asciilifeform: i find it strange that people would skimp on a device that they stare at for 12+ hrs/day.
asciilifeform: fellow i know from india (former physicist) confirmed the famous rat temple
asciilifeform: still foolish to rely on x86 'rings' for isolation of something genuinely important
asciilifeform: it had cultural impact though:
asciilifeform: most of the people i know with actual degrees - yours truly included - (sci/eng.) had, at the time of signing up, delusions of employment in academia
asciilifeform: maybe poor choice of words. 'employment' rather than 'work'
asciilifeform: this place would probably empty out overnight if everybody had work elsewhere.
asciilifeform: sometimes i wonder if i actually learned english, or was cheated and given something vaguely compatible
asciilifeform: a bit of an oversimplification
asciilifeform: by tradition, one is expected to actually piss in the company of a witness
asciilifeform: surely that girl could learn to pull a trigger, for example.
asciilifeform: big empty space in the middle for DSHK.
asciilifeform: they can't all be impotent
asciilifeform: and the 'college' racket could finally implode.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: (unrelated) consider one day telling the tale of where you dug up MPOEPR.
asciilifeform: as described in latest s.nsa statement, present plan is to display a working cardano at mp's conference.
asciilifeform: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/us-intelligence-officials-monitor-federal-employees-security-clearances << purges! lol
asciilifeform: and, mostly completing the list, maintaining infrastructure (sort of!)
asciilifeform: but it is not entirely implausible
asciilifeform: 'v' is more important than 'm' here.
asciilifeform: from the same rag, 'Canadian man who poked holes in condoms to impregnate girlfriend loses appeal'
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: unrelated - from what part of the world is mpoepr ?
asciilifeform: perhaps woman posted this crap herself - hungers for free sympathy coin.
asciilifeform: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9246814/U.S._spy_agencies_adopt_new_IT_approach
asciilifeform: with added twist that a zombie can install the implant in a generic bird
asciilifeform: i've suggested it as 'landing gear' for flying bots, to diametric (who built an example of each at one point)
asciilifeform: mice do so love cheese. but, afaik, this particular trap remains empty. paper chumpatron.
asciilifeform: 'The Citadel is not designed to withstand any direct .Mil or .Gov attack. Nor is the Citadel, in any manner, attempting to provoke any government entity.'
asciilifeform: as far as i could tell, the thing is/was some combo of a usg honeypot and straight 'jam tomorrow, not today' chumpatron.
asciilifeform: from chumpers
asciilifeform: not simply noisy
asciilifeform: believing marriage and the care of a family to be incompatible
asciilifeform: over the Indian Ocean with important despatches, he had
asciilifeform: trick of asking questions and then promptly answering them
asciilifeform: and death he held up as an example worthy to be followed. Today
asciilifeform: complicate the records too much. What was needed was a piece of
asciilifeform: triumph of over-production in the Ninth Three-Year Plan, might
asciilifeform: ;;google sympathetic magic
asciilifeform: MisterE: see mp's essay on cattle-tronics technology to learn why this is not actually an idea.
asciilifeform: Chumpatronics Medal
asciilifeform: where people compute using song
asciilifeform: wait - it's a civil complaint?
asciilifeform: how? see mp's little piece about 'art'
asciilifeform: because that's simply how it works.
asciilifeform: re: invention, for the impatient:
asciilifeform: (and coughed up terms like 'impedence')
asciilifeform: the 'time microscope' thing is typical of aging inventors who, by virtue of being cut off from competent peers (either by having none alive, or being on the wrong side of a jail of one kind or another)
asciilifeform: no one alive today is even fit to suck his decomposed cocke
asciilifeform: eventually i will deal with this subject in writing, unless mp takes up this chore in my place.
asciilifeform: which one of you people spoke of reading landau in french? was it mp?
asciilifeform: it wasn't simply because it was a plywood jalopy with a grass cutter engine.
asciilifeform: comparison with pynchon et al is unwarranted
asciilifeform: quite a few people don't seem to understand the implications
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: re: 1% & comsec - one needn't be a historic champion to learn basic things
asciilifeform: Mats_cd03: studying classic examples only takes you so far
asciilifeform: 'Its not clear how you would build a secure way to initialise the Trezor, as youd need to use an untrusted computer to present trusted keys into the device. A virus (MITM) could intercept and rewrite the keys as they were being loaded into the device. Unless you had key fingerprints written down on paper, itd be impossible to notice a mismatch. Pre-agreed root certs installed at the factory solve this
asciilifeform: 'SSL is one of very few crypto systems thats in daily usage by hundreds of millions of people. Remarkably, it seems that governments have not compromised the infrastructure.'
