truantbuick

I don't remember. It was many years ago -- circa 2015. Nevertheless, I'm irritated by the implication that it's the user's responsibility to do this.

At least as recently as last year, I've discovered instances where iPhone users will not have received a message/image (both from me and others in group chat) seemingly randomly.

I really don't like that Apple has managed to sell a prevailing narrative that it's somehow the fault of users who don't buy their expensive hardware that is necessary to use their software that impinges on an open protocol.

They held my number hostage for a while after I switched off iPhone. I think it took months for iPhone users to be able to message my number before it actually started reaching me again.

I think there's a lot of truth to the word "hijacking" here.

I'm getting the impression that the new job I'm starting very soon uses something like this.

Any suggestions on most convenient way to cover up camera when not using it? I've looked at a few "webcam camera slide" products around, but I'm hearing a lot of reports of them cracking the screen of recent Macbook Pros.

AFAIK the only player to have tested positive for COVID in that outbreak is Gleyber Torres (the rest were support staff), who had an actual COVID infection before, which undermines your idea that getting COVID is somehow superior to getting vaccinated.

And as already mentioned, the Yankees received the J&J vaccine, which is not an MRNA vaccine.

Not the best example since there was a severe earthquake in Pompeii in 62 AD. They were still rebuilding in 79 AD when the town was destroyed by Vesuvius.

Not sure you meant to imply otherwise, but just to clarify: Bly intentionally got herself committed for an undercover assignment.

From a great coffee table book, "100 Facts About Pandas", by David O'Doherty and Claudia O'Doherty (no relation).

https://www.amazon.com/Facts-About-Pandas-David-ODoherty/dp/...

One of my other favorite "facts" in there is that if a panda gets struck by lightning, its black parts turn white and its white parts turn black. It is called a "negative panda". If it gets struck by lightning once more, it reverts to its natural coloring and it is called a "double-negative panda", or just a "panda".

Don't forget about Keith B. Alexander, the director of the NSA at that time.

He testified to congress that this program helped foil 54 terror plots. Weeks later, he conceded that it was helpful in "only one or two".

We later found out there was basically just one, and it wasn't a terror plot; it was a Somali-born taxi driver living in San Diego who attempted to send $8,500 to a Somali terror group.

But the damage was done. The headlines blared from his initial testimony about the NSA using this program to thwart 50+ terror plots, but there was a fraction of that coverage correcting it.

Clapper's perjury may be more blatant, but Gen. Alexander's is pretty galling too. They both should've been charged.

> There's so much to learning where the sharp bits of math are; proofs are the razor-thin path through the briar patch.

This is an excellent metaphor using beautiful language. Did you just coin this yourself or is it pre-existing?

Isn't this article missing the point of the internet?

It talks about an ambitious (but ultimately aborted) top-down project to build thousands of interlinking mainframes.

But building large networks wasn't particularly novel. It was the idea that you could build a logical layer that potentially linked any network.

The key to the early internet was you didn't necessarily need to build anything physical. You could link up several existing networks in any which way you want, despite involving disparate organizations, systems, and infrastructure.

Billions? Ridiculous.

There's a lot of suggestions of what one might accomplish with this exploit, but I'm not sure they would be obviously more lucrative than this. Any time you use it, you're likely to lose it, so its value is pretty precarious. How much can you really accomplish in a few hours?

People get hacked so often on twitter that there's already substantial doubt ("did they get hacked?") whenever somebody tweets something odd, so I really doubt you could accomplish some diabolical geopolitical aim that some seem to expect.

And as if it's so straightforward to find a terrorist billionaire that's willing to pay top dollar to use it to start a war or something to that end.

I'd like to believe we will start mass manufacturing all promising candidates long before testing is complete.

The stakes are so high this time that it's important _as soon as_ testing results are deemed adequate, they can start distributing them, even if it means manufacturing stuff that doesn't ultimately pan out.

