anologwintermut (u/anologwintermut)

anologwintermut commented on Pistol sights yarchive.net/blog/gun/pis... · Posted by u/luu

seibelj · 8 years ago

Anyone who is diehard anti-gun for personal use, I recommend taking a pistol class from a reputable organization, and keep an open mind. No one is telling you to get a license or buy a gun, just go take a class. They will teach you all about safety, how to shoot, gun cleaning and maintenance, and all of the basic skills needed to properly own a gun. Then if you are still diehard anti-gun, great! But if you have no experience, then taking a day to learn more might help you understand how the other side thinks.

anologwintermut · 8 years ago

I happen to like guns and shooting. It's a good point to understand the appeal of guns and also "the other side."

But there is a point you are leaving out that comes up if you talk to anyone who does treat firearms seriously: many people do not take those classes and/or do not treat guns safely. Go to a range on Sunday and that will be really clear. Or read the comment history by people who bring this up whenever guns come up in a general forum. Often they rightly end up complaining about safety of other gun owners in posts in more topic specific forums. But somehow, when it comes to a general audience, those issues get omitted.

Taking the class would give you a distinctly wrong impression about the responsibility of all gun owners. As does the suggestion to take the class.

Sorry, not to single you out specifically, it really is a good suggestion. But the net rhetorical effect of people making points like this is (and I think it's intentional) to skew the framing of the issue. Yes, you may be responsible, but with the exception of some people who would never heed your advice, people who want more regulation of firearms aren't worried about you. Guns don't kill people, some people with guns kill people.

anologwintermut commented on Secret Code Found in Juniper's Firewalls Shows Risk of Government Backdoors wired.com/2015/12/juniper... · Posted by u/r721

fabulist · 10 years ago

"Instead of using the NIST recommended curve points [ScreenOS] uses self-generated basis points..." [0]

The way I read this statement is that each device generates its own set of points. If this is the case, I don't see how it would work as a crypto backdoor.

If by "self-generated" they mean generated by Juniper once, well, thats fishy.

[0] http://kb.juniper.net/InfoCenter/index?page=content&id=KB282...

Edited to add: Upon further research, the latter possibility seems more likely.

anologwintermut · 10 years ago

Instead of using the NIST recommended curve points it uses self-generated basis points and then takes the output as an input to FIPS/ANSI X.9.31 PRNG, which is the random number generator used in ScreenOS cryptographic operations."

Looks like they feed the output through a standard CPRNG. Assuming it's true, that pretty much breaks the DUAL_EC attack because you can't use the output of the final CPRNG to recover the DUAL_EC state.

anologwintermut commented on What Does the OS X Activity Monitor’s “Energy Impact” Actually Measure? blog.mozilla.org/nnetherc... · Posted by u/nnethercote

wmf · 10 years ago

I suspect that's the real reason why Apple is weighting wakeups heavily and exaggerating the energy impact: it shames developers into making their apps more efficient.

anologwintermut · 10 years ago

Except Chrome, which on every laptop I've ever used seems to decrease battery life by about a 1/3rd compared to Safari and is always marked as using significant power. (Currently 10.9.5 with chrome 44 on a 2014 macbook air, but I've had the issue on newer computers at work)

anologwintermut commented on Google’s Project Vault Is a Computing Environment on a Micro SD Card techcrunch.com/2015/05/29... · Posted by u/harshabhat86

PinguTS · 10 years ago

Onboard the Vault itself is an ARM processor running ARTOS, a secure operating system focused on privacy and data security.

Am I the only one wondering why there is no information available about that OS? Google is in many ways committed to Open Source and then it is using a proprietary OS where I do not find any information about.

There is a Wikipedia comparison table with an outdated link. There is an old entry on a blog with basically zero information, except there where only a single person involved in designing and developing this OS. Which makes it suspicious to me regarding the claim "safe and secure".

anologwintermut · 10 years ago

I'm 99% certain they meant Free RTOS[0] and someone just misheard.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeRTOS

anologwintermut commented on Tesla Plans to Open Car Doors to All Hackers This Summer forbes.com/sites/thomasbr... · Posted by u/wglb

TheLoneWolfling · 10 years ago

Nope.

Dylan's comment requires a timer in both the key fob and in the car. The key fob to delay transmission of the challenge response, the car to check if there isn't too much delay in the challenge / response pair.

You really need a timer in the key fob, as the processor in the key fob is often so slow (for battery / cost reasons) that an extra couple clock cycles somewhere would throw off the timing enough to make it fail.

anologwintermut · 10 years ago

The usual distance bounding protocols only need a nano-second accurate timer on one device called the verifier. For example https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec10/tech/full_papers/R...

