asciilifeform: how long does it take to write a perlturd that tells a planted box which other units in a cage are pumping tor?
asciilifeform: the creation of the most humble lamer is still an improvement over a professionally-designed honeypot.
asciilifeform: trivial exercise: pump bitcoin addrs through tor (exits), see what comes out on the other end.
asciilifeform: the man in the middle can present arbitrary crap instead of what bitbet pumped out.
asciilifeform: given that bitbet pumps out unsigned text, there are no sides here
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: worry after i'm impaled.
asciilifeform: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/college-park-shady-grove-campuses-affected-by-university-of-maryland-security-breach/2014/02/19/ce438108-99bd-11e3-80ac-63a8ba7f7942_story.html
asciilifeform: (for completeness of picture, first player who moves with M' > M (illegal) also lost. clearly.)
asciilifeform: this is predicated on the assumption of brute force, though.
asciilifeform: to complete the picture, 'dragon' turns out to be a peculiarly-shaped active volcano.
asciilifeform: is there a scenario with 'paper & pencil btc' that does not reduce to simply 'Hawala' ?
asciilifeform: (for anyone unfamiliar with 'djvu', it's an old but irreplaceable format specifically for warez scans. wavelet-compressed images. no turing-complete vector rendering as in pdf.)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: example, p. 69, optical 'correlator'
asciilifeform: will be interesting to see what becomes of the empty throne.
asciilifeform: people did amazing things with optics, without any access to coherent light, much less computer
asciilifeform: there's a whole field of weird analogue computers using light, that mostly died out some time last century
asciilifeform: that was just a simplified restatement of problem;
asciilifeform: or, failing that, simply the set of necessary words (all words from his poem slate)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: might want to describe this for the simple (i.e. mathematically)
asciilifeform: contemplating design of btc-related anything while assuming sympathetic (or even grudgingly-cooperative) bureaucrats is like designing tanks and assuming a cooperative enemy.
asciilifeform: there are russian factories still running various machine tools with nazi eagles stamped on them.
asciilifeform: my understanding is that people generally get whatever's lying around in the ruins of whichever great 20th c. empire they happen to live in.
asciilifeform: manual for m16 (downloadable!) actually had a chapter on how to destroy the piece, if capture is imminent - instructed to scatter parts, and bend the barrel by jumping on it...
asciilifeform: djvu is a really spiffy format that uses wavelet compression
asciilifeform: TomServo: simply bought the highest 'dpi' screen sold, for reading scanned crap.
asciilifeform: the whole notion of applying concepts from 'human' civvie life, with various connotations, like 'self defence', to the doings of empires, is fundamentally disingenuous.
asciilifeform: and jump on it
asciilifeform: 'even' in the russian prison there are smart folks. some, perhaps not quite smart enough to spring loose, some that stay out of habit, some that have simply not located a sufficiently fat herd of bullocks...
asciilifeform: leaving aside the question of whether a particular mouthpiece of the headless dictatorship believes this, it is clearly intended for the consumption of folks who do (or could, with the right prod)
asciilifeform: witness herr dimon, believing that 'surely this cartoon coin can be copied just like mp3'
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: remember 'the camel has two humps' piece?
asciilifeform: of, you could say, insufficiently high temperature in the simulated-annealing sense.
asciilifeform: ('russian i would learn, simply because, it was spoken by lenin')
asciilifeform: if i recall, it was mpoe-pr
asciilifeform: (by mpoe-pr)
asciilifeform: which is still an improvement.
