It's really cool that the full text of this paper is posted publicly like this, +1 for foss science. But it's also very dense and I'm not a physicist, can anyone ELI5 for us mere mortals?
HN user
derekmhewitt
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/derekmhewitt; my proof: https://keybase.io/derekmhewitt/sigs/SGxtLUDcwAdzX3-keAX7EQAYXu3654QCWG_91V3xiwY ]
This actually happened in WW2, after fully breaking the Enigma codes the Allies had to carefully choose which intelligence to act on and not act on, sometimes with poor results for their own side. But the alternative would have been that the Germans would have to conclude their communications were compromised and change something, rendering a lot of the effort to crack enigma in the first place moot. The Turing movie mentioned in another comment is excellent and touches on this topic.
I highly recommend the book 'Flyboys' by James Bradley (also the author of Flags of our Fathers) for help putting this period of WWII into context. A good portion of the end of the book discusses the firebombing of Japan and the dropping of the two nuclear bombs, and how that was rationalized as acceptable in the minds of those who participated.
I received an email with this text from support@envkey.com earlier today:
---
Today I have some difficult news to share. After nearly 7 years of working on EnvKey, I’ve decided to begin winding down the company. In order to give all customers and users plenty of time to transition away, EnvKey will wind down over the next 6 months. EnvKey Cloud will shut down on February 1st, 2025 and then the EnvKey company will be dissolved.
This has been a stressful and emotional decision for me, but unfortunately I’ve had to accept that continuing to run EnvKey is no longer financially sustainable for myself and my family, and therefore it’s time to move on.
I understand that this may come as a surprise and a disappointment. I’m deeply honored by the trust that hundreds of organizations and thousands of users have placed in EnvKey over the years, and I regret giving you extra work to do in transitioning away.
I hope that the gradual wind down period will help to soften any negative impact. Additionally, I've been in touch with the CEO of Infisical, another secrets management platform that is also open source, end-to-end encrypted, and similar in its spirit and goals to EnvKey. They are working on migration tools to help automate the transition as much as possible, should you choose to move to Infisical. You can learn more about migrating from EnvKey to Infisical here: https://infisical.com/docs/documentation/guides/migrating-fr...
Here are a few more details on how the wind down will work:
The creation of new accounts and orgs on EnvKey Cloud has been disabled. Updates to the EnvKey website, docs, GitHub readme, and the app itself will be made shortly as well to account for the wind down.
I’ll continue to ensure that EnvKey Cloud runs reliably and securely until February 1st, 2025.
I’ll continue to provide support during this period. Support will prioritize helping customers transition to a new system.
For customers on annual billing plans:
If your current subscription period ends before February 1st, 2025 and you retain an active EnvKey Cloud account when your subscription period ends, you will be transitioned to an equivalent monthly plan until the shut down on February 1st, 2025.
If your current subscription period ends after February 1st, 2025, a refund will be issued to you for the difference, based on the number of days after February 1st, 2025 that your subscription would end. For example, say you’re on the Cloud Pro plan—$149/mo billed annually. Your subscription would end on April 18th, 2025, 76 days (or 2.5 months) after February 1st, 2025. 2.5 x $149 = $372.50, so you would receive a refund of $372.50. If your organization is eligible for a refund based on this formula, I’ll send your billing contact an email individually to let you know when it has been issued. These refunds will be processed over the next few weeks.
I thank you for your understanding. You can reply to this email with any questions, or you can reach out to me directly: dane@envkey.com.
All the best, Dane
---
(edited to remove extra whitespace) Unfortunately I can't find a post on their twitter, github or website to substantiate so the link is just to their main github.
IANAL but a face-value evaluation of this policy seems unlikely to shield Cloudflare from either civil or criminal liability for illegal activity? I know the DMCA provides a certain degree of immunity to web hosts (regarding copyrighted content in particular) but after abuse is reported I believe there's a timeline where action must be taken or they lose their immunity, right? Does a similar law not exist for content that's already always illegal (such as hosting C&C servers for/distributing malware)?
This is such a neat discovery, I'm having fun just thinking about all the amazing things you could do with this. Imagine in many years being able to inject, or deposit in some more elegant way, ceramic (or other abrasion resistant) medium into a worn bone joint and print it as cartilage tissue replacement.
