"This was a marathon session. I will congratulate myself endlessly on being so smart. We're in a good place to pick up again tomorrow."

"I'm not proceeding on feature X"

"Oh you're right, I'm being lazy about that."

Student loans are guaranteed by the federal government. That is not the same thing at all.

But if a company borrowed the money and never had the intention to make enough to pay it back or return on investment, we have a different word for that. That word is fraud. Just ask Elizabeth Holmes.

That dastardly Ben Franklin with his bifocals..

Not quite. A cert denial isn’t a merits ruling and doesn’t "solidify" anything as Supreme Court precedent. It simply leaves the DC Circuit decision binding (within that circuit) and the Copyright Office’s human-authorship policy intact, for now.

SCOTUS doesn’t explain cert denials, so why they denied is guesswork. my guess: they’re letting it percolate while the tech matures and we all start to realize how deep this seismic fracture really is.

(For example: what does "ownership" of intellectual "property" even mean, once "authorship" is partly probabilistic/synthetic, and once almost everything humans create is AI assisted? Hard to draw bright lines.)

MD5 preimage over a uniform 128-bit space is infeasible. Emails are not uniform 128-bit values. They’re low-entropy, structured identifiers drawn from a predictable distribution.

Attackers don’t search 2^128. They search realistic candidates.

Emails are lowercase ASCII, structured as local@domain, domains come from a small known set, usernames follow common patterns, and massive breach corpora already exist. If you’ve ever used John/Hashcat, you know the whole game is shrinking the search space.

Given a large dataset of MD5(email): Precompute common emails, generate likely patterns, restrict by known domains, use leaked datasets, distributed GPU it. I.e, relatively cheap

if the attacker already suspects a specific email, MD5 gives them a perfect equality test. That alone kills privacy.

So unsalted MD5(email) is not protection. It’s a stable public identifier that enables membership testing, cross-dataset linkage, re-ID, and doxxing.

Academic preimage resistance can still hold while real-world privacy absolutely does not.

It's not about breaking MD5’s math, but more about attack economics and low-entropy inputs. To your point, this problem exists with any bare hash. Salt slows large-scale precomputation, but it doesn’t magically add entropy to predictable identifiers.

On the other hand, if you switch to the latest Google camera app, you will not really be participating in making the open source version better.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

(When will people learn that biometrics are not another factor: they're entirely public and irrevocable. It's not just security theater, but Apple & Google know that this forces you into their ecosystem, which should be illegal. Of course, Brussels is full of rubes anyway.)

Shutting down the only working database is the proof point that perfect is the enemy of good.

Of course, this gives cover to the "well, we're working on something better" and "AI companies are evil"

Fine, shut it down AFTER that better thing is finally in prod (as if).

And if the data was already leaked because you didn't do your due diligence and didn't have a good contract, that's on you. It's out there now anyway.

And, really, what's the issue with AI finally having good citations? Are we really going to try to pretend that AI isn't now permanently embedded in the legal system and that lawyers won't use AI to write extremely formulaic filings?

This is either bureaucracy doing what it does, or an actual conspiracy to shut down external access to public court records. It doesn't actually matter which: what matters is that this needs to be overturned immediately.

I like my feed being personalized to who I am. I am unique. I'm not like anyone else.

Oauth, for example.