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: this is a classic example of 'proofiness'
asciilifeform: decimation: see, for example: the notion of 'formats.' (http://www.loper-os.org/?p=309)
asciilifeform: ricochet was a classic example of a co. with a real, useful product, killed by gross mismanagement
asciilifeform: yeah i never understood the appeal of giving slaves actual computers. give them graphic terminals and be done with it
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: but as you observed, the age of the impotent. whose doings perhaps will not make for good pictures.
asciilifeform: the man i quoted re: the meatgrinder was employed as a detective embedded in a prison, in what was then leningrad. he had an interesting take: much of what the rubes think of as 'the cruelty' was simply administration of justice among the convicts
asciilifeform: 'in one cellar...' '...tire pump, soldering iron, bottle, ... rat, bucket on hotplate.'
asciilifeform: the compendium is now a best-seller.
asciilifeform: baldaev got quite a lot of shit for these, many folks insisted that he simply drew his fantasies (during his employment as a prison guard)
asciilifeform: 'convicts, during escapes from far nothern camps of gulag lured with them (due to the impossibility of gathering adequate provisions while imprisoned) other inmates, who would be killed en route. such victims of cannibalism were known in convict argot as 'bullocks.' how many 'bullocks' were eaten up, is unknown.'
asciilifeform: 'the slaying by a convict of a 'bullock' during an escape from camp.'
asciilifeform: i think the implication might have been that 100k users turns you into a 'person of interest' for the vultures
asciilifeform: do herds of chumps bring into existence chumpmeisters, or the other way around?
asciilifeform: i'll extend mp's thesis and conjecture that it died from, rather than in spite, of, the mountain of free advertising in u.s. mouthpiece media 'mtgox, the largest exchange, today, ... etc'
asciilifeform: one chump magnet dies, another takes its place.
asciilifeform: only got dumps for the last 2 times,
asciilifeform: and now for something completely different.
asciilifeform: ht the rogue - and released the rogue. the other constables took flight, and, when they came to the judge, spoke to him of this. the judge and his horsemen went to the king with complaint of drakula. the king a messenger to drakula, to ask, 'why have you wrought this evil?' he replies thusly, 'no evil have i wrought, but the constable has slaine himself with his own hand: such shall be the demise of any who, li
asciilifeform: as if it needs much of an explanation beyond simple translation in the anglo world.
asciilifeform: k to a great lord.' such was the custom of drakula: when an inexperienced envoy came to him, from a king or an emperor, and could not answer the wily questions of drakula, he would be sat upon a stake, drakula saying to him this: 'not i am to blame for your demise, but your lord is, or perhaps you are. for if your lord knew that you are unintelligent and inexperienced, and still sent you to me - a wise lord, yo
asciilifeform: ng the noble has dealt with you unjustly, and for him you have prepared a death more stately than for others.' drakula answered, 'you speak the truth. here you are - an envoy of a great lord, a kingly emissary, it is for you that i have crafted this stake.' answered the envoy, 'lord, if i have wrought an injustice worthy of death - do with me as you will. you are an impartial judge - it is not you who shall be
asciilifeform: rself, these people are martyrs. so i wish to make you a martyr, be in the company of your fellows.' and ordered him sat upon a stake, but the other monk, sent with fifty golden ducats back to the hungarian borders, 'you are a wise man.'
asciilifeform: translation: 'once dining under the corpses of men, those impaled on stakes, many sat around his table, dining among him and in this taking plasure. servant of his, placing food before him, could not endure the stench,
asciilifeform: they pass an old man who says, 'don't drown this fellow. i'll feed him dumplings, he won't have to do any work but to dip them'
asciilifeform: the folks you're talking about might be a hard sell. they'd need to be talked out of their addiction to 'standards-compliant' (read: u.s.-diddled) turdware.
asciilifeform: if you personally can make this happen, talk to mp!
asciilifeform: reduces to a search for the right moneyed fool (e.g. reportedly, kabbalists do find employment in israel)
asciilifeform: reason i mentioned google's widget, is that the chumps pay manyfold for 'conversions' (term of art)
asciilifeform: cads: pick up one of google's '$100 off' coupons and see for yourself what it is the chumps pay for
asciilifeform: cads: with some 'hardness assumption' in the way of practically accomplishing this, yes.
