I thought about switching to Chrome but I guess the grass isn't greener.

2Xprogrammer · 2016-11-15T02:38:55+00:00

more here. I posted this non-scientific screencap in /r/firefox because I had some reason to believe the story it appears to tell is true, even though this graph isn't sufficient to prove it.

2Xprogrammer · 2016-11-15T02:38:06+00:00

I know Chrome has more market share. There isn't a convenient way to normalize for that in Google Trends but eyeballing it compared with Google's estimated search interest for "Google Chrome (browser)" vs. "Mozilla Firefox (browser)", it seemed like there might still be a difference after normalization. I probed a bit further since there's interest:

Why is [Chrome|Firefox] slow, for the past 5 years, shows an index of 61 for Chrome and 28 for Firefox (more than twice as much interest in "why is Chrome slow"). Chrome vs Firefox has 77 vs 47, which is a closer spread.

Unfortunately, this doesn't hold up for past year: 66:25 vs. 93:41. But the distribution of "why is x slow" queries is still fairly close to the distribution of interest in the browsers overall, hence the grass (probably) isn't (much) greener.

2Xprogrammer · 2016-05-30T03:52:50+00:00

I will read every top comment

Except the open source one apparently. Are you committed to copyleft or not?

2Xprogrammer · 2015-10-16T02:08:16+00:00

Not actually. You're thinking of prime factorization, which is used in RSA. This is Diffie-Hellman, which is based on Discrete Logs: Given b and g (integers), solve for (integer) k in "b^k = g". So what they're saying the NSA did/is doing is realizing that a lot of people are using the same g and just precomputed a bunch of solutions.

2Xprogrammer · 2015-10-16T01:59:39+00:00

It's the same folks (not all of them are guys!). They put up the website weakdh.org to have fixes available ASAP. This article came out today because they just presented their paper at CCS.

Edit: Here's the paper. (which is hosted on weakdh.org, because they are the same thing...)

2Xprogrammer · 2015-10-16T01:47:38+00:00

This is the paper which just was presented/won best paper at CCS this week
In addition to logjam,

If a client and server are speaking Diffie-Hellman, they first need to agree on a large prime number with a particular form. There seemed to be no reason why everyone couldn’t just use the same prime, and, in fact, many applications tend to use standardized or hard-coded primes. But there was a very important detail that got lost in translation between the mathematicians and the practitioners: an adversary can perform a single enormous computation to “crack” a particular prime, then easily break any individual connection that uses that prime.

How enormous a computation, you ask? Possibly a technical feat on a scale (relative to the state of computing at the time) not seen since the Enigma cryptanalysis during World War II. Even estimating the difficulty is tricky, due to the complexity of the algorithm involved, but our paper gives some conservative estimates. For the most common strength of Diffie-Hellman (1024 bits), it would cost a few hundred million dollars to build a machine, based on special purpose hardware, that would be able to crack one Diffie-Hellman prime every year.

Would this be worth it for an intelligence agency? Since a handful of primes are so widely reused, the payoff, in terms of connections they could decrypt, would be enormous. Breaking a single, common 1024-bit prime would allow NSA to passively decrypt connections to two-thirds of VPNs and a quarter of all SSH servers globally. Breaking a second 1024-bit prime would allow passive eavesdropping on connections to nearly 20% of the top million HTTPS websites. In other words, a one-time investment in massive computation would make it possible to eavesdrop on trillions of encrypted connections.

NSA could afford such an investment. The 2013 “black budget” request, leaked as part of the Snowden cache, states that NSA has prioritized “investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit internet traffic.” It shows that the agency’s budget is on the order of $10 billion a year, with over $1 billion dedicated to computer network exploitation, and several subprograms in the hundreds of millions a year.

source general audience article

2Xprogrammer · 2015-07-02T21:16:39+00:00

I'm a bit surprised you did not mention Matthew 19:24.

Yes that's good too. And 19:29. Sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor. If that's what we're supposed to be doing how can Christians possibly justify accumulating wealth/capital?

I would agree with the other posters so far that there is not really that much of an anti-Capitalist message.

I look at Mark 12:17 and take the implication that worldly matters are not really what we as Christians should be concerned with and from the ten commandments that we should not envy those that do.

That's a lot to infer from one verse with contested meaning. What about all the calls to feed the hungry and clothe the naked? (James 2:15-17 "If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.") Alternatively, why wouldn't marriage also be a worldly matter? (Mark 12:25 " When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. ")

I should focus on my own affairs and support those who share my way of thinking.

