Viewing profile — honestjohn

Many software engineering adjacent courses, starting with AP Computer Science A, are heavy on the Java-style OOP. And you're never designing an actually complex system, just using …

It's about as secure as any other non-E2EE chat or other kind of service, except it also has E2EE mode, which is limited to 1:1 chats for fair reasons. Plenty of other services adv…

I know newer reactor designs are much safer than Chernobyl at least, but they haven't solved the problem of some people having inflated egos.

The human element is just as much part of the engineering and design. The plants are designed for humans to operate.

This was a response to the comment about nuclear weapons proliferation being a cat out of the bag. It's not out of the bag yet. Iran has been "nearly there" for several years alrea…

Yeah, it seems nuts. Nuclear submarines have proven our ability to operate a small reactor a km underwater, but under land is much harder.

Are you talking about me or the article?

There aren't very many nuclear-weaponized countries in the world right now. Otherwise, the whole Iran Nuclear Deal issue would've been moot. Even Russia won't hand over nukes to Ir…

Positive feedback loop isn't the only risk of nuclear power. Fukushima had a negative void coefficient too, right? Rather than pretending there's negligible risk, I'd rather say it…

"A mile underground" and "cheap" don't seem to go together.

Separate from our other convo, I just found this spicy note in Telegram's manual: "Multi-device End-to-end encrypted chats are a mess[...] Most of our competitors (notably, Whatsap…

Telegram's e2ee mode is only usable for 1:1 chats, so I wouldn't be surprised if some government(s) could gain access to any group chat they want.

Where? Their website says "a new era of messaging." I see at the bottom that it's "heavily encrypted," but that doesn't mean e2e.

The worst thing for me was that app versions expire pretty frequently with no warning, then you just stop getting notifications. Which is extra annoying cause I'm only on it for so…

Maybe it's similar to adding a new chat participant, except your client says "btw this is also me." I used that way when designing a toy e2ee app a while back. Or maybe there is a …

Someone else here probably knows more than me. I don't want to speculate too much about what it actually does, I just know that the original device takes part in authorizing a new …

Multi-device mode is new enough that I might be wrong about this, but afaik the web client still needs to get the priv key from your phone, so they can't authorize a new client uni…

I'm not sure if they can add a participant to an existing conversation, and if they did, your client would at least know. Also don't remember if the client will send message histor…

No, your client asks Signal's server for the other end's public key. There's fundamentally no way for Signal's server to prove to your client that the pubkey you're encrypting for …

It's delusional to think a modern technology is more secure than an old Motorola radio used by local law enforcement?

You mean you didn't install the Yahoo! translation extension to your kernel?

This is a good instinct. Even if you're using a good E2EE messaging app like Signal, you still trust them not to mitm unless you check the other person's public key out-of-band. I …

Stanford researchers said that ChatGPT passes the Turing Test. Honestly I don't understand how, since it's pretty easy to tell that you're talking to it, but yeah I don't think it …