Blog/November 2019/Nov 1st
From RonWareWiki
< Blog | November 2019
| November 1st | Comments or questions? Click here! |
We’ve been tired and busy this week. Tired because the clocks changed and now it gets dark at 5:30 in the afternoon. This whole “changing the clocks” thing is getting tiresome. The EU is going to stop this nonsense but probably engender confusion as well. It’s at least possible we’ll do the same, since we are currently more or less synchronised with the EU. Well, it’s a thought…
Busy, as usual. Esther’s back to work, as is Sarah. They both would rather not, I think.
The recent American abandonment of its Kurdish allies and the subsequent Turkish atrocities bring into sharp focus America’s untenable alliance with Turkey. Let’s not forget that the Turk’s genocide of the Armenians was an inspiration to Hitler: he correctly surmised that “the world” would be indifferent. In his words: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”. Still true, almost a century later.
The political scene in America has deteriorated into the politics of ‘cooties’. Y’all need to grow up, fast, or your country will no longer be one. This week I was “blocked” by someone on Gab, for informing him that Robert Spencer, an ardent campaigner against Muslim supremacy, is not in fact Jewish. The guy blocked me for stating something which is an incontrovertible fact. If you can’t introduce facts into a conversation without ending it, how will you ever learn anything?
Various things:
- Culture wars: going from ‘woke’ to broke.
- “Dark web” site taken down without breaking encryption. The important take-away is that weakening everyone’s security by putting “backdoors” into encryption protocols is not necessary. As testified by:
- The former FBI General Counsel chooses encryption over “backdoors” in encryption protocols.
- Facebook sues an Israeli company for hacking WhatsApp. Even without backdoors, faulty implementations open up “front-doors”.
- Rented a car recently? You might want to check the remote-app access.
- Thinking of skipping that vaccination? Don’t. Why getting immunized against measles is really important.
I’ve been working on getting 8th put back together for the next release. There are a lot of changes, bug fixes, and enhancements. The QA effort is pretty exhausting.
One of the major work items for this upcoming release was “hardening” the encryption. In this case, I’m referring to ensuring that the “randomness” of the PRNGs is as random and unpredictable as possible. I wrote about this two weeks ago, and have continued working on this issue. This week I reviewed things to ensure that different tasks use different PRNG states. So, why all this emphasis on “random numbers”? Because bad randomness is disastrous!
I’ll have a lot more to say about this next week, B”H, since the release is planned for then.
Our weather’s been pleasantly cool; a bit below average, in fact. It looks like we’ll have cool weather over shabbat, and then a slight warming for the week.
Just the three of us this shabbat; we’ll try to console ourselves with:
homemade ḥalla,
veggie soup,
chicken and red rice,
baked yams,
sticky wings,
various salatim,
and brownies.
Until next time,
shabbat shalom!
| Top: Blog | Prev: Oct 25th | Next: Nov 8th |