Government subsidies in China — while 5 to 10 percent of Chinese automakers’ capital spending, estimated O’Donovan, compared to about 1.5 percent in Europe — are no longer the Chinese auto sector’s primary advantage. Chinese carmakers now enjoy deeper structural advantages from their enormous scale, dense supply chains, high factory utilization and automated production.

In hindsight, one thing we could’be done - as a community - was leave easy questions to be answered by new answerers. There’s still a lot of careful design to consider here - how do you avoid “broken windows” for newbies (and search engines), how do you moderate posts that the experienced users don’t/won’t interact with, etc. On the other hand, it would get those questions answered, give new answerers a chance to gain experience (and points) without getting beaten to the punch by some 100k’er, and generally reduce that air of unfriendliness and elitism that eventually permeated the site.

In any case, for better or for worse, I guess we have LLMs now. The real loss is the deep expertise embodied by all the answerers on SO. While 90+% of questions can probably be answered now by an LLM, it was nice to have a place where those remaining few questions could get a real, deep answer.

q=82392744353585332429460820191121154258120959554076291572887591391377445536703

n=6961473881062880999817189307002435362675293718841800458853975151946795609411283948376850761685158526939121778595276868395992041449207352173613540433589369

e=1305276352699290187465722995062956630501617572282837586035120340990024176764584449553695476096002966088824142338449519554315283866861919281309484272012046

d=4

assert n == p * q

assert pow(pow(123456789, e, n), d, n) == 123456789

(This doesn't work for all messages `m`, so I agree with what you've said - d=4 is not a good choice. But it can work.)

So far their responses to critical questions in the Bugzilla (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2083449) have been rather weak and delayed.

Note that p,q (the primes you’re thinking of) are not actually required for decryption. They enable you to calculate d, the decryption exponent, and also enable decryption-time optimizations (exponentiation with d_p and d_q followed by CRT recombination), but that’s optional. In fact, p,q can be computed from n, e and d.

2. This is an old model that isn’t very good at writing secure code in the first place; I’m not sure it’s an improvement to use a “westernized” model that still writes insecure code 50+% of the time. If this is a genuine issue, it should be demonstrable with later models and with models that are more secure-by-default.

Yeah that’s just oof. Not hard to imagine the kind of code error that could cause this, but hard to imagine that any serious vendor of cryptography hardware or software could make a mistake like this.

For one, this article has (charmingly?) terrible math rendering, rather reminiscent of someone copy-pasting random pictures of equations from the Internet and supplementing them with Word’s Equation Editor or something. An LLM would have just dumped a pile of LaTeX and called it a day. For another, I don’t sense any of the usual writing tics that are suggestive of LLM writing. I don’t claim either of those are remotely definitive, but my personal feeling is that this was largely hand-written and aimed at a very introductory level (i.e. not the sort of level that will benefit from knowing about Riemann surfaces).

A complex number can be expressed in Cartesian coordinates as (x,y) or x+yi. It can be expressed as polar coordinates as (r,theta). What’s the corresponding complex notation? Surprisingly, it’s r*e^(i theta), where the angle is taken in radians. It might seem really weird to see an exponential there, but it turns out that the exponential behaves like a trig function when given an imaginary exponent - to be precise, e^(i theta) = cos theta + i sin theta.

Now multiplication becomes easy: multiplying two polar-notation complex numbers (r1,t1) x (r2,t2) gives r1r2 e^(i (t1+t2)) following the usual rules of exponential arithmetic, i.e. (r1r1, t1+t2).

The complex exponential looks like a very strange notation at first because we’re all used to grade school exponents, but you can think of it as a function that takes an angle and produces a point on the unit circle. Feed it a continuous input, and it traces out an arc or a circle. sin and cos are merely the one-dimensional projections of this function.

Frequency becomes simply e^(i ft) where f is the frequency in radians and t is time - representing a point racing around a circle at a set speed. Multiplying two signals with different (complex) frequencies produces a new signal with the sum of their frequencies. With this notation, complex signals are the simple ones to understand - real signals are the “more complex” ones, as every real signal consists of a complex signal added to its conjugate.

In principle, a decoder could refuse to process images with predictors above a certain complexity limit, but it’s hard to know how to set such limits accurately.

It is, however, an incredibly cool demo of what the format is capable of. I'm not completely sure if an image format should be that flexible, but I'm impressed nonetheless.

There was an effort to properly handle the .name 2LDs, but it was never resolved because there’s no easy way to tell a reserved 2LD (open for 3LD registrations only) apart from a normal 2LD on .name: https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/issues/2306

So yes, this TLD’s setup is in fact pretty insane.

Keep in mind that Anubis will rarely inconvenience an actual user who visits the site often; it’s meant to keep out first-time scrapers trying to grab a few pages from their queue.

The scraper problem now is fleets of residential proxy devices - often things like smart TVs, phones, and browsers with some “proxy SDK” installed as part of an app’s monetization scheme. They make a couple of requests to a site - just enough to fly under the radar - and move on to a different site.

If each new site they hit forces them to solve a proof-of-work, that’s a meaningful dent in their scraping performance. Many of these boxes may not even have the spare CPU power to efficiently solve so many proofs of work - and anything that makes an owner notice their device is running slow is something that could meaningfully impede adoption of these SDKs, or force the operators to choose between minimizing performance impact or scraping more sites.

Distributed scrapers are going to generally try and hit their assigned list of pages; it’s a bigger waste of time if they have to go off to visit other pages first to get the cookie challenge.