Re: Where's the quantum?
I found out yesterday that OpenSSH has had a post quantum key exchange mechanism(*) since 2022, so it's no big deal.
(*) Actually a hybrid PQ/EC method that's supposed to be resistant to failure in either half.
3516 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2009
Shouldn't that me "kredit"?
Muphry's Law strikes.
Then again repeatedly getting 404 does not seem to sink into the heads of the script kiddies.
Through a bit of silliness I found out that if returning 404 doesn't stop people/bots repeatedly hammering your web site for non-existent pages that might be vulnerable, returning 418 ("I'm a teapot") seems to discourage at least some of them. I now configure nginx so that all requests without a Host: header (i.e. scans by IP address) get 418 status codes. It's probably not fully RFC compliant, but who cares if it reduces the noise in my logs.
And most ISPs don't allocate a /48 per subscriber anyway; /56 is more common unless you want to pay extra.
That's one of the nice things about Zen - when you finally find someone who knows what IPv6 is, they give you a /48.
So we do have a ridiculous amount of address space for everybody.
A back of the envelope calculation suggests that if I managed to assign a machine to every address(*) I'd need a few percent of the Sun's total power output to run them. That might make my office a little too warm in summer.
(*) I'm not sure whether there's enough Si and Cu on Earth for this. Left as an exercise for the reader.
You can't take your profile anywhere.
Funny, that's exactly what a lot of the third party developers have done. It's not for the non-technical at the moment, but it's certainly possible. That's one of the features where the AT protocol wins over ActivityPub. (There are pros and cons for both protocols, says he in an attempt to avoid a stupid religious argument.)
Whether a law is passed has nothing to do with whether it's practical or even possible to comply with it.
Hence idiocies like Malcolm Turnbull's declaration that the laws of mathematics don't apply in Australia because of an Oz law requiring tech companies to unencrypt end-to-end encrypted messages.
Most of the time it worked quite well - the the users spotted things that would be a problem
In my experience, you also got to find out how remarkably varied users were in their thinking. I had quite a few conversations along the lines of "Sorry, you did what with it??? Can you show me? Hmm, I'd have never thought of that.(*)".
(*) Half the time that was the polite version of "Are you a complete idiot?", the other half it meant "God, that's genius!"
I'm firmly in the camp that says if it's a publicly funded body - say, a university - that has provided the paper, it should be easily available free of charge, or for at most a minimal charge.
I agree, but you can usually find an online draft (basically the final paper without the publisher's logos) or simply ask the authors for a copy. Generally authors love to find out that someone is interested in their work.
But the "reputable" journals don't pay for peer review either!
They don't pay cash, but a reviewer for Elsevier gets free access to all Elsevier journals for a period of 30 days, which could be regarded as payment in kind. This isn't a particularly good payment, as many reviewers will have institutional access anyway, but it helps for independent researchers.
That way they can also put themselves up for sale or list on the stock market (horror!).
Unfortunately that would pretty much guarantee rapid enshittification.
I'm pretty sure the execs are thinking of simply pilfering the company and leaving the spent husk to wither and die.
Classic principal/agent problem. See also: representative democracy.
I wrote that as part of the plot to my first novel back in 2012.
And yet you don't give the novel's name or ISBN, or promote it in any way. You are definitely not Boris Johnson. Well done, carry on. :-)
Didn't Hitler try to do this with the British Pound?
Yes, Operation Bernhard.
As the socket isn't usually covered, things like phones end up with pocket lint getting into the socket and preventing the plug from going in properly. I've had to dig the fluff (or in one case a grass seed) out of various USB C sockets with a pin several times recently.
I'm sure Jacob Rees Mogg et al will be lobbying for the BS546 round-pin plug to be made the standard.
That's a bit too modern for JRM. I'm sure he'd prefer a system whereby you handed the device to a flunky who then used an amber rod and a piece of silk or a preprepared Leyden jar to supply the necessary electromotive force.
The West Germans ran several PBR's (including one IIRC on Thorium).
The West German reactors worked fine. South Africa (apartheid era IIRC) tried it and their pebbles broke up and jammed the pebble circulation machinery. The Chinese currently have at least one PBR, no idea how it's going.
But AIUI there is no history of irradiated pebbles in molten salt. TBH given how dense U is (SG of UO2 is about 10.26) I'm not sure they would float in the salt at all.
The pebbles are mostly carbon AIUI, much of it porous carbon, with SiC & pyrocarbon for the crisp outer coating that doesn't melt (in) your hand. The only sources I can find are vague but suggest an overall density in the region of 1.5-3. FLiBe has a density ~1.9, so floating, or at least bobbing, pebbles sounds feasible. In reality I don't think you'd actually want the pebbles floating in a layer at the top, you'd want them submerged to maximise heat transfer.
Another big advantage of molten salt reactors is that they can be designed to fail safely.
In theory, but we haven't had much experience with molten salt designs compared to water based reactors. With nuclear reactors the devil is very much in the details.
The thing I don't understand about the Kairos design is that it's TRISO fuel, aka pebbles, but in molten salt. Usually pebble bed reactors just have a pit full of pebbles with He gas as the coolant and you get passive limiting of the reaction as the temperature increases. I wonder how floating the pebbles in salt will affect that. Also I hope they've tested how the pyrocarbon coating reacts with hot FLiBe or whatever salt mix they're intending to use.
Except that a colony on Mars is stupid.
And anyone who thinks it isn't should read the Weinersmith's book on the subject. It's both a thorough debunking of the idea and very funny.
It not only registers if you voted or not, who you voted for can be determined.
It's 1 out of K anonymous. To find out how Joe Bloggs voted you'd have to look at on average half the ballots cast to find his vote. That's a small number of tens of thousands for a general election, and thus expensive and tedious. On the other hand, finding out who voted for a particular candidate is trivial (before the ballots are destroyed) because they've been sorted into bundles as part of the count(*). Back in the 60s and 70s (no idea about now, anyone with experience of recent counts?) the ballots of those who voted for the Communist Party were handed over to Special Branch after the count was done.
(*) In theory. In practice mistakes are made and politically motivated counters have been known to stuff extra votes into the pile for their preferred candidate, which is why you have other party activists watching them.