asciilifeform: even predominated. Actually, so far as he could judge, the majority of people in Airstrip One were small, dark, and ill-favoured. It was curious how that beetle-like type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men, growing stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the dominion of
asciilifeform: implication is that this achieved something more than one can get by merely hashing & signing code.
asciilifeform: and now for something completely different:
asciilifeform: nsa cryptosystem, circa 1980s. implied to function on this principle.
asciilifeform: cads: not so simple. you can't have the machine actually branch in any obvious sense
asciilifeform: unless you are carrying out the compilation with paper and pencil,
asciilifeform: cads: i reinvented the concept, as probably just about every maths student has, when first reading about Paillier's Addition and thinking 'what if you glue this to OISC - 'jump if zero' - machine.
asciilifeform: (if cosmic rays are insufficient, someone might be so kind as to pump some ionizing strange through your server. or merely turn up the thermostat in the cage. etc.)
asciilifeform: example, for the thick:
asciilifeform: and this requires a 'bonfire of the' complexity.
asciilifeform: it is an attempt to hide head in the sand, escape from the fact that the only way to guarantee expected function is: actual understanding
asciilifeform: attempts at 'transitioning from the informal to the formal by formal means'.
asciilifeform: obligatory link to the MIT lamp video!
asciilifeform: arguably imperative, but we live in bizarroworld
asciilifeform: implementing btc would be a little like having the mech eng. students build a working howitzer.
asciilifeform: give it another decade... we implemented 'sed'.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: right. you arrange to have the turd jumped to after sig check.
asciilifeform: there is a statue on the campus, car-sized, so many of the locals think it must be a gigantic sea-turtle.
asciilifeform: though perhaps an aficionado of tentacle porn could cough up a counter-example.
asciilifeform: (and, not simply mine)
asciilifeform: it is very easy to draw mistaken conclusions from the fact that the 'man on the street' was entirely unaware of manhattan p. (or 'operation gladio', for a more recent example)
asciilifeform: i tend to agree with MP and others who conclude that we no longer live in a world where manhattan projects happen.
asciilifeform: this goes back to the 'what is control' question from earlier, as well as MP's recent discussion of 'owning a cow'
asciilifeform: in this scenario, imagination can indeed have an impact on reality...
asciilifeform: modern 'debt politics' is simply a maintenance of the historic norm (most humans being formally enslaved to someone or other) by other means.
asciilifeform: i.e. the six or so global telecoms with de-facto control over the net could switch it off like a lamp. (provisions against this scenario are quite feasible, but no one has cared to consider much less make them.)
asciilifeform: describing 'power' as a scalar is naive. there is power to destroy, for example, which is arguably held by whoever controls the satoshi mega-hoard
asciilifeform: Duffer1: the assumption that we know anything whatsoever regarding the distribution of the bulk of mining power is mistaken.
asciilifeform: francis_wolke: and so, when a government pumps out propaganda by the truckload re: how it maintains a stable of uniquely-capable cryptologic janissaries, what can you conclude?
asciilifeform: mp, i liked your telling. let's have it
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: old owner still had working passwords - half a year after the transfer was completed" << Butugichag is waiting with open arms for these fine folks.
asciilifeform: virtually no one gets to 'design a computer' now. (not apple, either.) they get to glue the same old crap together in mildly-different ways.
asciilifeform: i mention this in the hope of making it clear how pervasive the architectural problem mentioned in MP's piece is.
asciilifeform: question should've been more specific: 'what if' a 'soviet clone' of mpex, that is, one which bows in agreement to all of the technical decisions.
asciilifeform: FL isn't a hg arc lamp, the 'fluorescent' refers to the inner coating of the bulb, well, fluorescing.
