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Our study finds that the current real-world deployment of Diffie-Hellman is less secure than previously believed. This page explains how to properly deploy Diffie-Hellman on your server.

When I tested https://soylentnews.org/ on their website, I got the following message:

Warning! This site uses a commonly-shared 1024-bit Diffie-Hellman group, and might be in range of being broken by a nation-state. It might be a good idea to generate a unique, 2048-bit group for the site.

I do not know enough about this to make a comment. Maybe, someone more experienced would find this interesting.

It's been a month and a day since I ordered the parts I needed to build a new computer. Being on something of a budget right now, and with my motherboard selections curtailed by my choice of the mini-ITX form factor, I plumped for a Pentium G3258, 4GB of RAM, a Z87 motherboard, a recycled AMD 7850 graphics card and a 500GB/8GB SSHD storage unit. Nothing special. I totally agree with most folks in the know around the net that an AMD quad core (either an Athlon 780K or an FX 4300) would have been an overall better choice, but there simply wasn't an AMD mITX motherboard that would fit in my budget. Factor in that my games of choice right now are Kerbal Space Program and Minecraft, both heavily single-thread bottlenecked games, the G3258 is no hardship and I should hit 4GHz with the stock HSF if I'm careful and don't push the voltage too ambitiously during overclocking.

Why on earth, after a month and a day, am I only expecting delivery tomorrow? It starts with my bank, Lloyds. While they have fantastic Internet banking services, their security systems are... somewhat lacking. Not that they get compromised or hacked or anything like that, nonono. The automated fraud prevention system they've put in place has a habit of spitting out false positives. My first attempt to place the parts order was brought to a screeching halt when my Visa card stopped working. On calling the bank, I was told it was an "automatic randomly selected security check" (I smell bollocks!) and that I was being put through to the fraud prevention department. After being asked all kinds of questions that don't provide any measure of security ("Can you name another street within a mile of the address your card is registered at?", "When were you born?", "What's your card number?" - steal my wallet, look on Google Maps, you're good) I was told I'd failed the test and I'd need to take photo ID into the bank and do another test. Took a few days to squeeze that around my working hours, but end of the week and the order was in. Yay!

It continues with compatibility issues between the CPU and motherboard. The difference between Z87 and Z97 chipsets is purely one of out-of-the-box support for all Haswell and Haswell-refresh CPUs, plus one or two other irrelevant features. While cruising for suppliers, I found a Z87 motherboard that perfectly suited my plans and was deeply discounted - enough to make up for the small fee leveed by the supplier to update the BIOS before shipping, effectively guaranteeing CPU compatibility for two-thirds the cost of even the cheapest Z97 board. And with 802.11ac wireless too! How long did it take to get around to performing this fairly trivial update task? Two weeks. Yeah, thanks.

The final delay makes all of this completely worth it. I like to make YouTube videos of gameplay highlights and generally funny moments, plus I have plans to do some streaming some time soon. I added an Avermedia LGP C875 - a USB-powered HDMI-passthrough capture box with it's own encoding processor, good for 1080p. As an extra trick, this unit includes an SDXC slot and can cap 720p60 in standalone mode - handy for just recording without a hit on game performance, capturing everything just in case something cool happens that I can't reproduce. Like yesterday when my re-entry vehicle came down and landed quite happily on top of a discarded booster stage that (somehow) survived faling to the ground from first stage separation. I wasn't recording. It'll never happen again. Never mind. So why has this added another week delay to my order? Because of supplier problems. I have no idea what's going on with this thing, but it's now back in stock with no price - just a "Call" note on my regular supplier product page. A quick browse through Amazon shows it's now selling for just over twice what I've already paid for it. Score!

So yeah, I've just had confirmation that it'll all be arriving at work tomorrow. About damn time!

A given audio stream (such as myself talking) can be compressed without noticable loss of fidelity, to an mp3 between 32 and 256 kbps per second. (Depending on how much of a crazy audiophile you are.)

Presuming that I'm speaking in english, that 32 to 256 kbps per second of audio, could be further compressed to 0.015 - 0.05 kbps per second of transcripted text. Perhaps with a few emoticons tossed in ;) ?

That's not really enough to accurately convey, a foreign concept. It's more like, words are enough to transmit an index into a list of concepts.

