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saynsediton Reasons not to use (i.e., be used by) Facebook

Okay... So you just want to know why RMS has posted pictures online? How is that relevant to original post at all?

saynsediton Reasons not to use (i.e., be used by) Facebook

Okay, what is the intent of your post?

saynsediton Reasons not to use (i.e., be used by) Facebook

Yeah when people say correct things in an incorrect way it makes them incorrect. Why don't RMS supporters understand that?

saynsediton Reasons not to use (i.e., be used by) Facebook

What is your point? Criticizing Facebook is not inconsistent with posting a curated list of photos online.

saynsediton Reasons not to use (i.e., be used by) Facebook

There's also GNU social. It's a decentralized (a la email/XMPP) social network. Distributed technology is not there yet but decentralized gets us pretty far.

saynsediton Reasons not to use (i.e., be used by) Facebook

Yes yes, let's focus on the superficial components of his arguments via false equivalences and ignore the very legitimate criticisms he makes.

RMS argues like an idiot therefore Facebook is probably blameless. Progress.

saynsediton My Most Important C++ Aha Moments (2006)

Yep the beauty (and maybe curse) of C++ iterators is that they are a faithful abstraction of pointers.

saynsediton The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fields

For a mathematically rigorous password strength meter library, check out zxcvbn: http://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbn

saynsediton The British are Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it

False equivalence, I wouldn't call uninformed voting (as they are painting it) extreme. I would call malicious voting extreme though.

In any case you're probably right. Most people who voted to exit the EU probably weren't uninformed. Google data only represents correlation. General buzz about brexit is a more likely explanation for the search trends. Occam's razor dominates.

saynsediton The British are Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it

The support of Trump has data behind it.

Second-hand anecdotes of people claiming they'll vote for Trump just to see the system come down is not data.

Without data, it may be such a minority of people that it's not worth significant consideration in a discussion. I'm apt to believe it's an extreme minority given it's an extreme view.

saynsediton The British are Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it

Actually I think HN leans center. HN has no particularly inspiring agenda, it's mostly conformity to the status quo. There are extreme left and right on HN but they are usually down voted.

saynsediton The British are Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it

It makes a good story. People love reading about how other people are stupid.

You can see the projected bias: people who voted for brexit must be idiots whose knowledge depends on Google.

saynsediton The British are Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it

Yep. Also: a single day of consequence is apparently enough time for "I told you so."

Maybe I should judge my entire life by what happens today.

saynsediton The British are Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it

Do you know anyone personally who has said this?

saynsediton Bloody Plant Burger Smells, Tastes and Sizzles Like Meat

For the record, I know plenty of people who actually believe climate change isn't real. Is that relevant to a discussion on environmental policy?

saynsediton Bloody Plant Burger Smells, Tastes and Sizzles Like Meat

Is linking to some random opinion article on the Internet your way of arguing for the validity of stereotypes? Well, I'm convinced. Too bad "accurate enough" doesn't work in physics, we'd already understand the universe by now!

saynsediton Bloody Plant Burger Smells, Tastes and Sizzles Like Meat

I don't think getting GMOs labeled is a plot to get all consumers to boycott them... It's so the subsection of the population that cares about ingesting GMOs can make an informed choice when buying food.

That's like saying getting kosher food labeled was really a plot to get everyone to boycott all non-kosher food.

saynsediton Bloody Plant Burger Smells, Tastes and Sizzles Like Meat

Ohhh I see. It's similar to how vegans generally consider all non-vegans immoral lazy unhealthy fat poison-eating murderers. The informal sociological clustering is efficient since the generalization is ~80% true. Nuance wastes too much time.

saynsediton Even Mark Zuckerberg puts tape over his webcam

"No, government spies probably don't care what you're saying or doing in front of your computer."

This logic really annoys me. The implication is that it's not so bad that the govt. can violate privacy since most people have nothing to hide.

It's like saying censorship is not so bad since most people have nothing to say.

saynsediton Bloody Plant Burger Smells, Tastes and Sizzles Like Meat

Not all people subscribe to the conventional wisdom that carbs and oils are unconditionally unhealthy.

Oils can help your body absorb nutrients more effectively and also aid in other cellular processes.

Carbs are energy and your body needs this.

The key is to not consume processed carbs/oils that your body can't integrate.

