>Water, a drink consumed by nobel price winners and European kings...

Oxygen, an element serial killers need in order to kill again.

Nearly all air molecules were once part of a dinosaur fart.

> Nearly all air molecules were once part of a dinosaur fart.

While it is plausible that at least a handful of molecules (out of the sextillions) in a breath you take passed through a dinosaur, i don't think that qualifies at "Nearly all".

Dihydrogen monoxide - a constituent of many known toxic substances, diseases and disease-causing agents[0]

[0]: https://www.dhmo.org/

thousands of people die every year from DHMO toxicity, literal overdoses of DHMO, yet you can still find it in baby food and breast milk.

I was alway taught that Adolf Hitler was a prevalent user of dihydrogen monoxide and refused to give it to his captives.

100% of people who've ever had DHMO have died.

This is scientifically verified and yet nobody does anything about it.

I know this is a joke, but you did it wrong. There are obviously people (like me) who have had DHMO and are not dead.

100% of the people who have died have been exposed to DHMO.

You aren't fooling anyone, you know.

http://montypython.50webs.com/scripts/Holy_Grail/Scene2.htm

Truly, we can eliminate the null hypothesis because only ~93% of humans who have ever lived have died. [0] [1]

[0] https://www.prb.org/news/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-... [1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

Over 90% of people who've ever had DHMO have died.

> and yet nobody does anything about it

So dismissive of all the transhumanist efforts to eradicate death!

Their failure to address the presence of DMHO suggests they are not serious.

I like the formulatiom that 100% of the cancer tumors have DHMO and no one has done anything about it.

Water? Like, from the toilet?

It's what plants crave.

(I needed to be able to post that to HN tonight.)

Very on brand for our darkest timeline, if you excuse the mixed media metaphor.

Ah yes, the cautionary tale where the leadership is willing to accept their own faults, seeks out the most competent to solve their issue, despite initial reservations are willing to go with the suggestions provided and a public that, upon being provided evidence accepts it. Kinda hopeful, if one thinks about it, the Eugenics nonsense notwithstanding…

At first, they had no plan. They tried to imprison their most competent person for being an outsider and being unable to pay their hospital bill at Carl's Jr, before making a public spectacle of working to kill him.

They also consumed all of the french fries and burrito coverings, and were otherwise reduced to eating Flaturin -- "Hand-to-Mouth Goodness". Let us also not forget about the Great Trash Avalanche of 2506.

It was only towards the very end that they came 'round to using water (from the toilet!) for crops, put the smart dude in charge, and they all lived happily ever after.

Perhaps it'd have been a better fit if they actually killed the protagonist, Not Sure, and faded to black after the last edible plant was shown to wither and die. Maybe the end credits could have even included sepia-toned photos akin to those from the Siege of Leningrad, with slow Ken Burns-style layered pans and zooms documenting the peril.

But, I mean: It was supposed to be a comedy. :)

Does it have electrolytes?

Water? You mean like out of the toilet?

> I would ping him over the Signal app

Signal, the free encryption app used by journalists

Signal, an App predominantly used by governmental officials to leak war plans or bypass historical recording obligations.

Signal, which shares its name with the propaganda publication of the Third Reich ...

"antinuclear activists and human rights groups to shield their files and emails from government surveillance"

You mean the people responsible for not allowing us to embrace Nuclear 30 years before we should have?

Yeah the weird thing about living in a democracy is you have to convince people who don't agree with you to do things. Maybe try better politics rather than attacks or else you'll go another 30 years of no nuclear power then die without realizing your dream of nearly free clean unlimited power.

Nuclear restrictions were instituted by beurocratic means, not democratic means.

It depends on the country. In many, there were actual rounds of dedicated votes.

In Austria we put it to a vote. Right after building the first fission plant. We never switched it on after a narrow defeat. At least in our narrow case, the restrictions were exclusively democratic.

Yes and who made up these bureaucrats and what regulations are they following? Who wrote those regulations? Who advocated for them? Who voted for them into law?

Sorry but we still live in a democratic society, as much as Sam Altman would convince you otherwise. The buck stops at failing to convince those we entrust with power to make pro-nuclear regulations.

Learn to organize better or continue failing at influencing society.

It’s 10x easier to destroy things and block stuff than it is to build anything.

As witnessed by the US inability to build anything for a generation or two. It’s all NIMBY (or worse) all the time.

Anti-anything is fighting a nearly unwinnable asymmetric political fight these days. Eventually times will get hard enough where this flips, but we are nowhere close to that yet.

> people who don't agree with you to do things.

the problem is that those people who don't agree with me are also not taking the externalized cost of non-action.

That's fine but as someone whose side hobby is literally politics, it's not hard to convince people that disagree with you to join your side. This is what organizing is, please note I am not talking about discussing things online (advocacy). Online advocacy is by far the worse form of politics, albeit the most popular, where you will rarely, if ever, convince anyone of anything.

You're going to have to go out and speak with people that disagree with you person to person to try to convince them to join your cause.

If you can't do this, you won't succeed.

No - Zimmerman was an anti nuclear weapons activist with the Nuclear Freeze campaign when he invented PGP.

And nowadays, PGP technology is mostly used by the government and military. I wouldn't be surprised if this was also the case when Bitcoins was originally developed

Never seen it. What parts? Do you mean PKI?

[Citation needed]

Seriously why would gov use pgp? They would be the last group i would expect to use something like PGP.

Source: I worked two years on GnuPG, which is certified VS-NfD: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geheimhaltungsgrad

that's such a loaded statement.

This is the power of language.

The bias is built into it.