The Astros hid behind the guise that they were outstanding at picking up "tipping" from opposing pitchers. i.e. The smallest difference in a pitcher's delivery, imperceptible to you or I, would indicate what kind of pitch was coming. Writers often talked about how Alex Cora or Carlos Beltran or Jose Altuve were just remarkable "students of the game" and would figure it out and tell the rest of the lineup who would pounce upon it.

It's kinda funny to look back on, because I remember lots of people producing videos where they would supposedly point out what the Astros were picking up on, and it never seemed very clear to me no matter how much they slowed down the footage.

Another thing to note is that there's always fun baseball stats coming out. Kershaw getting no misses on his breaking balls would just be one of several interesting tidbits talked about the next day. It wouldn't really cause suspicion, as most people would just assume it indicates Kershaw was ineffective.

For example, in the the 2017 ALCS, Astros pitcher Lance McCullers finished off the feared Yankees lineup by throwing 24 straight curveballs. This is no suggestion that Lance McCullers cheated; it's just an example that there's always odd stuff to reflect upon the next day.

To all appearances, this looked like an actual kidnapping. For myself, I'm happy to receive an amber alert on my phone even if it sometimes ends up being a false alarm. About your point of "productivity", I can't really say, but I'm skeptical that it's worth measuring such a tiny disruption to a day even if it affects millions of people.

It's more annoying to me when they issue Amber Alerts for fairly low risk non-custodial parental abduction cases. I could easily see that making the whole system less effective if they deploy it for such cases.

I don't know specifically about secp256r1, but in general, I think there were already a lot of suspicions and most people were wary of any ECC curves NIST or NSA had chosen by 2008 when Bitcoin was developed. [1]

In a purported email [2] (reasonably well attested to) from Satoshi Nakamato, he claimed

> I didn't find anything to recommend a curve type so I just... picked one.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140621062515/http://archive.wi...

[2] https://archive.is/lHHSk

> At any time in the past five years, Google could have leveraged Android’s 80-plus-percent market share and told carriers that it was launching a default messaging service that works like iMessage, falling back to SMS only when necessary.

One of the reasons I threw away my iPhone was because I detest iMessage. I'm not sure why the author thinks that was the way to go.

Ah, thank you! That explains it.

As far as I can tell, he uses "word" in the same way it's used today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_(computer_architecture)

But, he does say a "word" is the information of 6 letters or 10 numbers, which is a bit curious.

My understanding is the most encodings for letters in 1960s were 6 bits, so that would perhaps imply a 36-bit word for Dr. Corbato's computer. But then, if you have to fit ten of them into a word, you could only use up to 3-bit integers, which doesn't sound right.

This post is running around BSV-associated social media outlets. [1] [2]

BSV is a project almost entirely propped up by a billionaire gambling tycoon named Calvin Ayre who is promoting a known con-artist named Craig Wright [3] as the inventor of Bitcoin. They promote BitcoinSV, which came into existence last November as the "One True Bitcoin". They are invested in massive astro-turfing for publicity and to lend themselves perceived legitimacy.

[1] https://twitter.com/_unwriter/status/1143599992667590656

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoincashSV/comments/c5eg27/its_t...

[3] https://craigwright.online/

I'm still enraged over the fact that Oracle got $300 million to make a website for Oregon's healthcare and failed. The website wasn't ready (nor would it ever be ready), and the whole state's healthcare was in tatters when the ACA came into effect. Oregon had to scramble to hire thousands of temporary staff and start processing paper forms to keep things running.

Oregon sued and ended up settling ostensibly for $100 million, but in actuality, it was $60 million in "customer service" and $25 million in legal fees.

Obviously, Oregon's government is culpable as well, but it's another data point to suggest Oracle is a dodgy sales/legal company posing as an engineering company.

You mentioned in another comment that haplogroups would be too foreign a classification for you, but that would likely be the most specific/differentiated classifier.

If somebody says they're a "quarter French" -- putting aside whether that's interesting or not -- do you believe that's meaningless? Do you demand them to specify whether it was one of they have Gallic roots or if it was one of the Germanic tribes that invaded from the north 1500 years ago or something else altogether?