asciilifeform: "Bitcoin interests me as an obvious example of a technological jewel tossed around aimlessly by the brutal hands of cave men. I cant help but picture a flashlight or a radio set, left behind in the wilderness by geologists, to be picked up later by some Stone Age aboriginals; to be fought over and worshiped. Until the batteries run out. But the batteries have not yet run out!" -- old turd of mine
asciilifeform: birthing a parsimonious implementation of something (i.e. one that can actually be understood) is not necessarily the same as the student pissing contest of 'write the shortest hello world for ms-dos in asm'
asciilifeform: the only truly unambiguous definition of a computation is the computation itself.
asciilifeform: (what values of 'reasonable', depends on the intrinsic complexity of the problem.)
asciilifeform: the question is not of a 'perfect' implementation,
asciilifeform: mike_c: i'd love to read 'Bitcoin, the book.' with rationales. but it would be of little worth without a strictly-minimal, brain-loadable reference implementation.
asciilifeform: sort of how i once pontificated re: fpga implementation of bitcoind (e.g. verilog) would be a good 'cruft shedder' exercise.
asciilifeform: i still predict that gox et al will eventually 'repay' the chumps in a scamcoin minted for the purpose.
asciilifeform: "To this day pots of late-Roman gold are periodically dug up in England during excavations of Roman villas; the residents of these villas were unable to derive any benefit from their hoards as their empire collapsed and the Dark Age closed in around them." (further from herr Orlov)
asciilifeform: ifetimes some tin-pot pseudo-nationalist leader will print up ugly slips of paper with pictures of dead people, Masonic symbols and big numbers, and attempt to charge people for using them as a medium of exchange in all transactions, and your great-grandchildren need to know, from an early age, that it is a scam. It is an official scvam, backed up by the threat of violence, but it is still a scam."
asciilifeform: en they will probably think that anyway, because by then you probably will be. But it certainly won't be helpful to hold on to multiple shoeboxes full of old currency, because then your great-grandchildren will think that you are in fact insane, because no sane person would be hoarding such trash. It is important that they don't think that, because the lesson is an important one: chances are that during their l
asciilifeform: -ruble note, which seemed like a lot of money to me at the time, and was very surprised to hear that it was completely worthless and that I could take one and use it as a bookmark (which I did). It was not until the 1990s that Russia again issued a note in that denomination, which likewise became worthless soon after it was printed."
asciilifeform: prediction: at some point ATMs will require the user to stuff his hand in a 'monkey trap.' if the transaction is deemed 'suspicious', the clamps close.
asciilifeform: (at one time, and perhaps still, the courts there presumed guilt on the part of the complaining card holder)
asciilifeform: one important fact is that u.s. card issuers love sending 'spam cards' via mail
asciilifeform: http://www.kaspersky.com/about/news/virus/2014/Kaspersky-Lab-Uncovers-The-Mask-One-of-the-Most-Advanced-Global-Cyber-espionage-Operations-to-Date-Due-to-the-Complexity-of-the-Toolset-Used-by-the-Attackers
asciilifeform: as observed by MP and others.
asciilifeform: (more or less simply 'strela' with the seek-trigger taped down.)
asciilifeform: brilliant simplicity, unmanned aerial 'mine.'
asciilifeform: pilots are human, when idiot employers/officials offer paid sick leave for an imaginary injury, they're happy to run with it.
asciilifeform: they make IR (ocular compatible) laser sights now, because u.s. polizei can't hit a victim from across the street otherwise.
asciilifeform: yes. perhaps physics has been cancelled by imperial decree, and we're all fools.
asciilifeform: the ddos crap is a pill against folks like MP, who have declared that they'll stick with ancient versions of bitcoind.
asciilifeform: there's a difference between 'amply paid' and $MAXINT
asciilifeform: if the rewrite were compact enough to be auditable with reasonable effort, it would be worth considering regardless of the authorship
asciilifeform: often wonder when/if we'll see a sane reimplementation of bitcoind.
asciilifeform: if bugged cell phones were presided over by Meta-NSA instead of classic nsa, the buggers would store compressed audio and piss it out in bursts when plugged into the mains
asciilifeform: example:
asciilifeform: still waiting to see an 'mpexian' exchange with no www site, operated entirely by coded TX amounts.