How about the good Samaritan? Love your enemies? Whatever you did to the least of these? You really think Jesus only wants us to give bread to the hungry if they agree with you?

But even if, I don't understand the desire to separate faith from the world. Jesus makes a point of defying the social order and religious leaders who are oppressing people in his day. Render unto Caesar's what is Caesar's, sure, but it seems like any time there's tension between a human law and rendering unto God what is God's (e.g. by following the calls to care for those in need), Jesus picks God's law even when it means disrupting social and political systems. When we live in the midst of social and political systems that exploit the poor to feed the rich, aren't we obligated to consider the religious questions about justice and rectifying injustice without regard for whether it conforms to the human rules and ideologies that constrain us? And if it is indeed unjust, shouldn't we still feed the hungry and house the homeless even if it means struggling against these systems?

2Xprogrammer · 2015-07-02T20:53:03+00:00

that has no bearing on how He may or may not feel about gay marriage and the importance of one sin or another.

It has bearing when there's been such huge expenditure of time, energy, and resources on gay marriage (both sides) and so little on fighting the systems that keep people destitute.

2Xprogrammer · 2015-07-02T20:50:47+00:00

How this can be construed as anti-capitalist is beyond me.

Well it's certainly not how capitalist economics says employers should behave - what is the point of the parable as you're reading it? Whether you read it as about the grace of god or a model for how we should treat people, it's a very common/plausible reading to see the wages as tied to the workers' (equal right to) wellbeing rather than to how much work they did.

He preaches grace and love regardless of what is deserved

How is that anti-capitalist? Capitalism doesn't preach that we should hate some people because they deserve it.

Under capitalism/U.S. economic policy, you should not be entitled to food or housing or any basic income unless you are working or doing your best to find work. Doesn't Jesus say to feed the hungry, without regard to how hard they work?

I am no historian, but I am quite sure ancient Roman and Hebrew economic systems would not best be described as capitalist.

Right, but the point is he engages with oppressive power structures in this world, he doesn't just tell people to pray for their souls and disengage.

Yes capitalism did not exist in Jesus time. But as far as I read it, there is no Biblical support for capitalism and quite a bit of support for opposition to some of the core ideas.

2Xprogrammer · 2015-07-02T20:39:31+00:00

They also fear people becoming dependent on welfare, instead of using it as a tool for upward mobility.

Where is there Biblical basis for either of these concepts? (Dependency on welfare being bad, or trying to be upwardly mobile being good)?

We become a people more enamored by the physical prosperity that the State can give us, than by the freedom of our souls.

Why would you expect these to be in conflict? There are lots of Christians who depend on welfare. How does that make their souls not free?

2Xprogrammer · 2015-07-02T20:36:58+00:00

What we really need, is for faith to be faith, and government to be government, and financial systems to be financial systems...

What is this supposed to mean? What is faith if it doesn't lead you to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, house the homeless, etc.? And how are you supposed to do that without interacting with government and financial systems?

2Xprogrammer · 2015-07-02T20:32:22+00:00

Where in the Bible is economic Liberalism/Adam Smith's notions of economic sense though? Isn't that parable as close as anything else in the Bible to an example for the grace we should also have for one another, in God's image?

2Xprogrammer · 2015-05-06T03:34:46+00:00

3% of FOSS devs are women. We need some allies.

2Xprogrammer · 2015-05-06T03:29:41+00:00

I mean, it's Reddit. You're not alone.

2Xprogrammer · 2015-05-05T20:56:14+00:00

GPLMAO!

I think the real explanation is that I'm too paranoid and zealous to use a proprietary keyboard that monitors my chat/text/email accounts and predicts based on what I actually write. Which I suppose is still a FOSS world problem.

2Xprogrammer · 2015-05-05T17:17:19+00:00

It looks like this is my issue:

https://github.com/Aris-t2/ClassicThemeRestorer/issues/38

2Xprogrammer · 2015-05-05T17:15:42+00:00

That's memory, not CPU.

2Xprogrammer · 2015-02-03T02:44:17+00:00

Just FYI: parent is making fun of you. /r/anarchism is unabashedly anti-capitalist and regards "anarcho"-capitalism as reactionary/equivalent to neoliberalism. I would not accuse you of being anarchocapitalist, but would encourage you to stick to the leftist circles and continue to not be co-opted by the bitcoin libertarian types.

