cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

  • 244 Posts
  • 480 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
Cake day: January 17th, 2022
  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPMtoMemes@lemmy.ml•IEEE 754English
    1·
    1 month ago

    And other times 0.1 + 0.2 = 0.3000004

    0.1 + 0.2 != 0.3000004

    You’re off by 0.000000399999999955991114575226674787700176239013671875

    (0.1 + 0.2 is actually 0.3000000000000000444089209850062616169452667236328125)

    (And 0.1 is actually 0.1000000000000000055511151231257827021181583404541015625, and so on. People unfamiliar with IEE 754 may be surprised by the output of python -c 'print("%.60f" % 0.1)')

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•How do I survive the US immigration?English
    4·
    2 months ago

    It is risky to carry encrypted devices across the border which you are not prepared to give them the passwords to.

    In most cases they won’t ask you to decrypt anything, but they do sometimes randomly and when they do if you refuse then you can/will be denied entry and/or they’ll keep the device(s) indefinitely.

    One approach to avoid this problem is to create an encrypted disk image (your operating system hopefully comes with a program to do this, you shouldn’t need to install anything) and then store it online somewhere and then download it after you’ve crossed the border. Read about how to pick a strong yet memorable passphrase.

    It was reported last year that the US was going to start requiring that you disclose all of your social media accounts used in the previous five years, but that did not actually go into effect in December as it had been announced that it would. Something along those lines could still happen later this year though: Here and here are articles from March and May of this year about it.

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPtoWorld News@lemmy.ml•Iran to close Strait of Hormuz, strike twice as many targets in response to any US attackEnglish
    11·
    2 months ago

    Their certificate was revoked (by their certificate authority, Actalis, part of the Aruba Group) on July 6. Presumably the CA was pressured to revoke it by the Italian and/or US government, and they will get a new certificate from someone else soon.

    There is a hexbear thread here about it; afaict there doesn’t appear to yet be any reporting about it. But in the CRL you can see it was revoked July 6:

    $ curl -s http://crl15.actalis.it/Repository/tls-subca-rsa-dv-2025/getLastCRL | openssl crl -noout -text |grep -A 4 02295E6BB25717C4652321F4ED9D2B29
    Serial Number: 02295E6BB25717C4652321F4ED9D2B29
        Revocation Date: Jul  6 13:54:09 2026 GMT
        CRL entry extensions:
            X509v3 CRL Reason Code: 
                Privilege Withdrawn

    The reason “Privilege Withdrawn” means it was the CA’s decision rather than their own.

    Because certificate revocation has never worked very well, many people can still access it (until their browser fetches the certificate revocation list, or checks OCSP, does some newfangled proprietary other thing i don’t understand…).

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoNew Communities@lemmy.world•Chess - since the existing commuity seems dead and hosted on .mlEnglish
    11·
    3 months ago
    This is offtopic here, but here is an answer 🙄 (click to expand)

    why do you stand against Telegram as a secure and optimal solution for the majority

    Because it isn’t secure. It is marketed as being secure, and it is not. It is snake oil.

    Just to clarify, are you aware Telegram is blocked in Russia by the government

    yes, i am aware that they are (again) currently blocked. i’m curious your theory for why they were unblocked after the previous blocks? (note: please don’t actually reply to this question here; see end of this comment first)

    mostly because the former does not want to share data with the government standing for the privacy, if I am not mistaken?

    yes, you are mistaken.

    Russia has strengthened and later weakened their restrictions on Telegram various times over the years for reasons which are probably unknowable without insider information. What is clear is that Telegram is absolutely sharing data (which they’ve chosen to design their service such that they can have access to) with various governments at various times; assuming that they never would share any with Russia is nonsensical. The extent to which they willingly share which data with which governments, versus which governments access data without their cooperation (by compromising their servers or coercing their engineers, which gives access to message contents due to their lack of e2ee) is not particularly interesting.

    Beyond that, I recommend that you post on !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world or somewhere similar if you need people to explain why telegram is offtopic in communities about privacy technology. (This discussion is very offtopic in this thread so I won’t reply further here. If you really feel the need to argue about the above I recommend you do it in a new thread somewhere it isn’t offtopic; if you tag me maybe i’ll reply there.)

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