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moscovium

386 karma · joined May 3, 2017

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moscovium··on Attacking Merkle Trees with a second preimage attack
This was interesting, but when you think about it, this isn't really a flaw as much as something inherent to the way it was designed.

Imagine you had some combinations of functions f, g, and h such that f(g(h(x))) = y. Obviously you could calculate that as h(x) -> g(h(x)) -> f(g(h(x)) = y, but then of course knowing h(x), or g(h(x)) would enable you to find y as well. So of course, due to the recursive nature of it, picking any set of inputs that were the outputs of a previous call would give you the same output.

That argument doesn't exactly fit multiple inputs, but the idea is the same.

moscovium··on Why Developers Never Use State Machines (2011)
We tend to use state machines for massively asynchronous operations like order management (with days between updates), as well as a home-built library for handling the task. It's incredibly fault tolerant and offers really easy abstraction and automation.
moscovium··on Solresol
Always love Tom Scott (and 12tone!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyC4lLTOyL8

moscovium··on How Common Is Your Birthday? (2012)
Heavy concentration 9 months after the coldest times of the year...baby it's cold outside.

Personally, there was a pretty significant blizzard ~40 weeks before I was born. Snowstorm babies unite.

moscovium··on Privacy
Not trying to be an apple fanboy here, but that seems like a business decision concerning Chinese citizens to keep operating in China, having nothing to do with non-Chinese citizens.
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