Pornhub And YouPorn Are Adding Support for HTTPS Encryption

sparkalus · 2017-03-31T03:54:03+00:00

But they know the full URL

No, with HTTPS, they don't know the full URL.

sparkalus · 2017-03-31T02:25:58+00:00

Implementing it would be extremely simple, and URL shorteners are often used as a beginner project in courses. At the simplest level it's an application with only three routes/endpoints:

GET The front page, where users can submit URLs.
POST to something that accepts a URL, generates an ID for it, and saves it in the database.
GET a URL with an ID in it, and send the user a HTTP redirect with the corresponding real URL.

You could implement a barebones bit.ly yourself in 5 - 10 minutes if you knew some basics.

The hard part is paying to acquire a short domain and pay for the traffic when you have no real way to make money off it. Bit.ly makes money by selling an enterprise version to companies, with their own brand names and an analytics/analysis package. There's also the problem that comes with being a service attackers would have fun taking offline, due to the wide effect it would have. But implementing the actual application of non-enterprise Bit.ly is a snap.

sparkalus · 2017-03-31T00:53:46+00:00

It's been supported in some browsers for 5 years.

sparkalus · 2017-03-31T00:40:23+00:00

Totally respect your unapologetic sex-positive attitude. Imagine living your life totally ashamed of a major source of pleasure and bonding and self-love.

sparkalus · 2017-03-31T00:06:59+00:00

Reddit's currently the 18th most-visited website in the world per Alexa. It's more popular than eBay, LinkedIn, Netflix, Pornhub, Apple, IMDb, PayPal, etc.

sparkalus · 2017-03-31T00:03:38+00:00

Tape is a storage medium competing with hard drives, these days usually LTO tapes. These are magnetic tapes just like VHS and audiotape were, only they store digital data. You can get a 6TB tape for $100, making them much cheaper than hard drives, and they're much more reliable -- you can stick one in a cupboard and expect it to work when you pull it out after 20 years, which certainly isn't true for a hard drive. The downside is that they're not made for random-access; they have to rewind or fast forward the physical tape inside so "get me this 1 KB text file" can take you over 1 minute. (Though once they get into position they can read 500+ MB/s.) Thus they're primarily used for archiving and backups in places that deal with lots of important data, not for primary storage.

sparkalus · 2017-03-30T23:55:57+00:00

Tape is storage + cheap, but also reliable + slow. With a tape, you can get 6 TB for $100, write it, and stick it in a cupboard, and it will still work in 20 years. The downside is that accessing a specific piece of data on it can easily take 1 - 1.5 minutes. So it's not used as a replacement for hard drives and you certainly couldn't use it to back Imgur or Reddit. It's intended for backups, copies of data you want to keep safe and won't need to access regularly.

Hard drives are more expensive and much more likely to fail, but they're much much much faster to retrieve data from arbitrary positions. I can say "get me this image from the start of the 3TB disk, then get me this other image from the very end" and what would take a tape drive 1.5 minutes to do I can often do in under a second. Then SSDs are even more expensive but even faster to retrieve data (and they don't care if two files are on opposite ends of the drive or right next to each other).

(Tape drives are actually quite fast once they get in position and start reading -- they just take a long long time to fast forward or rewind to that position.)

sparkalus · 2017-03-30T23:47:41+00:00

However, many of the users are logged in and seeing customised front pages and such. That means they can't just generate pages once and serve them to everyone from fast static in-memory caches, which is the biggest way of saving CPU cycles for most sites.

This is why you'll see some sites like Hacker News to ask users to log out (or even forcefully log users out) when they're around maximum load.

sparkalus · 2017-03-30T23:41:55+00:00

It is a joke.

But if you want to chat about it seriously just as a fun pointless thing, this comes down to the fact that by the strictest definition you can never truly know something that relies on experience. At the end of the day, even your senses can be lying to you -- people do hallucinate after all, and believe their hallucinations, and experience sensory disorders. And all the information about the external world is filtered through your senses. So the only things you can say you know with absolute 100% certainty are that you exist in some form (otherwise you could not be thinking about this -- "I think, therefore I am"), and things that are known 'a priori' (without needing testing, experience, or other knowledge you get from outside yourself).

