WesternInfidels, westerninfidels@feddit.online

I’m probably an idiot. Tell me I’m all wrong about this.

The danger is that quantum computers could factor large products well enough to reverse public keys, finding the associated private keys. Which would indeed be very bad. But this isn’t quite a magic key that opens everything.

Public key crypto is used to set up a secure network connection, but it’s not used to encrypt the data that flows on that connection. Quantum snooping would require an eavesdropper to intercept every bit on a connection, from initiation onward. And decrypting it would probably not be a real-time affair.

Public key crypto is also not used to protect your typical encrypted zip file or file system volume. Your Bitlocker and Veracrypt secrets aren’t about to fall to quantum spies.

I’m bothered that so many popular articles about this issue draw no distinction between the classes of cryptography that are vulnerable and those that are not.

It is my understanding that some fraction of players of the last Wolfenstein game had this complaint, but un-ironically.

https://youtu.be/JWfD4geJm2Q

If there were no suckers, there would be no money, no winnings to motivate the insiders. It requires exploitation in order to “function.”

The next step will be stratifying the insiders. Big bettors, people who hear things and think they know things, suckered by a tiny cadre of the innermost circle. Maybe that’s happened already.

Eventually, of course, there will be motivation to spread falsehoods to change the odds in the insider’s favor. Or to outright direct history to take advantage of long odds.

Edit: Oops, my prediction may be behind the curve here. That was fast.

Seems like an appropriate companion piece:

The 49MB Web Page

I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.

I guess I must have seen that here in the Fedi.

As early as 2016, some observers suggested that the president was a Russian pawn, an instrument to end American hegemony, to ruin America’s ability to project its influence into the world.

It’s funny how absolutely nothing that’s happened since then contradicts the idea.

Let us also recall his remarks concerning the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi :

“You’re mentioning someone that was extremely controversial. A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about,” he said. “Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen.”

Like so many criticisms of others he offers, it would be perfectly applicable to himself.

This is a great story to illuminate the large number of problems that could be addressed by decent public transit, better options for walking and biking, etc.

I think a post like this would be more useful with some kind of geographic hint in the title:

[Hawaii, USA] Wahiawa dam failure expected! Haleiwa, Wahiawa: Get to higher ground now!

Of course, best of all would be to post it to a Hawaii community, but I don’t know if there is one.

I spent a couple of years doing phone support (for a Windows program, in the internet-by-modem days), and we had a paper manual that we spent a lot of effort on. I’m not sure it helped too many people. We didn’t have a way of measuring, though. We had no idea how many people were blundering through things on their own, how many people set things up on their own with the manual’s help, or how many people were chucking the whole product in a closet and forgetting about it.

Sure, some callers definitely felt it was a waste of time to learn how to work things; they just wanted their things to work. They wanted their things to serve them, instead of the other way around, and I can’t even argue with that philosophy.

But most callers just didn’t have the technical experience to make sense of any documentation we could write. Some didn’t know what the desktop computer they used every day even looked like, didn’t know which of the metal-and-plastic boxes around their desk was “the computer.” They didn’t know the difference between a floppy drive and a hard drive, and they’d argue with us about it. “I don’t have a floppy drive, my drive takes those hard disks.” No manual or knowledge base article was going to help these folks, no matter how much effort we made.

Is the Umbrella Corporation logo on her shirt relevant to anything?

It occurred to me recently that someone is trying to distract us from one kind of child abuse by performing a different kind of child abuse. Arguably faster, louder, harder, a million times worse in every way.

Q: So do you have any hobbies?

A: Well lately I’ve really gotten interested in routing VGA through unusual items!

Q: Ooooh, that’s so hot right now

How many of our all-time favorite games even have photo-realistic graphics? Is this just the logical outgrowth, an endpoint, of a generation-long strategy to accomplish a goal that nobody really wants?

[X] I’m in this picture and I don’t like it

“So you’re saying that the agency will buy Americans’ location data,” Wyden said. “…doing that without a warrant is an outrageous end run around the fourth amendment. It’s particularly dangerous given the use of artificial intelligence to comb through massive amounts of private information.

“This is exhibit A for why Congress needs to pass our bipartisan, bicameral bill, the Government Surveillance Reform act,” Wyden said, referring to legislation he is working to pass to rein in surveillance.

While law enforcement must get a judge-authorized search warrant to obtain location data directly from telecom companies, government agencies have instead been able to buy such information from private data brokers.

I think Wyden is right, it does sound like an end run around the fourth amendment.

If the FBI (and probably other TLAs, domestic and foreign) are willing to do this now, why would a statute addressing the practice stop them?

I participate in the techtakes community on awful.systems…

Jesus, that sounds awful.

Subscribed.

The commentariat at HN was anti-DEI before anyone knew what “DEI” even was.

Garry Tan, tech [Y Combinator] CEO & campaign donor, wishes death upon San Francisco politicians

At least her opinion was changeable. By something. For many, that’s not the case.

It’s been 11 years since our president announced he was running for office. She would have been about 24. It’s possible that the biggest thing that changed is: she grew up a little.

I’m certainly not going to argue that things aren’t bad. I’m not going to tell anyone that they’ve got it better than they think they do.

But I believe I’ve seen the “Most Americans have less than $1,000 saved” factoid bandied about a lot in the headlines. It calls forth such a dismal picture, I’ve been a little skeptical.

The NIRS report (PDF) clarifies that this “less than $1,000 saved” figure is based on some pretty narrow definitions of “saved.” It’s about “working-age Americans (ages 21-64),” so it includes a lot of young people with (no surprise) little or no retirement savings yet. And it’s specifically about savings in employer-organized “defined contribution” ("DC") savings plans, chief among which is the 401(k) plan.

If you’re a 22 year old college student with a part-time job and $5,000 in the bank, you’re likely to score $0 on this metric anyway, because you probably don’t have a 401(k) yet.

And if you’re a 50-year-old self-employed person who owns a home and a fat Roth IRA, you can still score $0 on this metric. The wealth you’ve stashed in owning a home or a business doesn’t show up here.

So this “less than $1,000 saved” figure isn’t really about how much wealth Americans have saved, it’s more about access to and participation in employer-organized “DC” savings plans, which have long been touted as a private-sector alternative to (and which have almost entirely replaced) pensions.

It would absolutely be better if that figure were higher. But it gets spread around (IMHO) because of it’s emotional impact, not because it’s a particularly clear way of understanding the real-world situation.

I am constantly asked to explain my opinions … I am constantly harangued for proof of what I believe, and every time I hand it over there’s some sort of ham-fisted response of “it’s getting better” and “it will get even more better from here!’

For an industry so thoroughly steeped in cold, hard rationality , AI boosters are so quick to jump to flights of fancy — to speak of the mythical “AGI” and the supposed moment when everything gets cheaper and also powerful enough to be reliable or effective.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with “AI,” but I think this highlights an interesting pattern, one where the standards of evidence for critics and boosters are different. Certainly we’ve seen a similar phenomenon in cryptocurrencies and NFTs.

Is it profound, is it one of those penetrating insights that you can’t stop seeing once you’ve seen it? I’m not sure. Of course enthusiasts are biased, of course their arguments are emotional and unfair.