1,137 karma · joined June 5, 2016
Tiberian Sun remains my favourite C&C game. I know it was rushed and had some bugs but... I mean: The Forgotten? Absolutely there should be a mutant commando walking around with a portable railgun, physics be damned!
I like C&C3, but it isn't TS and I feel it abandoned a bit the direction TS was taking us.
Outside of London, UK public transport varies greatly in quality and all of it is very expensive and overpriced. UK season tickets for lines outside of London typically involve a fixed route on one operator and usually only support commuting: one there and back journey 5 days per week max. By contrast, the GA in Switzerland really is unlimited. It will work equally well for boats crossing the lake in Geneva as it will for the local trams in Zürich and the train to get you between them, even if you travel on a Sunday. It doesn't matter if you present it to cantonal transport people, or private train operators, it will work, no arguments. Pretty much the only people not part of the GA scheme are tourist train routes up mountains, and to be honest, that's fair enough - staff to the facilities on the top likely get a free ride up anyway and nobody else needs to commute to the top of the Jungfrau.
A lot of this weakening of ciphers was US government policy at the time: crypto was considered only to have military applications so in the same way foreign countries don't get the full US-edition fighter jet, they also didn't get the full crypto.
DualEC was a mess, no doubt, and should never have been standardized. I'm guessing they were railroaded by NSA. What is bizarre is that everyone knew it sucked. Not only the backdoor potential but also that it was slow. In fact the backdoor was even patented: https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC... which is my personal favorite part of the saga.
So while DualEC was a mess and the export policy was disliked, generally speaking the NIST process for standardising things is widely regarded.
Of course that does not mean you should trust them blindly, but examine the evidence. AES, SHA3, the lightweight crypto competition and the pqc process will all produce ciphers from largely non-US scientists and there are detailed discussions on the forums and at the workshops.
Of course if they decide to shut down these forums for discussion or ignore community consensus then there are definitely reasons to worry.
Visiting Toledo is on my todo list, as is working out how to get a sword through customs on the way home :)
However it opens up the possibility that the artefacts can be tampered with on the server. Signing confirms their authenticity. In a (cryptographically secure) hash, there is no 'key' and so anyone can create a valid one for their modified bundle.
Ditto for containers, Android Apps, and just about anything else we use.
Bachelors and masters pay fees according to: https://www.epfl.ch/education/studies/en/rules-and-procedure... or https://ethz.ch/en/studies/financial/tuition-fees.html
Tuition is definitely not free, but also not extortionate.
These are the constructions tptacek refers to. How we put together the bits we have in a way that meets our expectations, which we refer to as semantic security. This doesn't just apply to AES but also to public key crypto as well. This might seem quite abstract, so let me put it this way: AES alone doesn't know if the ciphertext you feed it has been modified by an attacker. It will simply process that data with a given key. The decrypting software might notice and report an error (the message will look garbled), and there are circimstances where this can actually be exploited to reveal information. This is not what we expected to happen.
We've learned a lot about this since the early 90s. Many modern primitives actually come with all the parts we would call a construction built in, to avoid potential misuse (although these schemes are for the most part academic right now). Almost all modern systems combine primitives like AES in such a way as to meet our expectations. Except perhaps Telegram but nobody knows what they're smoking.
If you want an actual textbook, Introduction to Modern Cryptography by Katz and Lindell, or Cryptography Made Simple by Nigel Smart will cover this in plenty of detail, and are also good all round introductions to most areas of cryptography by leading experts. I learn towards the book by Smart, but either will be perfectly fine.
However there are definitely time limits. You would find it hard to be enrolled on a doctoral programme for 6 years or more especially if you aren't about to imminently graduate, and this is likely the main motivation behind the advice given the proposed 3 year break in China.
But yes it doesn't make sense for local wiring at all. 1Gbit-capable LAN cabling is cheap and ubiquitous. On the other hand it sounds like you have wired ethernet in your building... that's also quite unusual. Mine (70s) does not :)
Plenty of places here are stuck on some form of broadband.
