Older blog entries for mca (starting at number 4)

Today is paradox day. (Oh look, I mean yesterday. Again.)

The silly thing is, I don't know how to explain why.

Things that brought me to this conclusion,

  • I think I can have SAUCE or TLS with my exim, but not both. I'm not sure about this yet though.
    (Yes I know TLS is no substitute for end-to-end.)
  • Public information is private if you can't find the thing you would have wanted to know (this is a poor way of phrasing it)
    (This posting in this thread on ukcrypto.)
  • Elitzur-Vaidman Bomb Testing [1993, 1997]
    You've got this bomb, and you want to see whether it works. So you test it!
  • Even if I want privacy of my traffic data (who I talk to, how often and how much data), I can talk to my friends with impunity provided I encrypt some of the data.
    I can't talk to strangers though.
  • On the camram-spam list, we're discussing another set of ways of cutting down on UCE or spam.
    I've got so many mails from this I don't know where to start with them, or where to put the ideas and suggestions.
  • I'm tempted to snip this text and replace with "avoided submitting drivel to diary", but that would be more pointless than not posting, so I'll just crash Netscape again and lose it instead...
    This isn't paradox. This is just bedtime, slightly overdue.

Hmm, wonder what happens if you test the bomb, it would absorb the photon but doesn't, you think it's good, but then it doesn't go off anyway? So, the test only weeds out a certain type of dud.

(This, like yesterday's diary, is yesterdays. There should be a checkbox for "it's just gone midnight", and there should be <small> tags for silly comments. Unfortunately today I seem to be about to have a little rant.)

I'm a "software engineer" not a wheel builder, FFS. It's a very nice wheel (28 DBSS spokes, Ultegra hub, Mavic CXP33 aero rim (-8). But it isn't round, flat or in the middle of the bike.

Long story involving dented rim (how? FIIK), shot hub and "please wait two weeks for the hub" - thanks Craig for the lend of the crusty bike!
I built it,
trued it,
rode it,
and almost all of the spokes went slack after about 20 miles.

So I cleaned the grease off (yes I know that now), applied some blue nut locking compound and trued it again. Of course that takes me about two hours, so the nutlock has long set and isn't terribly effective.

Apparently I didn't do a very good job of cleaning the grease off either, 'cos it's gone slack again.

Bike shop couldn't do it today. I tightened it to wobble less and rode to work... it remains to be seen whether I woos out and get someone else to do it, or strip the whole thing down and start again again again.

...makes me wonder what's in store for the front wheel I did a couple of months ago. That has done many miles already and only needed the tiniest tweak after settling. The benefit of radial spoking, perhaps? Black art, this.

Wrote a bit of perl CGI for ESJ in the hope that he can use it to demo Hashcash, for the purpose of spam reduction.

I write lots of perl CGI. Why is this tiny little script so pants, and why did it take so long?

Need to start on the Java side PDQ. Never mind start, I need to think about what it should do. I'll think out loud, so you can help. (Very kind of you to list... oh, see ya later)

  • HTML fires up the applet, either just because it can or (more likely, and the purpose) to calculate a partial hash collision on a bit of data.
  • Well it should probably be threaded, so..
  • ..one thread to sit there and churn numbers. It should probably update a variable and notify the other thread, when it finds a collision bigger than what it had a moment ago.
  • ..the other thread to look at how fast things are going and update the GUI to estimate how long it will take. I suspect a progress bar would be depressing to watch. Also misleading since it could go to 1000% if you're unlucky.
    Maybe a Windows-style "5 seconds left!". "Oh, hang on .. no, it'll be about 2 minutes". Five minutes later...
    Abort button? Well you could send an inadequate hashcash token. I've been starting to think about this. I think it should be valid to say "I think that talking to you is only worth 10 seconds CPU time, so if you want to sit there and demand 2 hours then tough".
  • ..network access will be pretty simple. The only important bit is sending the completed collision back to the webserver (POST request, I should think) so it can validate it and then email it to someone. (Webserver sends the email so I don't have to fart about with a "secure" applet.)
  • There may be some merit in requesting some tiny bit of data of the webserver just to obtain a cookie saying how fast your processor is, so that the HTML can tell you how long things will take next time you visit.

Of course, I say "start". Lapo Luchini's GPL code will do all the hard work for me. Oh yeah, I should drop him a line if I'm going to start hacking about, shouldn't I? I'm so rude. 8-(

Am I scared that lots of stupid emails will be leaving my computer, destined for random people? Well all I have to do is up the minimum collision threshold to 25 bits and it will go very very quiet. 8-)

I'm tired of having domains that don't do anything useful.

I have a DNS server which is up ~98%. All I really want is enough secondaries to make it reliable, but the problem is my primary is on dynamic IP.

I've written some software which allows updates over SSH to a DJBDNS zone file, which would allow someone to provide the service I require... but who can you phone at 4am? (No it isn't urgent, but then it has been "not urgent" for the last six months)

So I've cheated and used xtremeweb.de for full primary. It seems very slick.

Meanwhile I'll poke about on ns2exchange.com.

OK, I exist. I've been meaning to exist for a long time, but never got around to it.

I'm not claiming that existing is useful to anyone, but one day I'll finish "getting organised" and contribute something.

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