asciilifeform: which is why the 'perfect dpr' owns no computer, neither do his friends, and is, in fact: a dentist. (whose name we will never learn.)
asciilifeform: for extra fee, will pump (and dump) automagically...
asciilifeform: they'll simply 'repay' their chumps in 'goxcoin', as soon as mr. k gets gcc working on his box.
asciilifeform: pwned in the sense of certain people taking home astronomically-improbable winnings
asciilifeform: complete with master keys (bonus if hidden), artificial infusions of fiat to pump up 'value', collaboration with governments...
asciilifeform: the 'trivial solution' would be, somewhat obviously: everybody pgp-signs all wot ops, and people simply mirror the results
asciilifeform: just 5 guys signed up for MP's party?
asciilifeform: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2553964/CEO-commits-suicide-nail-gun-company-investigation.html
asciilifeform: ah that's lame. should be diddled in a way that survives recompile.
asciilifeform: if lifted from classic btc, it's compatible.
asciilifeform: what's the plan? dump when moon is full?
asciilifeform: broadcom inc. tempted them with at-cost cpu offer
asciilifeform: (hanging upside-down with arse tubes in a camp)
asciilifeform: i can already see the chinese world of warcraft labour camps switching.
asciilifeform: i'm still waiting for 'slavecoin.' it would be the perfect 'gift from the gods' to the 'anyone with a computer Ought to Matter!' crowd.
asciilifeform: note that it is not, in principle, impossible to pull it off
asciilifeform: every altcoin is really an attempt to 'refight the war'
asciilifeform: (actual competence / contacts in black market)
asciilifeform: confession: at one point when i was younger, i did succumb to the temptation to replicate various soviet experiments and put current through my brain.
asciilifeform: simple recipe:
asciilifeform: mike_c: if pump'n'dump is a type of honest business, i'd hate to see what a scam is now
asciilifeform: and chumps will flock to them.
asciilifeform: in the latter, fiat infusions will make these boobycoins appear to be (temporarily) valuable
asciilifeform: the proliferation of chumpcoins sets the stage for this
asciilifeform: live by the chumps, die by the chumps. who are fickle.
asciilifeform: the trouble with chump harvesting, morals aside, is that there is always a new, slicker chump-harvesting artist coming to town.
asciilifeform: ThickAsThieves: good luck with the chump harvesting.
asciilifeform: take classic btc. it was a net gain in wealth, rather than simply a machine from moving money from one pocket to another, because it made new things possible. what new things does the altcoin-of-the-day make possible?
asciilifeform: it isn't impossible. we live in a world with ms-winblows, for example.
asciilifeform: hard to sell swamp to people who understand what a swamp is.
asciilifeform: every cryptocoin can be seen as an attempt to 'replay the history of money'
asciilifeform: the overflow works elsewhere, these folks only looked at the winblows example.
asciilifeform: .22, 'olympic' caliber, favourite of executioners around the world
asciilifeform: herbijudlestoids: i'm feeling generous, have an example:
asciilifeform: by carrying out certain computations.
asciilifeform: the inevitable boojum of conventional computing is that a boobytrap, no matter how clever, could eventually be stumbled upon by some clever soviet kid with a copy of 'ida'
asciilifeform: they would like to create (and then mandate) computing machinery that cannot be audited for security even in principle.
asciilifeform: so, worked example:
asciilifeform: certain people would /love/ a mathematically-impenetrable boobytrap.
asciilifeform: if it 'keeps key safe' via the whole proggy becoming the key, you haven't accomplished much
asciilifeform: lift it, accomplish the same purpose.
asciilifeform: i live right outside of a big uni, whose comp sci dept. pisses out a never-ending supply of this crud.
asciilifeform: there is already a hard impossibility proof of turing-complete computation in a homomorphic turd.
