#asciilifeform | 2021-07-29

Logged on 2021-07-28 08:44:20 punkman: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2021-07-27#1049068 << I tried using the "open sores" GPU stuff on an allwinner years ago. didn't work out, bricked the board at some point. went looking for ARM without megaton of blob, didn't find anything. thought "I'll come back in a few years"

00:59

Logged on 2021-07-27 18:04:13 punkman: "The vast majority of our customers care nothing about open source or closed binary blobs" << yeah I guess the customers just wanted them to pretend about being "open source", and they got exactly what they really wanted

01:00

http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2021-07-28#1049144 << ftr the indeterminate-width fields of irc (and similar protocols) don't play well with udp. ( in asciilifeform's thing -- fixed-length fields. for absolutely everything, defined as it were hardware )

01:00

Logged on 2021-07-28 12:49:53 thimbronion: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2021-07-28#1049137 << Deduping absolutely required, but I think PeterL's comment was about "fixing" IRC.

01:02

http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2021-07-28#1049107 << if you think mp wasn't aspiring to 'properly aristocratic' demise, think again. (and not so many of these to choose from -- filthy plebes 'ruined' e.g. dope OD)

01:02

Logged on 2021-07-28 06:41:11 adlai: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2021-07-27#1049082 << "People who drown don't simply drown because the river was closer to their house than the cliff, but because the drowning specifically has some sort of subconscious meaning or importance." http://trilema.com/2015/the-mp-suicide-self-evaluation-scale/#selection-187.323-190.0

01:03

http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2021-07-28#1049105 << meanwhile chimneys of google (california), microshit (washington), etc. datacenters, continue to belch

01:03

Logged on 2021-07-28 06:01:10 punkman: and some more: "Dell has stopped shipping certain highly energy-intensive gaming computers to customers in six states with new electricity consumption regulations." "This product cannot be shipped to the states of California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont or Washington due to power consumption regulations"

01:05

looked at the fishwraps, apparently this concerned two particular 'alienware' 'gaming' boxes. (who the fuck still buys prebuilt desktops?! and why?!)

01:17

http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2021-07-28#1049155 << phunphakt, 'gain of function'(tm)(r)(c) work has gone on re: prions for quite some time. (and obv. for same ultimate reason.)

01:17

Logged on 2021-07-28 15:23:11 punkman: "lab worker named Émilie Jaumain died at age 33, 10 years after pricking her thumb during an experiment with prion-infected mice" https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/07/france-issues-moratorium-prion-research-after-fatal-brain-disease-strikes-two-lab

01:20

a++ weapon, theoretically, if could be manufactured mechanically. no detector likely to exist, cannot be destroyed short of combustion, persists in soil for years, not broken down by water, sunlight, etc., no antidote and none even hypothesized to exist.

01:21

and fatal dose, theoretically: 1. (not gram, microgram, etc. but simply 1.)

01:21

of course is weapon that cannot be aimed, but not erryone is put off by this.

~ 1 hours 21 minutes ~

02:42

asciilifeform: what are good household sources of entropy? like coin tosses and stuff or lava lamps?

~ 21 minutes ~

03:04

raw_avocado: depends what means 'good' neh.

03:05

Well lets say i want to generate some Bitcoin private keys

03:05

raw_avocado: if you have nothing but a coin and time -- von neumann's debiasing algo worx just as well with paper and pen as with machines

03:05

Or maybe even a BIP39seed.

03:06

raw_avocado: if you aint in much of a hurry -- the above.

03:06

Well my question is what can i use a source, instead of a coin.

03:08

raw_avocado: there is not an 'official' correct answer to this. lotsa physical effects to choose from, and usable for so long as you understand the tradeoffs.

03:08

i for instance picked johnson noise for FG.

03:08

!s uptime

03:08

whaack: time since my last reconnect : 0d 5h 1m

03:09

the reasons for this are amply discussed in the log.

03:09

PeterL: Not sure scoopbot is scoopin'

03:09

manual: http://ztkfg.com/2021/07/a-short-guide-for-setting-up-apache-with-flask-on-gentoo/

03:10

oh nifty whaack

03:12

raw_avocado: is this an open ended brainstorm type question or a real concern of yours? you could stop a stopwatch if it has miliseconds and record the last few digits a hundred times or so.

03:13

whaack: imho it's a little like asking 'what household object makes the best hammer?' -- buy a fucking hammer.

03:13

lmfao

03:14

whaack: its a brainstorm open ended question

03:14

random bit generation aint hand-to-hand combat, where you use whatever's avail, broken bottles, shoes, etc

03:15

asciilifeform: gotcha

03:15

typically the asker is in a position where he has plenty of time to think & obtain tooling.

