balsoft
@balsoft@lemmy.ml
- Comment on What is behind the current Lemmy meme about 4 being a private key? 21 hours ago:
I think there’s a good chance people will be looking for this now so will get caught a lot quicker next time.
That’s pretty much guaranteed from now on, yes.
It feels like the kind if thing that someone, somewhere would have a script running constantly testing for private keys with low values. That it went 18 months without being found is a miracle!
It’s not the kind of thing you’d expect to need to guard against, or even really think of. It should not happen. It sounds like someone was kind of just fooling around with making private keys and stumbled upon it.
I guess now someone needs to try seeding some of the most popular PRNGs with 0-255 and seeing whether any keys come up in the first few hundred numbers.
- Comment on What is behind the current Lemmy meme about 4 being a private key? 22 hours ago:
We don’t know whether anyone tried it before April 2025, because that’s when the vulnerable certificates were issued. If someone did try it before then, they would not find any certificates (as expected) and probably wouldn’t even talk to anyone about it.
- Comment on What is behind the current Lemmy meme about 4 being a private key? 22 hours ago:
No it absolutely does, the method they used to generate private keys ended up having just 8 shannons of entropy which led to the discovery we are discussing
- Comment on What is behind the current Lemmy meme about 4 being a private key? 1 day ago:
I think it technically was not “brute forcing”, but specifically someone tried generating private keys with numbers 0-255, and surprisingly found a few.
- Comment on What is behind the current Lemmy meme about 4 being a private key? 1 day ago:
Well, someone did guess it so it’s not that hard. The entropy was really low.
- Comment on Why do we need legal genders at all? 6 days ago:
In an ideal society? No.
However, in our current patriarchal nightmare, people other than cis-men need various special protections to soften the impacts of sexual violence, sexism, discrimination, and inequality, hence the need to have legally defined genders.
- Comment on If the legalization of drugs reduces crime, why can't the same be said about the legalization of guns? 1 week ago:
I actually agree with you in principle: both should be legal and regulated. The extent of legality and regulation needs to be decided according to the use value/danger/harm of the item in question. Guns are generally much more dangerous than “party” drugs and so need to have stricter regulations.
- Comment on Wealth inequality will destroy America. 1 week ago:
Actually the top 1% in the US is ~600k per year. It’s a lot of cash but not entirely outside the realm of possibility for some extremely senior software architect/manager combo at some VC startup, which is also within the lemmy target audience.
- Comment on Are there words in reverse order within alphabet-based languages? 2 weeks ago:
I’m not sure I understand your question fully. Are you looking for two words with the same/similar meaning and etymology but with completely reversed letters? That’s not going to happen in alphabetic languages, because it’s simply not how languages work - completely reversing the actual sounds that come out of your mouth is a phonetic impossibility.
You will be able to find examples where two morphemes have swapped places, similar to your manners/etiquette example, but usually the meaning will change too. The first example that came to my mind is boathouse / houseboat - the former is a building used to store boats, the latter is a boat which is also a dwelling.
- Comment on Jury unanimously acquits Churchill statue spray-painter 4 weeks ago:
I’m just saying that the legal system is not here to protect the working class against capitalists, it’s there to (1) protect capitalists from the working class, (2) moderate conflicts between capitalists. This means that some particularly gruesome activities are moderated to prevent outright revolts, but less visible killings are permitted.
If we want to make a legal system that actually protects the working class, the first thing it needs to do is prohibit private property over means of production to prevent unlimited capital accumulation.
- Comment on Jury unanimously acquits Churchill statue spray-painter 4 weeks ago:
The law, incidentally, is also what makes it illegal for said capitalists to kill you for example
This only limits certain actions, not killing in general. There are ways that capitalists legally kill people all the time, like by enforcing car-centric infrastructure or with climate change or by refusing necessary healthcare in privatized healthcare systems or by evicting tenants.
- Comment on Just a matter of time before it's reality 5 weeks ago:
Also similar to the BMW heated seats nonsense.
