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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • jasondj@ttrpg.networktoScience Memes@mander.xyzShame.
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    6 months ago

    Viruses do adapt and mutate though. Look at all the various strains of H1N1 and SARS-COV-2.

    Just because they don’t reproduce without a host cell doesn’t mean evolution doesn’t happen. If a trait emerges that is beneficial to future generations, viruses carrying that trait can infect more cells and spread further.

    Usually it’s evolution itself that people give too much agency to. Mutations are a crapshoot. They can be beneficial or they can cause birth defects, sterility, prevent reaching sexual maturity, or make finding a mate excessively difficult. Or all of the above.


  • The 3B was like peak RPi though. Nowadays unless you need the GPIO or the low power or form factor, it’s not worth it at all. You can get low-spec 3-5 year old off-lease office desktops for roughly the same price point as a top end RPi now, and they are commonplace and easily found in the secondary market.

    Hell I just bought a really clean Ryzen 5 3500 laptop for $200. Only had 8GB mem and a paltry NVMe but these are cheap upgrades if needed.










  • jasondj@ttrpg.networktoScience Memes@mander.xyz"Earth-like"
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    8 months ago

    The mean surface temperature of Venus is only 464C.

    But, with 93x the atmospheric pressure of earth, water boils at around 300C.

    So…what is it that makes it difficult to thrive beyond 100C? Is it strictly the temperature, or is it the properties of water at that temperature? If it’s the latter, I wouldn’t be so surprised.

    Also keep in mind that photosynthesis was a genetic accident that just happened to work really, really well, and the ability to process sunlight directly into energy was what allowed microorganisms to move away from thermal vents.

    That same genetic accident could play out in a different world. Or a different genetic accident that’s more suited to their environment. Or no genetic accident at all, and life never moves past small, very secluded regions.




  • This is why I think that the lines should be owned by the municipalities (or a multi-community partnership) and access to them resold. Not even just for fiber, do all of them. The town already handles the water and the sewer, why can’t they lay the pipe for the gas?

    They don’t need to be the ISP, or the cable company, or electric company, or whatever (though they can be). Just own and maintain the infra. Obtain right of way. Lease access.




  • You are missing half the purpose of PKI. Identity is equally, if not more, as important as encryption.

    Who gives a shit if your password is encrypted if somebody intercepts DNS and sends yourbank.com and makes it go to their own server that’s hosting a carbon-copy of the homepage to collect passwords?

    And DNS isn’t the only attack vector for this. It can be done at the IP level by attacks that spoof BGP. It can be done by sticking a single-board computer in a trashcan at a subway stop. Have it broadcast a ton of well-known SSIDs and a ton of phones in the area will auto connect to it and can intercept traffic. Hell, if not for trusted CAs, it’d be very easy to just MITM all the HTTPS traffic anyway.

    In reality, you would tofu the first website you went to and not know if it got intercepted or if they just rotated keys (which is also a common security practice and is handled by renewing certificates and part of the reason why publicly-issued CAs are trending down the life of certificates and it’s not a big deal for admins because of easy automation technology. HSTS and cert pinning is more of a PITA but really barely any effort when you consider the benefits of those).

    Now, what certificates don’t protect, nor claim to protect, is typosquatting. If you instead go to yorbank.com, that’s on you, and protecting you from a malicious site that happened to buy it is the job for host-based security, web filters, and NGFWs.


  • But you only really need one to say it’s authentic. There are levels of validation that require different levels of effort. Domain Validation (DV) is the most simple and requires that you prove you own the domain, which means making a special domain record for them to validate (usually a long string that they provide over their HTTPS site), or by sending an email to the registered domain owner from their WHOIS record. Organization Validation (OV) and extended verification (EV) are the higher tiers, and usually require proof of business ownership and an in-person interview, respectively.

    Now, if you want to know if the site was compromised or malicious, that’s a different problem entirely. Certificates do not and cannot serve that function, and it’s wrong to place that role on CAs. That is a security and threat mitigation problem and is better solved by client-based applications, web filtering services, and next-gen firewalls, that use their own reputation databases for that.

    A CA is not expected to prevent me from hosting rootkits. Doesn’t matter if my domain is rootkits-are.us or totallylegitandsafe.net. It’s their job to make sure I own those domains. Nothing more. For a DV cert at least.

    Public key cryptography, and certificates in particular, are an amazing system. They don’t need to be scrapped because there’s a ton of misunderstanding as to its role and responsibilities.