neiman

Honestly, who likes any hype in anything ever? Especially if you genuinely like and understand the thing being hyped.

It's cool that stuff like vector file formats is still being reinvented. What's the new idea(s) here, though?

Like, I get that it's new and has better features (better compression, faster decoding, etc.) --- but what are the new ideas or insights that led to this design?

You can pay with a card, but there is an additional 5 Euros fee (which is fair enough).

I booked a refundable hotel already in the summer, in case I won't get the tickets. But getting the ticket this year was relatively easy (though maybe I just got lucky).

Where were people's favourite lectures?

I attended 7 talks.

My favourite talk by far was hacking the GPG. Brilliant, really: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-to-sign-or-not-to-sign-practical...

The "In-house electronics manufacturing from scratch" was a very inspiring talk: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-in-house-electronics-manufacturi...

The rest were less good for me personally. Either over-dramatic and shallow (with a sexy-sounding topic) or too procedural in topics I'm not an expert in.

A few questions:

1. People still do software based on the GNU license. What's the difference?

2. I'm a mathematician - math is not copyrighted, yet it's still being done.

3. Is it really so important for society that copyrighted movies be based on old stories? Won't society benefit from new stories and characters?

To be clear, I don't propose to really implement it. But the existing system also sucks. I'm thinking that maybe incorporating such an idea into the existing system - limiting what you can do with public domain work - can be beneficial.

I recently made a radical proposal of public domain rules; It's inspired by GNU software licenses. It goes like this:

1. Anyone can use anything that is in the public domain.

2. Any creation that uses elements from the public domain is also, automatically, in the public domain.

3. Activate retroactively: When the first book in a series (for example) gets into the public domain, then the whole series (and franchise) becomes public domain.

(3) depends on what the initial rule is for something to get into the public domain.

P.S: It's a thought experiment, not an actual "let's implement it now!" thing.

I don't care much about Betty Boop either, and I do care, like you, about The Maltese Falcon - but mostly I think that a version of The Maltese Falcon starring Betty Boop is definitely something I'd like to see!

I think the small-ish communities, where it's really people who are enthusiastic about the same topic, are often great.

It's when they become bigger that the crappy echo chamber begins.

I did a small project last week. It's completely vanilla and works great. It's a web tool for writing long threads for Mastodon.

I kept on wondering while making it if I was doing it wrong without any framework. Because that's what everyone else seems to expect.

Splinter, splinter.almonit.club, if anyone cares.

Many countries still have problems with organized crime, and it's getting worse even though they have aggressive KYC and AML. Israel is one example I'm familiar with. So it's a bit more complicated than that.

I understand the goal of KYC/AML, and maybe in some places it's implemented correctly. But from my limited experience in the EU, it can be easy for criminals to avoid it, but it makes my life difficult for no good reason (both for privacy violation and for times when it is simply fails).

Yes, you're correct. I used it in the wrong way.

I don't think KYC keeps people honest, I think it's just making the life of honest people uncomfortable.

Poland, and specifically Warsaw, since the process might be a little different in different parts of Poland.

There are plenty of civil organizations and hackerspaces in Europe that focus on such things, not to mention academic groups.

I tried with one physical bank, and they refused; the expat forums said it's the same with all, though I didn't verify myself tbh.

The problem is that the only thing you get is a stamp in your passport saying you applied for a temporary residence permit (including the request number).

The border control people can then (I guess) use this number to verify that your case is still pending, so you're legal in the country. But since no one else can, you get no services.

[Edit: I should add that my main problem was with other financial services, not a bank, since I could use my existing bank accounts from another country. So maybe if I'd make enough effort, I would be able to open a physical bank account, but this was not the main problem for me]

You get a stamp in the passport that you're waiting for a decision regarding your stay, but it's meaningless to anyone besides the border control people.

I'm a foreigner living in the EU for many years, here's my 2 cents.

For over a year, I was locked out of financial services due to my inability to pass KYC. The reason was that I had already left one country, but was still in the process of getting a residency visa in another. During the process, I'm allowed to live in this country, but I have no ability to prove it to any financial institutions.

So, no wonder I'm bitter about KYC and AML.

Regarding privacy, I appreciate the EU's effort, but I also feel they focus too much on the legal side and not enough on the implementation side of it.

My ID was photocopied at almost every accommodation I visited in the last decade. I have no way to make private digital payments, and even offline cash is not being promoted.

At least once, my private financial record was accessed by a 3rd party that used it against me. But I'm not the kind of person who would go into a legal battle. I'm the kind of person who uses technology to protect his privacy. And the EU, with decisions like this, makes it very difficult for me.

I doubt banning Monero or Zcash would prevent criminals from tax evasion. They'll find other ways. So, as often happens, "Locks keep honest people honest".

I adore Terence Tao, but this one feels like stating the obvious.

Basically, he says that simple solutions to complex situations work sometimes—for example when a simpler system can approximate your system.

But many times it's not true! So you need a complex solution to a complex situation.

That's kind of stating the obvious, no?

Isn't every community is like that after so long? Like, I don't like the way that Matt behaved recently, but regarding most of the complains in the post -- these exist in any community or organization which is big enough and has been around for long enough.

Did they? Heh, I didn't know that. But I thought they launched with the AT protocol already, no?

By making the protocol centralized and stupid-simple, it's also stupid-simple to replace in when everyone is done painting the perfect bikeshed.

Can you recall any example of anyone replacing a centralized protocol with a decentralized one?

At first, I thought they used a cool new variation of something like VDF (Verifiable delay functions) or sequential proof of work to make a time lock.

In these two options, you need to make a very long sequence of calculations to decrypt the message. Since the calculations cannot be parallized and since the sequence can be as long as you choose, it creates a time lock on the message.

But no, they just use some kind of regular multi-sig/secret sharing.

Oh yes, I even had a free IPNS pinning service (for community members mostly) built with a friend.

https://dwebservices.xyz/

I get told that a lot! xD

My original aim was to write an IPFS blogging engine for my personal use, so I needed some dynamic loading from IPFS there.

Now I switched to Jekyll, and it would be easier to host the blog on Github indeed, but I'm kind of playing a quixotic game of trying to minimize the presence of Google/Microsoft/Amazon and other big-tech in my life.

Maybe it is the case for ENS

Oh yeah, I was referring strictly to IPFS+ENS websites. I have been working with it for several years so my mind goes for this use-case automatically.

It worked fine before for many years when it was slightly less popular.

They're having growing pains due to scalability problems and some libraries, like Helia (the JS library of IPFS), being new. I guess I'm also quite stubborn in wanting to do it my way, without the aid of any services, and for the content I pin to be available in all places, including Helia in the browser.

I got one from a hackerspace outside Germany.

Which country is this from? I don't feel it fits where I live at all.

It has a unique identifier of data (their main feature), a naming system and some other features, that makes it quite different than bittorrent (as far as two p2p sharing data networks can be different, obviously).

Minecraft does not ban users for profanity. The list of ban offenses is currently:

Are you quoting reality of a FAQ? I don't believe the FAQ rules of Microsoft much more than I believe 10 years old kids.

For me creating an account is a sort of payment.