Hacker News: tauneutrin0

New comment by tauneutrin0 in "eMudhra to exit global SSL/TLS certificate business"

tauneutrin0 — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 17:24:23 +0000

This lockmaker analogy fails to capture one critical aspect: the failure of one CA breaks the security of everyone, even if they did not use that CA's "locks".

This is why I went for a "wall with many gates" instead; any bypass makes all gates redundant.

All analogies break down at some level; the main goal is to clearly communicate the most important ideas.

New comment by tauneutrin0 in "eMudhra to exit global SSL/TLS certificate business"

tauneutrin0 — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 16:02:34 +0000

The internet's security relies on an almost impenetrable wall built around it. The king appoints gatekeepers that are each entrusted with a gate they must protect. The gatekeepers must follow a rigorous interrogation process to verify the ID of anyone who wants to pass through their gate. Only then are they permitted to unlock it.

The king was very careful to ensure all the gatekeepers were following the process correctly. It did not occur to anybody that one of the gatekeepers could be using a dirty rag to jam their gate closed instead of a lock.

Once discovered, the wall could be trivially bypassed. The security of the whole internet was immediately broken. Rebuilding the wall to block up the dodgy gate took much effort from very many people.

New comment by tauneutrin0 in "Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure"

tauneutrin0 — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 23:33:46 +0000

One of the main goals of an electoral system is to ensure that the population trusts that their views are fairly represented.

The reason that paper voting is so good in this regard is that everybody can fully understand the entire process. It is so very, very simple. And if you need proof, you can go see the counting for yourself.

The issue with electronic voting is that there is far greater complexity. There are many valid reasons that someone could distrust it, for example:

- You might not trust the cryptography experts that claim the algorithms are secure.

- You might not trust the algorithms to be implemented correctly.

- You might not trust the computer manufacturer to have designed a secure machine.

- You might not trust the computer manufacturer to have built a defect-free machine.

- You might not trust the machine hasn't been compromised by some bad actor.

- You might not trust that there hasn't been some random bit-flips.

- You might just not understand how computers work.

- ect. ect.

Note that it is not important whether it can be proved to be correct and secure. The unique goal here is that everyone can prove to themselves that it is correct and secure. It must be obvious to everyone that they can trust it.

In my opinion, this is not possible to achieve with an electronic system.

New comment by tauneutrin0 in "Every 5x5 Nonogram"

tauneutrin0 — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 16:06:47 +0000

Love the idea! I do agree with others that have made the case for click and drag support.

I got a bit sidetracked and wrote a userscript implementing this feature. It's a little hacky but works pretty well (at least, until the site changes):

https://gist.github.com/DanielCausebrook/3836be4b5804fabe997...

If anyone would find this useful, you can run this on the site using an extension like Tampermonkey. Obviously be careful when adding userscripts in general.