Cool trick in that one, the Prover(i.e. the key fob) does the distance measuring part of the challenge response protocol using analog only components. This means its response time is <1 nano second.

So you can do it with only the car having a good timer.

anologwintermut commented on Tesla Plans to Open Car Doors to All Hackers This Summer forbes.com/sites/thomasbr... · Posted by u/wglb

TheLoneWolfling · 10 years ago

Detecting the amplified signal won't work. There are these things known as directional antennas...

The timer idea is a good one, although a ns-accurate timer is starting to get a bit much for something to put into a key fob. Especially give it's run off of a watch battery (power requirements) and often exposed to heat / cold (thermal drift).

anologwintermut · 10 years ago

The timer could be in the car. Protocol looks like fob pings car, car challenges fob, fob responds.

anologwintermut commented on ZeroDB, an end-to-end encrypted database blog.zerodb.io/hello-worl... · Posted by u/mwilkison

michwill · 10 years ago

Well, actually we don't use determenistic encryption, and the server knows nothing about ordering. It merely stores the trees and returns requested pieces (w/o knowing which piece is that or is it a piece of a tree at all).

I find some ideas in MIT mOPE paper similar though

anologwintermut · 10 years ago

so ORAM with this on top of it ?

anologwintermut commented on ZeroDB, an end-to-end encrypted database blog.zerodb.io/hello-worl... · Posted by u/mwilkison

akerl_ · 10 years ago

This feels like a hollow announcement, given that there's no code or design details to look at.

I am curious how they intend to let a client run queries against a dataset that the server cannot read without the server having to send all the encrypted data over the wire, or at least an index of all the encrypted data. Which sounds limiting for large datasets.

anologwintermut · 10 years ago

Not sure how they do it, but it has been done before as a research project http://css.csail.mit.edu/cryptdb/. One of the tricks it uses(though by no means the only) is to do a binary search in an index, it actually has the client decrypt a node and compare and then give the server the result.

anologwintermut commented on Why Does the Putnam Math Competition Give a Separate Prize to Women? wnpr.org/post/why-does-pu... · Posted by u/Flopsy

howling · 10 years ago

This [1] may seem sexist, but is it true?

Basically the article claims that while girls have a slightly higher average IQ than boys, boys have greater variance in IQ than girls. So while there is not much difference in average boys' and girls' mathematical abilities, the super smart top 0.001% will consist predominantly of boys.

[1]: http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math2.htm

anologwintermut · 10 years ago

It might be true, but how usefulness is it when dealing with society as a whole?. For the Puttman, it probably kicks in, but for a whole field like e.g. programing/computer science/IT, it almost certainly doesn't for the simple reason that the field isn't composed of anywhere near the top 0.001 percent of the population in terms of IQ.

anologwintermut commented on Why Does the Putnam Math Competition Give a Separate Prize to Women? wnpr.org/post/why-does-pu... · Posted by u/Flopsy

facepalm · 10 years ago

The article reads as if because of political correctness it HAS to be true that there are no differences in intellectual capacity between men and women. It also misrepresents Summer's quote - I think what he said is that the distribution might be different, he never said women can not be as smart as men.

I don't know if there are differences, but I think it's very wrong to assume there aren't just because it seems modern and politically correct. Especially since the alternative theories put forward to explain lack of women in maths or CS are usually harmful, heavily prejudiced and inflammatory. And barking up the wrong tree is unlikely to solve the problem (for example if billions are spent to fight assumed sexism and sexism isn't even the cause).

It's also funny that whenever there is a job which seems to call for "women's strengths" nobody has qualms to claim "women are better at x" (say empathy, risk management, relationships, whatever). I wish people would at least make up their mind, do they believe there are no differences or not? Then if they go praising papers that seem to show female CEOs are more successful, how do they explain it if they don't believe in differences?

There is also little debate about physical differences - I think few would suggest it is sexist to have separate football leagues for men and women. Although, to be sure, women can be stronger than most men - but most simply aren't.

Edit: HN doesn't let me comment atm. To the comment accusing me of sexism: I said it's wrong to assume there are no differences for PC reason. You say it's sexist to assume differences. That's something entirely different. It's always wrong to assume something without evidence (and then there are just degrees of belief):

anologwintermut · 10 years ago

Summers's point was about the distribution at the extremes, not the average. He was addressing the lack of professors in STEM at places like Harvard which manifestly select for the far end of the bell curve. Right, wrong, or otherwise, that has almost nothing to do with the average case and even he contended that the best statistical evidence showed women and men were roughly equal.

So, unless one seriously thinks that the entire field of programming/IT/computer science as a whole requires that level of talent, Summer's point doesn't apply and there are certainly other reasons for the gender gap in computer science.