From RFC 2804:

• The IETF believes that adding a requirement for wiretapping will make affected protocol designs considerably more complex. Experience has shown that complexity almost inevitably jeopardizes the security of communications even when it is not being tapped by any legal means; there are also obvious risks raised by having to protect the access to the wiretap. This is in conflict with the goal of freedom from security loopholes.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc2804/

This was written in 2000 in response to US government requests to add backdoors to voice-over-IP (VoIP) standards.

It was recognized 25 years ago that having tapping capabilities is fundamentally insecure.

Hm, maybe. I know that de Tocqueville found Americans to be obsessed with money in the 1830’s. Nothing seems to have changed in the past 200 years in that regard. 🤔

I use it when shopping online because DuckDuckGo is shit for shopping in Holland.

It can be done. The website provider can generate a request that it forwards to you. You then pass on this request to the age verifier, who can answer “yes person is over 16” without knowing why you want to know, or who generated the request.

The requester wouldn’t know your age, just that you were old enough.

There are a few problems.

One is that the website could embed some identifier in the signature of their request. But any information there can be easily send by the web site provider to the age verifier directly if they wanted so this is not a big problem.

Another problem is that the age verifier could look at times when requests were submitted and create a sort of “fingerprint” based on when requests arrived for different sites. This could be partially helped by having browsers request age verification randomly in the background any time you use a browser.

I worked with a French guy in Amsterdam. His parents were Portuguese, but he was born and raised in France. As far as he was concerned, he was French.

Contrariwise, I worked with an American woman in Virginia. Her grandparents were Irish, and she considered herself Irish, in spite of having been born and raised in America, and both of her parents having been born and raised in America.

It is a kind of fetish in America to hyphenate yourself. Irish-American. Cuban-American. And so on.

My own theory is that this is because America has no culture going back many generations, so people try to find one.

The article summary and the article both say “sold out”?

Yes I’m considering buying a high power laser so I can send the energy back into space instead of paying the power companies for the privilege of giving them electricity.

My company switched from WebEx to Teams and while Teams is not great it’s way better than WebEx.

Within my actual team we just use Slack Huddles unless we have to record. For my personal stuff I prefer Jitsi.

In the Netherlands a number of cities were banning fossil fuel for deliveries in the city. It was in planning for years, easing into implementation.

Our new government just scrapped all of those plans because the largest party doesn’t believe in climate change, and another party in the coalition is the “farmer’s movement” party and opposes environmental regulations.

😢

I work at a company big into AI. We build our own models. Our senior management drank the Kool-Aid. We don’t have search on our Intranet any more, just LLM chatbots.

Our TLS certificate expired last week on our main web page. I tried to find the contact details for the team responsible and the thing just hallucinated e-mail addresses.

Needless to say, I’m less excited than you.

There are infinite prime numbers. This has been known for thousands of years. You can find numerous proofs of this online, and go through them until one makes sense to you.

Also, quantum computers are on track to make division-based cryptography useless in the next decade or two. (Note that this only affects public key cryptography, and not shared key cryptography. So your online backups should be safe as long as you have a password for them.)

If a company has a lot of money in assets and those assets are worth less than before, the valuation of the company drops. This should mean lower share prices, which is basically the only thing a company cares about.

Again? I guess I missed Microsoft being impacted in any way. 🤔

Is it? I mean, 100 years ago you might all be reading different things, with either a record on or possibly the radio. Why is it terrible that now you’re all… reading different things together in one room?

Which is why the Supreme Court is hearing the case. Two wealthy industries fighting out who gets to extract the most wealth.

I shouldn’t feed the troll, but…

Why are vertical videos bad?

This was my first thought. I guess if you’re replacing a coal plant it’s not completely terrible, but be prepared to turn it off in 10 or 20 years.

i2p is a bit like Tor. Both are overlay networks, meaning that they use the “normal” Internet as their lowest layer. They use similar method of obfuscation using multiple hops.

i2p doesn’t rely on special nodes, I think, which Tor does. i2p also does not connect to the “normal” Internet (basically).

Like with Tor there is no need for a VPN (or rather, little need for a VPN… probably both i2p and Tor are safer than any VPN, but nothing is 100% safe, so some people use double VPN, or Tor over a VPN).

Tor is not designed for torrenting. It assumes TCP connections - mostly for web stuff - and doesn’t handle torrent well. They also don’t want you bogging down the system with your filthy porn. 😆

i2p solves this by forcing you to send data for other users in order to download anything. This helps make your traffic harder to track and helps the overall network. It also means that downloads are slow. Very slow. Like, basically start your download and come back in a day or two. Not a problem if you have four or five downloads in progress, but it makes spontaneous watching impossible.

Anyway, I’m hardly an expert but this is my understanding!

I’m curious why you think Python is unsuitable. Both of my kids picked up Python pretty easily.

People tend to hire people that they like. You don’t really know who is best for a job unless you’ve hired multiple people and they have been working for a while.

Having employees who happen to have the same background as hiring managers is not the same as having the best employees, but that’s what we have.

If you’d had DEI training you’d know this. 😉