decimation: a political fiction that for the time being is tied to observable astronomic phenomenon
decimation: well, yes, but the math is not very difficult to verify
mircea_popescu: i do not dispute they exist. what i said, again, was that if you use a nist table you're basically querying ntp.
decimation: there exist astronomy libraries like http://www.hs.uni-hamburg.de/DE/Ins/Per/Czesla/PyA/PyA/pyaslDoc/pyasl.html that could be used to make such tables
mircea_popescu: how do you get the calibration data ?
ascii_field: mitm can make the answer 1) verify sig correctly 2) be arbitrarily wrong
ascii_field: and if it did, hitler could simply delay the packet
ascii_field: decimation: you can do this, and sign the result with your gossipd key, etc. sure
decimation: then setup an ntp server
decimation: nobody has told me why I can't observe the position of the sun in the sky, use today's date, and reduce the time
ascii_field: someone, iirc, discovered that you could move the clock on most 'atm' machines this way
ascii_field: the banks thing really happens
ascii_field: don't even need hitler there. just a kid with an sdr card
ascii_field: (also without authentication)
ascii_field: and comically, without authentication of any kind
mircea_popescu: off of their own atomic clock no less
ascii_field: ntp is low-enough traffic that most of the planet asks usg more or less directly
ascii_field: conceivably, ~somewhere~ they do
mircea_popescu: they run dns but not time ?
ascii_field: certainly not on this side of the ocean
ascii_field: there is no widespread custom of isp running a time server
mircea_popescu: in other news i am pleased to inform the general public that my pyromania is progressing nicely.
decimation: doesn't need to, treats as man on the street
decimation: it can be hyptothetical until blocks start rolling in
ascii_field: by asking winblows for the time.
decimation: don't need to only rely on the ntp reply
decimation: well, there is such a thing as signed ntp
ascii_field: and how do you know the answer did not come from satanic isp ?
ascii_field: evidently i failed to make the minor point here
mircea_popescu: like the housewives, you know, "oph, i don;t care about the crisis, my husband does all that money stuff" "orly ? shut up and sit down, goose."
mircea_popescu: ascii_field they don't care now in the manner they don't care about how well oiled their rifle is.
ascii_field: lamport's achievement was to abstract out some of the attributes of timekeeping we actually ~need~
ascii_field: sorta the whole point
mircea_popescu: jurov the way you use the cow's teat is not the alpha and omega of what the cow teat is.
ascii_field: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=07-07-2015#1191733 << the machine tried to keep folks from 'rewriting history'
mircea_popescu: hence rejected blocks from the future.
mircea_popescu: they're like sleeping and fucking
decimation: well, if you only used the sun and the rotation of the earth, you would be ~60 seconds of utc (starting around 1960)
mircea_popescu: unless you discover a more precise clock, and keep it from the enemy, such that you can exploit his misclicks and take his women
mircea_popescu: precision is the problem
mircea_popescu: and think "hey, my clock can keep time within two hours, how would those newfangled financial traders and hedge funds render me destitute on the cointinent my fathers conquered ?!?!?!"
mircea_popescu: you don't appreciate the depth of this problem
ascii_field: but the mystery of building a non-usg and non-usg-pushable political clock remains, afaik, a mystery
mircea_popescu: decimation the human idea of time, yes.
decimation: can't someone in china look at the sky?
ascii_field: jurov: it is at least theoretically possible to build a non-usg network
mircea_popescu: the only new thing in the world is the history you didn't know, and the only thing that's worse than what we have today
mircea_popescu: and he's picked the dumbest link to do it to
mircea_popescu: basically he could be in government : he's decided to externalise the cost he can't bore
ascii_field: where miners slowly make life harder for themselves
ascii_field: punkman: we were contemplating a hypothetical clockless blockchain
punkman: mircea_popescu: this dies, because you will find a random block which is 00000000000000000000000000000f and game over. << this is incorrect. you don't infer the target from the hash. 256bit target is included in all block headers.
mircea_popescu: nevertheless...
mircea_popescu: no, we're friends with hilbert, and i don't think it's a bad idea, either.
mircea_popescu: you know the recourse to complexity is an academic habit.
mircea_popescu: anyway, took down (as folklore) by one alexandru donici in the 1800s
ascii_field: has the flavour, yes
ascii_field: mircea_popescu: actually it may very well be formalizable game-theoretically
mircea_popescu: you are aware of the complexity that introduces in say an attempt at mathematical provability re the entire shenanigan ?