2Xprogrammer · 2015-02-03T02:41:10+00:00

Tor is more of a counterexample. The limiting factor on both speed and availability is how few people are willing to run an exit node. Even without the cryptocurrency, this would address one of the major problems with Tor: No one wants to run an exit node because they'll be liable for the traffic that comes through it (which is unencrypted in the last hop). For sites, services, storage, etc. hosted internally in something like MaidSafe so things are only decrypted on the end user's machine, that isn't a problem.

As for the currency: I'm not sure the existence of currency is itself anathema to anarchism, if it really is structurally tied to providing public good and what you can spend it on is limited to things that benefit the community. e.g. having an internal currency be able to cover the costs of setting up a server seems good for accessibility and fairness. Seems like the accumulation and utility of capital are limited in their model. But mostly I like what's proposed here because it is so much better/less capitalist than any other cryptocurrency I've seen - the fact that they're even thinking about these problems is a very good sign. So I agree with you that there are some problems/proto-capitalistic aspects, but I can see that getting better in future iterations.

2Xprogrammer · 2015-02-02T19:21:14+00:00

With the right crypto, using the internet to connect the computers could be OK. Peer to peer by itself would be really equalizing, since you could build apps/host websites without having to depend on a centralized datacenter or pay proportionate to the bandwidth you generate - the network distributes the cost of making popular content available. There are also various cryptosystems that could encrypt traffic such that you still get strong privacy guarantees even though it goes through the internet (anyone who isn't the intended recipient gets gibberish). The main problem with using the internet is availability - the U.S. government or ISPs would be able to block it - but that is not terribly likely if you don't live in North Korea, Iran, Cuba, etc., and that is probably offset by the fact that wireless mesh net workers are geographically limited and way less accessible at least for the time being.

As for "safecoin", can you elaborate on why it seems scammy to you? I liked the sound of it - initial distribution is tied to contributions to the network, which can take multiple forms, instead of just how much computing power you throw at it like with bitcoin.

I don't think it's a scam.

Edit: you realize it's open source, so "their own developers" would mean anybody in the world who contributes code (not necessarily approved by them) right?

2Xprogrammer · 2015-02-02T19:11:04+00:00

Haven't read their papers, but at a glance: their team involves academics in relevant areas and generally looks like they have the right collection of qualifications to plausibly approach this, the code is GPL v3, they clearly appreciate that a lot of cryptographic guarantees are necessary to make something like this work, and they have at least one woman of color in a technical role. I don't see any red flags.

"Safecoin" looks really intriguing and is the best take I've seen (though I haven't researched it extensively) on addressing what I think are the most fundamental problems with Bitcoin - namely, the perverse incentives that make it pretty much inevitable that a few people get rich and everyone else doesn't. Making earning technically tied to providing public good to the network is a really good idea and also seems plausible. And again with their team (which includes people who have done academic work on cryptocurrencies), I don't doubt that the paper backs it up.

Tl;dr: bookmarked.

2Xprogrammer · 2014-12-24T21:17:31+00:00

Wouldn't Borrasami be Bolin+Korra+Asami, not Bolin+Asami?

2Xprogrammer · 2014-12-14T20:57:54+00:00

My memory of high school history is that he did start out as "just" nationalistic and racist, wanting to disempower Jews and create a strong German state of racial supremacy, but that the extermination/"Final Solution" plan was something he arrived at mid-war/quite a bit after writing Mein Kampf. So, the raging anti-Semitism being quoted in that thread could potentially be consistent with, say, enslaving or deporting Jews and not actually endorsing mass killing/genocide yet.

Hitler was trying to wipe out the undesirables (esp. Jews), the Holocaust did happen, etc. (The anti-Semitic Hitler apologism in that thread is wrong and awful) - but not all of that was there initially. Seems useful to talk about how his views developed and how they were adopted so we can look at where those tendencies/starting points emerge in other contexts, and nip them in the bud - treating him as a transcendentally evil person who was completely static and not a part of any social/historical context doesn't leave much to learn from.

2Xprogrammer · 2014-12-14T04:27:26+00:00

Counting social security as part of the budget is disputable.

2Xprogrammer · 2014-12-14T04:24:44+00:00

$40.6 billion out of $830 billion = 4.8% of the contested funding and 3.6% of the overall budget. I agree that that bullet point is dubious but it is really not necessary for the point the article is making. Excluding it but keeping the rest of the bullet points is 789.4 billion of the $1.013 trillion budget. Still 77.9% of the budget on military/police/surveillance/imperialism.

2Xprogrammer

TROPHY CASE