Hacker News: teythoon

Hey Signal Great Encryption Needs Great Authentication

teythoon — Mon, 28 Jun 2021 12:03:52 +0000

Article URL: https://sequoia-pgp.org/blog/2021/06/28/202106-hey-signal-great-encryption-needs-great-authentication/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27660757

Points: 28

# Comments: 1

Sequoia 1.3

teythoon — Tue, 08 Jun 2021 10:11:19 +0000

Article URL: https://sequoia-pgp.org/blog/2021/06/08/202106-sequoia-1.3/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27432666

Points: 155

# Comments: 17

Thunderbird, RNP, and the Importance of a Good API

teythoon — Thu, 06 May 2021 14:50:51 +0000

Article URL: https://sequoia-pgp.org/blog/2021/05/06/202105-thunderbird-rnp-and-the-importance-of-a-good-api/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27064096

Points: 52

# Comments: 4

New comment by teythoon in "Super Powering End-to-End Email Encryption in Mozilla Thunderbird"

teythoon — Sat, 10 Apr 2021 10:48:55 +0000

Yes. Sequoia abstracts over secret-key operations. In fact, the Octopus makes use of keys managed by the gpg-agent using this mechanism.

Native support for smart cards and TPMs is planned and being worked on.

New comment by teythoon in "The PGP Problem"

teythoon — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 10:42:48 +0000

We over at Sequoia-PGP, which gets a honorable mention by the OP, are not merely trying to create a new OpenPGP implementation, but to rethink the whole ecosystem.

For some of our thoughts on the recent certificate flooding problems, see https://sequoia-pgp.org/blog/2019/07/08/certificate-flooding...

New comment by teythoon in "Debian GNU/Hurd 2017 released"

teythoon — Sun, 18 Jun 2017 21:21:41 +0000

No, it has an startup server (helpfully called startup), since 2015: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/hurd/hurd.git/tree/NEWS#n86

GnuPG Fundraising Rally

teythoon — Tue, 06 Jun 2017 08:19:30 +0000

Article URL: https://gnupg.org/donate

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14495604

Points: 218

# Comments: 27

New comment by teythoon in "Meet Moxie Marlinspike, the Anarchist Bringing Encryption to All of Us"

teythoon — Mon, 01 Aug 2016 10:57:19 +0000

Meet Moxie Marlinspike, the Anarchist Bringing us yet another cryptographic island with a single point of failure.

New comment by teythoon in "GNU Gneural Network"

teythoon — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 20:02:53 +0000

Fault isolation. We're doing it for daemons, we're doing it for web browsers, it is insane we're not doing it for operating system services. I bought a graphic tablet and the first time I plugged it into my laptop the Linux kernel crashed. And this was merely a faulty driver, not even malicious hardware.

Also think of the effort it took to introduce namespaces to all the Linux subsystems. After a decade the user namespace still has problems. This is ridiculously easy on a distributed system, yet very hard on a monolithic one.

New comment by teythoon in "GNU Gneural Network"

teythoon — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 11:15:33 +0000

I know you're just trying to be funny, but I don't think it's funny at all.

The Linux kernel undoubtedly many features that the Hurd system lacks, but that is due to the severe lack of manpower of the latter system and the billions of Dollars being poured into the former.

On the other hand the Hurd has features that the Linux kernel can never hope to achieve because of its architecture.

New comment by teythoon in "Examining the Legendary Hurd Kernel (2008)"

teythoon — Sun, 12 Jul 2015 10:28:35 +0000

Hurd developer here.

I also have high hopes for Guix, and in fact there is a gsoc project to port Guix to the Hurd. Guix tries to empower the user, a goal shared by the Hurd. They are a perfect match.

I do not believe that it is easy to provide the Mach IPC interface in the Linux kernel. The IPC mechanism is tightly integrated into the thread switching and scheduling systems.

Furthermore, I do not see much benefits in doing that, the main point would be drivers, which we want to run as a userspace process anyway. And we are doing that using the DDE framework. Rump is interesting, and it wouldn't even be that hard. It just lacks someone actually doing it.

What people don't realize is how compatible the Hurd is. We are shipping the glibc. Debian/Hurd contains ~80% of the software that is found in Debian/Linux. We have Firefox. The other day I deployed two Django sites on my Hurd development server to work out some issues I had with the Apache configuration I had on the production system. I was curious how it would go. All the Python stuff worked out of the box, I merely had to select a different Apache mpm module, because the default didn't work. Need to rescue a box? Append "init=/bin/bash" to the kernel command line to circumvent sysvinit.

Other microkernel based systems might have more ambitious goals, but many of them sacrifice compatibility to reach them. Some aspects in POSIX are hard to implement in a distributed fashion, for example fork(2). But what good is a fancy system if it requires a huge effort to port applications to it?

New comment by teythoon in "GNU Hurd 0.6 released"

teythoon — Thu, 16 Apr 2015 10:45:10 +0000

Hurd developer here. You are spot-on. The Hurd solves a problem today that Linux (and all the other monolithic systems) will never solve: Fault containment.