It just feels a bit dishonest to sell a 10G connection and tell the user to speed test on the router's web portal when their PC won't get remotely near that.
Customers actively have to opt in to 6rd on Swisscom and actively have to set up hurricane electric and other IPv6 tunnels. Which means connectivity is limited to people who are going to do that, so service providers on the internet must offer IPv4.
This is utterly bonkers. While the ethernet cables they give out can likely do 10Gbit (but definitely not 25Gbit) very few people have 10Gbit-capable ethernet or wifi chipsets and there is no way they will actually be able to routinely transmit data at this speed.
Swisscom do 6rd and don't offer static IPv6 either presumably because of how 6rd works. So it is a pain to configure anything except using their own box.
The irony here is that much of the inter-service traffic on the internet could already be sent over IPv6 without anyone noticing. Getting end users onto IPv6 is always going to be a challenge as, well, ISPs, but when my mail server talks to your mail server there's no need for this to be IPv4.
But it is anyway in fact, since that's how insurance works even privately.
There is a model somewhere in between, like the swiss system. Here we pay a deductible amount of our own healthcare per year, which can be one of several set amounts. After that insurance pays 90% up to some set ceiling, then everything.
Costs including monthly premiums are regulated for essential treatment, and people who really can't pay can ask the government for assistance. The differentiator for health insurance is in add on packages. You want a private hotel room if you ever need to stay? Extra. You want something not covered by the basic insurance (most things you might reasonably need are covered)? Extra.
This has the advantage of making the cost of unnecessary healthcare visible to people, which discourages unnecessary use a bit, while making sure that if something really does go wrong you will be treated and you don't need to worry about going bankrupt. It isn't tied to employers either.
It isn't a perfect system but my point is that there is in fact a reasonable middle ground compromise if 'everything is free' isn't acceptable. It is also quite possible to make money even with a system that charges for basic healthcare.
I agree that the US system is probably unchangeable - too many entrenched interests. It seems a shame though. We need some level of safety net as a society.
20 years on, Internet Explorer is dead and Microsoft Edge uses Blink (the same engine as Chrome). Firefox is the only other browser with a distinct rendering engine.
Microsoft's Java VM also died. It was removed in XP SP2 and Microsoft no longer distribute, even via MSDN, versions of Windows that shipped with it. You could argue these events lead directly to the creation of .net since Microsoft's original plan was to jump on the Java train.
So it worked, or at least certainly shaped those various markets.
Can't comment on the investment bank situation, but I know they went through a few CEOs a few years back :)
Banks are required to and have large audit functions and have automated systems for flagging potential fraud to these teams, and are independently audited as well. This is why they enforce rules like KYC and so on. No system is perfect and certainly some level of money laundering will always slip through, but the idea they are not acting at all is pure fiction, as the regulator has teeth.
As sibling comments have pointed out, plenty of 'challenger banks' exist in the UK, e.g. Monzo, although they are not the only one, innovating just fine within the confines of 'legacy' banking.
Given the scam that is tether, and the atrocious transaction throughput all cryptocurrencies vs say just the Visa network, plus the fact that through Faster Payments I can move significant sums to any UK account within seconds, I am curious why you feel UK Financial institutions are not keeping up with 'the pace of change', particularly when bitcoin types are shilling a system that reinvents all the problems in the financial system regulation has been enacted to protect against, with no backing and terrible volatility?
I do agree however IP reputation matters. If you share an IP with other hosters, or your IP has been recycled from a bad reputation IP, or you have a residential IP or have found your way onto any of the email spam lists recently, or been reported for abuse or marked as spam enough times by freemail service users, you may have trouble getting to 'inbox' and eventually even getting delivered. Reporting systems like DMARC should let you know, however, before it becomes serious.
I don't think running your own email is a high maintenance activity that some suggest (especially for small servers) but it is definitely more effort than outsourcing it to someone else. I'm glad services like this exist, if only to prevent email becoming a Microsoft-Google walled garden.