Carbs from fruits and natural oils (like coconut) are a large component of any thoughtful vegan's diet. You can eat lots of these foods because they not only have carbs but they also have fiber, protein and other vitamins in good proportion, so "carb the f* up!"

Obsessively starving your body of all carbs and eating lots of meat is an extreme and unbalanced diet and will certainly lead to an early death. Just eat whole foods.

saynsediton JSON Web Tokens vs. Sessions

Asking you to disclose your identity was only a suggestion and it was offered at your discretion, appealing to your potential desire to be a Good Samaritan.

My sincere intent was not to offend you but protect you from yourself. I had already offered what I thought was sufficient explanation for the attack and I felt there were no further options.

I did not mean to offend you but since I have I apologize. I don't believe one's self-worth or employability is based on their expertise in computer security but I can see how that can be implied by what I wrote and I was wrong to be careless with my language online. Honestly I am no expert either. I just hope we can all cooperate, put our egos aside, remain humble in our limited knowledge, keep an open mind and stay focused on the facts to build more secure systems.

Peace and well wishes to you and your family.

saynsediton Bloody Plant Burger Smells, Tastes and Sizzles Like Meat

Okay, I don't believe you would suffer at a psychological level either, does that give me the right to take your blood without your consent?

saynsediton Bloody Plant Burger Smells, Tastes and Sizzles Like Meat

Probably good to stay away from processed food in general, and worry about carbs second.

Fruits and vegetables will take you far. If it doesn't taste good to you, put some salt on it.

saynsediton Bloody Plant Burger Smells, Tastes and Sizzles Like Meat

What does being "vegan on principle" mean here? What specific principles are you talking about?

Some vegans do it because killing animals is morally bankrupt.

Some vegans do it because raising livestock is unsustainable. There is not enough land on earth for everyone to have a meat diet.

Some vegans do it because it's healthier. In general you can expect to ingest less toxins by eating lower on the food chain.

I'm not sure what vegan principles are violated by GMOs. I don't know of anyone who is actually against GMOs, the debate is around labeling them not banning them.

Personally I don't understand why someone wouldn't want to eat pesticide/herbicide drenched food. It's how we're going to feed the third world.

saynsediton Bloody Plant Burger Smells, Tastes and Sizzles Like Meat

It's cruel to take a human's blood without their consent, even if done painlessly.

saynsediton Chasing the DAO Attacker’s Wake – A second exploit

Any code that calls arbitrary callbacks is prone to failure. The context in which a callback is called matters.

Calling a callback at the end of a method avoids interfering with the caller's state but ignores the state of the caller's caller.

An ethereum contract will only be tractably analyzable if it avoids dynamically invoking arbitrary callbacks.

saynsediton Bloody Plant Burger Smells, Tastes and Sizzles Like Meat

Better yet, why not use real human blood? It's probably cheaper.

saynsediton JSON Web Tokens vs. Sessions

It wasn't a personal attack. Computer security is a minefield of unknown unknowns. Individuals that aren't deeply familiar with all the modern attacks or aren't skeptical of unknown attacks shouldn't design crypto, has nothing to do with you. Some people need a document to tell them what the secure thing to do is, security analysts don't. I would beg anyone who claims that timing attacks against signatures don't exist to not build crypto systems. In the same way I would beg anyone who denies climate change to not make public policy, wouldn't you?

saynsediton JSON Web Tokens vs. Sessions

First, the signature isn't necessary public. As you said, there is a separation of concerns. If the JWT authentication is wrapped underneath encryption, then the signature is private.

In either case, public or private, an attacker shouldn't be able to create their own tokens at their leisure. Token theft is guarded against using encryption, token creation is guarded against using constant-time compare. Encryption cannot protect timing attacks.

Again, the hash secret is irrelevant in the case of trying to generate a token for a specific user. The signature for a specific user payload is an opaque hash that can be discovered via timing analysis. The secret hash function that was used to produce it is not important if timing information is available.

If you cannot understand this, please I beg you, do NOT design crypto systems. If you'd like to be an even better Good Samaritan, please disclose your identity to the community. This may protect your future employer and their customers from a breach.

saynsediton JSON Web Tokens vs. Sessions

This is not about retrieving the key, an attacker can still retrieve the correct opaque signature for specific data. This potentially allows an attacker to impersonate a user.