ascii_field: and play with the knobs
mircea_popescu: you know, when the holy paladin marches into the forest to kill the unseen devils that have been upsetting the natural order of the land
mircea_popescu: depends how you define it, but there's also the problem of "you're the lizard, bob."
mircea_popescu: this is necessarily the case, if you think about it.
ascii_field: could one design a system where fucking the lizards is always +ev ?
ascii_field: gotta have the prisoner's dilemma come out against it
mircea_popescu: because it is game theoretically advantageous to have a central scheduler.
ascii_field: where there is a 'tug of war' among top contenders for pulling difficulty up
mircea_popescu: i am maybe not the first but definitely not the last to admit when satoshi did the dumb. nevertheless, here he did no such thing. there is no alternative known to literature, and you can't fault a man for not coming up with a novel star.
ascii_field: incidentally, the answer, if it exists to be found, probably involves what fuller might've labeled 'tensegrity'
mircea_popescu: then maybe it's time for ada.
mircea_popescu: back at sad farm, there's really little we can do with the bitcoin as it is, other than acquiesce to the filth of human notions of time.
ascii_field: then?
ascii_field: i agree, this is very much a 'go, find' rather than 'sure to be found'
mircea_popescu: do not let me stand in between you and greatness. but until the day you shit out that magic, it's no magic time.
ascii_field: not merely the one we use now
mircea_popescu: not so negotiable. anyway, you DO need the sampling, and that fucks it all up
ascii_field: the 'double' thing is negotiable, potentially
mircea_popescu: moreover, this retarded version of farming is more like, "Farming done by bacteria colony. doubles every time there's food."
mircea_popescu: what do you do two weeks after you won the lottery ?
mircea_popescu: you're basically proposing we do a "your rent is a tenth of your income or more, forever. and you play the lottery daily."
mircea_popescu: the chance to die approaches infinity much before you even get a third halving
ascii_field: it is rather reminiscent of 'there is nonzero chance for you to fall through the floor'
ascii_field: for so long as the 'lucky strikes' can't nudge too far
ascii_field: say, anyone who can hash faster than strictly required to win the race, ends up pushing the target towards hardness
mircea_popescu: there is no way to distinguish between a block mined at difficulty x that came out with 9 leading zeroes and a block mined at difficulty 1 that came out randomly with that many zeroes.
mircea_popescu: didja miss the line where i said you can't have a statistical sample of one ?
mircea_popescu: thus, can't really blame it for the situation.
mircea_popescu: anyway. the problem of time (as you rightly observe) is a larger problem than anything bitcoin solves
mircea_popescu: look, there's only so many corners to a square box.
mircea_popescu: yes i realise. but at least these are our evil nodes rather than obama's evil nodes.
ascii_field: mircea_popescu: you realize that is exactly how the ntp nodes with which we're ddosed work
mircea_popescu: ok, how about this alternative : put a special time server on the pogo itself, have the pogo sync its time from the list of approved upstream sources.
jurov: also there is my doubt of finding 5000 or how many ppl that won't mind pogo trampling upon their connection and likely inviting attacks
mircea_popescu: it is not your fault, or mine, or his, that "the time" does not come engraved in the wave fucntion you know.
ascii_field: mircea_popescu: may as well ship a pc then!
mircea_popescu: it has the major problem of costing more money.
ascii_field: (anything requiring the pogo keeper to have hands and brain is not a solution)
mircea_popescu: anyway, not that i'm saying this must be done or anything. but i do not think it'd be the end of the world if it has to be.
ascii_field: alone, either is nightmarish
mircea_popescu: so yes, the rifle regiment wouldn't survive cavalry charge from the side. alrighty then, put them on a hillltop.
mircea_popescu: ascii_field anyway, mind that pogos are not intended to be THE ONLY solution to relaying. they are just supposed to be a type of solution.
jurov: how is the timing attack different from normal orphans?
ascii_field: delay is negligible, rather
ascii_field: unless the crowd is in a gasenwagen and behaves like a solid
ascii_field: mircea_popescu: the speed of the sound of the drum is negligible in comparison to the speed at which push wave propagates through a crowd
mircea_popescu: they are not an evil you may divorce.