asciilifeform: 6) All of this is based on mathematical computational assumptions, which may be proven false by future algorithmic advances.
asciilifeform: 3) The right way to think of what secure obfuscation allows is to create, *under many technical conditions*, software that has secrets built into it. These secrets are used by the software to compute output, and yet the secrets remain hidden even if an attacker obtains the entire machine-level code of the software, which of course the attacker could run and analyze. Thus the attacker would be able to *use* the
asciilifeform: I am a co-author of the research quoted in the article. I realize it is likely pointless to write this comment in an Internet forum, but let me attempt to clarify the situation, in the hope that some thoughtful participants will find it useful. Please note: I will not be monitoring this forum in the future. If you are a researcher, please feel free to contact me.
asciilifeform: homomorphic crypto seems to have the ancient appeal of other proven impossibilities, like perpetuum mobile.
asciilifeform: i did think that mpoe-pr lurks hidden somewhere here.
asciilifeform: i dare to predict: there will come a slick charlatan who will 'improve! the crypto!'
asciilifeform: not a physical impossibility, by any means
asciilifeform: i can easily picture, for example, a 'revolutionary! amazing! genuinely Alt' coin, with subtly pre-broken crypto.
asciilifeform: nubbins`: this would explain the fact that everybody loved a good impalement, etc. in times gone by. but hanging? seems boring.
asciilifeform: no gore as such, even. never having attended a hanging, i've no idea why the audience creams its pants along with the fellow dancing the hempen jig
asciilifeform: Vexual: if your idea of a portable computer is a briefcase with a tv and raspi, more power to you
asciilifeform: decimation: not even talking about re-inventing computing here (that's what my blob is for...) but just a decent unixlike portable
asciilifeform: Mats_cd03: all you need is a machine with documented, well-behaved (at least to the desktop standard) components.
asciilifeform: well, to be fair, if the participants paid for food/housing with btc, there might've been an actual body count rather than simple whining
asciilifeform: one could conceivably implement it as a 'dead man's switch'
asciilifeform: rng is simply a part therein
asciilifeform: naturally, a discerning chump will insist on parking in a mass grave of his peers, not some lonely hole in an abandoned lot
asciilifeform: other than chump-vacuuming, you mean ?
asciilifeform: traditional argument - if enough of the hoard were dumped, one could see a catastrophic stampede
asciilifeform: the uninitiated tend to group mpex as 'something somebody wrote'
asciilifeform: re: mpex performance and outraged lusers: there was an article, many years ago, discussing an overheard: 'is that a real program, or is that something somebody wrote'
asciilifeform: but worlds with mass chumpcasting don't produce caesars.
asciilifeform: where, in principle, one can radiate sufficiently little at any given point of spectrum to make classical triangulation virtually impossible
asciilifeform: if no consumer ever bought a winblows pc in a retail shop again, it would survive in something close to its current size, simply from the government largesse
asciilifeform: and ms isn't a company in the sense of, say, coca cola (or even the original 'standard oil') - it's a crown monopoly
asciilifeform: nubbins`: don't be surprised if mac os '11' or whatnot simply refuses to run 'unsigned' apps
asciilifeform: no one would've dreamed of trying to implement a cpu on one
asciilifeform: they were well-documented and extremely simple, because they were originally just a substitute for buckets of PALs/GALs
asciilifeform: docs only, or the complete chip mask and sources for the latter ?
asciilifeform: this is how soviet clones of DEC chips ended up exact duplicates, complete with the (poorly translated, with a dictionary, by DEC) profanities
asciilifeform: but presumably they simply use pirated tool chain
asciilifeform: the internals really are somewhat complicated
asciilifeform: the protocol for pumping in the 'bitstream' is simple and documented;
asciilifeform: if you are considering a machine for the comparison, you are in a state of sin.
