cassonmars

XSLT is great, but its core problem is that the tooling is awful. And a lot of this has to do with the primary author of the XSLT specification, keeping a proprietary (and expensive) library as the main library that implements the ungodly terse spec. Simpler standards and open tooling won out, not just because it was simpler, but because there wasn't someone chiefly in charge of the spec essentially making the tooling an enterprise sales funnel. A shame.

There's different proof constructions, but many are depending on recursive SNARKs. You basically have an execution harness prover (proves that the block of VM instructions and inputs were correct in producing the output), and then a folding circuit prover (that proves the execution harness behaved correctly), recursively folding over the outer circuit to a smaller size. In Ethereum world, a lot of the SNARKs use a trusted setup — the assumption is that for as long as one contributor to the ceremony was honest (and that there wasn't a flaw in the ceremony itself), then the trusted setup can be trusted. The outsized benefit of the trusted setup approach is that it allows you to shift the computational hardness assumption over to the statistical improbability of being able to forge proof outputs for desired inputs. This of course, assumes that the trusted setup was safe, and that quantum computers aren't able to break dlog any time soon

Does YC ever intend to revisit doing remote batches again?

There's many founders in the country who are just as driven and motivated, but have real-world situations that cannot allow uprooting themselves for several months, two very common ones:

- new parents

- disabled family members, or are themselves physically disabled

The discourse on Hacker News has frequently chastised companies demanding RTO, and some of the companies in your portfolio are remote-first (or remote-only), why does YC make the same kind of RTO demand with batches?

> Try mentally taking apart a car. Can you point to the component that supplies the transportation functionality?

Transportation, in agile terms, isn't a feature or primary function – it's an epic. I agree with the conclusion that emergent behaviors cannot be well implemented solely as features, but it's also somewhat tautological, and the argument can only be constructed from the initial (invalid) premise.

From a security mindset, I was thinking this had made a return: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Lantern_(spyware)

I was pleasantly surprised to find out this was something very different.

It's not inexplicable, they just don't want to explain that their asset listings are effectively beholden to banking partners in the same way that steam was forced to remove certain games because of Visa and Mastercard.

The backup is secured with "a strong key", implying that all PFS guarantees go out the window regardless of the PFS algorithm used to send the messages in the first place. Signal had great guarantees by how they both enforced a single client and was limited largely to screenshots as backups, now you'll never know if the person you're talking to has a full backup in the cloud, with metadata to match the actual conversation times, destroying the repudiability (i.e. plausible deniability) feature.

>difficult to cancel subscriptions

>magically reroutes to new card numbers no matter how complicated the change

>out $500

I don't need to play 20 Questions to know you're talking about legalzoom

No, it is not.

The arithmetic used is not constant time, meaning the actual computational steps involved leak information about the secret, were either the recombination of the shares or the initial splitting were observed via side channels.

The arithmetic does not guard against party identifiers being zero or overflowing to zero, although it is not likely to occur when used this way.

I came here to ask the same thing.

Still have the requirement to stay in SF for three months?

Tor isn't a money transmitter, but also, they were indicted more for the fact they actively sought out sanctioned individuals in marketing/dev outreach

I tried the product and I don't think this intro does it justice – this is a surprisingly authentic experience that I didn't think consumer AI was ready to do. There were definitely some rough edges, but this feels good enough to pay for as a tech screen.

VIGIL?

Was thinking the same thing after a recent flight - “huh, this is new”

Yes

That "lawful" interception allows certificate issuance to be a means of wiretap completely undermines any trust one should have in CAs. It seems that an alternative is greatly needed.

They _do_ do that anyway for iCloud. The E2EE support was inherently better, as it significantly reduced the decrypted content exposure to Apple. The uproar over the feature and Apple’s relenting on the implementation resulted in no E2EE as the default. Allegedly advanced data protection does do E2EE for iCloud Photos though. I can understand the good intentions playing out poorly and being ripe for abuse.

You don't need FHE to do this – what you're describing is generically a multi-party compute scheme that can be solved by other means.

Since you have familiarity with signatures, I'll plant the seed of how this particular MPC scheme works, in parts: Distributed Key Generation, and Circuit Creation and Execution

