Posts by aberglas 291 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Apr 2014
Proper PAKE does NOT enable brute force attacks by an eves dropper or man in the middle. Through the magic of the algorithms each attempt requires a protocol iteration, and any sensible server would stop after a few attempts.
If the server's secrets become known then brute force is possible.
Is OK as long as we do not like the content being censored. It would of course be truly evil that they censored some other group that incited illegal acts that we liked. E.g. Extinction rebellion, BLM, Arab Spring, US Founding Fathers.
For all its faults, the law gives people a right to state their case and is fairly transparent. Not so with corporate decision making. Any censorship needs to be done by due process. And then only very rarely.
Amazon was not supporting Parlor in the sense of Facebook. They were merely providing server infrastructure. Content was none of their business. People that support Amazon would probably support cutting other infrastructure providers off the internet entirely if they did not agree with them. It is a bit like a city banning someone from talking in any public or private space within its walls and not calling that censorship.
Politically, this makes a martyr out of Parler. It will end up being hosted somewhere, perhaps in Russia. And this has been great publicity for them.
By killing off VBA.
However, it is not just that there is a lot of VBA out there. It is the fact that VBA is *MUCH* better than JavaScript.
I am not talking about the fact that it uses nice End Ifs instead of messy {}s. Nor even the fact that it has proper static typing. But the fact that it is tightly integrated with Excel.
Pres Alt-F11 and you are in the VBA editor. Type [A1] and you are referencing the cell. Press ctrl-S and you have saved the function. JavaScript requires a complex deployment strategy that is way beyond end users that just want to get stuff done.
Excel even has a macro recorder that will write the code for you. Bad code, but no need to look up object properties, just hack the generated code to generalize it.
But the biggest issue is that JavaScript runs client side, while VBA runs server side. So to get any sort of performance out of JavaScript you need to write complex Futures code. Try explaining that to a user that just wants to get stuff done.
So Microsoft has been ignoring VBA for a decade but cannot let it die.
.Net for Excel is already pretty dead. I reckon that the JavaScript will also die in time. But in 2050 VBA will still be there!
But to Microsoft Product Managers the only question is what's HOT and what's NOT. Cloud is hot, VBA is not.
Taiwan heavily invested in China, and is indeed a major reason for the magic boom after Mao finally died. However, China no longer needs Taiwan, and those investments are a huge liability. China can make them unviable very easily. And Taiwan (now, finally) really appreciates its independence from China.
So they are pulling out and do not want more to go in.
Little to do with appeasing the west.
Back then, memory protection was less necessary because people programmed in sensible languages. Cobol, Fortran, Algol etc. cannot corrupt memory. Burroughs made a point of relying on their compiler rather than memory protection. The original author simply stumbled upon a bug in the compiler.
Then we "advanced" to programing in C.
If you work for those companies, and even if you do not.
If someone does not like you, especially in HR, then letting them call you racist or sexist is giving them a free kick up your arse and possibly out the door.
Google Damore Google Memo if you have any doubts.
There is nothing nice about people making these changes. They are about power, the power to inflict change on others, and to root out non-conformists.
Having a vast amount of code that is not normally used hardly gives one a good feeling about a well disciplined design process. Maybe a lot of it is device drivers for obscure devices, but even then one wonders.
Having lots of #ifs or optional modules does not make for easy understanding.
This was really bad. People living on the edge often with limited intelligence were expected to provide documentation going back years. It was very difficult to contact the department. And the department did nothing to help, even when they had documents.
This was very nasty right wing policy. Deliberate, and nasty. And it went on for years and years. It is only when it looked like losing spectacularly in a court case that the government eventually backed down.
Serious question.
The docs boast about doing things that you could easily do with unique pointers in C++. Boring.
It handles ArrayLists easily. So does C++.
It does not have the legacy pointer arithmetic that was was always a bad idea in C. OK, but boring.
It does not have proper garbage collection as found in Lisp, Java, .Net. Pretty important for most applications. Rules it out for me.
How does it do the hard stuff? Like stuff with real pointers like Linked Lists? I never waded through the hype far enough to find out.
It is already one of their priorities.
Then generally they will diverge, and there will be less interplay and communication between east and west.
Is that a good thing? Hard to say.
Xi Jinping is certainly potentially dangerous, but isolating him also isolates the Chinese people from western liberal thought.
What is frightening is that the Trump administration is quite incapable of thinking these sort of strategic issues through.
In oz, the entire paper election (with the preferential voting that the UK should have taken up) is done for about US$3/vote. And it is not only secure, but transparent. And here they are spending $2/vote to patch up their mess.
But I thought that the whole point of the US electronic voting system is that it was meant to be hacked. Mainly by Republican returning officers.
If they had a choice between working in the mines or going to a nice school with good meals, they would obviously choose the latter. But the choice is actually between working in the mines or sitting around without enough to eat.
People in the comfortable west have no idea what it means to go hungry. Really hungry.
This is the problem with attacking child labor. It is the wrong end of the stick. You need to attack extreme poverty instead.
There would be at least a few hundred thousand names on the list. Easily handled by Excel.
Pay a clerk full time to concatenate them together.
It does not matter if they make mistakes because the data is ultimately useless anyway.
Much better than spending umpteen million quid on and IT project that does the same thing.
