Hacker News: upofadown

Wine Now Runs on OpenBSD

upofadown — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 10:54:57 +0000

Article URL: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports&m=179236125692175&w=2

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50150820

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by upofadown in "Why I Wrote PGP (1991, revised 1999)"

upofadown — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 20:46:40 +0000

One big usability issue these days is that PGP identities come in the form of a file. Lots of people don't have the concept of that anymore.

Dunno that things have gotten much better over the years. End to end encryption is still fairly unusable to most. I think that rather than spending so much time on the cryptography we should instead work on a E2EE usability standard. Having everyone doing their own thing with respect to usability is not working out.

New comment by upofadown in "Why I Wrote PGP (1991, revised 1999)"

upofadown — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 20:42:14 +0000

Obligatory response to "The PGP Problem":

* https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=pgpfan:tpp

By what I saw, there wasn't really anything anyone would care about in https://gpg.fail/ . The GnuPG problem actually declined to respond to some of them.

New comment by upofadown in "Wanted to download an ISO, ended up writing a kernel exploit"

upofadown — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 12:07:29 +0000

... and don't take the vendor's word for it. I got burned on a GL-SFT1200 that way. It runs their version of OpenWRT. You can't install generic OpenWRT.

New comment by upofadown in "Forging 1024-bit RSA signatures in nearly SNFS time [pdf]"

upofadown — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 01:19:29 +0000

From the article:

>Still, some real-world systems continue to use blind-signature, also known as textbook, RSA.

I think those are two different things.

New comment by upofadown in "Transit rewards"

upofadown — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 11:25:00 +0000

Once you are in the Waymo, why bother getting out just to get on a bus?

In New York, increases in the use of ride services like Uber mostly came from bus and subway riders[1]. If we are being charitable to Google, we might assume that this initiative is intended to reduce the same sort of trend. If we are not being charitable, we might assume that this initiative is intended to encourage current bus riders to expose themselves to the product.

[1] https://www.6sqft.com/mta-says-uber-use-is-the-cause-of-nyc-...

New comment by upofadown in "RSA-896"

upofadown — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 14:28:35 +0000

Hard to judge. The bottleneck is the phase of the algorithm where a really big linear system needs to be solved. That takes a lot of communication between nodes. The breakthrough in using GPUs is that there is good communication between nodes[1]. At the scale of 1024 bit RSA the communication might become a bottleneck again.

[1] https://cognition.com/blog/factoring-rsa-260

New comment by upofadown in "RSA-896"

upofadown — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 10:44:52 +0000

Is someone providing prize money again? RSA ended the contest in 2007.

New comment by upofadown in "Keys Not Included: recovering the signing keys for US driver's license barcodes"

upofadown — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 17:00:35 +0000

Well most people don't verify identity with some sort of physical key. So it doesn't work as an analogy in the first place for signatures...

The XMPP Newsletter August 2026

upofadown — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 10:35:12 +0000

Article URL: https://xmpp.org/2026/09/the-xmpp-newsletter-august-2026/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49724469

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by upofadown in "How Trail of Bits helps verify the integrity of Signal chats"

upofadown — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:27:22 +0000

Allegedly, Signalgate was caused by Apple helpfully mapping the wrong number to a name. Then Signal mapped that number to the wrong cryptographic identity.

A Third Party Breached The Intercept’s Signal Tip Line and Has Been Soliciting Whistleblowers https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/intercept-signal-tip-line-bre...

Twilio Incident: What Signal Users Need to Know https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/4850133017242-T...

Russian State-Backed Hackers Intensify Attacks on Signal Messenger Accounts https://thecyberexpress.com/signal-attacks-russian-fackers-t...

New comment by upofadown in "How Trail of Bits helps verify the integrity of Signal chats"

upofadown — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 10:28:25 +0000

Unfortunately, in an end to end encrypted messaging system, an identity is denoted by some sort of long number. That is an inescapable fact. Trusting a third party to correctly map, say, a phone number to a cryptographic identity number eventually results in the sort of attacks we have been seeing with phone oriented encrypted messengers recently like WhatsApp and Signal. The PGP people were doing the right thing when they were doing education in the form of key signing parties. That is something the user needs to know.

Anonymous messengers have no real choice and have to use some sort of number for identity. See Briar, Session or Tox for examples.

My comments on Signalgate 1.0:

https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=em:sg

Starlink Signal Leakage Threatens Radio Astronomy's Most Critical Frequencies

upofadown — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:40:32 +0000

Article URL: https://www.gadgetreview.com/starlinks-signal-leakage-is-threatening-radio-astronomys-most-critical-frequencies

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49667375

Points: 144

# Comments: 87

A Decade of Hype, 3k Roofs, and One Redirect URL: Tesla Kills the Solar Roof

upofadown — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:38:23 +0000

Article URL: https://www.gadgetreview.com/a-decade-of-hype-3000-roofs-and-one-redirect-url-tesla-kills-the-solar-roof

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49667360

Points: 18

# Comments: 8

New comment by upofadown in "I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s"

upofadown — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 16:08:49 +0000

What does the speed of RSA have to do with anything?

New comment by upofadown in "I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s"

upofadown — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 12:10:33 +0000

My article:

2048 Bit RSA and the Year 2030 https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=em:20482030

We don't have any way to predict when and if 2048 bit RSA would be factorable at this time. We would need a breakthrough in hardware and/or algorithms. The common estimation that it is equivalent to the difficulty of brute forcing symmetrical 112 bit encryption seems to be based on some sort of straightforward extrapolation. It doesn't take into account the amount of memory required for the poorly reducible matrix reduction step in the currently known best algorithm. That's 10^18 bytes of memory, or a million terabytes, somehow coupled to enough processing power to actually make anything possible.

Even if you accept the 112 bit estimate, that works out to something like 400 thousand years using the Bitcoin network as a reference to what we could reasonably achieve.

New comment by upofadown in "I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s"

upofadown — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 11:53:59 +0000

This article from 2000 is about estimating what would be required to factor 1024 bit RSA:

A Cost-Based Security Analysis of Symmetric and Asymmetric Key Lengths https://cr.yp.to/bib/2000/silverman.pdf

It was a response to the idea that 1024 bit RSA was under threat at the time.

New comment by upofadown in "A/I shuts down"

upofadown — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 18:01:53 +0000

I note that that extensive list only contains a single death, due to a power failure. Extreme civil disobedience, but not really terrorism.

New comment by upofadown in "IBM Quantum Nighthawk R2"

upofadown — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 11:16:06 +0000

You can attempt 15 yourself if you want:

https://towardsdatascience.com/where-are-we-with-shors-algor...

If you run it over and over again you will eventually get 3 or 5...

New comment by upofadown in "RSA-260 Factorized"

upofadown — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 10:18:31 +0000

This article (mine) is about this:

2048 Bit RSA and the Year 2030 https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=em:20482030

I guess it could be updated to include this latest factoring result. Said result would not change the conclusion of the article.