asciilifeform: idk, i wasn't there - but it was either tried to no result, or not attempted for good reason, i'd bet.
asciilifeform: quoted tidbit was about the futility of simply offering a cop benjamins on the spot to send him off
asciilifeform: russian fellow by the name of D. Starostin did 5 yrs. in a new york prison for attempted murder
asciilifeform: all this is is an attempt to tax an already plentiful and omnipresent supply of mj
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the 'legalization' thing is a sham. it's quite like, if drinking a cup of coffee were punished with $25 fine, but anyone found with a sack of coffee beans were impaled
asciilifeform: uni is certainly a chumpatron.
asciilifeform: i did specify that in a chumpatron, vs. an ordinary bioreactor, the fuel /wants/ to burn
asciilifeform: casino is an incontrovertible chumpatron
asciilifeform: 'honest chumpatron' - like 'pleasurable woodchipper' ?
asciilifeform: benkay`: and what about chumpatron
asciilifeform: spammer wants to talk to one chump at a time
asciilifeform: http://www.computableminds.com/post/chatbot/eliza/parry/skynet/human-language/natural-language
asciilifeform: easier project, for complete beginner, then
asciilifeform: moiety: example - the blockchain-operated www-less exchange discussed last week (?)
asciilifeform: is the intended implication that... you don't intend to?
asciilifeform: because PKI == chumpatron
asciilifeform: (circuit-level implementation, done correctly, would leave no room for doubt as to the fate of every input bit, and the origin of every output)
asciilifeform: unrelated: did anyone ever answer the call to implement btc reference client compatible in verilog?
asciilifeform: '... If you have a 'specialty' field such as... a degree in computer science... you could be 'drafted'..'
asciilifeform: the only sure bet is that there will be some sweet placebo to reassure the chumps that 'this time, It's Different !11! (TM)'
asciilifeform: 'a holy place never remains empty' (rus. proverb)
asciilifeform: ThickAsThieves: a team of chumpatronic engineers is working around the clock to fix this.
asciilifeform: plow? bah. uprooted tree stump. what pre-iron-age slavs plowed with.
asciilifeform: attempt no parking there.
asciilifeform: it was a foolish declaration of chimp war, egged on by the u.s
asciilifeform: a not entirely-implausible scenario, though.
asciilifeform: 'Patton, like Douglas MacArthur, was an unfortunate mixture of personal courage, technical brilliance and toxic personality, and like MacArthur, a role model to three generations of mediocrities who equate pomp and nitpicking with excellence.'
asciilifeform: orlov's view seems to be that usg/nato/allies wreck countries (near east, etc.) to retard development -> to throttle resource consumption, create captive markets a la the brits at their peak, churn mil. inventory, 'controllable chaos' to feed various parasites.
asciilifeform: ThickAsThieves: imagine if technology were possible! he could simply whisper 'this turd will not bear my pgp signature' and be done.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: remember my 'test drive' of mpex? that's all i did...
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: seems like a serious amount of work to do, simply in order to make a fair gamble.
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: one of these days, you ought to write 'n00b guide' to sports bets. for instance, i grew up thinking of the whole concept as a chumpatron (lusers bet, the sports meisters throw matches & pocket the chumpatronium)
asciilifeform: empty now.
asciilifeform: military bureaucrats traditionally keep this simple.
asciilifeform: (if you are not willing to pay what this costs, the payload cannot be important)
asciilifeform: benkay: "personal crypto security: basically impossibly hard" << every time this is said, nsa cafeteria fillets and serves a white tiger kitten (or insert rarer and cuter animal)
asciilifeform: all the samples, if i recall, shipped in it.
asciilifeform: the problem of 'tell shit from shinola programmatically' is ai-complete
asciilifeform: the $5k circa 2010 - that's my old employer.
asciilifeform: http://www.usaspending.gov/search?form_fields={"recipient_name":"symbolics+","recip_state":null,"recip_congdist":null,"recip_country":null,"recipient_duns":["966978090","873185821"],"spending_cat":null,"dept":null,"extent_competed":null,"psc_code":null,"naics_code":null,"fyear":null}&sort_by=date&per_page=25
asciilifeform: he doesn't own the company
asciilifeform: http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/3769989/Symbolics_Open_Genera_2.0_for_Alpha_-_complete_package_with_Lisp
asciilifeform: (see the 'last psychiatrist' piece mp linked to the other day)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: if mpex acct costs 30, how did 'from new accts' add up to 70?
