Isolus (u/Isolus) - Readit News

Isolus commented on German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice blog.documentfoundation.o... · Posted by u/buovjaga

elygre · 2 years ago

Microsoft started building their new Munich headquarters in 2013/2014. Their old headquarters were already immediately outside Munich. For example, the Munich airport is further away from Munch city than the old headquarters were.

The decision to revert to a Microsoft Platform was taken in November 2017.

Isolus · 2 years ago

Yes, the final decision to revert to Microsoft was taken in 2017. But in 2014, the mayor of Munich began an investigation into how to return to Microsoft products. And he was also the one who negotiated the location of the headquarters with Microsoft in 2013.

Isolus commented on German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice blog.documentfoundation.o... · Posted by u/buovjaga

cladopa · 2 years ago

They already did that before until Microsoft offered them new conditions and they went back to MS.

So take all those "digital sovereignity" with a grain of salt. It usually means: "We want you to lower your fees".

Isolus · 2 years ago

No, they didn't. That happened for example in Munich. But that is on the other side of Germany. And there is already a joke that MS can't move their german headquarters every time a state or big city want's to move away from MS products. (They did this when Munich changed back to MS producs - but of course this was pure coincidence.)

Isolus commented on eSIM is altering how consumers interact with operators opensignal.com/2023/07/25... · Posted by u/signa11

Isolus · 3 years ago

I find it inconvenient that pluggable eSIMS are so hard to get. In my opinion they combine the best of both worlds. You can download profiles without wating for SIM cards and you can put them in different phones.

Isolus commented on I have written a JVM in Rust andreabergia.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/lukastyrychtr

tgtweak · 3 years ago

Embedded JVM is actually huge/pervasive and runs things as benign as the chip on your credit card.

Isolus · 3 years ago

Also many SIM cards (UICCs) / embedded SIM modules as well as e.g. the Secure Element that Samsung uses for Knox run with Java Card.

Isolus commented on IPv6 Deployment Status datatracker.ietf.org/doc/... · Posted by u/fractalb

pantalaimon · 3 years ago

Does anyone know why German universities are so slow to deploy IPv6? Almost none has their website reachable over IPv6 or IPv6 on their internal network.

Isolus · 3 years ago

Most German universtities have applied at an early stage for a class B network block therefore they have little pressure.

When I asked the IT staff at my university years ago, they said that there are still some very old routers without IPv6 support in use. And since everything seems to work with IPv4 for the university administration, there is no money for new ones.

Isolus commented on Ask HN: Cause of UK e-gates outage? · Posted by u/jjgreen

Nextgrid · 3 years ago

> But for modern passports they use Extended Access Control which requires up to date terminal certificates to access the data (you have to update them in the range of days

Passports don't know the current time and thus can't tell whether the presented certificate is within its validity range (as in a malicious attacker could feed an expired certificate as well as a fake "current time" value to make it appear valid), so why are those certificates short-lived?

Isolus · 3 years ago

Whenever you present a certificate to the passport, its current time is updated by the "valid from" value if it's newer then the current time.

It's not perfect but if you started you trip in another country with such a system and where a more recent certificate was used, your passport will deny access.

Isolus commented on Ask HN: Cause of UK e-gates outage? · Posted by u/jjgreen

danpalmer · 3 years ago

No insight here, but I've always wondered if the e-gates are doing anything "clever" with the camera, or if they're just connecting you to some call-centre in Swindon where your face and passport details pop up in front of someone with a lot less training than traditional border security.

It might be doing facial recognition, but it feels too reliable for the level of facial recognition I expect a consultancy could pull off in a government contract.

Isolus · 3 years ago

I don't know anything about this particular case, but about these systems in general. They can work without any operator or network connection. They verify that you have a valid passport and that the taken image (face) matches the one stored in your passport. But for modern passports they use Extended Access Control which requires up to date terminal certificates to access the data (you have to update them in the range of days) und you can give these systems revocation lists and lists of unwanted persons. If any of this is not updated, they stop working.

Isolus commented on I’m ready to trade in my electric car latimes.com/opinion/story... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

datadeft · 3 years ago

I am not sure when the car industry reaches that iteration where you can swap out batteries. It already happened for the electric rollers and it is freakin amazing. I think many of the electric car skeptics would convert if there was a way to "re-charge" the car within 5-10 minutes. The batteries would be also happier.

Isolus · 3 years ago

NIO ist doing this with it's Power Swap Stations. But there are too few to really use them.

Isolus commented on Asteroid lost 1M kilograms after collision with DART spacecraft nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/sohkamyung

shirro · 3 years ago

1000 tonnes. Though using the base units is never wrong and I generally prefer it. In common language a ton can be a short ton (US) or long ton(UK) though I am sure they are all well within the margin of error.

Isolus · 3 years ago

In a lot of other countries in common language a ton is a metric ton.

Isolus commented on Go 1.20 Cryptography words.filippo.io/dispatch... · Posted by u/mfrw

Isolus · 3 years ago

I'm pretty sure these changes are great for e.g. standard TLS connections.

But I don't quite understand what this means for other/custom curves.

For example I'm often using brainpool curves. Currently I just set the CurveParams and I'm done.

They are part of a lot of official standards (especially in Europe/Germany but also for e.g. travel documents in the ICAO standard) so I can't get around them.

Do I have to implement everything for that curves myself? That would probably be more insecure than just using crypto/elliptic.