PGP was different then. In the 90s the internet was unencrypted and the only people using PGP were those that had a reasonable need for it. However, there were a couple of big problems that the armchair historian would not be aware of.

First off, communicating with PGP was hard. Imagine you are based in London and you want to publish something controversial without getting taken to court. You could email someone in New York and ask them to post your 'hot potato of juiciness'. But, how to you exchange keys without the beloved five eyes seeing what you are up to?

This was in an era when very little was encrypted, so anything encrypted would theoretically get flagged for the three letter agencies to take a look at. Again, this would depend on the person you are trying to reach, if they were working at the equivalent of 'the Iranian embassy' then yeah, good luck with that, you are going to get caught.

The next problem was that PGP was doable for the three letter agencies using what amounts to WW2 Enigma tactics. In period it was possible for them to man-in-the-middle attack an email, to ask the PGP using sender to 'use the right key and resend'. The sender does as told, even with the same, as provided, public key. However, they just change their original message, maybe to remove a typo, change the date or add a friendly note. Then the three letter agency does a glorified 'diff' and they are subsequently in on the chat.

PGP was originally treated as a 'munition' with export controls. People weren't using PGP for their Uber Eats and Amazon orders, as per the article, it was only anti-government people that needed PGP, that being Western 'five eyes' governments.

Hence, even though it is a tedious NYT article, the author is right about PGP, in period. And, don't ask how I know about how PGP was hacked, there was a certain fog of war that went on at the time.

> However, they just change their original message, maybe to remove a typo, change the date or add a friendly note. Then the three letter agency does a glorified 'diff' and they are subsequently in on the chat.

Could you expand on this please?

You must be joking!

It is hard to imagine that "modern" encryption would be susceptible to known plaintext attacks, please provide some citations.

They cannot because PGP has no such vulnerability.

It was never trivial for TLAs to man-in-the-middle anyone, because PGP users were very much aware of the problem and nothing about key exchange was automated, for good or ill. Key exchange parties, reading out key fingerprints in their own custom extended phonetic alphabet etc.

A man in the middle attack would maybe work in rare cases, at great cost, and then you'd get one or two messages and immediately make people aware that they'd been attacked. It's not worth it. I'm confident the TLAs never bothered to do it against anyone with public keys on a key server, the minimum effort you could make to guard against MITM attacks.

I see your point, but PGP was literally invented by an anti-nuclear activist and intentionally disseminated to human rights groups.

"Created" or "originally used" would be on point, 60 years after the fact it is just slop.

60? Not even 40.

This section stood out to me because it started out explaining PGP to a layman like this, but then the author gets overly excited that a cryptographer would be interested in... basic cryptography

> I’d learned enough by then to know that P.G.P. relies on public-key cryptography. So does Bitcoin. [...]

> How interesting, I thought, that Mr. Back’s grad-school hobby involved the same cryptographic technique that Satoshi had repurposed.

We also have this gem:

> And Mr. Back’s thesis project focused on C++ — the same programming language Satoshi used to code the first version of the Bitcoin software.

Amazing! I bet they both for loops too! I heard Bitcoin relies heavily on for loops.

Infuriatingly, to people who don't know much about programming, these pieces of 'evidence' might sound quite compelling, because it will all sound equally obscure to them.

I'm only a quarter of the way through this piece, but I'm finding it very hard to take seriously.

It's strange. I'm sure that he talked to experts who would immediately say, yes many programming languages exist. But two cryptographers who wrote money systems both using C++ is not informative. Today maybe we could expect one to use Rust.

> I'm sure that he talked to experts

A NYTimes journalist? I wouldn't bet on it. The experts might be smelly nerds, they'd cramp his style.

Well .. you probably thought the same when John was unmasking Theranos

So what? We should give him eternal carte blanche because he did good reporting one time?

The leaps here would get one laughed out of an early 2k conspiracy forum.

Bob uses electricity provided from a coal power plant, therefore he must be able to design a Fission plant. Yeah, these are some massive leaps, the question of why, beyond morbid curiosity, one must dox Satoshi not withstanding. Satoshi or the wallets they controlled were never associated with anything beyond the creation of BTC after all, making the value of knowing who they are or were not really great in my view. If these coins suddenly started funding someone or something, there could be an argument, but this coupled with such a layperson approach makes me doubtful about the ethics or approach.

I think it's mind boggling that in 2026 encryption and signing of emails is still not a common thing, only because it's Google's business model to snoop on their users' email. For that reason we can't use email to send sensitive data and need apps for every little thing that could have been an email.

At the same time the dumps of government and corporate emails have been invaluable to society at large. They’ve helped win court cases, uncover corruption, etc.

I found that entire section amusing. Some choice quotes:

> So does Bitcoin. A Bitcoin user has two keys: a public key, from which an address is derived that acts as a digital safe deposit box; and a private key, which is the secret combination used to unlock that box and spend the coins it contains.

> How interesting, I thought, that Mr. Back’s grad-school hobby involved the same cryptographic technique that Satoshi had repurposed.

> And Mr. Back’s thesis project focused on C++ — the same programming language Satoshi used to code the first version of the Bitcoin software.

public key encryption and c++! It must be him.

> public key encryption and c++! It must be him.

I'm now worried I've secretly been Satoshi the whole time.

Lmao. I really expected better from the guy who unmasked Theranos.

The New York Times has some great journalists and does important work, but they certainly have an editorial bias/agenda on most topics, even though it's often subtle. People claiming they are neutral on most topics are just not seeing it, because it aligns with their slant. Just saying it's interesting to see when folks notice it or not on hackernews.

It's technically true, but it's also a very selective framing