- Comment on Shut Up Boomer 5 weeks ago:
Yeah exactly, I’m hearing americans almost brag about 60-70 hr workweeks (excluding commutes) and that just sounds insane to me. Like, when do you live? When do you do hobbies, enjoy nature, or go out with your partner? Can’t do it with like 2-3 hours you really have left after an 11 hour work day.
Humanity would be perfectly capable of establishing a 30 hr workweek if capitalists didn’t suck out every last drop of human labor from us.
- Comment on Languages have rules and follow predictable patterns. French: 1 month ago:
I think it’s more about how this doesn’t follow the usual rule for adjective agreement. By that rule it would be le manteau blanc / la veste blance, but that sounds weird so “blanche” it is.
- Comment on Why do we assume paper towels are sterile, or at least clean? 1 month ago:
That’s a bad assumption to make. Many pathogenic bacteria can survive for months with no meal.
It’s more that interacting with bacteria, even pathogenic bacteria, is a normal part of everyday life. That’s exactly what our immune systems are for. Unless you are sticking the paper inside you or doing surgery with it, you’ll be fine using a paper towel with some microbes on it.
- Comment on Why do we assume paper towels are sterile, or at least clean? 1 month ago:
The paper rolls themselves are variably clean or sterile
No consumer-grade paper towel/kitchen roll is going to be sterile even in the wide “medical” sense, that’s basically a statistical impossibility. No factory is going to spend a shitton of extra money to have clean-room equipment and practices, and that means people will sneeze on it.
- Comment on Why do we assume paper towels are sterile, or at least clean? 1 month ago:
Is anyone assuming they’re sterile (aseptic) tho? I would hope nobody is using paper towels for anything important in a medical context. In other cases their sterility is not important at all, interacting with microbes (includiing pathogenic ones) is a normal part of everyday life and our immune systems are pretty good at dealing with them (unless you are exposed to something particularly nasty, like during a pandemic). Unless you go full-on germaphobe, the microbial contamination that exists on new paper towels is nothing compared to other stuff you interact with (smartphone, door handles, kitchen sponge, fresh produce, etc).
Otherwise, they’re self-evidently cleaner than whatever I’m trying to clean with them, that’s why they work for cleaning in the first place. If I swipe a kitchen counter with them after cooking, it will very obviously have less gunk and shmutz now, which means it will be cleaner.
- Comment on DLSS 5 comes with a massive 50-60% performance hit, so I hope you like lower frame rates with your dose of AI image enhancement 1 month ago:
Imperial China has you covered: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_binding (the horrors never cease)
- Comment on 1 month ago:
I find that a bit weird, video compression (still) sucks for dark videos, either you need to make the bitrate higher or there will be artifacts.
- Comment on Park benches don't "open" until 10am 1 month ago:
It may have felt differently to you 25 years ago - maybe you were in a better neighborhood or something, but capitalism has always been about heartless extraction of money from the poor. Check out The Condition of the Working Class in England for a 180-year-old account of this.
- Comment on Every payment option has a fee 1 month ago:
If there’s an unavoidable fee for processing, it needs to be included in the initially advertised price of whatever you’re purchasing. In this case, the price should have been set $2 higher and the bank account fee should be $0. Otherwise it is just false advertising, since you cannot actually receive the service for the initially advertised price.
- Comment on U.S. Citizen Who Deleted Phone’s Data Says His Prosecution Puts Privacy at Risk 1 month ago:
Honestly yeah, that’s the best solution if you want to do something like this.
- Comment on U.S. Citizen Who Deleted Phone’s Data Says His Prosecution Puts Privacy at Risk 1 month ago:
Data contained on the phone is very much the property which they wanted to take into custody or control, and it was wiped.
- Comment on Google mistranslates the word because it uses English as a medium(probs). 1 month ago:
In my experience, with the amount of mistakes similar to the one in the OP, I strongly suspect that language is somehow unbelievably close (semantically) to English then.