mircea_popescu: ie, exactly like drummers (if you think about it, drummers are EXACTLY each guy pushing the other, sound has a speed, and it pushes ears)
assbot: Logged on 07-07-2015 15:02:31; asciilifeform: i will leave this with one more analogy: why did marching armies use drummers, instead of having each man push the next fellow, like in a crowded train ?
ascii_field: other half is natural drift
ascii_field: hitler is only half of the problem here
mircea_popescu: yes. the only way this attack would work is with a major chain replacement investment.
ascii_field: next block appears to be from the future
mircea_popescu: ok. but the expense of this is staggering.
ascii_field: you are now four hours, say, behind the actual earth time
ascii_field: hitler uses his week while your node was in the crate to re-mine the blocks from the last place you have on disk, with minimal plausible monotonically stepping time deltas
mircea_popescu: to answer your q : hitler's block is rejected on the basis that it's too far off from the last block pogo accepted.
ascii_field: the cpu clock is currently 1969 midnight
ascii_field: in order for it to be rejected. the chain on disk will have to be no more than a day behind
mircea_popescu: doesn't matter how old that block is. the block coming after it will be ~10 minutes later.
mircea_popescu: because when hitler block shows up, the disk has a block it ends with
ascii_field: how old is the chain on disk
mircea_popescu: now, this theoretically is vulnerable. but practically, can you construct the attack for me ?
mircea_popescu: once it accepts a further block, it resets its clock too.
ascii_field: how did the disk become not empty ?
mircea_popescu: let's consider the not clean disk situation
mircea_popescu: this is a horribru example. so, miner has 10% of the hash, 10% of the bnlocks are badly timed. what of it, pogo resets on the remainder.
ascii_field: fine, example. malicious miner starts crapping out blocks with timestamp more and more off in the future
ascii_field: because the box has no idea what year it actually is
mircea_popescu: again : if you have block x, from a year ago, when you get block x+1, the styamp on block x+1 will be, 1year ago + 10 minutes
ascii_field: according to the traditional bitcoin protocol.
mircea_popescu: the next block to wahtever it has on disk is not going to be too much from the future.
ascii_field: and any incoming block is invalid, because 'from the future'
ascii_field: from the cpu's pov
ascii_field: and if something on disk, then perhaps it is 2009
ascii_field: it will be 'from the future'
ascii_field: it'll be 2 hrs delta to the last known!
mircea_popescu: but the next block it gets wouldn't be more than two hours off.
ascii_field: for another, it could be days, weeks, months old
ascii_field: for one thing, there may not be any blocks on disk
mircea_popescu: and setting the time to "timestamp of the last block it actually has on disk" is going to what ?
ascii_field: because these are to be given to folks who will not volunteer any meat commitment
mircea_popescu: i mean, by siomething running on the box in question
ascii_field: mircea_popescu: yes, though i've forgotten the exact number. 500MHz i think it was.
ascii_field: the idea, as i understood it, was to let folks set up nodes without human committment
mircea_popescu: ascii_field is the things' processor freq known ?
ascii_field: with the scheme described, you don't even need an attack
mircea_popescu: nevertyheless, that is a marked improvement over the current situation
ascii_field: congrats, now pogo behaves like the clock on my stove
ascii_field: howabout at 4am on a sunday when the mains flickers ?
mircea_popescu: from there on, iut carries on by simply syncing its clock to last accepted block.
mircea_popescu: so, when you start the pogo, you provide it with the human touch, divine spark, politica time.
mircea_popescu: anyway, re the switch : let's talk it through.
assbot: Drone fires burgers at the homeless in charity viral video gone wrong - Americas - World - The Independent ... ( http://bit.ly/1HdQJcW )
punkman: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/drone-fires-burgers-at-the-homeless-in-charity-viral-video-gone-wrong-10372457.html
mircea_popescu: oh, openssl put out a bug ? best make sure the fucking calculator pulls it in.
mircea_popescu: ascii_field i know i'm fed up with random shit depending on random shit, but it's not mere stupidity. it's just them trying to make sure shit permeates everywhere.
trinque: nowhere clearer than the recent 1m+ lines-changed linux release
ascii_field: .... and how much shitgnomism is rolled into the 'updated' version of 10,001 proggies that will install.
trinque: I've half considered trying to stop using the web so much, aside from maybe syncing certain sites to a local box.
