• 0 Posts
  • 33 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle


  • You need a way to generate a psuedo random sequence that’s synchronized. You can then use that random stream as something that works like a stream cipher.

    Getting synchronized sources of random numbers like that isn’t trivial, but it can be done.

    To spitball a notion: get something like a small microcontroller that can drive a small screen, no wireless capabilities needed. Putting an implementation of something like the hotp algorithm on it will let you get some random data with each button press. That data can basically be used like a one time pad where you press a button each time you need more data. People decrypting the data just need to start at the same point in the sequence.

    There are so many issues with this that I haven’t thought of, but it’s the most reasonable approximation of a pen and paper algorithm that has modern security levels and can be done in a reasonable amount of time.

    Basically, you’re going to want to look into stream ciphers. Since those can be done without feeding the data into them, it’s possible to have a more disconnected system.

    It’s worth noting that against a governmental adversary, you’re far more likely to be revealed via poor application of a custom crypto system than by a targeted bypass of a commonplace one.
    If you’re under suspicion, a cop can grab the piece of paper you did your work on out of the trash if you forgot to burn it and no decryption is required. Being physically readable, the key material can be seized and it’s lost. If they have a warrant they can put a camera in your house and just record your paper.
    With a cellphone, the lowest level of scrutiny that can use a backdoor that we know of would be a sealed fisa court order. Anything less official would require more scrutiny, since the NSA isn’t going to send a targeted payload to the phone of a generic malcontent/domestic subversive.

    Widely used crypto systems address an extremely wide array of possible attacks, most of which aren’t related to the cipher but instead to issues of key management and rotation. This can give you guarantees about message confidentiality being preserved backwards in time if the key is stolen,cand only new messages being readable, as an example. (Perfect forward secrecy)

    What you’re looking for can be made, but you need to strongly consider if it actually makes you more secure, or less. Probably less.







  • I don’t know that I’d agree with the notion that games that are engaging need to be rated higher. Is there harm to playing one game a lot?
    I’ve read books that were so engaging I kept reading long after I should have stopped for the night. The author very much intended for the book to be engaging and to hold my attention. Should we rate the book as more mature because I kept reading it?

    I don’t think balatro is any more addictive than most other games, it just has a low barrier to starting and a quick turn around.

    Ratings should be informative and harm based. “This game is full of violence” and “this game has gambling”. Factual.
    A game being prone to being played alot isn’t factual, it’s just an observation that some people find it fun. Without an associated risk of harm you’re just putting a scary number on something because of your opinion about it.




  • They’re saying that they find due process to be lacking and the prosecution to be political.
    Do you think it’s depressing that someone would donate money to the defense of someone they think is being inappropriately prosecuted?
    If you think they’re guilty, you should still want them to get the best defense possible, so that when they’re found guilty it’s airtight. Our justice system is based on an adversarial model. If the prosecution, with the resources of the state, can’t successfully argue that they did it and that their arrest and all procedures were properly followed, do you really want that to still mean someone faces the death penalty?


  • “a drink” contains roughly the same amount of alcohol regardless of type, so a daiquiri should get you about as inebriated as a beer.
    Some caveats: since drunk people drink more, some places have specials earlier in the evening or on some drinks where you can make it a double for no or low upcharge. That glass now has two drinks in it.
    Some drinks are easier to drink fast, which makes you feel the effects faster and stronger, so you might perceive yourself to be “more drunk”, even though it’s really just hitting you all at once. Delicious sugary drinks that mask the alcohol flavor are notorious for that.

    It takes about an hour to process a drink; sugary drinks will inevitably give you an upset stomach; water and food help keep your stomach settled ; you’ll have a better time not having a drink you could have and feeling good than having a drink your shouldn’t have and feeling gross, so if in doubt say nah.

    You’ll be fine with one with a meal with someone you know. A second is probably fine in the circumstances but more than that is iffy.


  • So, for the actual answer to how you get private security: you hire a company like constellis (formerly blackwater, or Iraq war crime fame) or the honest to God pinkertons, who are actually still around.
    You pay them unholy amounts of money and get some burly people to follow you around, with skills proportional to how much you’re paying them. If it gets to the six figure a month range, they also get more war-crime-y because you’re going for the highly qualified special forces folks who miss the fun of combat and murder.
    If you try to pay what feels like a reasonable sum for private security you’re getting a cop working a second job who is definitely not taking a bullet for you, and probably not doing anything more to keep you alive than what’s coincidental to keeping themselves alive.