asciilifeform: you fuze a layer, then spread more powder, and so on, until the piece is complete
asciilifeform: benkay`: fiction like this ends up being 'a less funny joke' soon after it is written. see, for example, http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
asciilifeform: beyond simple 'ritual unclean' voodoo.
asciilifeform: just that you should understand the implications.
asciilifeform: and that, while certain interesting classes of attack are impossible on an fpga,
asciilifeform: (fpga has no idea where the 'cache' will be on the fabric, or even that it will be configured as cpu rather than, say, decompressor)
asciilifeform: but as soon as the western rights holders complain
asciilifeform: imho, MP's version is the most plausible one so far.
asciilifeform: wake me up for the televised impalements.
asciilifeform: their open declaration 'this priceless gem must never fall into the hands of the public' is simply begging for it.
asciilifeform: complex supports and fulcrums << codpiece ?!
asciilifeform: imported mugger? or homegrown american
asciilifeform: perhaps our little break is simply over.
asciilifeform: little parasites were constant companions of people, historically.
asciilifeform: phun phact - in soviet prison camps, notes ('scribbles', roughly translated from the argot) went around freely from one end of the archipelago to another. (how? bribe a guard)
asciilifeform: channelling herr naggum: 'It is like going to a library full of books that took 50 man-years to produce each, inventing a way to cut down the costs to a few man-months per book by copying and randomly improving on other books, and then wondering why nobody thinks your library full of these cheaper books is an inspiration to future authors.'
asciilifeform: did some chump really build a whatever-the-fuck with a set of leaked sources?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: this probably wasn't the purpose of 'compendium of basic points...,' but now i'm marvelling over the ancient forum garbage
asciilifeform: (under no circumstances are cattle permitted to wander unguided, mp had a piece on this if i recall)
asciilifeform: folks who think they have an efficient solution to an np-complete problem should not settle for small change.
asciilifeform: once the complete blueprints for the current product are published, the carcass becomes less essential. and this too should end up priced in.
asciilifeform: at any rate, i do assume that mpex users have brains and that the amount of s.nsa operations presently resting on my earthy carcass is priced into the shares.
asciilifeform: Apocalyptic: more importantly, do you need random bytes that others do not have a copy of?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: one of the great mysteries that my puny brain is powerless to digest is why you & mpoepr haven't decamped and left that forum to the radioactive cockroaches and rats
asciilifeform: mpoe-pr ?
asciilifeform: is the implication of $foowife something like 'married to the sea' ?
asciilifeform: fired in a two-parter - emp shell to blind sensors, classical shell follows behind.
asciilifeform: the notion of a useful non-nuclear emp weapon is transparent grantsmanship
asciilifeform: the reason why it is so easy to produce massive emp with nuke is, charged particles zinging around in van allen belt.
asciilifeform: u.s. claimed that they zapped the entire iraqi power grid with emp, a transparently laughable tale
asciilifeform: explosively-pumped vircator.
asciilifeform: knocking it out for several hours (they had to change an amp)
asciilifeform: during 'desert storm' u.s. popped an emp bomb above an iraqi radio station
asciilifeform: incidentally, emp weapon other than traditional nuke is more or less a joke
asciilifeform: (one can laugh at the implementation, but not the physics.)
asciilifeform: although the schoolbook typically starts with a spherical shell as example
asciilifeform: pill against emp is to use line-of-sight optical links between the 'bees'
asciilifeform: B007: box controlling some stepper motors. hence single-tasking OS where you can simply execute 'CLI' and kill interrupts, getting 100% deterministic timing with empty loop.
asciilifeform: (better example: lynne conway)
asciilifeform: i actually sat on a jury some years ago in a case where 'computrace' was the evidence.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: in case you missed, beautiful turd: http://www.securelist.com/en/analysis/204792325/Absolute_Computrace_Revisited
asciilifeform: re: ransomware: '90s virii simply formatted your disk. how exactly is this any worse?
asciilifeform: but if you're hijacking something, why not a supercomputer. 'might as well hang for a sheep as for a lamb.'
asciilifeform: neither is mooching cpu cycles from employer
asciilifeform: but, unlike the case of a dedicated app, there is no simple mechanical test.
asciilifeform: if you have any dedicated software component on the pc end (e.g. browser plugin), it is a target.
asciilifeform: example:
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: 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?