News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

Khoth

Re:eMudhra to Exit Global SSL/TLS Certificate Business on Thursday October 22, 2026 @10:39AM (#50196043)
They also have to convince the root programs to let them stay trusted, which can't be done by issuing vague press releases until the news cycle moves on.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2083449#c30 They're being asked some very pointed questions about why they encountered problems with the key generation process at the time but didn't properly investigate.

Re:Was Silent Reading Unusual During Augustine's Time? on Monday September 28, 2026 @05:27AM (#49875498)
For the other side there's A. K. Gavrilov's "Techniques of reading in classical antiquity", not (legally) freely available but quoted in various places such as https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2016/02/reading-silently-...

The argument for the Ambrose case is that the surprise isn't him reading silently, it's him reading silently while he has guests. (and elsewhere in the text Augustine mentions himself reading silently by himself in a way that suggests it's entirely normal)

Four types! You missed Ibiricus female, ie the next generation of queen
It's mostly talking about the case where someone receives an encrypted message which is intended to later be published openly. If it was padded by adding stuff, an attacker can try to reconstruct the original plaintext by removing the flowery adjectives, whereas if things were deleted the attacker doesn't know what to add.
Re:The reality of firearm suppressors vs. Hollywood on Thursday July 17, 2025 @06:16AM (#44591638)
It's not just about the actual sound effects, it's also the writing. The movie clip the article uses as an anchor shows people using silencers to have a gunfight in public with bystanders having no idea it was happening. That's not just hollywood sound direction, it's hollywood giving a completely wrong impression about how good silencers are and why they exist
Re:The Halting Problem is a terrible example of NP-Harder on Thursday April 17, 2025 @09:31AM (#43716558)
NP-complete is indeed the intersection of NP-hard and NP.

If you can solve any NP-hard problem then you can solve any NP-complete problem (because you can convert any instance of an NP-complete problem to an NP-hard problem), so NP-hard problems are "at least as hard" as NP-complete problems.

(But an NP-hard problem might not be in NP, ie given a purported solution to an NP-hard problem you might not be able to verify it in polynomial time)

Re:NIST Interoperable Randomness Beacons on Monday September 30, 2024 @06:58AM (#41695719)
Someone who knew or guessed that you were doing it could find your key very quickly by trying out every beacon value in the time range your key was generated in
For 2/3, it does indeed work with fractions internally. For pi, it uses some floating point representation I think, you get about 50 digits.
Whether family names are more differentiated depends on where you live.

The USA has a wide variety, but there are also places like Vietnam where only a handful of family names are in common use and more than 30% of people are Nguyens.

Re:PuTTY vulnerability vuln-p521-bias on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @01:04AM (#40048529)
Not sure about the pageant part, but it's a major problem when connecting to a compromised server leaks the client's private key.

(For example, if an attacker has compromised server A and you connect to it, they can now use your key to connect to server B which you also use)

Re:Ask HN: How are quantum computing companies making money? on Wednesday December 06, 2023 @12:51PM (#38547215)
The search keyword to learn more is "post-quantum cryptography"

RSA and ECC cryptography could be broken, but (with a probably rocky transition period) we could move to other algorithms which are still secure.

Crytocurrency I'm not sure about.

I suspect probably keeping it secret - announcing it would push everyone to move from crypto you can break to crypto you can't.

Re:Wait, What's a Bookmarklet? on Wednesday October 25, 2023 @12:32PM (#38014609)
I use one to get rid of fixed headers on a page

   javascript:(function()%20{%20var%20s,e,i,ee=document.getElementsByTagName('*');%20for(i=0;%20e=ee[i];%20i++)%20{%20s=getComputedStyle(e);%20if%20(s%20&&%20s.position%20==%20'fixed')%20e.style.position='static';%20}%20})();
The thing they're they're reporting is that a CVE leaked and Bard found out about it before public disclosure.

Except that it's false because Bard made it up. There's no real curl exploit involved.