While I appreciate the point of view the author of the article presents here, I do not think warning labels are a good solution to the addictiveness (and other negative effects) of social media. I would much rather see a regulatory perspective that comes at the problem from a data gathering and processing direction. If we limit (via appropriate legislation and a regulatory body) the amount and type of data that social media sites (really all websites) are allowed to retain and use to target users with content and advertising we can directly reduce the addictiveness of the product. It would be like taking the nicotine out of cigarettes during the production process, to borrow an analogy from the article.
Regarding voluntary adoption, I watched an interesting video on YouTube about this a few days ago which handles it from a "diffusion of innovation" point of view:
Absolutely worth the 10 minute watch giving you some useful ideas for selling tech innovations to your organization.
This was an interesting read! I hope they do a follow up article on how they automatically manage the rest of their recovery process.
Not weighing in on if this is a good or bad thing overall, but I did listen to a pretty good NPR podcast a while back that explains a little more about this treaty and how it was affecting businesses in the US.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/01/634737852/epis...
Sounds really cool! I can't wait to charge my phone just by setting it on my nightstand at the end of the day. And my smart watch, and my headphones.
I'm seeing the term "HA" being used a lot in the comments here, what does it mean?
Can someone explain why they would transition to a new hash function and not a block chain based system of tracking? If one of the goals of introducing a stronger hash function is signage of individual commits it seems like a block chain would be ideal.
I'm ok with Edge and Bing being the default "web tab" providers for this new tab functionality, but I'll be instantly changing it for a different browser and search engine. If it's not possible to change this I'll probably ignore tabs entirely until it is.
If you've ever thought about doing contract development work this blog post is worth the read.
Obviously YMMV, but my personal take on this is that no particular fish is too big to be thrown back, especially if they're a pain in the ass.
That said, it sounds like you don't want to do that. So instead, if I were you, I would attempt to find a back channel to get the information you need. This could be the executives administrative assistant/secretary, a corporate public information officer, someone in their marketing department, etc. Basically anyone other than the obstructionist person you're currently talking to, but avoid going over their head (if they aren't the business owner). This requires more leg work from you, but could net you most, or all of, that future business if you can deliver where others would have given up. Don't forget to bill them for the additional hours you spend though, never work for free.
Personally, my main take away from this article was that in 2015 50% of the patients that had a kidney removed (which would roughly be the other 24k patients the study didn't comment on) had their kidneys removed via an old school open incision procedure. Why is that still happening at all? Laparoscopic procedures are significantly safer for the patient, cheaper and faster than old school methods, and they have a quicker recovery time, but just two years ago literally half of the kidney removals performed in these 416 hospitals were using a completely outdated method.
Good article, was informative.
Germany isn't the only country considering laws like this, and companies with large online presences need to find some way to get a handle on the user created content they're propagating. The fact that it's open season as far as what users post is going to eventually lead to the companies doing the propagating: Facebook, Google, etc, being the ones called before the state to answer for it. This ultimately isn't fair and is terrible for business, but the situation we have right now isn't fair either, especially to the individuals who are being slandered with no recourse.
Just as a spitball idea...
What about a structured "cohort" hiring process where you give potential employees short term (literally one or two days, where you have a group exercise like a "hackathon" where you make a sample product for demo, then moving up to one or two week rounds) contracts that allow you to evaluate and accept (pass on to future rounds) or reject a large candidate pool and thereby filter your potential future employees. Given the current costs of recruiters, HR personnel, interviews and headhunters this might actually end up being cheaper than current "traditional" hiring methods and could generate some very effective development teams.
This was an interesting article, thanks for sharing it.
But as an average consumer and amateur investor (at best) I'm much more interested in using Bitcoin (and other digital currencies) as a medium of exchange rather than as a store of value. For short term transactions (ex: exchange fiat for bitcoin -> transfer bitcoin to recipient) digital currencies offer a very fast, secure, and simple method for transferring value across borders that would traditionally take much longer than a few ticks of the blockchain. And over that shorter term their value is relatively stable and suitable as a medium for such exchanges.