I decided to quickly experiment with two languages I somewhat know, and got 3/3 incorrect translations consistent with English as intermediary:
- Russian ширинка (fly, meaning “zipper on your trousers”) -> Georgian ფრენა (to fly, as in “flight”) - completely incorrect translation, consistent with English as intermediary
- Russian парковаться (to park, as in “park your car”) -> Georgian პარკი (park, meaning “green space with trees”) - completely incorrect translation, consistent with English as intermediary
- Russia лежать (to lie, as in “lie on your back”) -> Georgian ტყუილი (lie, as meaning “untruth”) - completely incorrect translation, consistent with English as intermediary
It makes exactly the same mistakes if you translate from Russian to Spanish and French too.
- Comment on U.S. Citizen Who Deleted Phone’s Data Says His Prosecution Puts Privacy at Risk 1 month ago:
I think stuff like that would be up to the jury to decide. If I was on that jury I definitely wouldn’t consider just having a duress password to imply intent of “knowingly preventing the Government to take property into its custody”, especially since GrapheneOS doesn’t really mention state actors in its FAQ. It would be reasonable for him to claim that he enabled this feature to protect himself from illegal searches or kidnapping, and accidentally gave the wrong answer to the cops.
But reading the OP interview it seems to me that he is almost admitting that he wiped the phone intentionally, tipping the scales significantly. Is it “beyond reasonable doubt” that he intentionally gave the duress password now? Maybe.
- Comment on U.S. Citizen Who Deleted Phone’s Data Says His Prosecution Puts Privacy at Risk 1 month ago:
Nah, it doesn’t change anything. The statute says
Whoever, before, during, or after any search for or seizure of property by any person authorized to make such search or seizure, knowingly destroys, damages, wastes, disposes of, transfers, or otherwise takes any action, or knowingly attempts to destroy, damage, waste, dispose of, transfer, or otherwise take any action, for the purpose of preventing or impairing the Government’s lawful authority to take such property into its custody or control or to continue holding such property under its lawful custody and control, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.
It’s clear that if he intended to wipe the phone and told the officer a password which would erase the contents, he “knowingly took an action for the purpose of preventing the Government’s lawful authority to take such property into its custody”.
- Comment on U.S. Citizen Who Deleted Phone’s Data Says His Prosecution Puts Privacy at Risk 1 month ago:
Yeah and it’s even more stupid for him to be giving out interviews right now defending his actions. If I was him I would shut up in public and tell prosecutors that I was under extreme stress and pressure of the detainment and accidentally mixed up the real password with the duress password. The government can easily prove all elements for obstruction of justice and/or destruction of evidence here, except for intent.
- Comment on Google mistranslates the word because it uses English as a medium(probs). 1 month ago:
it should be able to translate text not just by the word definition, but also context and conceptual meaning.
It has been doing that at least since 2016, and it’s using LLM-adjacent tech (transformer + RNN) since 2020. The problem is that it still seems to be doing things via English, which is especially problematic for single words with no context. In this example, “зачиняти” means “to close”. Google translates it to English as simply “close”, which loses the context of which meaning or even part of speech it is. Google then translates it to Japanese, but since the context is lost it assumes that “close” means “near” rather than “block an opening” and translates it as “chikai”.
- Comment on Google mistranslates the word because it uses English as a medium(probs). 1 month ago:
Yeah, in my experience it absolutely does translate everything via English. If you need to translate from Ukranian directly to other languages, ironically Yandex Translate is probably your best bet.
- Comment on This is what Democratic voters are saying. Will the party listen? 1 month ago:
It’s like expecting fender benders to not happen. And people die in auto accidents. We accept that risk as a part of driving, and we understand that safety improvements over the years have made accidents more survivable. And yet we drive, take that risk, and know that it could be worse.
Not to take away from the rest of your point with which I agree, but we absolutely must stop driving. The risks of driving are not necessary. There are plenty of other forms of transportation that are not only safer but also faster, healthier, make for better cities, and help eliminate poverty. Motonormativity is a crime perpetrated by capital to sell everyone more cars, tarmac, and gasoline, at an enormous cost to human wellbeing and life.