cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • Wikipedia says:

    The mitochondrion is popularly nicknamed the “powerhouse of the cell”, a phrase popularized by Philip Siekevitz in a 1957 Scientific American article of the same name.[4]

    But know your meme attributes its meme status to this tumblr post from 2013:

    screenshot of text: "what i learned from school 1. im a fucking piece of shit 2. everybody else is also a fucking piece of shit 3. mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell"

    Contrary to comments in many places like this reddit thread from 2018, I suspect the phrase wasn’t actually used in many textbooks or very commonly known prior to that tumblr post.

    (If you search on Google Books you can find numerous textbooks using the phrase. Range-based search on Google Books appears to be broken so I’m not sure, but all the ones I checked were published well after 2013.)












  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.mlI made a gpg Hat
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    23 days ago

    were you careful to be sure to get the parts that have the key’s name and email address?

    It should be if there is chunks missing its unusable. At least thats my thinking, since gpg is usually a binary and ascii armor makes it human readable. As long as a person cannot guess the blacked out parts, there shouldnt be any data.

    you are mistaken. A PGP key is a binary structure which includes the metadata. PGP’s “ascii-armor” means base64-encoding that binary structure (and putting the BEGIN and END header lines around it). One can decode fragments of a base64-encoded string without having the whole thing. To confirm this, you can use a tool like xxd (or hexdump) - try pasting half of your ascii-armored key in to base64 -d | xxd (and hit enter and ctrl-D to terminate the input) and you will see the binary structure as hex and ascii - including the key metadata. i think either half will do, as PGP keys typically have their metadata in there at least twice.



  • This article buries the lede so much that many readers probably miss it completely: the important takeaway here, which is clearer in The Register’s version of the story, is that ChatGPT cannot actually play chess:

    “Despite being given a baseline board layout to identify pieces, ChatGPT confused rooks for bishops, missed pawn forks, and repeatedly lost track of where pieces were."

    To actually use an LLM as a chess engine without the kind of manual intervention that this person did, you would need to combine it with some other software to automate continuing to ask it for a different next move every time it suggests an invalid one. And, if you did that, it would still mostly lose, even to much older chess engines than Atari’s Video Chess.

    edit: i see now that numerous people have done this; you can find many websites where you can “play chess against chatgpt” (which actually means: with chatgpt and also some other mechanism to enforce the rules). and if you know how to play chess you should easily win :)








  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoScience Memes@mander.xyzfaen
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    1 month ago

    Due to the Norwegian language conflict there have been various competing forms of written Norwegian over time, two of which have been officially recognized as equally valid by the Norwegian parliament since 1885. Both apparently changed their spelling of “slut” to “sludd” in the 21st century, Bokmål in 2005 and Nynorsk in 2012, presumably in an effort to encourage English speakers to make jokes about Swedes and Danes instead of them.


  • TLDR: this is way more broken than I initially realized

    To clarify a few things:

    -No JavaScript is sent after the file metadata is submitted

    So, when i wrote “downloaders send the filename to the server prior to the server sending them the javascript” in my first comment, I hadn’t looked closely enough - I had just uploaded a file and saw that the download link included the filename in the query part of the URL (the part between the ? and the #). This is the first thing that a user sends when downloading, before the server serves the javascript, so, the server clearly can decide to serve malicious javascript or not based on the filename (as well as the user’s IP).

    However, looking again now, I see it is actually much worse - you are sending the password in the URL query too! So, there is no need to ever serve malicious javascript because currently the password is always being sent to the server.

    As I said before, the way other similar sites do this is by including the key in the URL fragment which is not sent to the server (unless the javascript decides to send it). I stopped reading when I saw the filename was sent to the server and didn’t realize you were actually including the password as a query parameter too!

    😱

    The rest of this reply was written when I was under the mistaken assumption that the user needed to type in the password.


    That’s a fundamental limitation of browser-delivered JavaScript, and I fully acknowledge it.

    Do you acknowledge it anywhere other than in your reply to me here?

    This post encouraging people to rely on your service says “That means even I, the creator, can’t decrypt or access the files.” To acknowledge the limitations of browser-based e2ee I think you would actually need to say something like “That means even I, the creator, can’t decrypt or access the files (unless I serve a modified version of the code to some users sometimes, which I technically could very easily do and it is extremely unlikely that it would ever be detected because there is no mechanism in browsers to ensure that the javascript people are running is always the same code that auditors could/would ever audit).”

    The text on your website also does not acknowledge the flawed paradigm in any way.

    This page says "Even if someone compromised the server, they’d find only encrypted files with no keys attached — which makes the data unreadable and meaningless to attackers. To acknowledge the problem here this sentence would need to say approximately the same as what I posted above, except replacing “unless I serve” with “unless the person who compromised it serves”. That page goes on to say that “Journalists and whistleblowers sharing sensitive information securely” are among the people who this service is intended for.

    The server still being able to serve malicious JS is a valid and well-known concern.

    Do you think it is actually well understood by most people who would consider relying on the confidentiality provided by your service?

    Again, I’m sorry to be discouraging here, but: I think you should drastically re-frame what you’re offering to inform people that it is best-effort and the confidentiality provided is not actually something to be relied upon alone. The front page currently says it offers “End-to-end encryption for complete security”. If someone wants/needs to encrypt files so that a website operator cannot see the contents, then doing so using software ephemerally delivered from that same website is not sufficient: they should encrypt the file first using a non-web-based tool.

    update: actually you should take the site down, at least until you make it stop sending the key to the server.