From the pigeonhole principle, it's impossible to disambiguate between more than 2^N different concepts, using an N-bit message. Collisions are unavoidable.

The above paragraphs, refered to about 8 different concepts, using a total of about 4500 bits, probably even less. Even if you can infer the meaning of an unknown word from context, that's an average maximum of 560 bits per concept.

2^560 is certainly a big number (about 10^169), but rather small compared to other huge numbers.

If I believe in the multiverse or I believe in infinity, then I believe that among an infinite number of readers armed with an infinite number of dictionaries, there's a greater infinity of incorrect misinterpretations of what I just wrote, than a paltry, tiny, insignificant; lucky 2^560 who managed to read it correctly.

:(

Albert Einstein wrote a letter in June 1951 that has now been discovered in a safe at a Brazilian school. It was addressed to students at Colégio Anchieta in Porto Alegre in the south of the country. The original is in German, and the translation is: “He who knows the happiness of understanding has gained an infallible friend for life. Thinking is to man what flying is to birds. Don’t follow the example of a chicken when you could be a lark.”

Take home? Find happiness in understanding and thinking, it will reward you. Do what you are good at regardless of detractors and don't follow the slimy flow of complacency.

Any thoughts?

In my last entry, I talked about this girl that I had been on a few dates with and how things were going really good. Well, apparently I have some sort of disability when it comes to judging relationships...

I had thought we had a great few dates. We had a few meals together, kissed, and a few cuddles on the couch. However, shortly after our third date, she canceled the 4th date saying she had to work (no big deal). I tried to reschedule but she said that "She had some demons from her past" that she had to deal with. No worries, everyone has shit from their past to work on, so I said I'd give her a couple weeks and then check in and see how things are going.

Ya, so I checked in a couple weeks later. She responds, I reply, then nothing... Silence. I don't get it. I thought we had a connection, but apparently it wasn't mutual.

It honestly really pisses me off that she didn't have the decency to just tell me that she wasn't interested. Instead she had to waste a couple weeks and leave me hanging like a fool.

Ya, so anyways, back to searching again. Honestly, this one hurt. I really liked her, but... Them's the breaks...

My wife and I are dong well. Just had our one year anniversary! (we dated for 12 years prior to getting married). She is still 180% focused on having a baby. She is tracking her fertility cycle and all that. This morning she barges into the bedroom and tells me that 'it's time'. I'm really scared though... We have our shit together. We are solid and a good couple. I guess I'm just scared because of my own selfish reasons. Ideally I'd like to get the whole poly experiment somewhat under control before having a baby. There just isn't enough time in life to do everything in the order you want though...

So tonight, it's baby making time.

Anyways, that's the latest update... Feel free to judge away in the comments below.

A week ago I had a dream in which I was partially lucid, i.e. somewhat aware that I was dreaming but not in control of the dream from within the dream. Then I woke up and started getting out of bed but the dream continued despite of and to the side of being awake. It wasn't in any way any kind of interesting dream (and all I can remember of it now was that is was boring and kind of meaningless) and I think I more or less decided to stop (or rather not continue) dreaming as I stood up (or maybe it just happened naturally) because the dream wasn't going anywhere/petering out.

The period of time of “wakeful lucidity” didn't last long, maybe as little as a few seconds and any mind is very good at tricking itself and/or messing up continuity.

Then I realized maybe I should have tried to keep it going but I might not have been able to. Maybe it was nothing but one “part”/“thread” of my brain waking up more or earlier than another, or maybe one “part”/“thread” kept focusing on memories of the dream while waking up, but it really didn't feel like remembering or memory; it felt active just like any normal dream one has at least partial lucidity in i.e. remembering dreams is (very) different from dreaming.

It's tricky to feel certain what happened but the impression I was left with was that I had kept dreaming (and still perhaps only semi-lucidly) after waking up.

Just an anecdote, I'm wondering if others might have experienced something similar while waking up. I'm not much of a lucid dreamer and have for now decided I'm not going to spend much (or any) time trying to be one either, I need as much rest as I can get and don't want to interfere too much or risk getting even less rest (“rest” to me includes the idea of letting the subconscious, the instinct, the reptilian complex¹, whatever is in charge of “garbage duty”, and so on get on with normal functions). For that matter I “waste” a lot of time trying to catch up with myself when awake too: unfortunately I need a lot of time to let things filter down so that I can be reasonably sure or somewhat confident I know what I've done/am doing (so many people don't seem to need to do any of that, I envy you).

