And yet they got themselves into a demographic death spiral

Maybe we'll need to go back to some sort of proof-of-work system, i.e. only accepting physical mailed copies of manuscripts, possibly hand-written...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46780726

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

The previous comment was suggesting making sure that every code path takes the same amount of time, not adding a random delay (which doesn't work).

And while I agree that power-analysis attacks etc. are still going to apply, the over-arching context here is just timing-analysis

Further the article claims that SPNs are used in RSA... which is completely wrong and indicates no domain knowledge.

The article has completely mis-interpreted the paper. The paper is written in Chinese but with an English abstract - the article seems to have just pulled keywords out.

I wonder whether a LLM hallucination is at play somewhere???

The article does not mention AES

Wouldn't this also require some additional HW/SW in the pagers to trigger the devices? Otherwise, if it was just battery terminals connecting to the battery, how would a remote signal trigger them?

Or maybe it's as simple as the adulterated batteries containing timers and thus not needing external triggering?

This sentiment runs through this piece as an undercurrent.

Part of the frustration comes from the fact, which is emphasised throughout the piece, that all these things are possible in real life. The utopia of autonomous MPC and ZK agents running obfuscated programs to prove identity attributes, vote, etc is all possible, if only we rewrite the entire internet.

The stumbling block, as ever, is human nature. This utopia would decay in just the same way that the bitcoin utopia did, moving from a perfect libertarian idea for an incorruptible currency to a cesspit of fraud, manipulation and speculation.

In Moxie Marlinspike’s article on web 3, he makes the case that the decentralisation promises of web 3 will inevitably decay and be reshaped as a new form of centralisation, leaving us in a potentially worse place than before. Pretty much the same arguments apply here.

Nonetheless, it’s an interesting read. But it would be fascinating to see this approached from a human perspective, I.e. “what are the compelling adoption vectors?” and “how can we avoid re-centralisation?”

1. Shuffling money around 2. Socialist-level ponzi government spending 3. A combination of property flipping and high-end property overseas sales used for tax evasion

Innovation-wise, always looking for the easy wins without the hard work, unlike the US.

As a Brit and former resident, happy to have emigrated and escaped the >50% (soon to be increased) tax rates.

In doctoral school I spent some time applying the state-of-the-art methods to trying to break lightweight symmetric ciphers. The idea was that the system of polynomials generated from a number of plaintext/ciphertext pairs might be solvable via Gröbner bases methods if the number of rounds of the cipher was low enough.

Quickly ran out of steam after a couple of rounds and ~200 polynomials or thereabouts (doubly exponential)