133700+ entries in 1.054s
mircea_popescu:
i am known for my kindly, generous, charitable disposition
Adlai: so just to lay this to rest:
i only rewrote the EC group function. ECDSA requires hashing and proper combination of EC group functions, which has not yet been verified. tl;dr: don't use my code
phf: fair,
i'm itching to validate blocks, but it'll have to wait
Adlai: it really depends what your objectives are... if you're learning without immediate product deadlines,
i strongly recommend rabid NIH celebrations
phf: Adlai:
i'm trying to decide if
i want to get working OP_CHECKSIG first by blindly using someone else's code or ffi'ing to openssl; or write a first approximation of ECDSA myself. will probably offset me by a week
mircea_popescu: ascii_field
i think they give books more in line with "tehnologia navigatiei cu vele"
ascii_field: prolly the one
i'd like to take to my oubliette
Adlai: dunno man
i'm still working my way through GEB
mircea_popescu: the last time
i encountered humans that balked for hours at reading "at least 50 pages"
i was in jr high and the humans in question where the losers in the class.
mircea_popescu:
i read a million words a day, and have been reading a million words a day each day for years straight.
Adlai: you think
i throw my books out the window? no, they go to trusted friends
mircea_popescu: if
i ever want to buy a bible,
i do not wish to buy a soggy dog eared piece of composted toilet paper ensmeared with the biological refuse of five generations of idiots of the sort that'd misread a bible.
mircea_popescu: "Meanwhile, what is the actual amount that the British public spends on books?
I cannot discover any figures, though no doubt they exist. But
I do know that before the war this country was publishing annually about 15,000 books, which included reprints and school books. If as many as 10,000 copies of each book were sold–and even allowing for the school books, this is probably a high estimate-the average person was on
Adlai: last price
i heard quoted for books was "50% of the price you bought'em, if they came from this shop"
mircea_popescu: "
I have said enough to show that reading is one of the cheaper recreations: after listening to the radio probably THE cheapest."
Adlai: "
i don't think
i smoked enough to pay for a decent book" << as though books are priced by content and not... who knows
mircea_popescu:
i don't think
i smoked enough to pay for a decent book in those tobacco prices.
mircea_popescu: making nearly £40 a year. Even before the war when the same tobacco cost 8d. an ounce,
I was spending over £10 a year on it"
mircea_popescu: "Twenty-five pounds a year sounds quite a lot until you begin to measure it against other kinds of expenditure. It is nearly 9s. 9d. a week, and at present 9s. 9d. is the equivalent of about 83 cigarettes (Players): even before the war it would have bought you less than 200 cigarettes. With prices as they now are,
I am spending far more on tobacco than
I do on books.
I smoke six ounces a week, at half-a-crown an ounce,
ascii_field: the original was posted shortly after his death.
i have a copy.
ascii_field: (old thread, re: when
i discovered that some derp posted a fake (!) 'naggum's books' list in place of real one)
ascii_field:
i have more or less solid wall-to-wall now.
Adlai: but
i guess you're not growing up a kid
mircea_popescu:
i owned > 10k volumes before getting rid of the lot, as a 20yo man.
mircea_popescu: l text-books and so forth–that accumulate in the bottoms of cupboards.
I have counted only those books which
I have acquired voluntarily, or else would have acquired voluntarily, and which
I intend to keep. In this category
I find that
I have 442 books, acquired in the following ways:
mircea_popescu: The books that
I have counted and priced are the ones
I have here, in my flat.
I have about an equal number stored in another place, so that
I shall double the final figure in order to arrive at the complete amount.
I have not counted oddments such as proof copies, defaced volumes, cheap paper-covered editions, pamphlets, or magazines, unless bound up into book form. Nor have
I counted the kind of junky books-old schoo
ascii_field: Chinese forum (in Chinese, which
I can't read, but it seemed to be about Lenovo). In the end it did the exact same thing that the autochk.exe method (under Windows 7) does (loads LenovoUpdate.exe, installs a service, etc), except you get a cryptic entry in your System Log: "A platform binary was successfully executed."'
ascii_field: 'nstead, a file called "wpbbin.exe" was placed in C:\windows\system32 and executed. That turns out to be a method Microsoft introduced with Windows 8 to allow the BIOS to execute code on boot up (!?!) called "Windows Platform Binary Table (WPBT)".
