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zellyon Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything

for now rubs hands

zellyon Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything

Website looks entirely as one would expect

zellyon Preparing Rustls for Wider Adoption

https://www.openssl.org/news/vulnerabilities.html

Half of these are caused by C problems not present in Rust like: null pointer errors, buffer overflows, integer overflows.

The rest are logic errors (e.g., parsing errors) or crypto vulnerabilities (e.g., side channel attacks). There's nothing about Rust that magically prevents these errors. These vulnerabilities are discovered through testing and more importantly real world usage. Rustls has not been used nearly as much as or as long as openssl, so critical bugs could be in Rustls. You could encode some logic in the type system, but the types are still code that have to be tested. It's not a formal proof. It could still be wrong.

It depends on your threat model and your risk tolerance whether you want to depend on relatively unvetted code.

zellyon Apple Introduces AirTag

They already know where you are because of the GPS chip and mobile data. This is just the final step to find/fingerprint non-Apple and possibly non-internet connected devices.

Think of all the interesting things you could do with a worldwide bluetooth mesh network, and they choose to use it for surveillance. Lol.

zellyon Apple Introduces AirTag

So what's the point of LoJack now? This will probably bankrupt them. The most practical use for this product is hiding them in cars and tracking car thieves.

zellyon Preparing Rustls for Wider Adoption

Rustls is still not formally verified. It may not have memory errors, but there are a lot of other security errors besides just that (and there may be more of them since it hasn't been used as much as open|boringssl has been used). It's a slight improvement at best.

Ideally you want a formally verified SPARK or CompCert C implementation of TLS, but those are not open sores compilers so they won't fly.

zellyon Bitcoin is a ‘boon for surveillance’, says former CIA director

Headline is misleading. The whitepaper by the CIA director emphasizes that the US should not outlaw crypto, because China would then capture all the value that the US would miss out on.

zellyon Bitcoin is a ‘boon for surveillance’, says former CIA director

We do see it though. There's Uniswap and Bancor on ETH. The trading volumes are in the billions of United States dollars per day. There is also Bisq as a decentralized fiat onramp for BTC and XMR (and soon on-chain atomic swaps). Today it is possible to completely interact with the crypto ecosystem without centralized exchanges.

If you're worried about the code changing, you can run e.g. ETH nodes yourself, download the DEX frontends, and run the DEX locally.

zellyon Bitcoin is a ‘boon for surveillance’, says former CIA director

It's not. All of the DNMs have switched to Monero already. Ransomware is also changing to Monero. Anyone using Bitcoin for illegal stuff at this point will be caught.

zellyon Urbit: A clean-slate OS and network for the 21st century

the original and still the best NFTs

zellyon Filecoin Foundation Grants 50k FIL to the Internet Archive

Nocoiners have already lost all hope. They're not even trying to FUD anymore.

zellyon Audacity 3.0

if someone "upgrades" the UI you just know it's going to be some Typescript/React/Electron monstrosity. so I'll keep the 90s look.

zellyon Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building

> Apple fire

Their solar panels on the roof caught on fire. Presumably there was no actual disruption in service computing-wise.

> Google fire

2006, still a young company at that point. Also this was way before GCP where they were responsible for other people's services.

> AWS fire

Data center caught on fire while it was under construction. Drunk construction workers messed up, not AWS. Presumably no computers were even inside yet. This is completely different from OVH completely burning down while all their customers' data went up in flames.

If these are the best examples of Big Cloud messing up, this is quite the endorsement.

It's funny how the OVH CEO tells everyone to go activate their DRPs while the company didn't have enough foresight to install fire suppression systems.

zellyon Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building

Yup, I've never heard of a fire taking out a Big Cloud DC. They actually know what they're doing and don't put server racks in shipping containers stacked on top of each other. If you want quality in life, sometimes you have to pay for it.

Personally I'll continue to use these third world cloud providers. But I like to live on the edge.

zellyon Why asynchronous Rust doesn't work

C++20 coroutines are not async in the standard. They are just coroutines. Actually they have no implementation. The user has to write classes to implement the promise type and the awaitable type. You could just as easily write a coroutine library wrapping epoll as you could io_uring. The only thing it does behind your back (other than compile to stackless coroutines) is allocate memory, which also goes for a lot of other things.

zellyon Why asynchronous Rust doesn't work

Rust programs can theoretically be fast, but most of the ones I've used are slow. I tried two high profile implementations of the same type of software, one in Rust and one in Java. The Java one was faster and used less memory.

Rust programmers tend to do all kinds of little hacks here and there to make the borrow checker happy. It can add up. The borrow checker is perfectly happy when you copy everything.

Rust is becoming one giant antipattern.

(I'm sure highly experienced Rust programmers can get it to work, but there are probably less than 1000 people on this planet that can write good Rust that outperforms C++ so does it really count.)

zellyon Why asynchronous Rust doesn't work

Why did polling have to be baked into the language? Seems bizarre for a supposedly portable language to assume the functionality of an OS feature which could change in the future.

Meanwhile C and C++ can easily adopt any async system call style because it made no assumptions in the standards about how that would be done.

