Most of us do have a need to transmit messages privately. Do you not make any online purchases?

Yes, but those have to use public-key encryption. I am sure of my one-time-pad encryption because it's just exclusive-OR with the data, and I am sure that my diode noise is really random and there is no way for anyone else to predict or duplicate it. I can not extend the same degree of surety to public-key encryption. The software is complex, the math is hard to understand, and it all depends on the assumption that some algorithms are difficult to reverse - which might not be true.

Or, like EVERYONE tells you to - backup your damn machine. P.S. If your backup doesn't get you back to exactly where you were last week, it's not a backup, just a bad data copy.

Also:

https://4sysops.com/archives/d...

However, for years, people have mocked my decision to NOT have auto-updates turned on. I only press update when I know that my machine is backed up, there's a fix I need to deploy, and I have the time / willingness to do it.

No, my machine doesn't have viruses etc. (I've had precisely one in my life and that was from a demo copy of Sin on a PC magazine coverdisc - which shows you how long ago that was!) because I abide by simple security practices that mean Windows doesn't NEED to run lots of random third-party executables to do what I want.

There's a reason that MS *can't* block WSUS for business users being used to stop automatic updates for Windows 10. Because we'd tear their fucking heads off. Windows updates have caused shit like you describe since their introduction. Sure, most people won't notice, but if it only happens to 1% of computers regularly deploying updates the chances are that none of your friends will have had those problems. But similarly, with the same odds the chances are that in any large deployment AT LEAST one machine will fuck up from automatic updates every month. Fuck adding that to my IT burden.

In work the other day, one of my users was accidentally given a brief window when they could receive updates from Windows Update instead of WSUS (I'd accidentally pulled them out of the client group on WSUS while looking for a test machine). In that short opportunity, it took it upon itself to update from 8 to 8.1, thereby breaking the finance software that we use permanently. Additionally, the desktop now gets a crash in in a mp4 video dll every 10 seconds that you can't stop crashing without reverting the update associated with it. Seriously, no newer patch fixes it or I'd deploy it in a second. And I had to give them RDP to a plain Windows 8 machine to finish their finance stuff temporarily while I revert their config.

Seriously, automatic system-level updates without user interaction is the most stupid fucking idea in the history of bad ideas, not to mention not being able to PERMANENTLY say no to a particular update, and having NO proper way to system restore to a point before the update applied and stop it (in the majority of cases - I've yet to see system restore do what it promises but I've dealt with lots of users have accidentally restored their personal laptops back to factory settings or unrecoverable states using it!).

If you work in IT and haven't yet realised this, I really pity you. Servers, internet-facing services, maybe but there you have the tools to deal with this crap and STILL shouldn't be blindly pushing updates anyway.

Unmanaged clients that aren't eligible for WSUS because they are home-use? Back those fuckers up and turn off automatic Windows Update.

Most algorithms to do this use the time between keypresses, measured to very high precision so that the lower bits are chaotic. So it doesn't really matter what keys you hit, and it doesn't matter how rythmic your typing is.

The problem with FM static is that you could start receiving a station, and if you don't happen to realize you are now getting low-entropy data, that's a problem.

There are many well-characterized forms of electronic noise: thermal noise, shot noise, avalanche noise, flicker noise, all of these are easy to produce with parts that cost a few dollars.

True randomness comes from quantum mechanical phenomena. Linux /dev/random is chaotic, yes, enough to seed a software "R"NG. But we can do better and devices to do so are cheap these days.

I wouldn't trust anything but diode noise for randomness. If I had a need to transmit messages privately, I'd only trust a one-time pad.

Incorrect.

Even the EMBASSY is not "foreign ground". It's UK soil. Go read up on your international law rather than believing what the movies tell you.

And a car most certainly isn't.

First, he's arrested for skipping bail and (probably) serves time in a UK jail.

Only then does he get handed to anyone.

Yes, he'll be swarmed by cops. But it'll be a while before rape charges are seen as anything other than "next on the list".

Fine.

A) He can't get to France without stepping out of the door.
B) We arrest him the second he does that.
C) He stands trial for skipping bail etc. (unfortunately, his life in the embassy is prima facie evidence of guilt in that case, no matter the mitigating circumstances).
D) He serves whatever sentence he gets for that (hard to imagine he doesn't get one).
E) Then we're required to honour any EU warrant that was issued.
F) Then he's either out of UK hands, or able to go to France freely anyway.

After that you can discuss whether or not asylum in France is justified - methinks that the political climate may have changed somewhat by then (in which direction, who knows)?

"Low-latency"

Yeah. Right.

At absolute best*, with no processing time, buffering, contention, sharing, delay or retransmission whatsoever through the entire process, with optical switching all the way along, with routing direct to each users and end-point, with not a single blip or anything else, that's going to be more delay on top of normal Internet latency.

Fast, yeah I can't argue that one way or another. But that's about volume, not delay. If you turn on a tap (faucet?) in the US and then put your head in the other end of the hose in the EU, it doesn't matter how big the hose is or how much water is coming down - it will still take a long time for the water to arrive. When it does, of course it can be high-pressure, huge volume down a ginormous hose. But delay will still make it useless for telephony, streaming, and a range of other purposes.

I'm all behind the concept, but don't claim low-latency as if it could possibly compete with any other technology out there - my mobile phone barely get 100ms delay to even default gateways).

(* Even LEO is 190km up. A round-trip from that to a base-station to a 0ms Internet back to the satellite back to the ground is going to be:

4 x 190km = 760,000m
Speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s.
3ms or thereabouts?

Maybe tiny in theory, huge in practice because none of the above theoretically-ideal-scenarios actually exist.)

Communism has been tried on a large scale - see Mao's Great Leap Forward.

Nope. That was a totalitarian socialist program pushing a collectivism that didn't work. Communism is a post-scarcity society and obviously scarcity was the thing Mao produced best.

Whatever it has been used for subsequently, A113 is a classroom at Cal Arts.