The first step is securely generating a key – but how do you know it was done correctly with SSS? SSS follows what is called a "trusted dealer" model, where you assume what generates the Shamir splits has operated correctly, but can we do better than that? Thankfully, yes! Feldman Verifiable Secret Sharing is an enhancement over SSS, where the splits generated are committed to by raising the coefficients of the SSS polynomial to a public generator of an additively-homomorphic group, or in other words, treating the coefficients like private keys, and producing the public keys (as in elliptic curve cryptography, the private key is just a large scalar number, the public key is produced by performing scalar multiplication of the private key against a known public point – the generator, part of the public parameters of a particular curve). By having the public points (A_0, A_1, ..., A_n) corresponding to the coefficients (a_0, a_1, ..., a_n, where a_0 = secret), you can calculate the secret's commitment by using x=0, as P(x)=A_nx^n+...+A_1x+A_0 where x=0 cancels out all terms besides the secret's commitment. Similarly, you can verify your share split by using x=(your share identifier), then raise your share to the same generator. And finally, to prove that all shares are valid, each person of course must verify their share matches their commitment, but then you can do Lagrange interpolation in the exponent (because the only operations you do over the commitments are multiplying by publicly available scalars (the share identifiers), and adding public points together) across any threshold combination of commitments, they should all resolve to P(0). That's FVSS in a nutshell.

But this still requires a trusted dealer! You have to trust that the dealer itself is not corrupted and exfiltrating secrets. How can we remove the trust component? By having all share holders perform FVSS – each party creates a random polynomial, samples shares accordingly, sends the shares (securely, of course) to each corresponding party, then everyone individually adds their provided (and self-sampled) polynomial samples. Because polynomials can be added together, you have effectively combined the random polynomials of all parties, without any one party knowing the real coefficients. Then verification involves each party raising their shares to a generator like in FVSS, and publishing their public commitments. The same Lagrange interpolation process is performed to verify all threshold combinations of public points resolve to the same public point – essentially confirming the secret was generated correctly without having to reveal the secret.

Now, to use the secret – execution. The technique for this is called Oblivious Transfer – it essentially leverages the same intractability problem of a given cryptosystem (discrete log for elliptic curves) to bootstrap a circuit garbling technique. There's many ways to do this, I'll explain the simplest form, for two parties:

Party 1 generates a public key, private key pair (a, A), and has two choices for messages (m_0, m_1), and sends A to Party 2.

Party 2 generates a private key (b), and a choice bit (c), and depending on c:

  c == 0: Party 2 generates B = b \* A

  c == 1: Party 2 generates B = b \* G + A, where G is the generator of the curve.

Party 2 sends B to Party 1

Party 1 calculates:

  e_0 = Hash(a \* B)

  e_1 = Hash(a \* (B - A))

Party 1 encrypts m_0 with e_0, m_1 with e_1, and sends both encrypted messages.

Party 2 calculates:

  e_c = Hash(b \* A)

Party 2 decrypts m_c with e_c.

Because Party 2 does not know a, they cannot calculate the encryption key for the message they did not choose, as the encryption keys calculated by Party 1 are contingent on an operation on B that cancels out the respective values produced when creating B from the choice, multiplied by the private scalar a.

Additionally, because Party 1 does not know b, they cannot determine which choice Party 2 actually made.

Now, for a simple choice between messages this seems silly, but this is actually sufficient to bootstrap a logical circuit – any computable circuit can be evaluated through this process of oblivious transfer. What does that give us? The ability to jointly compute operations over data required to be kept private by each side, such as an HMAC. Since HMACs are generally used in idempotent operations, generating the HMAC for a request using an OT circuit is sufficient to do what you're wanting.

For basic authentication, you'd need to extend the OT circuit evaluation all the way out to TLS frame construction itself, but is still possible.

NB: I am creating a decentralized network, Quilibrium, to make it easy to build and deploy applications that evaluate as OT circuits – MPC TLS is on the roadmap.

This could not be found on either google or ddg. Link?

There’s a distinction — see incidents where a state employee refuses to issue a marriage license, and that gets the employee fired. Public defenders do not get the same leeway a non-state provided lawyer has in representing a client.

Would you want a lawyer who disagrees with your very existence? I wouldn’t.

Except in an intersection or on a highway

They further elaborate that security by obscurity is a poor approach though

Not to be the one prone to whataboutism, but why is the one blatantly unsubstantive pro-crypto comment chided while several other equally blatantly unsubstantive anti-crypto comments never receive the same treatment?

Seeing the Midwest figures is unsurprising and still disappointing. As someone pitching a startup, the number of big name investors that have asked where I’m calling from and have this look of “why?” or even outright asking it really shows some extreme bias. Given the world is moving more towards remote work, it’s strange that VCs still have this belief that only coastal areas can innovate.

Always Inverse Cramer

Can confirm, am one of those people.

But what do you classify an intersex person as when you see them, assuming you don't know this detail? Our social lens is focused to a binary, even if there isn't a definitive binary.

Realistically I think what has happened is the puritanical culture has donned new clothes. Blind subservience and self-flagellations to ever increasing standards of a sacrificial victim sky man who never asked for these things in the words they twisted, replaced with blind subservience to sacrificial victims in the present who one again, never asked for these things in the words they twisted.

It makes me feel like a pawn in their own self-actualization, not someone they remotely ever gave a thought or care about.