Rust also didn't solve the colored functions problem. Most people think that's an impossible problem to solve without a VM/runtime (like Java Loom), but people also thought garbage collection was impossible in a systems language until Rust solved it. It could have been a great opportunity for them.

zellyon Zooko's Triangle

You still need some way to distribute the git commit hashes so it's TOFU and less secure than Bitcoin.

zellyon Migrate Everything from Linux to BSD

> Linux is fragmented

Ten year old FUD. Most distros are on systemd now. Whatever you want to say about systemd, it's definitely not fragmentation. Also there's the freedesktop project and dbus which creates a standard API for desktop applications. All Linux distros use glibc and GNU coreutils. Where's the fragmentation?

Linux desktop applications are all very fragmented and broken (GNOME, KDE, 100 different tiling window managers, 100 different music players that all suck), but that's not Linux, that's userspace.

> Torvalds has a bad opinion on ZFS

Doesn't matter. ZFS on Linux still works. Also ZFS is not immune to criticism. BTRFS is getting better and is more than adequate for everyone who is not running a CDN. Also ZFS isn't exactly usable on all BSDs, just FreeBSD (nor did FreeBSD come up with ZFS in the first place (why not migrate everything to Solaris then?)).

> Linux is being heavily influenced by corporate interests

Good. Problem? The computer is a tool not a political bumper sticker. I'm happy to use something for free that developers are paid to improve and that I still have complete control over. Linux [Android] is the most widely deployed OS in the world. It's constantly improving and lots of eyes are on the code. There just aren't enough skilled volunteers to maintain a giant codebase as critical as an OS.

https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/openbsd.html

When BSD is used by corporations, they fork it and make their improvements proprietary.

> Time to migrate everything to BSD

Then almost everything I do with my computer would be impossible except for dicking around in a web browser. How do I run containers, modern hardware, or CUDA? Hard mode: No Linux emulation.

zellyon Threadripper 3990X: The Quest To Compile 1B Lines Of C++ On 64 Cores

On Linux I would just use Bazel. It can burn through 1B lines of code on all cores.

zellyon XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

X11 is a keylogger, for one. Network transparency is a vulnerability, not a feature.

zellyon My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

The most important part of a social network is the people on it. A decentralized social network will never be able to compete with the marketing of for-profit social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Without marketing, you will never get a critical mass of people on it, which means your social network would be missing the most important part of a social network.

At best you end up with a little hangout for you and a handful of people you already know, possibly people who were already on the mainstream for-profit social networks with you but you insisted they use this other one to contact you. At that point you have an overengineered group chat application.

zellyon What Is a Gamma Squeeze in the Context of Stock Trading?

Bitcoin whales manipulate the futures market. The liquidity is (or was, maybe) small enough that individual players can move the spot market in the direction they want in order to profit from a futures play. It doesn't take that much (relative to traditional markets)--a year or two ago someone on Bitstamp sold 5000 coins, which was enough to cause a 30% dip/flash crash. Thanks to leverage (some exchanges offer up to 125x), whatever money is lost on the spot market side is made up for in spades.

zellyon What Is a Gamma Squeeze in the Context of Stock Trading?

It's not. Tesla's stock price is driven by supply and demand. Even after a 5-for-1 split, there still is not enough float. Many shareholders are true believers.

zellyon What Is a Gamma Squeeze in the Context of Stock Trading?

Selling covered calls is a widely used strategy, especially when the underlying doesn't give dividends. There's nothing wrong with it. As for the tail risk, that's what buying options is for. Look at the rest of the options chain and use your imagination.

zellyon What Is a Gamma Squeeze in the Context of Stock Trading?

The market is not as efficient as you think. There is a lot of money to be made in options, but no one wants to give you free alpha. The market like any other system can be reversed engineered. I'll give you a hint, learn how the VIX is calculated.

Also if you believe just buying the S&P 500 is going to be most profitable, then why not buy deep ITM calls on SPY. You'd at least 2x your exposure at the same cost.

zellyon Ubiquiti Networks Breach

Mikrotik is much better and cheaper, but you actually have to know the basics of networking to use it

zellyon Skynet – Build a Free Internet

It's already out, but most people are still on the eth1 chain

zellyon Amazon, Apple and Google Cut Off Parler

In 2011-2014 era, IS*S was huge on Twitter. Not many people seem to remember this happened. They were posting propaganda videos and actively recruiting people on the public timeline. Jack was letting that go on for years. A lot of the terror attacks in that era were tied back to people getting recruited online.

Now it's basically dead. Was it the deplatforming? Did the world just move on? Nobody knows.

zellyon Amazon, Apple and Google Cut Off Parler

The interesting thing about Parler is that the US government and its laws are neutral to it, but no US corporations wish to carry the liability of serving them--regardless of the money they offer. Legally, Parler could operate but no laws exist to guarantee it can.

If this scenario played out in another business, like a restaurant, then nobody could really stop them from operating. Even if the food supply companies stopped delivering, there is a decentralized network of small farmers and transportation companies that could pick up the slack. No such counterpart exists with internet companies. You're either part of the grid or you're out. Come to think of it, that could explain a lot.