Viewing profile — str4d

> The XDG specification has been around for 22 years. Indeed! > It has real benefits for users. I once believed this! > It's trivial to implement. Nope! I ranted about this a while…

> The firehose is all public data going into the network right? It's the "main subset" of the public data, being "events on the network": for the Bluesky app that's posts, reposts,…

> > If you want large scale social networks, you need to work with a large scale of data. Since federated open queries aren’t feasible, you need big machines. > Thats just simply n…

Additionally, a user _can_ root their identity in DNS if they want, by using did:web instead of did:plc [0]. The main Bluesky client doesn't expose this (presumably because did:web…

For a lower-friction firehose experience, you can use Jetstream [0] (by one of the Bluesky devs) which supports subscribing to specific Collection NSIDs and user repositories, and …

For non-Bluesky apps built in ATProto, in addition to White Wind (blogging), there is also Smoke Signal (events, only Lexicons are open source currently AFAICT) [0], and Frontpage …

There are a few more details about the reason they didn't use JSON-LD in Paul's blog post [0]. [0]: https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/why-not-rdf

> But I’m still wondering how one would aggregate reactions. It seems it would not be enough just to have a PDS, but also to run an Indexer/Relay, which indexes other peoples PDS. …

A useful way to think about it is that the PDS is a "user agent" - they act on behalf of the user, and with the user's implicit trust. This is much the same way that a user trusts …

> The indexer is only necessary because the user ids do not remain static on the system. Instead there is some weird cryptographic reshuffling going on where DID:PLC starts as a su…

> There is a sub-curve (Ristretto) which is of prime order which can be used on top of curve25519. I'm sure you are aware of this and are just abbreviating, but I think it's import…

I was briefly _very_ confused when I saw the news.

> But if I recall, it seems that the age key file itself is 128 bits! Thus in the symmetric mode, Age provides only 128 bits of security. This is substandard, and in particular sec…

Ooh, nice! Having a Kotlin-native implementation will be a significant UX improvement over e.g. using my Rust age implementation via FFI / JNI behind a wrapper. It also reminds me …

> Tornado Cash is a service, _run by an individual_ who was warned to cease serving sanctioned entities, and failed to do so. This is false. The (vast majority of the) Tornado Cash…

> A good feature of PIV applet of Yubikey 5 is that it stores 24 keys. Note that not all 24 of those keys are suitable for age usage. The 4 main keys have specific usage definition…

Yep! Plugins themselves are ephemeral - all of their runtime state is provided by the age client - but when the plugin binary is invoked by the age client, it can then connect to (…

> and also a mobile app that can do this (right now I use PasswordStore on Android, which communicates with OpenKeyChain which is basically GPG for Android with a nice shell around…

The change in hash function did also result in speed improvements. Quoting the commit messages: Change to BLAKE2s: > This also has the advantage of supplying 16 bytes at a time rat…

My answer to that is "maintainability". The more flexibility and moving parts we add to the RNG, the more things that can break. The delta from "one hash function" to "two hash fun…

The same thing happens with age-plugin-yubikey. You can only generate identities on the device (so you never have access to the private key), and the YubiKey needs to be plugged in…

A few people have been experimenting with OS integration (e.g. Windows context menu), but IDK how far along those experiments are. I've been experimenting with a web-based UI [0] f…

> o It's odd that -e (encrypt) can recognize an age-keygen file, but -d (decrypt) errors out with: > > age: error: failed to parse recipient file "person.pub": "person.pub": malfor…

> For some reason, I was under the impression age itself had some logic for keys.txt files. An early version of the draft spec did include a default keys.txt path, and I implemente…