This is such a nice and pragmatic solution. And yet for some reason people would rather prefer the CA madness we know in the HTTPS ecosystem to be established in the SSH world. I understand that DANE was ahead of its time which is why we settled with CAs for SSL certificates but can we please take a different route this time for SSH?
Thanks for the feedback. It's certainly interesting to see that you did not find it helpful at all. I was oversimplifying so much that I felt uncomfortable about it because I feel like some aspects of my answer are just borderline wrong. I don't think I can make it even simpler. Explaining highly technical issues to people without any background in that field really is a tough skill that I apparently don't possess.
Also: I did not use ChatGPT. Proof: Any native english speaker can tell you that my answers do not come from a native speaker. I don't think ChatGPT can mimic that (yet). English not being your first language can have its virtues.
It's strange if you come from Weierstrasser curves and think of public keys as points on the curve, which I think is what most people start with. I was obviously oversimplifying heavily.
An extra titbit for anybody who is interested in this: The Weierstrasser curve used by Bitcoin (secp256k1) has an interesting public key where the secret key is 1/2. What's so special about this (apart from the fact that the key is a nothing-up-my-sleeve number) is the x-coordinate of that public key has 162 leading 0-bits (out of 256). This can be used for saving Bitcoin transaction fees as they use the DER encoding to compress these leading 0 bits.*
Considering that it is highly unlikely that this is a coincidence it is believed that the designers of the secp256k1 curve chose the generator point based on that value. They looked at that point (1/2, P) and then they defined the generator point G as 2*P.
* NOTE: don't try this at home. If you're not clever about this you will lose all your Bitcoins.
Very generally speaking: with ECC using Weierstrasser curves the secret key is a x-bit integer (say x=128 for example) that is usually generated randomly and the public key is a point on the curve that you get by multiplying a "generator point" with that secret key using elliptic curve point multiplication. Actually, it is only the x-coordinate of that point but that doesn't really matter. This all has to satisfy certain mathematical properties. Most importanly given a public key (remember, this is a point on the curve) it should not be possible to undo the multiplication to retrieve the secret key.
If you understand this it becomes obvious why it is strange that people seem to be able to know the private key of the all 0 public key. Getting to that point on the curve would either require undoing the multiplication or brute force, both of which are not feasible assuming that ECC is not broken.
Without going to deep: the explanation of this penomenon is that ed25519 uses a different curve model (not Weierstrasser curves) where this logic does not completely apply due to special cases.
I'm always (pleasantly) surprised to see that DNS sinkholing is still a viable option. Couldn't smart tv vendors or the like simply hardcode DNS resolvers and use DNSSEC or DoH (with certificate pinning) to circumvent it?
I personally don't use LastPass due do their history of failures. My point is that the tweet in question and people around here are insinuating that attackers have gained access to unencrypted passwords in the infrastructure of LastPass. This would a new low for LastPass and I would advice to not jump to conclusins gegarding this aspect unless other stories like this pop up, i.e., passwords getting hacked despite being resilient against brute force attacks.
You missed the point. maria2 is talking about whitebox crypto. The "whitebox" part means that the decryption process happens on your machine incuding the secrets, which are present in some obfuscated scrambled form in memory. Getting the secret key is a matter of debugging and understanding the obfuscation scheme. A prime example of this is DRM like Widevine (L3) in the chrome browser.
Well, you would only need to compromise a dns zone once and sneak in your DNS record. If the actual owner of the domain/zone does not carefully watch their records and if they use a different verification method for their certificates, then you'll have a continously operating backdoor. Maybe this is somewhat fabricated, but if you require a fresh challenge everytime, then that means the attacker has to maintain a compromised channel to the dns zone, which one could argue raises the bar significantly.
That's a different proof of ownership model, though. If I understand it correctly, you set the DNS record once and then forget about it. Hence, you will only prove that you had control over the zone at some point in time. With the DNS-01 challenge you prove that you have control over the zone at the time you request the certificate, because it requires a new TXT record every time.
I'm not talking about success. I just stated that Mastodon is not going to be a replacement for twitter in the sense that it is never going to be a platform with hundreds of millions of active daily users, which is what (for some reason) a lot of people think Mastodon has the potential for.
I'm talking about mainstream adoption. Mastodon is never going to be anything more than a niche phenomenon. Similar to how odysee is never going to be the next YouTube, which is even more ridiculous that people believed that.
If you want the masses you need a "classic" setup: big commercial company, lots of money and a centralized infrastructure.
It's absolutely beyond me how people believed (or still believe) that Mastodon will be a replacement for Twitter. That's a level of delusion I will never get behind.
Serious counter-counter-point for anybody interested: HTTPS protects people from ISP-based MITM attacks. This by itself is more than enough reason to always use HTTPS if your website can be accessed by other people, even if it is just a small little innocent static blob of HTML.
In case you want to download genuine Windows ISOs you can use https://tb.rg-adguard.net. It's a simple website that uses some sort of MS API to generate download links (directly from Microsoft servers). AFAIK MS does not publish checksums of their ISOs anymore, which means you have to rely on trusted sources to compare hashes, but at least it is a download directly from MS servers instread of some random torrent.
Unfortunately, side-channel attacks like this (or like Meltdown, Spectre, TLBleed, Foreshadow, etc...) only have negligible real-world impact. They are very interesting from a theoretical point of view, but are usually totally impractical for a plethora of reasons. Therefore, chip designers aren't really pressured into thinking about new chip designs. The sad reality is that something like Log4Shell, which is super boring from a theoretical point of view, is much more practical for attackers to exploit.
> To use that terminology though, your body could be said to have a "set point" that it aims for, but that "set point" can change.
Which I acknowledged. You can decrease (or increase) your set point, but there is a limit to that. Thinking that everybody has the potential to be at BMI x simply does not match reality. The vast range of human physiology is stunning. Everybody is different. Some people need to carefully watch every bite they take and they still struggle with overweight, whereas others can eat "what they want" and they are underweight.
Totally neglecting any genetic component here is equally as false as neglecting the impact of factors like diet, exercise and environmental ones.
It's genetics. I think it's called the set point theory. You're genetically programmed to keep a certain body fat percentage. Anything below (or above) that set point and you're body will regulate your appetite with hormones. You can manipulate this set point with things like diet or exercise, but there is only so much you can do. If you're genetically programmed to keep a body fat percentage of 25% for example you're not gonna have a lot of fun staying below 15%.
What's even worse is that a lot of people think that it is a great idea to check the TLD against the set of existing TLDs. Of course, nobody gets such a whitelist right or cares to update it if new TLDs are created. From experience I can say that having an e-mail address with a not so popular and rather new gTLD is an absolute nightmare. We had to roll out aliases with "normal" TLDs to combat this.
That is also why cheating done by actually skilled people is really dificult to detect. Schmooey is a skilled guitar hero player and therefore he very well knows the limitations in terms of the results the competitive gh community will believe him. A random kid with no skill would have no idea of what he is actually doing and would just perform some absolutely unreal run that nobody would buy into. It's a bit like cheating in chess where a grandmaster using an engine would not blindly play the best moves but rather the ones that seem barely within human capabilities. Or like a professional runner on EPO who breaks the world record in the 10000m just by a few seconds although he would have had much more left in the tank.
Blocking somebody who is harassing you seems to be a very bad idea. You're actively telling them that they're blocked. They can create a new account to work around this. Muting is much more efficient because it does not give any feedback and thus does not provoke any further escalation.