03:15

often enuff such thread goes for long enuff that asker could've built FG 2-3 times..

03:15

But ran into this bloke on twitter today https://github.com/jimbojw/seed-picker-solitaire. uses a deck of cards to generata a bip39 seed, i think its kinda convoluted

03:15

And then i was like what are other thinks like a deck of cards, that could do well.

03:16

raw_avocado: nonbinary outputs are a bitch to debias by hand

03:16

if you find yourself in this position, use coin.

03:17

asciilifeform: i looked over the FG website, but i dont understand what those compenents are and how to solder them together. is there a shopping list available?

03:17

nonbinary outputs are a bitch to debias by hand << just mod 2?

03:18

re use coin << i dont want to find the best practival way, i want other ways that works just as good.

03:18

raw_avocado: start w/ the analogue board.

03:19

asciilifeform: link broke ^^

03:19

raw_avocado: loads fine here.

03:19

raw_avocado: this is nth time -- what are you using for a browser?

03:19

http://btcbase.org/data/fg/trng_tw.png][analogue] << this is not the right one

03:20

raw_avocado: you must have a buggy 'greasemonkey' script or sumthing similar installed on your end. you are the only one who is getting this effect, to date no one reported.

03:20

LimeChat its prolly interpreting the link wrong.

03:20

raw_avocado: read via log www.

03:21

Anyway i saw this, i dot know whose symbols mean, and there is no legend

03:22

raw_avocado: horowitz & hill (or your preferred schoolbook from own country)

03:23

whaack: the milisecods one, yeah exactly stuff like that.

03:23

there is 'no royal road'.

03:24

mats

raw_avocado: california

03:24

raw_avocado: i aint trolling. rng is a safety-critical component if you're a rsa or bitcoin user. if you had to jump with a parachute tomorrow, would you ask randos on a forum how to sew one ?

03:25

'but i dunno how to sew'

03:25

1st you learn. on something other than parachutes.

03:25

mats: im waiting on a guitar and some other stuff from the US, been months still not here(in the UK currently)

03:25

mats

sucks

03:26

raw_avocado: maybe write to diana coman, see if will sell you a FG

03:26

(uk)

03:26

i don't expect she needs hers anymoar

03:27

asciilifeform: yes, you are right, and i am not trying to find a macgyver substitute.

03:27

Ok, ill ping her

03:28

iirc there was another fg user in uk, but the name escapes me, and he got it 2ndhand

03:28

possibly cruciform

03:28

!q seen-anywhere cruciform

03:28

cruciform last seen in #ossasepia on 2020-09-21 17:10:25: also, would you kindly recommend an OS to attempt the installation on? I've had a look around republican blogs, and am having trouble finding a known-working one

~ 37 minutes ~

04:06

asciilifeform: i read in some of your posts that you dont think whitening entropy is a good idea. Why?

04:06

I failed to find anywhere any mention of this thing, and in the logs there dosent seem to be a detailed explanation, or maybe i am using the search function wrongly.

04:16

raw_avocado: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log-search?q=f%3Aasc+whitening&chan=all

04:16

more discussion of this than probably anyone could want.

04:26

10x

04:35

*

asciilifeform to bed.

~ 58 minutes ~

05:34

http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/trilema/2015-10-29#1310713 lol

05:34

(trilema) 2015-10-29 mircea_popescu: you want to fuck your computer, that's all there is to it.

~ 43 minutes ~

06:17

verisimilitude

I'd like mine added as well, PeterL: http://verisimilitudes.net/rss.xml

06:19

verisimilitude

On that note, I'll link to my latest book review; despite the popular book, I think it turned out rather nice.

~ 1 hours 58 minutes ~

08:18

recently read autobiographical book from famous greek bank robber. quite the character. pulled off helicopter escape twice from same prison. interestingly never killed anyone, even after countless armed encounters with police.

08:18

apparently english version is coming out this year. will share if I get pdf.

08:25

"“I never showed disdain for the value of human life; yet I found the act of taking a life perfectly legitimate and acceptable, under certain circumstances and with good reason, as when “wider” freedom was concerned. Because death is the inescapable consequence of life. On the contrary, causing pain by torturing is something horrible,

08:25

something heinous.”"

08:28

"once you are an outlaw, an ever-increasing amount of resources are required to maintain your freedom". as the banks made the robbing less lucrative, kidnapped a rich dude. "When they dropped him off, Vassilis remembers, Haitoglou left them with a joke: “Guys, if only it didn’t cost that much, I’d very much like to have another adventure with

08:28

you!”"

08:41

fun opsec tale from the book: after another kidnapping, they cracked open a prepaid sim phone. you had to activate this by calling a number. they were driving down the road, guy saw pizza billboard, called pizza place.