I think the point of this test is to try to capture the spirit of what Americans have done for a long time, which is to try to describe their heritage in fractions using nationality of a distant (but not too distant past) as a rough guide.

And in the same way that your genome might prove more complicated than naming fractions by nation, somebody might say "My grandfather came to the USA from France... but he was part of a second generation immigrant community from a Greek-speaking part of Sicily who emigrated en masse to Alsace, which was located in Germany, not France at the time".

So maybe the DNA test will call that French or German or Italian or Sicilian or Greek or whatever and that might oversimplify it and the test doesn't work as well as somebody whose ancestors stayed in one location and was part of a largely homogeneous population, but that doesn't render the test meaningless. Part of the excitement people derive is that it can sometimes illuminate your ancestral history beyond what is well known. Using the previous example, somebody might not be aware of the complexity of their grandfather's heritage, and might be interested to understand that part of the family has roots in Sicily and not just France.

It doesn't mean _nothing_ -- it's just prone to the same type of problems and edge cases affecting pretty much every attempt at categorizing in a very complex system.

"There is not universal agreement on the region’s components." [1]

"It can be difficult to define exactly which countries are included in the Balkan States. It is a name that has both geographic and political definitions, with some of the countries crossing what scholars consider the 'boundaries' of the Balkans." [2]

Almost the entire wikipedia article is dedicated to explaining the various definitions of it and how it is a problematic term. [3]

[1] https://www.britannica.com/place/Balkans

[2] https://www.thoughtco.com/where-are-the-balkan-states-407024...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkans

What are the characteristics of those who generated an RSA key sharing a prime factor? Can they be linked back to a few bad CSPRNG implementations?

What are practical steps to be responsible about it?

It's contrived, but I just imagine that if I'm generating some particularly important keys, that I should somehow find a way to give /dev/urandom a kick of some kind. Even if that were possible, it's more likely to make things worse than better. Still, it makes me a little paranoid to even hear about theoretical weaknesses -- especially like collision attacks. I have no idea how long it takes for the CSPRNG to get properly seeded. Does it take a microsecond after booting? 10 minutes? A day?

> That doesn't mean "there are truths that humans can never prove", all it means is that we have to extend our axiomatic systems in order to prove some truths.

If you believe that the only consequence to Gödel's theorem is we need to "extend our axiomatic system", I do think you've missed the point.

For one thing, I think Gödel's theorem and Gödel's proof are unfortunately conflated.

Gödel's proof is lovely and elegant, and can be understood with minimal knowledge of logic, but, ultimately, all it does is provide a counter example. So when people read his proof and understand it, they tend to be unimpressed with its power because the counter example is very generic and seems an uninteresting barrier to our ability to discern "truth". But that says nothing about there may be lots of other kinds of unprovable statements.

Ultimately, Gödel's theorem tells us one absolute kernel of truth by saying all but very basic axiomatic models are necessarily incomplete. However which way you want to make the philosophical leap to connect that to our notion of "truth" seems far more up to interpretation, but it annoys me when people disrespect the theorem because they're unimpressed with the counter examples the proof constructs.

Speaking mostly about my experience with Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition, but my impression is it's pretty similar for the other games:

The early EE release was a bit buggy. When you're just re-releasing an old game and charging $20+ for it, if it ends up buggier than the original, it tends to attract the "what are you good for?" sentiment.

But

1. They've ironed out the bugs over the years

2. There's loads of nice interface improvements that makes it a much more polished experience.

3. The new content they add tends to be a notch or two below the original game, but I still find it pretty enjoyable and well above the quality of most fan mods. And the new content isn't intrusive; you can ignore it if you want.

4. Obviously, it's much more convenient than trying to figure out how to install the original from CDRom, and it's nice that I can play it on Mac or on a tablet these days.

5. The modding community has entirely embraced EE and has for years. I was afraid that I would be unable to install some of my favorite mods when I tried the EE version, but it's actually much easier. If you try to go non-EE, then you're probably going to have more problems with installing stuff nobody has paid attention to in 8 years.