asciilifeform: one can take photos, sufficiently detailed to include imperfections of the pcb, solder joints, etc. and sign them
asciilifeform: pankkake: there are two identical rngs (removable.) each is an analogue device, with convenient probe points and a very simple circuit (29 parts, 26 of them passives)
asciilifeform: working temperature of printer extruder. max temperature of chamber during firing.
asciilifeform: recipe for those disinclined to be chumped: 1) read published (3 yrs +) verilog src for sha256. 2) build. 3) see minimum gate count for unrolled hasher 4) laugh
asciilifeform: other components (buckling springs, controller, chassis) can be sourced or laser cut
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: IANAL, but this tidbit seems to signal the final, complete death of the 19th century u.s. law known as 'posse comitatus act'
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: complicated. people would plunder every graveyard they can find before selling their own parts.
asciilifeform: (a SlaveCoin would, hypothetically, do to human labour what bitcoin did to computing power)
asciilifeform: the most educational possible outcome of the circus is: use of bitcoin is banned under penalty of cranked impalement - and continues enthusiastically regardless.
asciilifeform: that is, MOV predicated on flags, a la conditional jumps
asciilifeform: mission accomplished.
asciilifeform: remaining question is, would banks move to challenge/response silicon cards first, or just focus on hunting down and impaling the hypothetical daring 'dread pirate'
asciilifeform: it's a simple, if suicidally dangerous, solution to 'how to teleport fiat'
asciilifeform: many differences, yes. chinese have a few thou. yrs. of practice collapsing empire and re-constituting, etc.
asciilifeform: fact is, every mega-empire has 'fault lines', along which it can be cleaved, whether by 'natural' decay, or external 'help.'
asciilifeform: ukraine is a complicated beast. most of the folks there with 'national identity' are actually from the western half (really, pre-partition poland)
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: afaik, no one sells a usable pc-compatible chording kbd
asciilifeform: and stuck doing compile on a pentium 1...
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: and what if i were 'civilian', rather than a weirdo with a physical drive hooked through a dongle to a vm for installs/overnight compile of whatever
asciilifeform: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/22982/Symbolics/ (not mine, but good picture)
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: (unrelated) i now sympathize with your travails re: that Mac SE
asciilifeform: know how in the early days of computing they had 'delay line memory'?
asciilifeform: they simply write to a flash card
asciilifeform: like pumping as many watts of broadcast as possible over all digital TV channels, if the panic button is pressed
asciilifeform: (example of 'zerocoin' etc)
asciilifeform: best thing is, any hypothesis in the field is immediately testable, all you need is a computer.
asciilifeform: ;;rate bingoboingo 2 retrocomputing archaeology enthusiast, intelligent commentary.
asciilifeform: we're all in approx. the same age 'band', old enough to be in a hurry, young enough not to be impotent yet
asciilifeform: i can't say that i've collected every known sample, but virtually all crap artists are using some variant of gpu-capable miner
asciilifeform: "something important happens when a previously privileged position in society suddenly sees incredibly demand that needs to be filled, using enormous quantities of manpower. that happened to programming computers about a decade ago, or maybe two. first, the people will no longer be super dedicated people, and they won't be as skilled or even as smart -- what was once dedication is replaced by greed and someti
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: hard (but not impossible!) to cross-compile winblows trojans under mac os.
asciilifeform: just an example of 'clean isp'
asciilifeform: stego example
asciilifeform: 100 amps per?
asciilifeform: btc priv. key is: compact, and (can be) used rarely
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: you may have 'jumped the gun' with the bsd piece. the peanut gallery won't believe until theo admits.
asciilifeform: anyone remember the bulbs they used to have in street lamps? the size of a man's head?
asciilifeform: the luminosity/watt claims (transparently bogus, visit an electronics store) and the lifespan claims (chinese driver electronics in the lamp base)...
asciilifeform: i still have yet to see an led lamp that will evenly light a room without being the size of a small tv set.
asciilifeform: worst part is that in this latter case, the devil occasionally appears and shits out a little gold, just enough to temp the sinner into being stupider