Notices by Jacob Christian Munch-Andersen (nohatcoder@mastodon.gamedev.place)

@f4grx @soatok There is this argument that even if a zero key is in some way bad, you don't really need to check if your rng produces all zeroes when generating a key, because the probability that this happens is so low as to be effectively impossible.

However, when you accept someone else's key as part of some interaction they could have maliciously set it to 0. It is not obvious that that bestows any major ability, but the threat analysis gets complicated, it is easier to just do the check.

@f4grx @soatok The thing is you can reasonably argue that it is not important, the cost of doing the check is just so low that doing it simply to eliminate some analysis complexity is worth it.

The mere fact that someone can break the secrecy of a transaction in which they partake is not really a vulnerability, because that is always the case, no protocol can prevent that someone simply chooses to share their private key with the world.

@senil @soatok The truth is that there aren't a whole lot of embedded style chips that need to do cryptography, trying to shoehorn a general purpose cryptographic library into them is a fool's errand. If you need cryptography on such chips you are generally much better off with a specialised library that implement only primitives suitable for the chip.

@Greengordon @mekkaokereke Wait, that is not a photoshop?

@compiler_explorer @dalias @tranzystorek_io Well, AWS is like 10x more expensive than reasonably priced hosting, that is if you only use the "cheap" services. If you on top of that have some big instances on standby in order to serve big requests I can see how the cost racks up. You should go through the motions of at least calculating what building your own server costs, then work out what renting a similar server should cost. Hint: You can get 8x64GB DDR4 memory for approx $1000.

@mekkaokereke @futurebird Yes, but I still think it is worth taking a closer look at the deaths that do happen. Especially because violence begets violence, and I'd wager that the situations where cops get shot look a lot like the situations where civilians get shot.

Having some statistical and anecdotal evidence that keeping their gun holstered and being nice to people is actually a really good safety measure for cops, would be nice.

@futurebird @mekkaokereke It is stories like these that make me wonder about the exact stories behind all those cops killed "in the line of service". What exactly is the ratio between cops that go down fighting an active terrorist, and cops that mismanage a benign situation so badly that they manage to trigger a fight or flight response in someone who happened to have a gun?

@sinbad It is such a shame. Node itself is really nice for small projects, but you have to steer clear of the "ecosystem", and that makes it a lot less useful than it could be.

@sinbad @GeekAndDad Or you can just tweak them in BIOS.