throwaway812's comments

throwaway812 | 10 years ago | on: Terra Bella

> Are there any resources that talk about what is a safe number of satellites for different altitudes and the effects of space pollution?

Lots. It tracks radius squared, if not cubed. As altitude gets large (which you need for orbit anyway), you can fit a ton of small satellites safely.

throwaway812 | 11 years ago | on: Introducing Pseudo IPv4

Given that protecting the source IP is not a goal (keyspace is far too small for that), why use something like MD5 when something like CityHash or MurmurHash3 would do?

throwaway812 | 12 years ago | on: Coinbase user emails and full names leaked

If they had evidence of that, why wouldn't they have pasted it as well? I'm assuming it's baseless speculation.

Btw, has anyone actually confirmed any of these emails / names are real? I have a coinbase account and am not mentioned in the leak.

throwaway812 | 12 years ago | on: How Everyone Got the Top 1% Wrong

How? They still have gobs of principal lying around making gains. Unless you mean it will help enable more progressive taxation and income redistribution via the federal government?

throwaway812 | 12 years ago | on: Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD OS: 2nd edition available for preorder

GPLv3 doesn't see very widespread use.

Fedora tracks licenses on a package by package basis. You can fairly easily determine what the license of a library you use is, and recursively examine dependencies to see if there is something objectionable in there.

FreeBSD ships GPLv3 ports (gcc47, ...). So... it's not just smooth sailing there, either.

No need to hate on either platform.

throwaway812 | 12 years ago | on: Show HN: ffjson: faster json serialization in Go

The last time I looked at upb, it only supported parsing, which was a deal-breaker. Have you implemented serializing since then? It's hard to tell from the git log, which is mostly "dump from google internal sources XX-YY-ZZZZ".

I'm very excited about upb! Thanks for your work on it over the years. Do you have any tasks that an outside contributor could help with?

Thanks!

throwaway812 | 12 years ago | on: Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD OS: 2nd edition available for preorder

> The ports selection in FreeBSD is second to none. Linux has nothing close.

[citation needed].

If you mean Linux-just-the-kernel, sure? But that's not really comparable.

Every Linux distro has a collection of 3rd-party packages; neither FreeBSD's 3rd party package integration (ports) nor breadth of software is particularly exceptional in this space.

And FreeBSD doesn't seem to attract as many volunteers to keep its port collection up to date, or at least that has been my experience.

> Lots of imbedded projects are based on BSD and always will be. The insanity of GPL licensing.

Sure. I work on a BSD-derived embedded system at $DAYJOB. But the GPL doesn't prevent Linux use in lots of spaces.

throwaway812 | 12 years ago | on: Downloading Software Safely Is Nearly Impossible

If you think you're safe: it's the same thing with Linux. Yes, good distros sign their blobs and you can probably verify that with builtin tools.

However, consider how distros generate their signed binaries:

1) A packager downloads a random tarball off the internet, often over HTTP and/or unsigned and unverified.

2) The packager uploads the same tarball to the distro build system (you trust them, right?)

3) The packager's script for building the program or library is executed by the build server (you trust all of the packagers, right? they have implicit root access to your machine during pkg install.)

4) The packager's script likely invokes `./configure` or similar. Now even if you trust the packager, the downloaded source has arbitrary code execution. You verified it, right???

(Not trying to advocate for webcrypto. And I'm a Linux user. But I'm also a packager, and I have some awareness as to how one would go about pwning all users of my distro.)

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