ascii_field: and that's ~after~ resolving the circular dependencies
ascii_field: trinque: and guess what, rebuilding all the deps of that thing would take a month+ on my box
trinque: now that the de-dockerization is complete, I may have it announce its current balance along with newly uploaded deeds
trinque: and if it gets low, feel free to throw some bitdust in the tank
trinque: it will switch to the next
trinque: ascii_field: did you see the awesome glsa on icu yesterday?
assbot: Logged on 07-07-2015 04:08:49; decimation: asciilifeform: https://github.com/zrm/snow < I thought this could be it, but then saw the deps list
ascii_field: then useless
ascii_field: trinque: the 'dot' file, does it contain something like a logical flow graph ?
trinque: I'm not even going to share the result; just take a pen and go nuts on a piece of paper and you'll have it
trinque: asciilifeform: I got clang to fart out a graphviz dot file; so far, every tool that can eat the thing results in a horrid ball of yarn
punkman: "I have intentionally adjusted my teaching materials as the political winds have shifted." "While I used to pride myself on getting students to question themselves and engage with difficult concepts and texts, I now hesitate. What if this hurts my evaluations and I don't get tenure?"
pete_dushenski: "All the old, enlightened means of discussion and analysis —from due process to scientific method — are dismissed as being blind to emotional concerns and therefore unfairly skewed toward the interest of straight white males" << moar gold.
lobbes: "So it's not just that students refuse to countenance uncomfortable ideas — they refuse to engage them, period. Engagement is considered unnecessary, as the immediate, emotional reactions of students contain all the analysis and judgment that sensitive issues demand." << ayup
pete_dushenski: "The real problem: a simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice" << sounds about right.
jurov: haha yes. but most of the time it just throttled it from gobbling full 768k down to 600k, not very noticeable
decimation: at the cost of slowing email delivery
thestringpuller: yea. torrent clients (rtorrent) let you limit from within the client
jurov: the idea is, if you limit the uplink yourself before isp does, you can set priority for misc traffic
mike_c: omg - this better not turn out like the robot ping pong match: http://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/giant-robots-set-to-fight-after-u-s-company-issues-video-challenge-to-japanese-rival-1.2456864
thestringpuller: but the main issue is that my upstream limitations are greater restricted than downstream, so when I relay blocks and tx data esp. when mempool is getting big, it chokes me from doing anything remote (like ssh is even slow)
thestringpuller: jurov: yea and assuming the neighbor's wifi is setup to allow incoming connections to 8333
decimation: just use ntpdate to set the clock once and be done
decimation: I don't get it, why do we need to run the ntp daemon to use ntp?
thestringpuller: jurov: if i had a pogo i would connect it to the neighbors unsecured wifi XD
thestringpuller: so i can stream music from my library. these people don't know what they're talking about.
asciilifeform: what is the shortest known implementation ?
asciilifeform: jurov: flood is not the only known past ntp vuln
asciilifeform: shinohai: jurov just described a 'business class' that ~will bother~
asciilifeform: jurov: again, i was speaking of ddos in the sense of 'if it is trivial to take out pogo with a nudge that no one else will notice, it will be done'
shinohai: I just pay for business class internet so no one bothers me about my activities
jurov: so, stfu about ddosing then
asciilifeform: i've been running public node at home for years, in the heart of mordor
jurov: and where are these mythincal civilian nonresidential lines pogo is supposed to be on?
asciilifeform: 'get nothing in return but the word 'business' !!'
punkman: reading the code is quite discouraging
asciilifeform: jurov: classic chumpatron. exists on this side of the atlantic, too
jurov: and "must not disturb other users"
punkman: asciilifeform: don't even need mitm, dozens of DoS vectors in there
jurov: obv. no p2p there
asciilifeform: (the latter is an entirely separate conversation)
jurov: so, ntp is the least worry atm
asciilifeform: i am concerned with 'pogos will fall like dominoes from simple and cheap nudge' rather than 'in the dark future where being a known bitcoin user merits gassing'
jurov: if it's 5000 residential lines, then it's easy
asciilifeform: the 'ddos' i'm concerned with is more that we are setting up a box with unique vulnerabilities
asciilifeform: who, precisely, can ddos (in the traditional sense) 5,000 ip ?
asciilifeform: jurov: unless i am mistaken, the plan was to deploy these to the homes of cooperating civilians
jurov: and when there's whispernet, it can do time, too
asciilifeform: ntp has serious problems even aside from the central control
asciilifeform: i firmly believe that all of the answers proposed so far are disastrously bad
jurov: why going to such contortions with time before the rest of proto is secured?