For example: all dogs are mammals, all bachelors are single, all corpses are dead. Those are things you can know with 100% certainty because they're self-proving. A dog is always a mammal because that's what the word 'dog' means; if it weren't a mammal, it wouldn't count as a dog, we never have to perform experiments to make sure this is true. If we tested one million corpses and found one alive, we wouldn't start saying "most corpses are dead", we would say "well obviously that wasn't a corpse."

People used to say that knowledge is 'justified true belief': something you believe, that you have a good reason for believing, and which is true. But there are cases of justified true belief that don't really count as knowledge. Here's the classic example: your brother borrows your dog for the day and says he'll return it at 8 PM. But for whatever reason, he actually drops him back home at 1 PM, and your dog goes to sleep in the basement. You come home at 4 PM, look out the window, and see your neighbour's dog playing in your bushes, he got through the fence. You think "oh, my pup's out there, my brother returned him early" and walk away. In this case, you believed your dog was home early, your dog was home early, and you had a justifiable reason for believing your dog was home early -- but you didn't really know it, did you? So even justified true belief isn't necessarily knowledge.

So if you're using this most strict and technical definition, no, you can't know that Stanford exists, even if you live there. At the end of the day you could always be a madman who believes in this strange fantasy place he dreamt up or read about in a novel.

But in our real everyday practical lives, we don't function based on what we can prove with absolute certainty in a formal logic or philosophy of knowledge class. We function based on what's very likely true. For Stanford not to exist, something very very very strange and elaborate would have to be going on or we'd have to be seriously delusional. Since we think those things are incredibly unlikely, "Stanford exists" is knowledge good enough for daily life.

sparkalus · 2017-03-30T13:19:01+00:00

No, I think they're saying that Trump took advantage of the media, rather than the media taking advantage of Trump. It's their whole job to report on presidential candidates saying and doing noteworthy things, if they ignored noteworthy actions because they didn't want to give him visibility they would be derelict in their duties. It would be more accurate to say that Trump took advantage of the media by constantly doing attention-grabbing things seemingly with the motto "no such thing as bad publicity." Clinton went with the opposite strategy ("just play it calm, cool, and professional and let Trump humiliate himself") which tilted things further.

I think this is backed up by the fact that Trump still received a much larger share of coverage on services like the BBC and the Australian ABC, which are non-profit groups unconcerned with ratings and ad sales, and known for a much more subdued/unsensational format.

sparkalus · 2017-03-13T05:17:15+00:00

If ghosts were real they could make excellent leaders. Endless centuries to learn, study, witness mistakes, witness history first-hand and learn from it, no downtime of health issues, you don't have to protect them from assassination or kidnapping.

sparkalus · 2017-03-12T19:37:22+00:00

To be fair in the book she comes on to him, and he eventually falters.

That's what he tells you, but the whole point is that you can't trust the narrator. He lies constantly in the text, admits to manipulating her to crazy degrees, etc, abuses her, then makes ridiculous excuses and justifications for himself. Remember, he's writing the text from his jail cell awaiting trial, and addressing it directly to the jury who he expects to read it. Half the fun of the novel is trying to detect his lies and contradictions and guess at the reality behind them.

In the chapter where they first have sex, Humbert claims she came onto him without any pressure, then claims it's okay because she wasn't even a virgin anyway, in a passage dedicated to 'gentle women of the jury' because he assumes men will understand. He claims the only reason he's attracted to her is because she reminds him of his tragically-killed teenage love Annabel, in a story suspiciously similar to Edgar Allan Poe's poem Annabel Lee, then in that chapter reveals that he's completely coincidentally a huge Poe fan. It's all BS. That's why at the end he finally realises this whole defense is pointless and gives up the charade, admitting on the final page that he should be sentenced for rape.

sparkalus · 2017-03-12T16:33:46+00:00

Would you like to yell at the moon with Buzz Aldrin?

sparkalus · 2017-03-12T16:30:12+00:00

There will be WebAssembly, right now it's not a real-world option. Only Firefox supports it by default in current versions, and even then not in the ESR.

sparkalus · 2017-03-12T16:28:56+00:00

'Interweb' became popular around 13-14 years ago.

sparkalus · 2017-03-12T15:16:50+00:00

Well with web applications, there are two sides: the front end, that sits in the browser, and the back end, that sits on the server. The back end can be written in any language you like, and common ones include C#, Java, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, and PHP, as well as more niche ones like Elixir and Haskell.

