jcims (u/jcims) - Readit News

jcims commented on Upcoming Changes to Let's Encrypt Certificates community.letsencrypt.org... · Posted by u/schmuckonwheels

ekr____ · 2 days ago

To the best of my knowledge the answer to "2" is no.

jcims · 2 days ago

I did a bunch of work with Verisign as a contractor back in the early 2000s and got to see some of the systems and infrastructure issuing a good portion of the world's certificates at that time. 15 years later I was at Google when they let an intermediate certificate in their SMTP certs expire and had a major GMail outage. At work last week we had a major outage related to certificate issues. Of course there are thousands upon thousands of stories like that in between.

The chains of trust you can build with PKI have been incredibly useful and instrumental to securing code, data and traffic, but the fact that it's still subject to such brittle failure modes is bemusing.

jcims commented on United 777-200 fleet faces an uncertain future after Dulles engine failure liveandletsfly.com/united... · Posted by u/makaimc

rottencupcakes · 2 days ago

I had paid $150 or so for a extra legroom seat (on lufthansa). They did some last minute tomfoolery and my seat changed on my phone as I boarded the plane.

I was now not even in a premium economy row, but just a normal seat. I tried telling the flight attendant, who gave no shits - she just said "the plane isn't full, sit anywhere when we are in the air."

Fine, I found a premium economy aisle (still no extra legroom exit row seat, but whatever), and then filed for a refund when I landed.

They responded to my request for a refund with a form letter apologizing, but no refund. Then ignored any follow up. I had to do a charge back (no joke).

Them:

> I hope this message finds you well. I am writing to sincerely apologize for the seating issue you experienced during your recent flight. I understand that you requested an exit row seat and were not able to be accommodated, which is understandably frustrating.

> We strive to honor all seating preferences, and I regret that we were unable to meet your expectations in this instance. Please know that your feedback is important to us, and we will review our seating allocation processes to prevent similar situations in the future.

> Thank you for your understanding and patience. If there is anything further we can assist you with or if you have any other concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

> We hope that you put your trust in Lufthansa and partners also in the future and continue to fly with us.

Me: This wasn't a seating preference, I paid $130 to reserve this seat. This is something I purchased. I'd expect you'd at least issue a refund and extend me some sort of credit to make up for this.

Them: crickets

jcims · 2 days ago

It's wild. It's basically just straight up theft wrapped in layers of disclaimers and circumstances.

jcims commented on United 777-200 fleet faces an uncertain future after Dulles engine failure liveandletsfly.com/united... · Posted by u/makaimc

kelnos · 2 days ago

Where do you live? In the US and EU at least (and presumably other places), you can cancel within 24 hours, no questions asked, for a full refund.

jcims · 2 days ago

I was in Dusseldorf headed to Budapest and I spent two hours with ticket agents, call center folks and Amex travel and couldn’t get any motion.

They said the complicating factor was that the flight out of DUS was still available. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

jcims commented on United 777-200 fleet faces an uncertain future after Dulles engine failure liveandletsfly.com/united... · Posted by u/makaimc

rottencupcakes · 2 days ago

What has become much more degraded in Europe than America is the domestic flights.

Try flying Lufthansa (or one of their half dozen subsidiaries created almost entirely to give worse service) anywhere inside of europe. Everything is a money grab and the service and boarding are terrible.

United maintains a relatively consistent experience between domestic and international, minus the free alcohol.

jcims · 2 days ago

> Lufthansa

I had to walk away from a $600 ticket that I booked at the last minute b/c in the 30 seconds between the time I paid for the ticket and the time the booking returned, the connecting flight filled up and I had to wait a day I didn't have for the next one. Couldn't get a single consideration from anyone, they said they couldn't cancel the ticket b/c the first leg was still available. Just had to walk away from the money and find another airline.

I'm sure it happens on every airline but man I was pissed. They go to the bottom of the list until the next tomfoolery occurs.

jcims commented on Upcoming Changes to Let's Encrypt Certificates community.letsencrypt.org... · Posted by u/schmuckonwheels

jcims · 2 days ago

I used to be knee deep in PKI stuff, now I hardly pay attention.

Two quick questions:

1 - Are there any TLS libraries that enable warnings when certs are nearing expiration?

2 - Are there any extensions in the works (or previous failed attempts) for TLS to have the client validate the next planned certificate and signal both ends when that fails?

jcims commented on Cosmic-ray bath in a past supernova gives birth to Earth-like planets science.org/doi/10.1126/s... · Posted by u/toomuchtodo

buu700 · 2 days ago

Turns out "God" was just a convenient shorthand for "alien AI", and Genesis was about terraforming and seeding life on Earth.

jcims · 2 days ago

Eden would be a great name for a sterile yet fertile planet waiting for a visitor.

jcims commented on P-computers can solve spin-glass problems faster than quantum systems news.ucsb.edu/2025/022239... · Posted by u/magoghm

jcims · 2 days ago

Is this similar to what Extropic is doing?

jcims commented on DNA Learning Center: Mechanism of Replication 3D Animation dnalc.cshl.edu/resources/... · Posted by u/timschmidt

rolph · 2 days ago

the reactant molecules themselves, are primed with an ATP like a one use capacitor, it provides threshold energy, and is "consumed" as part of the reaction.

jcims · 2 days ago

Nice. This was a detail I wasn't picking up on for some reason.

jcims commented on Cosmic-ray bath in a past supernova gives birth to Earth-like planets science.org/doi/10.1126/s... · Posted by u/toomuchtodo

jmyeet · 2 days ago

The Universe coalesced into hydrogen and helium from a quark-gluon plasma soon after the Big Bang. It's kind of staggering the sequence of events that occurred afterwards to bring us here.

As many of us know, the fusion in stars produces elements as heavy as iron. It then takes explosions of those stars to scatter those elements into space, ultimately bringing them into the protoplanetary disc of a new star, such that it can form a planet in the right zone. That star then needs to live long enough and the system needs to be stable enough to produce complex life.

But it gets worse because we obviously have elements heavier than iron. So stars of a sufficient size need to form such that when the stars die they do so in an even more violent fashion. The core needs to collapse into neutronium and the resultant supernova can produce heavier elements. They also come from neutron star mergers.

So all the uranium we have on Earth came from such an event. Because of the nuclear decay chain we can estimate when this uranium was made and IIRC that's somewhere between 80 and 200 million years before the Earth formed.

So this all had to happen sufficiently close to the Sun and that material had to be captured in the Sun's protoplanetary disc. We needed the right combination of elements to form a protective magnetic field and produce enough but not too much heat.

We're going to keep discovering mechanisms like this and the importance of particular isotopes, events and things like how amino acids seem to form relatively easily (given the right elements are present), which itself is a consequence of CNO fusion.

But also why did the Sun form at all? It has to be in a nebula of largely hydrogen and helium and something had to trigger that like the shock wave from a nearby supernova or neutron star or black hole merger.

It's kind of why I think sentient life is incredibly rare.

jcims · 2 days ago

>It's kind of why I think sentient life is incredibly rare.

Agreed. The universe is big, but combinatorics are bigger.

I'd be disappointed but ultimately unsurprised if an all-knowing oracle said it has only happened once in the history of the universe. My follow up question, of course, would be whether or not it happened on Earth.

jcims commented on It seems that OpenAI is scraping [certificate transparency] logs benjojo.co.uk/u/benjojo/h... · Posted by u/pavel_lishin

jcims · 3 days ago

Given these are trivially forged, presumably they aren't really using a Mac for scraping, right? Just to elicit a 'standard' end user response from the server?

>useragent="Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36; compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.3; robots.txt;