I can find almost NOTHING about this anywhere on the internet except a single document on Microsoft's website (link to the Google Cache since it's a .docx file) and in a random
☟︎☟︎ ascii_field: internet connection is established.
I don't know too much exactly what those do, but one appears to phone home to
http://download.lenovo.com/ideapad/wind ... 2_oko.json which is a bit worrying with the combination of a "ForceUpdate" parameter shown and the lack of ssl, making it fairly likely that it's exploitable for remote code execution by anyone who can intercept your traffic(public wifi, etc).'
mircea_popescu: <mats>
i'm rapidly tiring of being a relay << why's the guy not come over anyway ? well...
i guess the answer's actually obvious huh. nm.
jurov: not that
i complain.. needed some fiat :D
ascii_field: it's quite another to propose that this can be a little pc peripheral turd that
i can get 10,000 of and somehow still not crack
ascii_field:
i mean, it's one thing to consider a whole computer in a safe which sets off built-in nuke if anyone so much as scratches the door
ascii_field: fwiw,
i always thought the idea of a copyprotection dongle that tries to take over the whole machine was quite lulzy.
ascii_field: what's to keep me from sitting it down on one bus where ram hashes to H, then it spits key, and
i sit it back down on another.
mats: he is quite clear about what it can and can't do, no dishonesty as far as
i can tell
ascii_field:
i never understood how anyone could ever be so gullible as to believe that 'remote attestation chip' could be a thing
ascii_field: boils down to the hardness of the fritz chip (and yes,
i will keep calling it that, because the motherfuckers don't get to pretend that fritz, palladium, etc. never happened.)
mats:
i'm rapidly tiring of being a relay, but: he says that intel's 'trusted execution technology' wouldn't work with marss86, and you'd also have to have the key to provision marss
assbot: Logged on 15-07-2014 03:00:27; asciilifeform: one of my first job interviews out of uni. telephone. a fellow from one of the giant gov. contractors was really intrigued that
i know x86 asm., have reversed crud for money.
i ask him 'what's the job'. he: automated reversing. me: of what. he: ever hear of karatsuba's algo? me: sure. bignum mult. him: well, we wanna find encryption softs on terrorist drives!
mats: guy's not a scammer as far as
i can tell, and you do a disservice to folks (and yourself) by coming to judgment so quickly
assbot: Logged on 12-08-2015 17:54:13; mircea_popescu: one of the best places for stego
i can think of.
ascii_field: but
i do earn a living demolishing idiocy quite like what was described, yes.
ascii_field:
i'm not mpoe-pr and don't engage with sc4mz0rz recreationally
mats: ask him. or
i can do so on your behalf. he's on freenode
ascii_field: mats:
i read the paper. it's a crock of shit. why does this fella assume that no one can run his process under cycle-accurate emulation ?
mircea_popescu: but yes, you're broadly correct in suspecting that past this general, "managerial" intuition
i lack any actual idea of how it'd work out in practice.
mircea_popescu: in your mind this means "
i won't be able to tell if nsa is running X on my computer". in my mind, this means "nsa won't be able to tell if
i'm running trilema off obama's computer".
mircea_popescu: so
i can run trilema off of them and there's nothing they can do about it.
mircea_popescu is kind of sick paying "datacenters" for hosting,
i'd much rather pay "criminals".
mircea_popescu: "
I think it is worth recording what some of them cost, just to show what you can do with a few shillings if you invest them in something that grows.
