I miss Pine too. I could read/file/delete scores of plaintext emails in seconds using single keystrokes.
Every email client I've used since Pine has been better at dealing with all the stuff we've bolted on to email (HTML, attachments, calendar invites...) but none of them have been as efficient at the core tasks of email as Pine was.
A side note: I think there's an unmet need for algorithms that can convert photos of these random patterns into text (or something similar) that can be stored in a database and searched quickly for matching patterns. I've tried image similarity algorithms like the ones used by e.g. Google Reverse Image Search, but they seem poorly suited for this task. I ended up writing my own crude algorithm in the paper above that converts a pattern into a set of strings, and it works OK, but surely there are better ways to do this.
Very cool! This seems almost like physical cryptography. Maybe there is a better term for it, but I’d be very interested in other work along these lines.
> We describe the first MITM-resistant device pairing protocol purely based on a single wireless interface with an extensive adversarial model and protocol analysis. We show that existing wireless devices can be retro-fitted with the VP protocol via software updates, i.e. without changes to the hardware.
I once wondered if the colorful fibers in bank notes — which, like the nonpareil spheres, are distributed at random throughout the paper on which the notes a printed — can also be used to generate a unique number.
Examples (aha, including a teaser to an upcoming product called “Verifibre”!) can be seen here:
Instead of a lookup table, that number could be signed and the signature printed onto the bank note itself. It would be impractical to either deduce the signing key or duplicate the pattern of fibers in a way that the signature was still valid.
I don’t know if there’s a signature algorithm though that is resilient to lossy and unreliable input data and which can also produce short enough output that could be printed on the face of a bank note.
I should think you could do this with fingerprinting the photo similar to how music is fingerprinted for things like Shazam or MusicBrainz. I used to work for MusicIP, which I believe developed the fingerprinting system MusicBrainz is using.
There are image-representation versions of wavelets that would work well in that context, with some tolerance/quantization of the frequency representation to accommodate fuzzy edges, and likewise for nearby hues.
Perceptual color representation gets a bit harder but if you're only looking at gamut differences on cameras/screens/printed media I think it's feasible.
Alternatively, if you know a lot about the source image you can train a NN for the specific application.
It would be pretty hard for the attacker to precisely arrange a hundred tiny sprinkles on the surface of a pill to exactly match a known-good pattern. (At least compared to just throwing a bunch of assorted sprinkles on the pill randomly and taking a photo of the result, which is what legitimate manufacturers would be doing.)
yeah, this is one common claim about sprinkles - that the pattern can't be reproduced. Is that so true? Manually, sure, probably, perhaps. But if sprinkles signing is common enough, or the attacker has enough budget - and they do - then sprinkles matching deserves a machine. A sprinkles printer.
And if you have a standard algorithm which converts a sprinkles picture or three into a hash. Then now you have a precise target for the machine to benchmark against.
I guess this would be easy to spot for the end user. Maybe the app that is used for checking the pills can alert the user if one pattern is scanned multiple times.
Can anyone recommend a backup strategy for iCloud? Specifically, my Macs' hard drives aren't big enough for any one computer to store everything locally, so some documents end up living only in iCloud which is clearly asking for trouble. My ideal solution would be to regularly mirror iCloud's contents on my NAS (which is big enough to store everything locally) but I've never seen anyone implement something like that.
Have a look at SuperDuper![0] (The exclamation mark is part of the software name, as there are some other things with the same name, but the spelling above is correct.)
It’s shareware, and there’s a free trial. It’s fairly priced imo, and I’ve only used the shareware version. The paid version has some decent QoL features including ACL fixup, but I’m not sure how important that is? I usually run Disk Utility to try to fix those myself but I don’t claim to know the specifics of the paid features.
It seems to work fine with NAS volumes that are configured to play nice with Time Machine, but I forget what the specifics entail on that part. The .dmg backup should be more compatible with varied NAS setups; iirc it has something to do with ACLs being writable by macOS and associated software.
I like that it can make bootable clones of disks to other disks. It can also make .dmg backups of folders or disks.
No affiliation, just a happy user. If anyone knows of other software in the space, I’d love to hear about them, especially FOSS options.
