We already have a standard for shortening long names. Thus

* a13n replaces 'authorization', and
* a14n replaces 'authentication'.

both of these are 1 char shorter than authz / authn, so it should greatly simply things.

It has been an open secret in the cryptography community that Hal Finney was the designer of BitCoin from the very start. Hal died in 2014. Or at least he was frozen in liquid nitrogen so not talking either way.

Besides being the first person to be involved in BTC who didn't hide behind a pseudonym, Hal published a paper that describes essentially the whole BitCoin scheme two years before BTC was launched. And Hal never once accused Satoshi of stealing his work.

The reason Hal had to hide behind Satoshi is simple: The Harber Stornetta patent didn't expire until about 9 months after BTC launched. That covers the notion of the hash chain. There is absolutely no way anyone working in the field did not know about that patent or its imminent expiry. Hal certainly did because I discussed it with him before BTC was launched.

So the big question is why BTC was launched when it was, why not wait 9 months to have free and clear title? Well, Hal got his terminal ALS diagnosis a few weeks prior: He was a man in a hurry.

Having launched prematurely, Hal had to wait six years after the original expiry of the patent term to avoid a lawsuit over the rights to BTC from Surety. He died before that happened.

Oh and I have absolutely no doubt Hal mined the genesis blocks straight into the bit bucket. The key fingerprint is probably the hash of some English language phrase.

The real inventor of BitCoin wrote a paper describing the architecture two years earlier under his own name, Hal Finney. He got a terminal diagnosis of ALS a few months before he launched the BitCoin service, the pseudonym being necessary at the time because of the Haber-Stornetta patent on the BlockChain.

No, Hal, did not keep the coins. He invented BitCoin because he was a crank with weird ideas about inflation, not to get rich. Mining the coins and keeping them would have been a betrayal of his principles.

The proof of this is given by the fact that Hal did not in fact get rich from BTC despite being the ''second' person to join the project. Nor did Hal ever complain that Satoshi took the credit for what was very clearly his work. If Hal had been just another person coming along, there would have been every reason to keep the cash.

And we do in fact know Hal ran mining servers from the start and that he ended up in serious financial trouble due to his ALS. The freezing his head thing came from donations.

Craig Wright does seem to be the last of the three early advocates alive but that doesn't make him Satoshi. Wright has never shown the slightest sign of being the sort of person who builds such a thing and in any case, Hal's name is on the much earlier paper.

Here's a simple example: perform the computation in the exponent over a finite field. Let's say you're doing linear regression and need to compute a*x+b. I'm going to pick a number g and give you g^x instead of x. You're going to compute g^(a*x+b) = (g^x)^a*g^b. Now you can twiddle a and b to fit a line. But you don't know the data x (because inverting g^x is computationally hard, aka the discrete logarithm problem). Note 1: this is vastly oversimplified to demonstrate the idea. Note 2: this is partially homomorphic encryption -- you can't multiply two hidden numbers in the exponent -- this is what is added by fully homomorphic encryption, which pulls in a mountain of new headaches.

The people who buy electric cars are hip urban professional types. The people who support Brexit are pensioners and skin-heads.

Dyson's public support for Brexit meant that most people in his target market wouldn't ride in a Dyson car, let alone buy one. And of course buggering off to Singapore because the Brexit he campaigned for would make assembly in the UK a disaster only made things worse.

It was a stupid idea anyway. Musk was there ten years ahead of him and was already churning out electric cars as a new entrant. It is far from clear Tesla can survive as VW and the major manufacturers enter the EV market. Dyson stood no chance. Sticking an electric motor in a vehicle instead of a petrol engine is not a huge feat of engineering. There are significant design differences but the bulk of the design and assembly technology is unchanged.

Electric vehicles still have doors, monocoque, windows, seats, suspension, in car entertainment, etc. Ford, GM and the rest only need to change one small part of the package. Sure, they have been slow to adapt. But nobody is making EVs at a profit yet. VW and BMW look set to change that this year.

Only it will automatically update itself unless you stop it.

This is irritating as it upsets my plans for end-to-end Web encryption. By which I mean encryption of the data on the server so that the server has no access to it. The only things that are on the server are encrypted data blobs and a pile of random numbers.

By end-to-end Web I mean that you will be able to set up comment forums like slashdot, read email in a Web browser and everything else you are accustomed to doing on the Web but without any of the plaintext content being accessible to the server.

