Hacker News Reader

croikleon Automatically encrypt your Gmail account

This is why all worthwhile encryption schemes are nondeterministic, incorporating randomness. If you encrypt the same data twice with GPG, the results will not be the same.

croikleon NSA can retain encrypted communications of Americans possibly indefinitely

Limiting the energy source to a single star is weak. If you use a whole galaxy (or several) you can easily bring that up to 256 bits. For example, the Milky Way has on the order of 10^11 stars; most of those aren't supernova-sized, but if we use a few million galaxies we can get that many. That gives you an extra 37 bits, bringing the counter to 256.

So, if you have terrifically huge enemies, who will burn galaxies to get at your secrets, you might want to use a few more bits.

You might worry about quantum computers, too, since afaik Grover's algorithm halves effective key size.

croikleon NSA can retain encrypted communications of Americans possibly indefinitely

To expand on this a little, 256-bit RSA is easily crackable, since there are good algorithms for integer factorization. You need a significant increase in key length to get equivalent security to symmetric keys: Wikipedia claims 3072-bit RSA ~ 128-bit symmetric, 15360-bit RSA ~ 256-bit symmetric. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_size#Asymmetric_algorithm_...

croikleon US hacked Pacnet, Asia Pacific fibre-optic network operator, in 2009

    $('.region').style.visibility="visible"

to show content without running their js.

croikleon Encrypted e-mail: How much annoyance will you tolerate to keep the NSA away?

Yep, they're still rather vulnerable. I guess their approach would stop a dumb MitM which just replaces any .exe download. It also protects against the download server being compromised, assuming the original server is fine and your connection is clean.

The best way is to check the signature, but that requires GPG in the first place (and trust on the key remains hairy). At least they could serve the site with HTTPS (GPGTools does this right).

croikleon The Guardian walks back claims of direct NSA access to servers of tech companies

The yottabyte stuff is basically BS. HN user Jabbles found a possible source for that, which just says '''The target GIG supports capacities exceeding exabytes (10^18 bytes) and possibly yottabytes (10^24 bytes) of data.'''[0]

Exabytes are eminently reasonable; yottabytes are not.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5854587

croikleon Evidence of Turkish state violence in pictures

Submission is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5825443 if anyone would like to support it.

kweks: Posts start on 'new', and only rise to the front page if they get enough traction. Unfortunately, yours has been missed so far.

croikleon Ask HN: Is hotmail.com/outlook.com storing passwords in clear text?

They could hash substrings or variations of the new password and check against the original hash. Further, I guess they could be storing hashes of several modified passwords, but that seems unlikely.

croikleon How crackers ransack passwords like “qeadzcwrsfxv1331”

http://www.inutile.ens.fr/estatis/password-security-checker

The Terms and Conditions are worthwhile, too.

EDIT: Also, see http://www.ismytwitterpasswordsecure.com/ (needs Javascript)

croikleon Calculating the perfect Tetris play: Part I

Note that results like this [0] tend to be for generalizations. '''It is natural to generalize the Tetris gameboard to m-by-n, since a relatively simple dynamic program solves the case of a constant-size gameboard in time polynomial in the number of pieces.'''

[0] http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0210020

croikleon Logged in to LinkedIn? I just got your details

A good reason to use something like RequestPolicy [0]. I'd rather not tell LinkedIn, Facebook, etc., about everything I read.

[0] https://www.requestpolicy.com/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/requestpolicy...

croikleon Google 'kerning' easter egg

The highlighted instances of "kerning" have extra letter-spacing.

croikleon Turing Drawings

Interestingly, that's quite similar to cookingrobot's.

[ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5709406 ]

croikleon Turing Drawings

The world is finite, so every drawing eventually loops.

However, the state space is something like k * 2^18 * n^(2^18), where k is the number of states and n the number of symbols. For the default (4, 3) this is 3.125 * 10^125080, so you could be waiting for a while :)

croikleon Try Objective-C

PDF.js doesn't use emscripten, as far as I can tell.

For a recent example of emscripten, try this one from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5673356