Apparently RetroShare is SO dark-netty that the author did not know about it. RetroShare has been around for 20 years. It uses internet connections but there is no central server and the entire thing runs P2P, encrypted everywhere.
Posts by Scene it all
272 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2018
Jack Dorsey floats specs for decentralized messaging app that uses Bluetooth
'Cyber security' behind decision to end defense satellite sharing of hurricane data
The only "weather app" that is guaranteed to work most places in the US is a "Weather Alert Radio". These special purpose VHF radios are tuned to a network of stations all over the country, and controlled directly by the NWS. You program your radio according to your postal code and the radio will turn itself on if it receives an alert specific to your area. No internet required. And there are portable versions for campers and hikers.
Proton bashes Apple and joins antitrust suit that seeks to throw the App Store wide open
China just two years behind USA on chip design, says White House tech Czar
Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up
Do you trust Xi with your 'private' browsing data? Apple, Google stores still offer China-based VPNs, report says
Ex-NASA Admin pick blames Musk ties for pulled nomination
And living underground requires digging a big hole, and that requires heavy equipment. One article I saw pointed out that heavy construction equipment wears out all the time because of sand getting in the works, hoses breaking, etc. Mars surface is a very hostile environment not just for people but for backhoes and bulldozers.
Unless you land near one of those volcanic skylight things, but I would want that to be fully robot-mapped before I went into one.
Schneier tries to rip the rose-colored AI glasses from the eyes of Congress
Trump lifts US supersonic flight ban, says he's 'Making Aviation Great Again'
Ex-Meta exec: Copyright consent obligation = end of AI biz
AWS says Britain needs more nuclear power to feed AI datacenter surge
Intuitive Machines blames dim lighting and dodgy data for second lunar faceplant
EU tells US scientists to dump Trump for a lab in Europe
US Copyright Office found AI companies sometimes breach copyright. Next day its boss was fired
Tech titans: Wanna secure US AI leadership? Stop giving the world excuses to buy Chinese
US Transpo Sec wants air traffic control rebuild in 3 years, asks Congress for blank check
So every radio, in everything from a Piper Cub to an Airbus A380 needs to be replaced with the new VOIP equipment? At whose expense? (And avionics tend to be really expensive because of all the testing and robustness required.) And what do you bet StarLink will be the preferred satellite provider to funnel more money to Elon Musk? What could possibly go wrong?
Trump derails Chinese H20 GPU sales, forcing Nvidia to eat $5.5B this quarter
Meanwhile, in Japan, train stations are being 3D-printed in an afternoon
Oracle Cloud says it's not true someone broke into its login servers and stole data
Re: Encrypted passwords?
I know of a case where some clever guys were able to "crack" every password for every account on the in-house development network for a certain operating system. The OS was using the hardware CRC instruction to do the "hashing" and the project leaders ignored cries that this was not secure. So a demonstration was in order. The key insight is that it was not necessary to discover the EXACT password, only one that HASHED THE SAME. And doing this for several hundred passwords at once greatly increases the speed of the process. They completed the whole thing in one night and everyone on the network was emailed their own password (or one that worked just as well) the next morning. The hashing algorithm was changed immediately, as was the protection on the password file.
I can vouch for this being a true story as I was there and received my own password in the mail. I also knew the two "clever guys".
GCC 15 is close: COBOL and Itanium are in, but ALGOL is out
Re: ALGOL-68 is out
I once worked on the Bliss compilers at DEC. That was a language in which "2=X" made perfect sense but you probably would not like the result. It means "Store the address of X into memory location 2." Maybe if you were setting up interrupt handlers that would be OK, and Bliss was targeted at applications like that.
Boeing, Boeing, burned: Over half a billion dollars by Starliner in 2024
Larry Ellison wants to put all America's data, including DNA, in one big Oracle system for AI to study
This Perfect Day
People need to read "This Perfect Day", a 1970 novel by Ira Levin (who also wrote Rosemary's Baby). A huge computer named UniComp runs the world. The entire population is being treated by psychoactive drugs to keep them compliant. Recalcitrant individuals are banished to small islands that strangely do not appear on any maps. Then it turns out that UniComp, under a mountain near Geneva, is actually controlled by its programmers.