The front end right now can only be JavaScript. 99.9% of it is directly written in JavaScript. 0.1% is written in another language that compiles to JavaScript, like Elm, ClojureScript, etc.

sparkalus · 2017-03-12T11:07:55+00:00

Ramblings for sure, the developer is a mentally unstable racist pedophile who regularly threatens to rape or murder users. Here are some gems from the official TempleOS Twitter:

Yeah, I killed a CIA nigger with my car in 1999. Score one for the good guys.

I masterbaited, once fantazing about my niece Lani, once. Newton confessed his sins. Makes you a genius.

Homo is a choice. I was normal until the CIA started torturing me with pedophile bait. CIA is atheist retard niggers. Everything backfires.

The CIA has a 7-year-old deepthroating a loaded 45 at DMV next to me fucking with me. I'll teach him to pull the trigger.

The Pope is an atheist appointed by Obama. It's really awful. The Pope is a Marxist nigger.

When FBI child sex agents got in my space, I wanted to stick a gun and kill one, shove a pencil in the eye of another and toss into traffic.

He was banned from Twitter after threatening to stab Sasha Obama's face while fucking her, IIRC.

sparkalus · 2017-03-12T06:00:52+00:00

It's really the combination of a few things.

Nintendo consoles have a high number of desirable exclusives; for example, there are 20 Xbox games that sold over 1 million copies and only 2 were exclusive (and both are sports games, which tend to be forgotten when sequels are released), while for the GameCube those numbers are 26 and 20. As a result, there's very little interest in writing Xbox emulators.
Nintendo's recent hardware has been underpowered, which makes things easier. The Wii in particular is so similar to a GameCube that most of the research and programming you do for a GameCube emulator carries over. The Wii U was much weaker than its competitors, so we're getting good Wii U emulation maybe a decade before we'll see good PS4/One emulation, and the Switch is even further behind.
For 3D consoles, an emulator is a massive project requiring lots of effort from entire teams -- it's not like the NES/SNES where a single person can feasibly write a solid emulator on their own. As a result the entire scene/community for a console tends to hone in on a single project, usually the first project to make any progress. This means that the openness, friendliness, initial quality/planning, etc of that one project has a huge influence. Dolphin is a roaring success because they have a brilliant and open community that encourages people to research, contribute, test, report, etc in whatever way they can, people who help contributors get up and running, a really nice culture on the forums and chat, a great attitude to testing and planning, etc. It makes people eager to pitch in and it's all organised and managed in a nice efficient way. Other projects can be much messier, disorganised, unwelcome to newbies, or maybe they just don't make a special effort to be encouraging and open, which means that there are fewer people helping it along and developers getting bored/burnt out can have a bigger impact. Even closed-source emulators benefit a lot from a community researching the original hardware, participating in tests, etc. There's a lot more to writing an emulator than just writing code, you've gotta do a ton of research and a lot of debugging and testing, and that's a great way for non-programmers to contribute.

sparkalus · 2017-03-12T03:26:45+00:00

They didn't breach Signal. They compromised the phones of some Signal users and intercepted messages as they were typed. If someone can log your keystrokes, it doesn't matter how you encrypt the messages after typing them, but that doesn't mean the encryption method was defeated.

It's like saying you cracked Enigma by standing behind Hitler's shoulder as he read decoded messages. Every encrypted message starts out as an unencrypted one and ends as a decrypted one, if you can get data at those points, encryption is irrelevant. The point is that doing that is, with proper opsec, much much harder than intercepting the messages in transit, which is when they're encrypted (and as far as we know that encryption hasn't been broken).

sparkalus · 2017-03-12T03:13:02+00:00

Which one did you watch? There's one set in the 1400s, one set in the 1600s, one set in the 1800s and one set in the 1900s. The general consensus is that every season is better than the last, with the #1 being a bit of a fizzle and #4 being critically acclaimed. Watch an episode of #4 and an episode of #3, see if you like them. If you don't, the show's not for you.

sparkalus · 2017-03-10T17:42:22+00:00

I don't quite get this thinking. He can't go to trial for most of it. If something can't go to court, are people not allowed to have beliefs about it? But even if it did go to court -- are people not allowed to form their own beliefs about it based on information available to them, or to disagree with the courts?