Real aircraft manuals for light aircraft often use a nasty mixture of units depending upon who wrote which page. A real mess.
My favorite is "gallons", which usually mean US gallons unless it is an old English plane in which it means UK gallons, with nothing to indicate which.
And they tell you to take the manual very seriously!
You often do not fuel to full because can make the plane too heavy with desired load.
That is why you return a hired plane empty, let the next pilot fill as much as they want.
So yes, pilots do depend quite a bit on dipping the tanks.
Personally I just always filled up and ignored the fact that it is a bit heavy, with the extra weight in the wings.
Nobody would mind paying 20% more, say. But 10,000%! My provider charges $1000 / gig. Needless to say I just turn it off.
It is a pain when you travel through Europe. And the cheap burner sims you buy typically do not actually work across countries. So you need many.
So, fancy that the eagle did not know about global roaming charges! They needed a multi-sim transmitter.
The human or the computer?
That was the problem. It should be one or the other. If the humans were not capable of doing a full landing they should not touch the controls. At all.
Semi automation is an issue for airliners too. They have things like Auto throttle that control the speed. Meaning bad pilots do not monitor air speed. So when it goes wrong, planes crash. (E.g. Ariana SFO a few years ago)
There is zero training about how to use a computer. At least in Australian schools. Kids are supposed to just "pick it up".
How could there be? Their teachers don't have a clue either. And it would break every rule in the book if IT was to talk to them. The only message they get, over and over, is the evils of cyber bullying and how that could embarrass the school administration.
Some of them have parents who teach them. But most just wonder on.
So why wouldn't they just use a USB stick? It seems to work, and they have other priorities than stuffing about with IT.
But there is potential for real trouble with China which is growing ever more repressive domestically, and somewhat more aggressive internationally.
So reducing one's dependence upon them for all things makes some sense from a security perspective, even if it will cost a bit economically.
That is why the Swedish prosecutor refused to interview Assange in London, despite such foreign interviews being quite common. If she did the interview she would either have to put up a detailed charge or shut up.
Recall that Assange spent some time in Sweden after the "rapes", and that the initial issue was to get him to do an STD test, which he foolishly delayed in doing. Indeed, one of the "raped" woman put on a "lobster dinner" for him the next day -- not the usual behavior of an intelligent rape victim.
There is no statute of limitations for charges if you are running from the law. The limitations exist from the time of the offense to the time of being charged. Assange was never formally charged, which let the clock run out.
Now, whether this really was a ruse to get Assange to the USA or just feminist incompetence is unclear, and I suspect the latter.
Swedish rape trials are held in secret, and there is no jury but there is "lay" judges which are ex politicians. And Assange has upset Sweden politically. So how a case might turn out is hard to say.
He may be arrogant, but he did do some good work in the early days of Wiki leaks.
Everybody thinks that they are a piece of French engineering that is impossible to maintain and will fall apart in half the time of a properly engineered Toyota.
Which is perfectly true. Which is why you can by them with not many kms on the clock for half the price of said Toyota. Just realize that there will come a time to throw it out when something breaks that cannot be economically fixed. Like a headlight bulb.
(A bit of an exaggeration. I did manage to change a headlight bulb. Only took me a couple of hours.)
The charges were always dubious, which is why they never interviewed Assange in London.
They would be laughed at if they tried to actually prosecute him. Better to let the Americans have him.
No surprise that the Swedes dropped, and then did not reinstate, the charge.
And that stuff about expiring is nonsense. Statutes of limitations only apply before you are charged, not after. And they never actually charged Assange with anything. Because that would mean they would have to present their case in detail to his defense. And there has never been any credible case.
That said, as turns out, Assange was an idiot for not going to Sweden earlier. Would have dealt with this, and be a little bit harder for the US to get hold of him.
Similar issue.
They needed to add a heavy arrestor hook at the back, which broke the CoG. So they added a big spring to the elevator to trim it up. So hands off it would fly level.
But get it into a spin and it was time to jump out.
Needed more radical redesign, but that would have cost more.
(Also, could not see over the nose for a carrier landing. Amazing that a pilot could do it at all.)
Trying to buy a non-IOT light or lock or air conditioner or water tap will be like trying to buy a vacuum tube / valve today. When the IOT controls everything, turning it off will not be an option. Any more than turning off the smarts on your phone is an option today.
Does not mean a middle class.
It means the everyday rights we take for granted. To be able to discuss things freely. To be able to complain vigorously if we disagree with something. To go where we please. To be able to rely on the rule of law, and not the arbitrary dictates of a government.
These are the things China does not have. It is a major concern now that China is the biggest economy in the world (purchasing power parity).
NOBODY in the mainstream has questioned how a 500g drone could destroy a 100 ton airliner.
Sure, a well aimed 100kg military drone could do serious damage, take out an engine. But that is not what is being talked about here.
It makes as much sense as the idea that a terrorist could blow up an airliner with a box cutter.
Size does matter.
(There was a video of someone firing a largish drone out of a canon directly into a Mooney (very light aircraft) wing and doing damage, but still not destroying the main spar. An airliner weighs roughly 100 times a Mooney. The leading edges are made of thick high grade aluminum. And they can fly well on one engine, and even no engines is unlikely to lead to a hull loss if the pilot is competent.)
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