    The company I work for does business in countries where kidnapping foreign business people is a common and lucrative way to make money (it’s effectively IT consulting, we’re not evil beyond the baseline capitalist level). We hire security people for preposterous sums and basically get former special forces who drive a car, make sure the person who showed up to the meeting is actually who they should be, orders delivery food, and tells you not to do stupid things. They try to keep you from getting kidnapped in boring ways, and if you do get kidnapped they coordinate the ransom exchange. (That I know of the most that’s ever happened was someone made the phone call to verify that the car they were about to get into at the airport was the pickup, and were told that it was not, abandon your bag if they’ve already loaded it and immediately go back into the airport and wait for the guard who showed up a minute later and handled the police interaction)

    In general just try to avoid being in a position where you feel like you need to have hired a hero.



  • If you have reason to believe they are, you explain that reasoning to a court and if the reasoning is sufficiently persuasive the company can be compelled to provide internal information that could show whatever is going on.
    Hiding this information or destroying it typically carries personal penalties for the individuals involved in it’s destruction, as well as itself being evidence against the organization. “If your company didn’t collect this information, why are four IT administrators and their manager serving 10 years in prison for intentionally deleting relevant business records?”

    The courts are allowed to go through your stuff.


  • Just for an example that isn’t visible to the user: the server needs to know how it can communicate responses to the browser.
    So it’s not just “what fonts do you have”, it also needs to know "what type of image can you render? What type of data compression do you speak? Can I hold this connection open for a few seconds to avoid having to spend a bunch of time establishing a new connection? We all agree that basic text can be represented using 7-bit ASCII, but can you parse something from this millennium?”.

    Beyond that there’s all the parameters of the actual connection that lives beneath http. What tls ciphers do you support? What extensions?

    The exposure of the basic information needed to make a request reveals information which may be sufficient to significantly track a user.


  • Though the headnotes were drawn directly from uncopyrightable judicial opinions, the court analogized them to the choices made by a sculptor in selecting what to remove from a slab of marble. Thus, even though the words or phrases used in the headnotes might be found in the underlying opinions, Thompson Reuters’ selection of which words and phrases to use was entitled to copyright protection. Interestingly, the court stated that “even a headnote taken verbatim from an opinion is a carefully chosen fraction of the whole,” which “expresses the editor’s idea about what the important point of law from the opinion is.” According to the court, that is enough of a “creative spark” to be copyrightable. In other words, even if a work is selected entirely from the public domain, the simple act of selection is enough to give rise to copyright protection.

    The court distinguished cases holding that intermediate copying of computer source code was fair use, reasoning that those courts held that the intermediate copying was necessary to “reverse engineer access to the unprotected functional elements within a program.” Here, copying Thompson Reuters’ protected expression was not needed to gain access to underlying ideas.

    https://natlawreview.com/article/court-training-ai-model-based-copyrighted-data-not-fair-use-matter-law

    It sounds like the case you mentioned had a government entity doing the annotation, which makes it public even though it’s not literally the law.
    Reuters seems to have argued that while the law and cases are public, their tagging, summarization and keyword highlighting is editorial.
    The judge agreed and highlighted that since westlaw isn’t required to view the documents that everyone is entitled to see, training using their copy, including the headers, isn’t justified.

    It’s much like how a set of stories being in the public domain means you can copy each of them, but my collection of those stories has curation that makes it so you can’t copy my collection as a whole, assuming my work curating the collection was in some way creative and not just “alphabetical order”.

    Another major point of the ruling seems to rely on the company aiming to directly compete with Reuters, which undermines the fair use argument.


  • I don’t think that’s the best argument in favor of AI if you cared to make that argument. The infringement wasn’t for their parsing of the law, but for their parsing of the annotations and commentary added by westlaw.

    If processing copy written material is infringement then what they did is definitively infringement.
    The law is freely available to read without westlaw. They weren’t making the law available to everyone, they were making a paid product to compete with the westlaw paid product. Regardless of justification they don’t deserve any sympathy for altruism.

    A better argument would be around if training on the words of someone you paid to analyze an analysis produces something similar to the original, is it sufficiently distinct to actually be copy written? Is training itself actually infringement?


  • I appreciate the reply/description of my life. :)

    I have gotten myself some medication, which has helped a lot. I still have the impulse to jump right to the massive project, but now it’s way easier to recognize that “learn how to do it” is a step, and that a smaller project might give fulfillment, in addition to learning how to do it more effectively because you actually finish, or even start.

    I’ve also had good luck with teaching myself that sometimes it’s better to do half of task than to be overwhelmed and not do the entire thing.
    It’s not ideal to get dressed out of a laundry basket next to the dryer for a month, but all the clothes are there or in the laundry basket, so things look clean and I’m only slightly wrinkly for a few minutes.

    Biggest side effect I got from the medication was a tendency towards dry skin and pimples. I actually sleep a little better because I get in bed to read a book when I’m “supposed” to, so when I get sleepy I just… Sleep, instead of idling on the couch for hours.