I think it is worth recording what some of them cost, just to show what you can do with a few shillings if you invest them in something that grows. [...] Between them, in nine years, those seven rose bushes will have given what would add up to a hundred or a hundred and fif
mircea_popescu: that munroe character makes the same point with schoolchildren, schoolmasters and condoms, but
i have no taste for it.
mircea_popescu:
i don't think orwell is properly credited with the invention of this term ?
assbot: Logged on 05-02-2014 03:56:24; asciilifeform:
i venture to say that the actual goal of general-purpose (or whatever approximation is possible) homomorphic crypto is quite different.
jurov:
i heard some stories that brasilia is okay
phf: jurov: theoretical potential is not the problem. what
i'm saying is that there's existing "flora and fauna" that you're going to run into pretty fast. local деревенские "people from the village", police, military divisions that for all practical purposes own the locations principality style and don't need to "trade" in order to get guns, cars and supplies. for some reason that sort of fantasies don't usually go "let's build a dream su
jurov: but what
i wanted to say... our block got just 70mm insulation and whole damn thing heats itself by used electricity and body heat alone,
i have cold radiator at -20 outside
assbot: Logged on 12-08-2015 15:46:48; mircea_popescu: "But a boxing audience is always disgusting, and the behaviour of the women, in particular, is such that the army,
I believe, does not allow them to attend its contests." lmao orlov and his middle class sentimentalities.
jurov: siberia is good for hiding,
i guess... not in mcmansion, tho
phf: that's kind of an obvious point to a nerd boy,
i thought the solution always was "stop being such a little shit", not "let's change everyone around me so
i finally don't feel inadequate"
mircea_popescu: "But a boxing audience is always disgusting, and the behaviour of the women, in particular, is such that the army,
I believe, does not allow them to attend its contests." lmao orlov and his middle class sentimentalities.
☟︎ mats:
i get the sense that he's on to something but lacks the ability to clearly describe it
phf: (there's a 90s russian commedy, дмб, about a bunch of hapless army conscripts. at some point they are supposed to provide entertainment for generals, in some total buttfuck nowhere location. one of the activities is pig hunting, they release a pig, and the general goes after it. so of course the pig gets eaten by one of the hungry conscripts, and he has to pretend to be a pig running through fields.
i can't help but think about orlov's boomer
mircea_popescu is further unimpressed with "Since joining the cult of LangSec,
I've spent a great deal of time pondering" intros.
mircea_popescu: yeah, universal literacy totally was a good idea,
i see it now.
phf: for fun. later
i did some research and realized that he's some kind of u.s. aparatchik who spent his 90s in russia
phf:
i started reading orlov with his piece about "everyone should get russian passport and move syberia to survive orks and global warming",
i thought that maybe he was one of those slightly misguided older russian expats, so
i sent him an email in russian with the general idea of, what about existing power structures there, it's not like moving to alaska, there's not going to be a shortage of local generals interested in hunting out of shape expats
phf: right,
i've not seen it in a while, so
i'm definitely misremembering
mircea_popescu:
i don't disagree with the point at all,
i just don't think that's what happened there.
phf: oh
i thought it's a control fantasy, a bureaucrat who imagines himself a sultan will necessarily act a bureaucrat in that role
mircea_popescu:
i'm not an authority on subcaucasian tribal customs, but my guess would be that such deeds would be a face wound for the poor guy in question incompatible with any sort of continued authority.
phf: "my brother's brother heard it from the guy WHO WAS THERE" "man,
i wish
i could just steal girls from classrooms like a brave chechen, because
i sure as hell can't talk to them"
mircea_popescu:
i think he's mixing the pots, too. this story's from serbia.
phf: mircea_popescu: oh that's the idea about him,
i guess that makes sense
phf: that orlov quote is questionable, with the same message as his other writing,
i.e. "orks are cooler then you" where you is a u.s. office worker.
i grew up in intelligentsia family and when
i started getting into fights
i was sent to sambo.
i also saw fights involving chechen boys, including "деревня на деревню" kind, and in none of those were russian boys holding back. what is this
mircea_popescu: you know, teaching a woman that she's supposed to neglect the functioning of her head so she can focus on... the kitchen,
i guess, as the puritans can't quite make the cunt point, is criminal.
assbot: Logged on 16-07-2014 23:42:34; mircea_popescu: if teh muricans really just wanted "something that shoots and a bus ticker there",
i'd have been really worried about the afghanistani.
mircea_popescu: "When
I showed up, there were fifteen of them waiting for me, all grown men.
I thought that they would simply kill me."
mircea_popescu: there's no way
i can explain to williamdunne what he asks and there's nothing
i have to ~say~ to chechens.