Surly Badger

Surly Badger

  • Commented on Unforeseen Consequences and that 1929 vibe
    BTW, the current hot thing is to infect people's systems with bitcoin miners. There are a variety of those going around, and Ars Technica has some good articles about what's happening there. Short form: your google game android app may...
  • Commented on Unforeseen Consequences and that 1929 vibe
    Key management with OTPs is hard. It's possible to wrap automation around it, of course, but we've seen (per the Vault 7 disclosures) that NSA is pretty aggressively compromising some sources of 'randomness' - I was surprised that there wasn't...
  • Commented on Unforeseen Consequences and that 1929 vibe
    Also: what happens if SHA256 turns out to have collisions?...
  • Commented on Unforeseen Consequences and that 1929 vibe
    All this device can do is call the bank server, and access your account over a one time-pad encrypted link. If you manage to do enough banking to go through a gigabyte of network activity.. well, your phone will require...
  • Commented on Policy change: future US visits
    Charlie writes: If we ever reach the point where DHS have direct access to the NSA's take for vetting folks at the border, then it's fairly clear that civil rights are dead. Hate to tell you but.... One of the...
  • Commented on "You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!" 2017 continued.
    Suggested listening for this posting: Leonard Cohen "you want it darker?"...
  • Commented on Writer, Interrupted
    When I was programming professionally, I wore a Tshirt one of our researchers had made. It read "carpe noctem - we get more done between midnight and 5am than most people do in a week." Naps become a business tool,...
  • Commented on Reality is broken
    Events in America confirm that we are all in an alternate reality now. Yeah, who'd a thunk shoggoths could rock a hairpiece so effectively?...
  • Commented on Cytological Utopia and the rapture of the eukaryotes
    I was also thinking: wouldn't a side-effect of being able to simulate people accurately involve the solution of every mysterious crime? Just fire up your favorite suspects and witnesses and read their source code....
  • Commented on Cytological Utopia and the rapture of the eukaryotes
    If we had the ability to simulate people, wouldn't it be a stronger moral position to only simulate people who hadn't had a chance to live, yet? For one thing, people who haven't had a chance to live haven't had...
  • Commented on A purely theoretical dilemma
    If they are capable of saying "in all identified previous cosmoi" they presumably have enough experience to draw upon that there'd be no sense in them asking. They'd take a look at us, run through some checklist of behavioral traits...
  • Commented on Rise Of The Trollbot
    Pigeon@#57 I have no sympathy with the people who claim ads are "necessary" to pay for websites. Unless you're serving silly amounts of traffic it doesn't cost anything to run a website. Ironically, if you're serving silly amounts of traffic...
  • Commented on Rise Of The Trollbot
    Does it mean the death of "impressions" based advertising? 'Tis a consummation devoutly wish'd......
  • Commented on Follow the money: Apple vs. the FBI
    @#134: I used to work with Denny Branstad some years after he left NIST. One time he told me a funny story about the DES, and it went like this: NSA improved the design of the S-boxes to make them...
  • Commented on Some notes on world building
    Re WoTW: Ants. Instead of having the martians felled by bacteria or viruses, let them be considered tasty by ants. You can't negotiate with ants; many of us have tried. Any rational alien species would never let an explorer ship...
  • Commented on Some notes on world building
    Whitroth@#15 - I seem to recall that the precipitous drop in lobster and oyster population happened around the same time, because it was possible to ship premier luxuries by train. Delmonicos' was big in 1827 but was a New York...
  • Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
    Could one make a perpetual motion machine if they had a time machine? I am imagining if you had a large enough mass that you dropped in a gravity well, then used its fall to drive a generator which powered...
  • Commented on A question about the future of the world wide web
    I was thinking about this the other day. Suppose there was a site that I could pay $20/month to, to not have ads. And whenever I go to a site that doesn't have ads, they get a slice of that...
  • Commented on The present in deep history
    A bit late to the party, but: the relief ship would also have huge water purification capacity....
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