DeepSeek rated too dodgy down under: Banned from Australian government devices
Stargate, smargate. We're spending $60B+ on AI this year, Meta's Zuckerberg boasts
Infosec was literally the last item in Trump's policy plan, yet major changes are likely on his watch
The latest language in the GNU Compiler Collection: Algol-68
Re: Lead to a bunch of stuff at what was RSRE Malvern
I remember how the "Revised report on Algol 68" used literary quotations to help "explain" the concepts. In the section on "comments" appears this quotation from Gilbert & Sullivan: "Merely corroborative detail, intended to lend artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative."
This made up for the difficulty in understanding the two-level "Wijngaarden grammar" that was the formal definition, as well as the not-invented-here use of unusual words. You did not "execute a program"; rather the computer "elaborated the definition" of the program.
It's been 20 years since Oracle bought two software rivals, changing the market forever
US reportedly mulls TP-Link router ban over national security risk
NASA finds Orion heatshield cracks won't cook Artemis II crew
Oracle's Java price hikes push CIOs to brew new licensing strategies
Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it
I knew some people who ran a usability lab. They would film people with no experience using a computer, to see how well written the documentation was. One user had trouble clicking on icons. He said "nothing happens". Reviewing the video footage they saw that this user had interpreted the words "position the pointer ON the icon" to mean "just ABOVE the icon".
China has utterly pwned 'thousands and thousands' of devices at US telcos
The National Museum of Computing reboots Bletchley Park's H Block
Tesla Cybertruck, a paragon of reliability, recalled again
Australia tells tots: No TikTok till you're 16... or X, Instagram and Facebook
The sad tale of the Alpha massacre
Re: don't try this at home...
I once did the ancient equivalent of this, on an IBM System 370. What I was SUPPOSED to do was copy the disk containing all the operator "procedures" to a backup disk. In those dark days, a "procedure" is what today you would call a command script, and the operations staff had a big book of scheduled things they had to do, like run the company payroll, or inventory updates, or something, and the book would tell them to "Mount tape number 2375 and run procedure XYZ". And a disk pack, weighing ten pounds, could hold about 250 Megabytes. With an "M".
But I got the device definitions backwards and copied the empty disk on top of the the live one, erasing it. Under the glowering gaze of my boss, I went to the tape library, fetched the most recent backup tape, and copied it to the proper disk as the operator staff stood there waiting. No timesharing here - this computer system that filled a room could do ONE thing at a time.
TSMC halts advanced chip shipments to Chinese AI companies
Python dethrones JavaScript as the most-used language on GitHub
Congress to Commerce: Sanction more Chinese chip firms to stop Huawei's evasion
The Europa Clipper stretches its wings as launch nears
Thinnet cables are no match for director's morning workout
To patch this server, we need to get someone drunk
EV sales hit speed bump as drivers unplug from the electric dream
We covered this in one of my EE classes. Thermo-powered electricity generation, by boiling water, has a thermodynamic limit on efficiency of about 40%. (look up "Carnot Cycle".) The electromagnetic process of converting the power of a spinning turbine into electricity is over 90%. The transmissions network is also over 90% and battery conversion about 85%. Compared to an internal combustion engine at ~12%, electricity still wins and that is assuming fossil-fuel use to heat the water. With any other source of electricity not involving thermodynamic limits, the efficiency of the electric car is WAY better. And this does not count the environmental factors. Using fossil fuels could be 100% efficient and there would STILL be an excellent reason to get rid of them.
A nice cup of tea rewired the datacenter and got things working again
Sweet 16 and making mistakes: More of the computing industry's biggest fails
Re: Honourable mention
The big thing I noticed during this time was that the Intel 8088 and 8086 architectures (the instruction set that the programmer sees) was very clumsy. As though it was designed by hardware people who were not programmers. The DEC PDP-11 clearly was designed with programmers in mind, most noticeably in its clever addressing modes based around truly general-purpose registers. And the Motorola 68000 clearly copied some ideas from that. Then later the DEC VAX line instruction set was *heavily* designed for the convenience of programmers and also for small code size. (I know - I was there) This was before the modern ideas around RISC designs that did simple things very fast.
City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle
Used to be, you would hire an army of guys with green eyeshades and sleeve protectors to just *do* it. Forget the automation.
In my county in the US, the county supervisors just signed a multi-year contracts with a new company to handle the residential trash collection. It has been, in the words of one supervisor, "an unmitigated disaster" with trash not being picked up on time for thousands of residents, going on several weeks. They are looking for ways out of the contract. But in the meantime, they have been redirecting existing county employees in the road maintenance department to pick up the trash, and then they send the overtime bill to the under-performing contractor.