doomrobo

This looks awesome. But wow wow wow they're serving executables over HTTP and the website doesn't load if you try HTTPS. I wish I could try this out

The Squirrel Theater is a new one that I also recommend people check out. It's a non-profit founded by former UCB people, and has a strong commitment to diversity. They're completely online right now, but looking to get a physical space some time this year.

https://www.thesquirrelnyc.com/

There's B12 in nutritional yeast. One serving of Bragg's is something like 600% DV of B12

Yup that's the idea. I give an example in another comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26421172

You're right. This isn't a good use case for FHE. Instead, FHE is really useful when the query itself is private, and the data is not private.

One example is a private OCSP. Every time you open a TLS-secured webpage, your browser has to check whether or not the TLS certificate has been revoked (I'm leaving out some complications but bear with me). In order to do that, you browser has to contact the certificate authority (CA) and ask "has anyone revoked this cert?". But in doing that, the browser is revealing your browsing patterns to the CA!

It would be nice, instead, to use Private Information Retrieval to ask the CA "please process this encrypted query and return the result". Then the CA knows nothing about your browsing patterns, and you still get your data. Well, (computational) Private Information Retrieval is super inefficient today, and the best asymptotic solution we have is based on FHE (https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1142). So getting efficient FHE would hopefully make something like this a lot more reasonable for moderately sized databases.

For the record, this is only a toy example. We actually have really good solutions for private OCSP that don't require FHE. We can side-step the difficult of Private Information Retrieval in this case because OCSP databases are small enough for anyone to download. If this interests you, check out CRLite https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2020/01/09/crlite-part-1-a...

You can think of FHE as just "you can compute arbitrary polynomials over ciphertexts". You can't exactly get conditional execution using polynomials. Most people instead think of FHE computation as "arithmetic circuits".

Also, some schemes offer extra stuff for free. BFV (https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/078) for example lets you compute Frobenius endomorphisms very cheaply. That is, given ciphertext c, you can compute c^q without having to do log(q) many squarings, where q is the characteristic of your ring.

No. If they wanted to harvest metadata, they could do it while still making their repo look up to date and totally clean. Wouldn't be hard either.

Not to mention memory intensiveness. Compiling a medium sized project (https://github.com/iv-org/invidious) on a DigitalOcean $5/mo droplet will throw an out-of-memory error unless I give it a few gigs of swap space

I think the answer is don't watch TV news if you can help it. If 100% of their revenue comes from ads, then their incentives are clear: keep you watching no matter what.

The way I see it, written news at least has a wider range of options, and the subscription model means they have slightly less incentive to be so manipulative.

A webapp that lets you listen to internet articles, save them for offline listening, and continue from where you left off. That's it. I'm super surprised that this doesn't exist. If anyone knows of something similar, please comment.

I have Signal on Desktop and iOS. I would like to save my chat history to an external hard drive. How do I do that?

Let's make some concrete claims then

On partisanship: "The extremist-related murders of 2019 [in the US] were overwhelmingly (90%) linked to right-wing extremists. All but one of the incidents had ties to right-wing extremism...Almost all of the 2019 extremist-related murders were committed by white supremacists"

On weapons: "In the past 10 years, 315 of the 435 people (72%) killed in the U.S. by domestic extremists were shot to death."

Source: ADL Report on Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2019 (https://www.adl.org/murder-and-extremism-2019)

In hard drives, reading off a single track is the fastest op, and reading off of sequential tracks is the next fastest op. I’d count that as a feature of the 2d geometry of the disk

Just the first story, Fiat Homo! If anyone wants to stop there I won’t judge

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller is my favorite sci-fi short story I’ve read in a long time. It follows an order of Catholic monks in the American southwest many years after a nuclear holocaust. I won’t say more than that.

It was originally just 1 story, Fiat Homo, and then was expanded into a novel. Fiat Homo is freely available in audio form from the BBC

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03w355l/episodes/guide

Instead of just giving their word that they won’t log IPs, I t’d be nicer if they used a privacy preserving revocation lookup scheme like CRLite https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2020/01/09/crlite-part-1-a...

Here's some very thorough documentation of the use of ropes a modern text editor https://abishov.com/xi-editor/docs/rope_science_00.html

When you are at rest on the surface of the earth, you’re actually accelerating. I barely understand it but veritasium explains it in the newest vid

https://youtu.be/XRr1kaXKBsU

The latter. I used the formula from the Wikipedia page on the birthday attack: p ~= 1 - e^{-n^2/2H} where n is the number of items you've picked and H is the size of the universe

Hashes are now 256 bits. In order to get a collision with probability 1% you need to produce about 4e37 hashes. For comparison, if you had a 5GHz computer that did a SHA-256 hash every cycle and gave 100 of these computers to every human on Earth, it'd take over 300 million years to produce 4e37 hashes.

Previous discussion

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24175351

This is too general an argument. Why did people work in factories where they'd lock the door during the day? Or where there were machines that sometimes ripped people's arms off? Why did this spur regulations on workplace conditions?

There's some cryptographic work in this direction. PhotoProof allows a photographer to prove that the image they're presenting is, e.g., the cropped version of the true original image they took. Video is still way out there, but at least people are thinking about this.

https://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tromer/papers/photoproof-oakland16...

(2015)

I'd really like a self-hosted videochat solution that had a native client. Basically something like Mumble (https://mumble.info) but for video.

The reason I want it is because most large videochat solutions have a really high variance in latency and reliability. If I just want a small group chat with friends, I'd have far fewer issues if I just self-hosted. I've already found this to be true for Discord audio versus self-hosting Mumble.

"didn't actually kill anyone"

Sure, but the intention was clearly there. He had guns inside, had shot them from a gun port in the chassis, destroyed structures that were occupied until they were hastily evacuated, and had people's names on his kill list.

I was surprised by this since it excludes billions of people, but then I saw it's explicitly an English-only forum

I hate to say it, but Signal.

Signal has consistently been a pain to use for my moderately sized (<15) friend group chat and for 1-on-1 threads too.

Messages sometimes don't arrive or arrive out of ordered and appear in the wrong order, scrolling up has random jumping behavior, opening the chat in iOS causes my audio to stop playing, there is explicitly no way to back up any of the chat, copying multiple messages is broken on desktop, search is super slow and search result previews have been corrupted for as long as I can remember, sharing links through the iOS share menu causes the app to behave super weird or just crash (my mom can't share links with me through Signal), you can't mute conversations on desktop (IIRC there have been two PRs implementing this feature in the last 2 years; both not pulled), mutual verification is so frustrating that I literally got yelled at when trying to explain it to my parents, I sometimes can't take pictures from within the app, when I can take pictures the viewfinder is half the resolution of the actual camera and everything looks blurry, the most recent app update causes a several second lag whenever I open the group chat, and I am throughly convinced that every issue I've mentioned is so low priority for the people running the show that they won't get fixed for a very long time. At least we have stickers now.

Seriously though I believe in what Signal is doing and will probably continue to use and suggest the app. But it will hurt every time I do it.

Examples?