¹ See also the outdated or less popular/unfashionable and currently disregarded/unapproved Triune brain if interested (“Reptilian Complex” and “R-complex” is the same thing in neuroanatomy/neurology as far as I know).

It was either talking about this or talking at least a little bit or maybe just giving a teaser about stunningly beautiful primes and showing a lot of unfinished and slightly messy work that might actually be “common”/published knowledge (I've found some references in this paper that seem likely to answer that and which I need to check). Yes instead of working I've managed to get as far as to go through old Schneier posts :) (I think the paper was the subject of one of his posts last year, only a short one with the link or something like that).

Hmm, I might as well ask: if anyone has an easy (not individual proofs) and recently current and up to date reference to or overview of or summation of or “state of the art on $topic” of the most complete “top-level” or “overall” view of primes/primes research then feel free to share it (not Wikipedia and highly unlikely to be anything out of Wolfram, Wikipedia doesn't really have that nor can they be expected to although the pages they have are decent introductions to particulars). I should probably ask around for the same directly to some specific people at some point but who knows who might be reading Soylent News. What I'm asking for probably doesn't exist.

Reflecting on my life so far, it felt as though time passed differently before I was 18. As if, "goof off all you want, it's not as though anything matters yet". Exploring the world after I turned 18, it took a few years for stuff to click together and form a coherent whole.

If I ever have children, I don't want to have to say to them, "uh . . . for now, just kill time and play WoW for 18 years, then goof off in the real world, make lotsa lotsa mistakes; and then real life really begins, when you're 26".

While erasing age-based restrictions all at once might be too sudden, maybe we could be kind to at least some children, and raffle off fake age tickets by lottery ? Maybe give out
      500,000 tickets for 16 years = 18 years old,
        50,000 tickets for 14 years = 18 years old,
          5,000 tickets for 12 years = 18 years old,
and then see what happens ?

I've recently come into possession of a Wang 720A/B Reference manual. My late uncle owned the Wang and hadn't been able to find a manual anywhere. Turns out, it was at my Grandmother's house. I was a bit suspicious because Grandpa had been dead for more than a decade, but I didn't ask any questions.

I don't understand why a Wang would need a reference manual in the first place, (even your mother can use one with little to no training or instruction) but here I am looking at one.

Does anyone have any suggestions on discussion groups / websites that might be interested in seeing pictures of my Wang (Reference Manual). Although demand for my Wang (Reference Manual) is at record low levels, I suspect a niche group somewhere has been itching for this.

Maybe the sad reality is that nobody cares about my Wang (reference manual). Sometimes it can feel that way.

Yooman rights? Yooman rights! I don't need no yooman rights! I ain't foreign and I ain't done nuffink wrong.

Michael "Teachers are the Enemies of Promise" Gove is going to give us a nice British Bill of Rights instead. They did promise to stop their supporters voting for Nigel and the bigots. Nigel didn't resign after all.

And Gove is going to be working with Theresa May, who will be pushing through the Snoopers Charter.

And the kickings are about to begin.

I've been staying in a motel the last week, because we had an arrangement where an apartment would become available on the 15th. That has fallen through and I don't have anywhere to go. I can't afford another week at this extended stay motel. I have $300 in my checking account. The motel takes $350 a week for me, my 67 year old mother, and two cats.

The fault is partly ours, and partly the wishy-washy landlord.
She guaranteed us the previous tenants would move out since they had given notice, and they did not. My mother is the one who decided to take this arrangement despite my concerns, god bless her, but now it seems my fears were accurate. The next place needs to be in my name I think.

I'm in Mesa Arizona.
Can anyone hear my quiet gurgling for help?

My email is thinkingrodent@gmail.com if anyone wants to help me financially. That's what my paypal is linked to.

Squeak.

Edit: Thank you to NORCOM and Krishna. You've given me a huge help. I am the author of the Epoch Init System, something I didn't mention before, so perhaps your kindness will allow me the stability to improve Epoch.