08:43

they called in for ransom, eventually got the ransom, let the guy go. many months later they had rented a villa, buried some money in the yard, laying low etc. cops do raid, catch everyone.

08:46

turns out they had later activated a 2nd prepaid phone, accidentally using same pizza place number. so cops were tracing ransom phone that had made only two phone calls before being discarded, pizza place and asking for ransom.

~ 3 hours 48 minutes ~

12:34

http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2021-07-28#1049209 << Hmm, it is not doing the one thing it is supposed to do. I will hack on this a bit and see what is going on.

12:34

Logged on 2021-07-28 23:09:45 whaack: PeterL: Not sure scoopbot is scoopin'

12:37

http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2021-07-29#1049258 << What is 10x ?

12:37

Logged on 2021-07-29 00:26:03 raw_avocado: 10x

~ 38 minutes ~

13:15

PeterL: tenx -> thanks

~ 49 minutes ~

14:04

New post: The Comms Chronicle

14:04

New post: Defeating Vendor Lock-Ins: "Liebert GXT4."

14:04

New post: A Review of John McCarthy's Original Lisp Paper

14:06

sorry about spam, I think it is almost there

14:06

New post: Overview of the Paleo Diet

14:15

scoopbot was just really excited to talk, should be calmer now

14:20

New post: Just a Test

14:24

Aha! Now it works

14:28

asciilifeform: bug report for watchglass: irc_dbg = cfg.get("irc", "irc_dbg") <-- this should get wrapped in an int()

14:39

PeterL: ty

~ 3 hours 6 minutes ~

17:46

asciilifeform: i finally got around to manually importing the logs for this channel starting from the split: http://logs.bitdash.io/asciilifeform/2021-06-15#1039188

17:46

asciilifeform: do you mind if i have my bot idle in here so that i can keep the logs on my www in sync?

17:47

billymg: please do. keep in mind that you'll need to patch the logotron.

17:47

Logged on 2021-06-16 13:46:57 asciilifeform: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2021-06-16#1039439 << i had to commit this kludge warcrime to get the bot to talk to 'unreal irc'.

17:47

billymg: lemme know if need help with this.

17:47

ok, will give it a shot and let you know if i run into anything

17:55

asciilifeform: can you add scoopbot to the list of bots for colorizing in the logs?

17:56

PeterL: will do, 1s

17:56

k, thanks

17:57

PeterL: done

18:09

test

18:10

billymg: seems to work

18:10

bitbot

Logged on 2021-07-29 18:13:51 billymg: test

18:10

a++.

18:11

excellent, gonna just restart it to change its command trigger

18:12

!. uptime

18:12

bitbot

billymg: time since my last reconnect : 0d 0h 0m

18:12

neat

18:12

i wanted that nick on freenode but it was already taken

18:20

i started getting this error from freenode sometime this morning as well, although it didn't seem to kick me from the network

↖ ↖

18:20

it was, however, annoying enough that i turned off that network in my znc config

18:30

asciilifeform: some people telling me that selfies are a good source of entropy, and of course they hash these images

18:30

I am thinking, that cameras reduce noise when taking pictures, and thus reducing entropy, no?

18:31

And if cameras would apply some kind of filer(like reduce brithness or something) that would actually make it easy for an attacker to reduce the space?

~ 22 minutes ~

18:53

camera sensors and software introduce a lot of bias

18:56

you'd want to take multiple photos or video frames

19:02

mats

raw_avocado: how long are you gonna go on crowd sourcing information from reddit and quizzing the poor souls in here about the content

19:04

mats: i am coming into contact with this a lot of these topics for the first time, and i am trying to understand whats happening in fact.

19:17

raw_avocado: let's take an elementary failure case and work it out :

19:17

asciilifeform: please do so

19:17

raw_avocado: suppose the camera fails in such a way that you get a stream of zeros instead of the usual frames.

19:18

( or, equivalently, /dev/whatevercamera is replaced in your program, somehow, with /dev/zero )

19:18

raw_avocado: will you be able to tell that the output is now easily predictable ?

19:18

No

19:19

so then.

19:20

Yeah, but cant i say the same thing about the FG or any source of entropu, what if it fails in some way how can you tell the string is not random?

19:23

raw_avocado: failure in iron rng typically happens in the analogue component. if the digitizer/post-processor 'whitens', the failure will not be detectable (via sample & util such as 'ent') because hash makes even /dev/zero into a soup which passes all statistical tests, despite being trivially predictable.

19:24

raw_avocado: if you had actually read the log pointers, would know this.