The paid version of SuperDuper! can do incremental backups whereas the free version will always do a full backup and take more time. I’d say it’s worth it to pay for it since you get updates for at least a few years for that version. I use the paid version of Carbon Copy Cloner (bombich.com) though.
Thanks for the reply. I don’t know CCC well enough to comment on it other than to say that I hear good things from its users.
What do you like about CCC? I haven’t ever used it, though I have used a few different commercial/paid backup software and services, running on various OSes. I don’t consider myself a backup expert as far as how the software is implemented or anything, but I have experience testing backups produced by various backup softwares in test and production environments for clients and in-house. I’ve also configured and used a few different FOSS and also proprietary NAS softwares/OSes and how they interact with backup sets.
I think I personally prefer backups that are a single or multiple file archives vs cloning files, and that’s why I don’t really consider iCloud a backup at all. Also I have encountered issues where the target filesystem doesn’t support ACLs or file/folder permissions in a compatible way compared to the origin filesystem/OS, leading to… fun times in rabbit holes.
The best advice I could give anyone when it comes to backups is testing the restore functionality; just because a tool tells you that a backup is valid doesn’t necessarily mean it will restore properly, or at all, with the software that produced it or even specialized tools.
And if you want to use that NAS while you are outside of your house, you could run Tailscale on both client and server, and that would allow you to securely connect to your NAS remotely over the WireGuard encrypted Tailscale connection.
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Even though Elcomsoft have a long and storied history, why should people trust their data to the software of a company which already shows such disdain for privacy?
OP stated he doesn't have enough disk space for everything on one computer. So it would at least be a bit of hassle (i.e. having the backup spread across multiple Time Machine backups.
Wow, thank you! This made my day: "Consider the possibility that introducing an arbitrarily small tame asteroid
could throw a planet out of the solar system. This would be a different kind
of instability than those that have been so far considered. It would be of
mathematical interest to prove that a system consisting of a sun and three
planets could be disrupted by a single arbitrarily small tame asteroid."
The sci-fi book practically writes itself. A wealthy entrepreneur puts an asteroid in motion to move mars and sets up a long term foundation to keep it operational for the next 40,000 years. In conjunction with the orbital adjustment, terraforming begins and the first enclosed permanent settlements are founded. After the orbital changes are complete, the new planet is open for human development and is renamed from Mars to Musk, after its visionary founder.
Of course things go horribly wrong, and Mars crashes into earth. The moral of the story being if you don't have ultra-superior technology and experience doing the same thing outside of your own solar system and checking the results to adjust your procedures, then nudging things and seeing what happens at planetary scale is playing with fire.
Is there any better embodiment of entrepreneurial capitalism than stealthily appropriating an entire planet, privatising it, and then naming it after one's self? ... I'd be hard pressed to think of one.
Hans Moravec is really into space elevators. Is there some correlation between being an AI researcher and having an interest in space mega-engineering?
Almost certainly, simply because they both strongly correlate with being geeks. And SF geeks in particular. And the very particular sort of hard SF geek who feels right at home at Shock Level 4 [1].
yes, it's known as the nerd space elevator strange attractor. It is frequently observed in nature with its related chaotic entities, the national-scale DC power grid attractor, and the singularity attractor (some argue that all these attractors are really just specific instances of the singularity attractor).
It's a nice hard problem with lots of juicy subproblems that you can work on even through the central problem (materials science) is nowhere near being solvable.
I wonder what will happen to the others planets, on a long scale... in a dynamical (chaotic) system stability is not granted, probably a bunch of asteroids-tools are needed to correct the deviation of all others planets form a desired configuration.
LLM then Google? "The greening of Mars" is not by Stanley Robinson, but by James Lovelock and Michael Allaby. It doesn't appear to feature moving Mars, but terraforming it using 80's technology. I don't think "Green Mars" by Robinson has Mars being moved either.
There's nothing on Google for Benford and "Martian Transfer", though it's possible he wrote such a story with a different title.
I had the same thought. BTW, the movie is titled "The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!" in the UK (same as the book it's based on). The studio changed the title for Americans [1], perhaps assuming we'd be less interested in a movie with scientists, shudder...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3p_Cv32tEo