/ˈbɑːltəkʊteɪ/. Knows some chemistry and piping stuff. TeXmacs user.

Website: reboil.com

Mastodon: baltakatei@twit.social

  • 0 Posts
  • 184 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 12th, 2023
  • baltakatei@sopuli.xyztoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•America
    30·
    1 month ago

    Hard mode: set time zone to UTC (or Reykjavik; it’s the same) and force yourself to add/subtract offset hours every time you want to know local time. Also, this forces you to track when exactly daylight saving time starts and stops.

    Benefit: you know when space probe stuff happens because they’re almost always timestamped UTC. Also, playing Eve Online becomes slightly easier.

  • baltakatei@sopuli.xyztoTechnology@lemmy.world•Group Pushing Age Verification Requirements for AI Turns Out to Be Sneakily Backed by OpenAIEnglish
    3·
    1 month ago

    Theoretically, it’s possible for the user to authenticate their age without either the site or service knowing the user’s identity. Quick and dirty example:

    There’s a thing called a ring signature that allows one to prove that one of a large number of people digitally signed something. Let’s say a million people all have private keys whose corresponding public keys are registered to a database after they flashed their state ID at a post office or something to prove they are ≥18 years of age. So, John Smith uses his private key plus all 1 million public keys to sign a statement that he sends to a server saying he’s ≥18. The server then takes all 1 million public keys plus the signed message John provided and verifies that his signature is among the 1 million but cannot calculate which exact public key belongs to John. The verification process requires all 1 million public keys as input; you cannot, for example, try an omit each public key one-by-one to see which causes the verification process to fail.

    Currently, there is ongoing research on how to make compact ring signatures since they can be very large the more public keys are involved.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature

    That said, even if you had scalable compact ring signature technology, I’d be more worried about advertiser deänonymization efforts once a user has logged in that check browser canvas size, IP address, user agent, font availability, etc. See https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

    Also, ring signatures for age verification don’t actually verify age, just that someone proved their age at some point in the past to the owner of the public key database; just like an adult can log into YouTube on behalf of their children and let the children go to town, John could give anyone access to his private key regardless of age.

  • baltakatei@sopuli.xyztoComic Strips@lemmy.world•Safe haven.
    2·
    1 month ago

    Relevant Hogfather (1996) quote:

    Biers, and undead bar where everybody knows your name

    Susan didn’t like Biers but she went there anyway, when the pressure of being normal got too much. Biers, despite the smell and the drink and the company, had one important virtue. In Biers no one took any notice. Of anything. Hogswatch was traditionally supposed to be a time for families but the people who drank in Biers probably didn’t have families; some of them looked as though they might have had litters, or clutches. Some of them looked as though they’d probably eaten their relatives, or at least someone’s relatives.

    Biers was where the undead drank. And when Igor the barman was asked for a Bloody Mary, he didn’t mix a metaphor.

    The regular customers didn’t ask questions, and not only because some of them found anything above a growl hard to articulate. None of them was in the answers business. Everyone in Biers drank alone, even when they were in groups. Or packs.