From what I've seen the same is true on the continent. .fr and .de for example are highly popular in France and Germany. You rarely see local business reaching for .eu domains.
According to wikipedia, the number of affected domains is 344,584. Also compared to wiki there are 11M .uk domains and 16.5M .de domains. According to EurID[0] there are 3.7M .eu domains
If we're not careful some hodlgang hooligan will have this implemented (badly) in Rust in 30 seconds!
I would personally treat any /64 as the same. Depending on your local network setup the second half of the address could be anything and could change frequently. You might also get multiple addresses. Whereas getting a new /64, or /48, requires slightly more effort.
Of course there's a risk you'll block a /64 and that takes out some whole company or whatever, but I've seen that happen to corporate proxies that got flagged as a source of spam as well so this is not an easy problem even without the 2^128 address space.
As I understand it the oversight is relatively minimal and any company operating on Australian soil can be subject to such a request. Here's their government web page on it: https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/natio...
It passed around the end of 2018 and a lot of Australian companies (e.g. Atlassian) were not fans of it.
Like all race condition bugs it is probabilistic, but it can be won. By contrast dlopen either succeeds or does not, and once you have the handle to the library you are good.
Actually windows also works this way, and has done since wow I think vista if not XP? There's a knowndlls registry key. Large parts of the windows api are contained in a few DLLs; these are loaded on system startup. When resolving shared libraries if one of these names is requested the normal DLL loading procedure of checking paths isn't even followed - it just links in the already loaded DLL from the cache.
It actually wasn't designed as a security feature, but for speed. No matter what the OS does there's little need to continually load these DLLs from disk when we know they are already loaded to even display the desktop.
Of course on windows you can still do the windows equivalent of stat'ing these DLLs but nobody ever does.
I'm not sure "attack" is helpful in this context. I'm not accusing anyone of attacking anyone else.
As an example, my view that lightweight crypto is largely useless is somewhat political, based on practical concerns. We have working AES accelerators and AES instruction sets in chips today we can exploit and for most of my company's customers, that's absolutely enough. I have a view; others disagree and have interesting counter arguments.
On the arguments quoted, there are multiple modes of the algorithms, and a constrained device is unlikely to transmit multiple gigabytes of data using the 48-bit mode mostly because if it can only cope with the 48-bit mode I'd be skeptical it can transmit multiple gigabits of data at all. ARM pointer authentication can use as little as 3 bits of QARMA, although according to Qualcomm the Linux kernel uses 24-bit PACs. This is entirely fine because the point is to require a low-latency check that is reasonably hard to forge over a short window during which exploitation is possible, not gigabytes of data. This is an example of an actually valid use case of lightweight crypto.
Second argument, AES is 100% broken. Yep. Key recovery over full-round AES. If I present just that fact I could make all kinds of arguments for not using AES, but of course I am neglecting to mention the fact that it only improves things by an order of 4 and that 2^126 computations are still required - impossible for 100 NSAs all joined together - to perform it. The time complexity of the attacks on 70% of Speck48/72's rounds is 2^71.8 so... likewise only a marginal improvement, and this isn't even full-round Speck like the AES attacks.
I wasn't at the standardization meetings, so I can't really speak to that, but if the NSA behaved badly then they probably ought to have known better given the fallout from Snowden. I'm not American and I don't owe them any special deference - I also don't trust them and I'm not advocating you should, either. I'm simply saying that to the best of my knowledge the algorithms seem fine. We've made this tradeoff to trust SHA2 before and to circle back around to the original purpose of this article I would be quite surprised to learn there is a backdoor in SHA2. This is mostly based on the fact that there is a huge motivation, in the form of embarrassing the NSA, to find either weaknesses or a backdoor in any publicly acknowledged NSA algorithm and consequently putting "made in Ft. Meade" on an algorithm is a sure fire way to ensure it gets a lot of cryptanalysis.
Anyway, let's leave it there, we've diverging somewhat from the original topic.