Re:Warp drive's best hope dies, as antimatter falls down on Monday October 09, 2023 @09:51AM (#37820446)
I don't think anyone really expected antimatter to produce antigravity, but it had never been tested before so it was worth doing the experiment.
Re:Google's new metrics: Interaction to Next Paint (INP) on Wednesday July 12, 2023 @01:52AM (#36690887)
Or to put it another way, people waste 10% of their time on the web waiting for slow bloated garbage to load (or more when you take into account pages that do more loading when you touch them afterwards)
Sounds like they were testing it with a small enough amount of data that the disk version could just work from cache and didn't actually have to go to the disk
Re:Why Commuters Prefer Origin to Destination Transfers on Monday July 03, 2023 @01:26AM (#36569231)
For me it's that I want the most inflexible leg of the trip first. I'll often get a local bus to a railway station then get a long distance train. The trains are infrequent and it's cheaper to book a specific train in advance, so if a journey is bus then train I have to get an early bus to ensure that bus delays won't make me miss my train. Whereas going the other way I can step off the train and get whichever bus happens to be next, so train then bus is a shorter journey time.
Re:Calling time on DNSSEC: The costs exceed the benefits on Saturday June 03, 2023 @03:38AM (#36174538)
Browsers won't accept a certificate unless it comes with proof that it was submitted to a CT log.

So a government could MITM you but they'd have to burn a CA to do it, whether you personally noticed the attack or not, so it's a very high cost attack

Yes, microcode updates are distributed as part of Windows Update
Re:Bicycle on Tuesday March 28, 2023 @01:32PM (#35344779)
To expand on one of those things - bike chains get slightly longer as they wear out. Once it's about 1% longer than it started, it looks about the same as it always did, but it's starting to damage the drivechain and you need to replace it. An ancient Roman blacksmith has no hope of making a chain with anything like that level of precision.
> idk what it will cost

That's the problem GP means. It's less than a week until it happens, and nobody knows how much it's going to cost, how you convert your free account to a paying account, whether auth is also going to be paid, etc etc

I agree, facebook could have saved themselves a lot of mockery and bad press by spending 0.01% of their VR budget on hiring some people who know how to make simple graphics look good.
Re:Designing My Own ASIC with Tiny Tapeout on Thursday January 26, 2023 @11:21AM (#34533767)
It's a completely ridiculous list. The blogpost is about designing a 2 tap filter, not a CPU, so even if there wasn't a gate limit the design wouldn't have those things.
Re:Paul Graham is leaving Twitter on Sunday December 18, 2022 @05:04PM (#34044073)
For anyone who didn't see this tweet before it got pg suspended:

> This is the last straw. I give up. You can find a link to my new Mastodon profile on my site.

If you deliver checkmate, you lose. You have to instead force your opponent into a situation where they only have one legal move (which is trivially the best engine move).
My first naive counterthought is that if you try to do that then black can ignore your queen and use their queen to take your pieces. You're a move ahead but you don't get a snowballing advantage.
There is a downside - if you contest and you're wrong, you lose.

The page doesn't say, but it's cheating to use an engine yourself to decide what move to make (or to decide whether to contest)

Re:Rice’s Theorem: An interactive tutorial on Friday November 25, 2022 @02:49PM (#33746082)
> Put another way, Turing machines suck even if you enhance them to have 5 parallel tapes (God why do they not have parallel tapes by default, should have at least one for output, one for main memory, one for a stack, and some more as scratchpads)

You answered your question as you asked it. If you juice up your Turing machine like that, it will still suck so much that nobody will actually write programs for it, but it will be more complicated to describe and analyse.

Re:How the Clipboard Works on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @03:46AM (#33327424)
On Windows, when you Copy the program supplying the data decides whether to send the data to the clipboard manager straight away, or whether to defer. If it defers, then yes it does a "last call" on closing. If it crashes you lose the clipboard.

Some programs will ask you when you quit them if you want to keep the clipboard contents, if you'd copied a large amount of data.

Re:Meta Meets Microsoft on Thursday October 13, 2022 @06:36AM (#33189334)
> Then one of the developers moved house, temporarily misplaced his headset, and we haven’t used it since.

> I’m not sure I can justify buying it for my Passport team, even if we were still going through the hassle of pulling on a headset for one meeting a week.

It sounds like he's in the target audience for this VR-for-business stuff he predicts, but he doesn't really want it. If it had been truly a game-changer rather than a gimmick, they wouldn't have abandoned the meetings the moment they had an excuse to, and he wouldn't describe the meetings as "going through the hassle"

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