It's interesting that there are a few bits of evidence that are used for and against the Satoshi = Szabo question:

1. Szabo wasn't cited in Satoshi's white paper

2. Szabo barely mentioned Satoshi or bitcoin in his own blog or posts until Satoshi had disappeared

3. In an email to Wei Dai (another pioneer in this space), Satoshi introduces himself and seems to imply he had only recently learned about Wei Dai (and by association, Szabo)

I tend to lean in the direction that Szabo probably knows more than he's let on.

Basically, it comes down to that I find it almost impossible that whoever developed bitcoin was entirely unaware of Szabo and Wei Dai's previous proposals and efforts during the development. Newton and Leibniz supposedly invented Calculus independent of one another, and considering their approach and notation, that seems plausible, but bit gold is so much like bitcoin (including, but not limited to the name), I just refuse to accept that.

And then when you suppose that Satoshi must've known about Szabo, the three bits of evidence above seem very suspicious. Taking the evidence above:

1. Once Satoshi discovered Wei Dai's similar work and cited him, why didn't he cite Szabo?

2. This was Szabo's baby. Why was he almost silent for 3+ years about the very thing he had written about for 10 years that was finally put into practice?

3. Satoshi contacted the other pioneers in the space (Adam Back, Wei Dai), and yet Szabo hasn't mentioned a thing about any communications he received from Satoshi.

It's speculation, but if you've been following the drama like I have (I'm not particularly interested in cryptocurrency per se, but I love reading about it like a sporting event), it's almost certainly Craig.

Craig Wright has been caught numerous times falsifying evidence that leads people to think he's Satoshi Nakamoto. It's such a ridiculous ruse, and I think the only reason he's still hanging around is he's backed by a billionaire named Calvin Ayre who has thrown his full weight behind Craig Wright. Ayre built a whole company around Craig that's constantly trying to promote him as being Satoshi.

A couple weeks ago, a new twitter user with the handle @satoshi emerged and tweeted a signature that validates with Satoshi's public key. The problem? A signature in ECDSA can easily be forged using only knowledge of the public key. It doesn't prove anything unless you're signing a non-gibberish message. This is also very similar to a trick Craig Wright already tried when he first tried to claim he was Satoshi in 2016.

The twitter user got suspended, so that got shut down without much of a fuss in the media, but if you follow this closely, you know that Craig was involved based on MO and because the public relations blitz of his company was very carefully coordinated almost exactly when @satoshi started tweeting. (Among other things, @satoshi and Craig's typical twitter posted extremely similar tweets within a few minutes of each other.)

Similarly, in this case, Craig and associated social media accounts started making thinly veiled oblique references to "light" and "nour" at the same time.

Has anybody in the world said that Caruana was "dead to rights" in game 12?

That's not what the controversy was about. It was the fact that white had "winning chances" in a completely unclear position with most pieces were still on the board. "Winning chances" isn't winning.

Magnus's reputation is he's a guy who will usually press on in a (seemingly) flat endgame where a lot of GMs will agree to draw and occasionally will squeeze out a win in those circumstances. It's antithetical to that image for him to offer a draw in a position _no_ GM would offer in typical circumstances. He did it for strategic reasons, and given his performance in the tiebreaker today, it looks all the more justifiable for the purposes of winning, but some people don't like that attitude from a champion.

Beyond overt fraud, I feel like there's so much incentive for imprudent analysis.

Several times when I've worked on a project at work that involves data analysis, I get really impatient responses when I don't come to a firm conclusion. We're not even talking about highly charged subjects. I'm not aware if my stakeholders are biased toward one conclusion or another -- I think they're just very upset that my analysis contains uncertainty. They expect me to be able to massage any kind of data to derive clear and obvious facts.

Thankfully, I can refuse this without much consequence, but it's really opened my eyes to the potential pressures to corrupt the integrity of fact-finding in even mundane circumstances.