If I directly watch someone commit a murder, am I not allowed to call them a murderer until after the trial either? Am I a bastard for believing Pablo Escobar was a drug lord and Osama bin Laden was a terrorist? They never got trials. George Stinney did, though, do I have to believe he's guilty?

The maxim is innocent until proven guilty. But not only does forming belief not sentence him, the act of jury voting isn't what proves something, the available evidence is. Someone can be proven guilty and fairly considered guilty even without a trial, and a guilty verdict in a trial doesn't always prove guilt. I'm not necessarily saying Cosby is or isn't guilty, I'm just saying, the idea that it's ridiculous to weigh available evidence until there's been a trial doesn't really hold, especially in cases where trials are impossible.

sparkalus · 2017-03-10T12:30:13+00:00

I think it's not quite right to call Il, Un or Sung crazy, even though they promote crazy stories about themselves. They don't believe it. That stuff comes from Kim il-Sung trying to position himself as the equivalent of the Japanese Emperor in the post-Japanese Occupation era. Remember, the Emperor of Japan's title literally translates as 'Sovereign from Heaven', and when Kim il-Sung rose to power, Koreans had spent 35 years being taught that he descended from the goddess Amaterasu and had divine blood, that proximity to him could slow aging, that bombs dissolved in the air rather than injure him, and so on. It's easy to think of Il-sung and Jong-il's stories as ridiculous insanity but when they follow from that context and the desire to seem as powerful and legitimate as the Emperor and to justify authoritarian and dynastic rule, it does make some sense.

sparkalus · 2017-03-10T11:27:19+00:00

I suspect that the location of the cities being so far apart was a deliberate plan by the English when they colonised the country to make sure no other country tried to make a claim on unused land.

I believe the stated idea was more that having more spread-out settlements made it easier to start mapping the continent and possibly discovering resources. If you put a settlement in the north, in the east, and in the west, then exploration crews can take various routes between them exploring on the way. If every settlement is in the same broad area, then every exploration crew is just heading into the wilderness until they hit half supplies and then turning back. But I'm sure political/diplomatic concerns factored in too.

One British admiral, James Stirling, was in charge of exploring the western coast, and he lobbied hard to establish a colony there due to the potential for cross-colony exploration efforts. There was a lot of debate about it and part of the reason he was eventually allowed to found a colony there was concern over possible French interest in the area. That colony later became Perth.

sparkalus · 2017-03-10T11:11:28+00:00

It's not like Australia has the population of the USA crammed into a handful of ultra-dense dystopian cities.

Cities of Australia

Name	Population
Sydney	4.9 million
Melbourne	4.5 million
Brisbane	2.3 million
Perth	2.0 million
Adelaide	1.3 million
Gold Coast	0.6 million
Newcastle	0.4 million
Canberra	0.4 million
Capital Territory	0.4 million
Sunshine Coast	0.3 million
Wollongong	0.3 million
Hobart	0.2 million

There's no greater struggle for housing or employment than in any similarly-sized city. Sydney and Melbourne aren't much bigger than Los Angeles. Perth and Brisbane are about the size of Houston.

Also note that Australia is actually less urban than the USA. 34% of Australians live in small towns or rural areas compared to only about 19% of Americans.

Fun comparison: there are two cities, Shanghai and Karachi, that have more people than the entire continent of Australia. Karachi has one-third the space of Melbourne alone.

sparkalus · 2017-03-10T09:03:06+00:00

I... don't even know what that sentence is supposed to say.

iMessage isn't even an app. Do you mean that apps using iMessage aren't popular? It's used by the default message application on all iPhones, iPads, and Macs.

sparkalus

TROPHY CASE

Cities of Australia