVNO would allow for subscribers to present their unchanged de- vice IMEI, giving the PGPP operator the opportunity to check against a EIR to verify the phone has not been reported as stolen. At that point, the IMEI could be reprogrammed to a single value, similar to our changes to the SUPI. Additionally, PGPP users can readily switch SIMs to different handsets (IMEIs) at-will. Note that different jurisdictions have differ- ent rules about whether, how, and by whom an IMEI can be changed, so only in some cases IMEI changes require cooper- ation with the MVNO.

...

A PGPP-based carrier is data-only, with voice and messaging provided by third parties.

"""

So, the next question is: if voice is provided by third parties (i.e., relies on the actual IMSI/IMEI), what stops the mobile operator from correlating the presence of the IMSI/IMEI to the ephemeral IMSIs/IMEIs, so as to infer the real network identity behind the randomised IDs?

An attacker may try to exploit bugs in the code base, or subtle language features (e.g., weird behaviours, overflows), in order to hide one or more connected endpoints. Further, in order to build assurance about the counter integrity, we would need to employ formal verification and code authentication techniques, so as to ensure that 1/ the software will behave only as intended, and 2/ nobody has tampered with the code base. In absence of such assurance guarantees – which are difficult to provide when the client can be instantiated essentially on any compatible device, the security of the protocol (ie., WebRTC + UUID out-of-band communication) reduces to software security of the code base.

Jeremy, thanks for Chitchatter and for bringing this up here. The first feedback I can give you is about the threat model and the associated OPSEC measures mentioned in the README.

Anyone with knowledge of the room UUID can listen to the conversation, even though the presence of the eavesdropper may (or may not) show up in the connected peers' counter. It is of essence to share such UUIDs over a secure channel, or the communication security will be compromised trivially.

It is mentioned in the README the relevance of government level threat actors and email, SMS, Discord, among the possible mediums over which the UUIDs can be shared. Of course this leaves Chitchatter open to be attacked by governments and network operators, who do have access to the phone network(s), email servers, and other platforms involved. It would be best to prefer other out-of-bound channels, or come up with one-time UUIDs generators able to resynchronise and shared among the peers.

It seems there are a pretty good deal of ideas for ever more sophisticated imaging technologies. That's nice. However it would be more reassuring to come up, at the same time (or in due course), with a similar supply of clever ideas for more sophisticated rocket engines, or, more likely, with a long series of fundamental contributions to our understanding of physics and biology. The ambition of the proposed mission is to reach a focal region ~548-900 AU away in order to image exoplanets which are distant up to 100 light years. I am sorry to have to remind us all about this, but given the extenuating long journey to reach a region that is not any closer than 548 AU, it would be even more "painful" to discover even more distant exoplanets which would remain beyond reach for all practical purposes – As per me discoveries of such level should remind us to reaffirm our commitment to take care of the only planet we can live for the foreseeable future.

We all owe him and Margulis so much. A true giant, whose ideas will live even longer than himself. RIP.

Indeed the pictures are not representative of the real setup. Anyway the idea is clever. The paper provides an overview about most of the missing bits, such as the mcu, power source, and software.