19:24

Logged on 2021-07-29 00:16:25 asciilifeform: raw_avocado: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log-search?q=f%3Aasc+whitening&chan=all

19:24

Yes i get that part, as in i can hash numbers from 1 to 10^5 and then hash them. If i run tests on that, the statistics pass on the hash function not on the input

19:25

Ive read some of the threads yesturday, not all.

19:26

raw_avocado: camera, in fact, is a fairly good source of entropy. but it gives great temptation to user, to pipe it directly through a hash, so to resemble a MB/s+ rng; but in reality it gives approx. same actual entropy as FG ( < 10kB/s )

19:27

if you apply von neumann debiaser to the bits comprising the frame, as many times as req'd to match the statistical quality of FG's output -- will get similar bandwidth.

19:28

but i've yet to see someone who is using camera as trng do this. (btw if you must do so, copper foil over the objective.)

↖ ↖

19:28

Well, the idea was not to use it as an RNG for the box, but use a picture to create a BIP39 seed.

19:29

raw_avocado: lemme get this straight, you simply need what, 256bits of entropy ? once ?

19:29

In this example yes, and the question was if a selfie would serve as a good souce.

19:29

if you had used a coin , would've already been done a while ago, lol

19:29

Logged on 2021-07-28 23:05:34 asciilifeform: raw_avocado: if you have nothing but a coin and time -- von neumann's debiasing algo worx just as well with paper and pen as with machines

19:31

raw_avocado: it is still unclear to me whether you are interested in understanding what makes for a 'good source', or simply looking for cookbook recipes

19:31

asciilifeform: i dont need a source of entropy for my use rn. i want to understand how these various methods would work, and how good they would be.

19:32

raw_avocado: moar log pointers, if you're genuinely interested in subj.

19:34

asciilifeform: ok ill do some more reading, and prolly return with dumb questions again

19:34

raw_avocado: i'm happy to answer q's, but would prefer that noobs do some reading 1st and get elementary grasp of the subj.

19:35

( finally found the particular thread was looking for )

19:35

(trilema) 2017-05-22 asciilifeform: and yes, this is still same old tests, nothing magically different about them, there will ~never~ be a mechanical test for 'good rng'

19:36

asciilifeform: I'm looking at adding a hash to the UDP packets sent by my toy. My understanding is that in your design, all UDP packets will have a hash of the cyphertext either prepended or appended. Is this correct?

19:37

asciilifeform: 10x

19:41

asciilifeform: in more detail the packet will look something like H(C+S) concatenated to C, where S is some shared secret.

~ 19 minutes ~

20:00

thimbronion: is this a checksum?

20:02

punkman: it's not checking for errors per se, just that it came from a trusted source.

20:05

thimbronion: it's a little moar complicated, but yes.

20:06

thimbronion: i'ma try and get the spec draft out this weekend, described in some detail this and other moving parts.

20:08

ftr keccak is theoretically immune to length extension attacks. however i haven't a fast implementation of it, and leaving it out of the spec, instead using bad old sha512.

20:08

asciilifeform's protocol comes with a 1byte version field, so theoretically can switch hashes later on.

20:14

asciilifeform: thanks.

20:24

punkman: interesting story above re: cell usage by kidnappers

20:25

punkman: gotta wonder whether any of'em had burner and non-burner turned on at the same time

20:25

punkman: tight correlation in carrier tower stats could lead to being ID'd and eventually DX'd...

20:26

assuming DX is not automatic at this point, esp. for cheap burner phones...

~ 53 minutes ~

21:20

billymg: I have a prototype web interface online available here. http://explorer.ztkfg.com/ Some things to note: 1, I've had some issues with my browser giving me security warnings, I think it was because i had a bad virtualhosts file but it may be because explorer.ztkfg.com points to a different ip than ztkfg.com 2) This is a prototype and I wouldn't recommend building off of it right away

21:20

because the api may change from under your feet

21:21

whaack: nice!

21:21

shinohai

neato whaack

21:22

ty!

21:25

http://explorer.ztkfg.com/?args=view-txn+b067c8044d341d9010bec7f7b0c764aae268f1716acfc4beaf0579a9845640b3

21:27

whaack: is there a way to get a machine readable version of the results? (whether tab, space, semicolon, however delimited)?

21:27

csv, json, whatever is easiest / makes the most sense on your end

21:31

billymg: i'm still thinking about the right answer to this. There is a structure atm, it's just a bit cryptic (i.e. first 6 lines for viwe-txn are always the same, so you can get the hash, block height, index, and size, then next line is inputs, then you do a (while nextline is not OUTPUTS readline ... ) etc.

21:32

When I write out the spec I'm likely going to write a python client that can deserialize the info that you can use.

21:34

Gotta go for now , i'll be back on tomorrow or later

21:34

whaack: ah, neato. a python library for interacting with your api would certainly be useful

21:35