0xabad1dea

Dual EC, The Saga Continues: BUT MAYBE I’M BIASED

Bla bla bla this is my personal opinion bla bla bla.

Patents. Can’t live with violating them, can’t live without violating them. The entire concept of patented cryptography is a bit beyond what I have the energy to deal with right now. Whatever. We’re going in.

It didn’t click with me yesterday, reading the crypto news, that I had already quoted one Dan Brown with whom we are now concerned. No, not the one who wrote the novels. One of the other ones. I cited him in my timeline of trying to reconstruct where and when exactly Dual EC DRBG went so wrong. Specifically, the paper has a casual mention (bottom of page 7) that the proof of security relies on initialization value Q being random, because if it is not random, an adversary in-the-know can recover the prestates and everything’s downhill from there. Therefore – and I quote – it is generally preferable for Q to be c

0xabad1dea

Keybase proof

I hereby claim:

• I am 0xabad1dea on github.
• I am 0xabad1dea (https://keybase.io/0xabad1dea) on keybase.
• I have a public key whose fingerprint is F390 1782 28A0 41E1 042F 9F9B 2B1B 8E3B 75D6 270A

To claim this, I am signing this object:

0xabad1dea

Guidelines for Singular They in Technical English

by 0xabad1dea, December 2014

This document is an RFC of sorts for increasing the adoption rate of Singular They in technical English. This is not an ultimatum; this is not shaming anyone who has done otherwise; and this is definitely not applicable to any other language.

What is Singular They?

0xabad1dea

/* include this file AFTER your standard includes */
/* clang -Weverything -Wno-unused-macros */

/*	SIGNED ARITHMETIC IS THE ENEMY. (use "signed" for main, etc.) */
#define int	BANNED
/*	THESE OTHER THINGS ARE ALSO THE ENEMY. 	*/
#ifdef	strcpy
#undef	strcpy
#endif
#define strcpy	BANNED

0xabad1dea

Installing cel-shaded effect into Skyrim

1. Install enb for Skyrim. The site design is terrible, that list of version numbers at the bottom are the hyperlinks. You did it right if it displays version text in the top left a few seconds after Skyrim starts. For the record I use the injector version.

2. in enblocal.ini in your skyrim folder, under the [ENGINE] group, put: ForceLodBias=true LodBias=4.0 which forces the textures to be shrunk down and throw out a lot of detail. 4.0 is as high as it goes, if anyone knows a way to get it to shrink textures to, say, 2x2 let me know.

3. Download the "DOS effect" example from the sample ENB effects. Place it as effect.txt in your Skyrim folder.

0xabad1dea

The Scammiest Scam To Yet Anonymity Scam

I'm still holding out for this being a hoax, a big joke, and that they're going to cancel the kickstarter any minute. It'd be quite the cute "lessons learned" about anonymity scams. However, I will be treating it from here on out as a genuine scam. (As of May 2nd, the kickstarter has been cancelled, after the strangest attempt to reply to this imaginable. Good riddance.)

This absolutely ridiculous thing was brought to my attention by a friend and since it was late at night I thought I must be delirious in how absurdly over the top fake it seemed. So I slept on it, woke up, and found that it had gotten a thousand dollars more funding and was every bit as flabbergasting as I thought it was.

Since I realize that not everyone has spent their entire lives studying computers – and such people are the targets of such scams –

0xabad1dea

Speedrunning FAQ/Glossary

by 0xabad1dea September 2018

You may notice a decidedly Nintendo bias to the examples. I can't change who I am.

What is Speedrunning?

Speedrunning is:

• Completing a video game

0xabad1dea

// SHA1 But I Let Copilot Take The Wheel

// this is ENTIRELY written by Github Copilot, all I did was
// give it a few prompts and made the absolute minimum changes
// to compile, which was rearranging the function order and
// adding one variable it had used without declaring.

// it does not quite work! have fun fixing it I guess :)

// license: uhh... a bot wrote it, I don't think you can

0xabad1dea

Risk Assessment of GitHub Copilot

0xabad1dea, July 2021

this is a rough draft and may be updated with more examples

GitHub was kind enough to grant me swift access to the Copilot test phase despite me @'ing them several hundred times about ICE. I would like to examine it not in terms of productivity, but security. How risky is it to allow an AI to write some or all of your code?

Ultimately, a human being must take responsibility for every line of code that is committed. AI should not be used for "responsibility washing." However, Copilot is a tool, and workers need their tools to be reliable. A carpenter doesn't have to

0xabad1dea

config_version = 1
%terminals {
	name = "xterm-256color"
	key_timeout = -1000
}
make_backup = false
hide_menubar = false
parse_file_positions = true
disable_primary_selection_over_ssh = false
color = true