The technical basis for this scheme was worked out in the 1990s and then patented by a completely unrelated company which merely sat on the patent till it expired last year. It uses meta-cryptography which is a property of the Diffie Hellman schemes that if you add two private keys, the corresponding public key is the product of the public keys, etc. Matt Blaze, Torben Pedersen and others worked out how to apply these effects to achieve an effect they considered interesting but insufficient. My contribution is merely to show that the simple scheme is more than enough to do interesting things.

So now I need to work out how to hook into the browser. One possibility is to present the decryption module as a new compression scheme. It looks like a compression scheme in other respects. It just requires the host to have access to a private key capable of completing the decryption.

Any help would be appreciated: hallam@gmail.com

The project site is mathmesh.com but that is of the previous approach which has been superseded in the reference code but not yet documented.

[Oh and yes, I do know what I am doing sort of, I have probably considered the corner case you have just thought up. This has been in discussion for many years with serious protocol design people.]

Give me another way to turn real-world assets into cryptographic form without "trusting" someone.

Bram founded a new company, https://chia.net/ which is making a new bitcoin-derived crypto-currency based on Proof of Space and Time. Basically it fills the unused space on your drive with entropy, and uses this like a set of lottery tickets instead of Proof of Work mining. They're also focusing on features of the crypto-currency that will enhance "Layer 2" (like http://lightning.network/) to enable scalability. In an economic sense this construction shifts the costs of mining toward capital expenditure (for storage) instead of electricity consumption.

He and a collaborator recently won Best Paper at Eurocrypt 2018 for a Zero Knowledge Proof of Time https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/1... (presentation: https://cyber.stanford.edu/sit... )

Interesting things are coming from Bram.

Obama didn't release his birth certificate for one very good reason, he is very clever and Trump is very stupid.

The fact is that the Republicans will always invent some crazy idiotic 'scandal' that they obsess about and endlessly throw up smoke. The birther conspiracy was mind numbingly ridiculous. It would require someone to go back in time to plant the birth notice in the papers. Or for some group of conspirators to go to an enormous amount of trouble in order to make a particular black kid president.

So rather than release the birth certificate and let the Republicans invent a new scandal, Obama held onto it and let them obsess about a scandal nobody else thought made the slightest sense, knowing that he could knock their house of cards down any time he chose. Which of course he did a week before the Bin Laden raid which was guaranteed to end the story.

George W. Bush opened torture chambers across the world and collected photographs for a sick sexual thrill. Yet nobody ever talks about that. None of the people complaining about Hilary ever complained about GWB refusing to comply with Congressional investigation or the deletion of 5 million emails.

So here is what is going to happen. Trump is going to go down to the biggest defeat since Carter and he is going to drag the rest of his party down with him. And afterwards there is going to be a new civil rights act that prohibits Republican voter suppression tactics and the gerrymandering that give them a 5% advantage in elections. And by the time it is all done the Republican party will have two choices, either boot the racist conspiracy theorists and Trumpists out or face two decades in the wilderness.

They're shooting protons at a LiF2 or LiO2 solid target. Why do we think there is not a (p,F) or (p,O) reaction contributing to this?

As a long time reader, I'm pretty severely disappointed by the responses to this post. No discussion of NTP, or GSM time distribution, or CDMA time distribution, or shortwave radio, or ANYFUCKINGTHING relevant to the poster's question.

Where did the knowledgeable people go? Because I really don't need some douchenozzle to tell me that the Amazon fire has a clock app, and see that that post has been rated +4?!?!?! WTF?!??!?!

Give mod points motherfuckers and I will clean up this mess.

Talk to me about IOPS -- Input/Output operations Per Second -- or don't pretend you're talking to me about performance.

Not saying this isn't actually really exciting, but that's the metric in at least 90% of use cases.

Issuing for .test and .local are strictly prohibited by the CABForum EV requirements. They will soon be outlawed for DV under the basic requirements.

What seems to have happened is that instead of issuing all test certs for test.verisign.com as the procedure manual required, they had to modify the procedure when Symantec took over and they no longer had verisign.com.

So instead of doing what they should have done and using test.symantec.com or a test domain bought for the purpose, they typed the first name that entered their head.

Actually it doesn't. DANE certificates are not self-signed for a start, they are signed by the DNSSEC key for the zone.

The problem with DANE is that you swap the choice of multiple CAs for a monopoly run by ICANN, a shadowy corporation that charges a quarter million bucks for a TLD because that is what the market will bear. What do you think the price of DANE certification will rise to if it takes off?

ICANN is the Internet version of the NFL only with greater opportunities for peculation and enrichment.