What about future attacks by quantum computers? Is Git safe from quantum computers for it's all hashes only? Or shall there be issues with quantum attacks?

I'm asking for there are several projects that are already moving to quantum-resistant schemes (like OpenSSH who uses an hybrid scheme [1]).

[1] https://www.openssh.org/pq.html

And from the other comment, symmetric cryptography is safe too from QC attacks.

So it's apparently as you wrote: it's really only asymmetric crypto that is at risk.

Quantum algorithms require some sort of quantum 'trick' to actually have any speedup over classical computers. The most general quantum trick is Grover's algorithm, which lets you find f⁻¹(x) (given f and x) in sqrt(N) queries rather than N queries, where N is the size of the set from which x is drawn. This cuts the bit security of every algorithm in half, although for things like cryptographic hashes, it really means that a second preimage is now only as 'easy' as finding a collision (due to the birthday attack).

The other really well-known quantum trick is QFT, which allows you to find the period of an unknown periodic function really quickly. This is what allows quantum computers to break asymmetric algorithms based on integer factoring or elliptic curves, since they can both be expressed in terms of the QFT.

But the article helps. Basically Grover’s is not as potent as Shorr’s. And it seems like everyone is convinced there is no dramatically better quantum algorithm than Grover’s?

Grover's assumes the function is a black box that you cannot look inside and that your only way of finding a certain result is through repeated invocation.

Under this assumption, Grover's is optimal in the number of invocations of the function required to find the result.

However, this assumption may be quite wrong for AES and friends. It may be the structure allows for non brute force attacks that are totally impractical classically but not subject to Grover's optimality limitation quantumly.

The only thing you are guaranteed here is that if you cannot take advantage of structure at all then Grover's is the best you can do.

Given that we have pretty much always found a way to take some advantage of structure, I would bet we will do so here.

That may or may not make it viable to break at all, I just wouldn't bet that it must be treated like a black box forever.

To me that would be a very bad bet.

And, if I’m following you, that’s the key difference in Grover’s and Shorr’s: Shorr’s takes advantage of structure?

I'll explain it without going too far into why any of this is true, which is much more complicated to prove. This will let me use relatively simple math.

Let's say you want to factor N. Pick some number that is coprime to N, which we'll call a, and consider f(x) = a^x (mod N).

Since it's a modular function, it repeats at some point. Shor calculates the period of this function (r), rather than seeing which of the 2^n numbers is "the answer".

Once you know the period of this function, there is a high chance that the factors fall out of gcd(a^(r/2) - 1, N) and gcd(a^(r/2)+1, N).

The point here is not to explain Shor's as much as to point out it is finding a strong amount of structure to take advantage of, quantumly.

This is actually the same way the oracle separation of BQP and the entire polynomial hiearchy works[1] - It depends on forrelation, which is a problem where quantum computers can extract a global property of the function without needing to learn all the individual values, by taking advantage of structure.

Which is why i go to "The idea that there is literally no structure that can be taken advantage of in AES strikes me as a bad bet".

In part because it's already false if you go literature searching. For example, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00200...

There are already reduced round quantum attacks on AES as well. Again, more to the point, the idea that symmetric key ciphers and cryptographic hashes in general are safe because grover's is slower than shor's is not a thing i would bet on at all. Even if AES ends up relatively safe, that tells you basically nothing about the other practically-used ciphers and functions since there are a lot of different construction mechanisms being used.

[1] People still seem to believe there are no functions which quantum computing models have been been proven to be faster at than classical computing models. This is false. Forrelation is the canonical example - and shows that BQP can perform things exponentially faster than you can classically even given access to an infinite polynomial hierarchy.

It is the current physical actualization of these computing models that have the "is it really faster than classical computers" issue, not the theory ;)

(IE it is a perfect example of "in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, and in practice, there is")

This has nothing to do with SHAttered

Not by a mile. They're even (probably illegally and there's apparently a class action lawsuit oncoming: at least something to that extent was posted on HN today) teaming up, as a duopoly, to push for the same bullshit regulations / "we need to slow down AI research".

The reason they're teaming up is the real competition is, as in many other domains, China.

Great countries, amazing cultures and all cultures are equally good. I personally miss the native south american ones who were torturing kids with stones (for they hadn't discovered the way to transform iron into knives) for as long as possible, to extract as many tears as possible from those kids before they'd eventually die.

All cultures are 100% equivalent. You know, I know it. We all know it.

What do you mean the "first" big? 1929? 2001? 2008?

Do you mean 1929 wasn't a big financial crisis and that, this time, we'll have the first "real" big financial crisis?

I'm confused.

It's honestly very refreshing to have stuff I self-host and be operational without needing 24/7 Internet connection.

I'm running such a setup since years and, IMO, it helps me focus.

I remember thinking about how different that workflow is but it must be incredibly productive. Everything would be lightning fast (even stable Internet isn't always snappy and sometimes it's a chore) and there would basically be zero inline ads or any context switches.

> "I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it."

Yeah people don't pay enough attention to those settings IMO. The first thing I do when I set up a new machine (or upgrade my OS) is to restore all my powersaving configs.

For example I've got all but one of my virtual desktops that put the CPU in powersave mode: I don't need max Ghz when browsing the Web, not even on demand. But when I switch to the virtual desktop where my development environment is, then I want power on demand.

Now I don't do it to save the planet: I do it because I love a quieter computing experience (coupled with Be Quiet! PSU and Noctua fans, this makes for a very quiet computer). That it consumes less electricity is a nice side-benefit.

I don't have any of those but I do need one messenger to communicate with my buddies in the EU. As I'm a "fuck the Zuck" person and an "ABM" (Anything But Microsoft), Telegram is my poison.

I don't have any doubt: I know it's not E2EE (and I doubt that one-on-one encrypted communication --it's a setting you MUST turn on-- in Telegram is actually really E2EE).

But Telegram is neither from the Zuck nor from Microsoft, so that's a big win for me.

Also basically everyone in the EU has Telegram now.

Secret Chats in telegram really is E2EE.

It is just a bit clumsy to use because it offers quite good protections. Because of it, it only works between two people and on one device of each participant. They also must be online at the same time for the key exchange/generation protocol to work. This makes it a hassle and nobody uses it. But what is there does meet the requirements of E2EE even more so than WhatApp or Signal where for example an extra party can be added to an encrypted chat. The police have used this feature to snoop in Germany: https://cybernews.com/privacy/police-telegram-whatsapp-signa...

With Telegram Secret Chats they wouldn't be able to do this. On the other hand, because it's so clumsy nobody uses it and thus people use the much worse off alternative of no E2EE at all in the regular Telegram which the police have also monitored. So it's arguable that whatsapp/signal's compromise was a good one. If you put up too many hurdles in security the people will stop using it.

But I wouldn't call Telegram's secret chats "not real E2EE".

But Linux took over the world and it had a crappy UI. I was there, back when Xorg didn't even exist, running X and messing with modelines on Linux. All the window manager sucked big times.

Sun, just like SGI, got attacked by cheap beige PCs running either Windows or Linux.

I don't think their UI had much to do with their downfall and, arguably, SGI's UIs were better than the competition and they still disappeared too.

Also weren't most machines sold by Sun servers anyway? Their famous "We the dot in .com" tagline.

My first exposure to Solaris was in 2003 when Linux had Gnome 2.6 and Solaris had CDE. The UI on my Debian box seemed decades ahead of the Solaris machines I managed, which looked like Windows 3.1 and performed about as well.

Combined with Linux package managers being infinitely better, the GNU core utilities having so many more conveniences and options than the Solaris equivalents, I felt like Sun was this dinosaur that couldn’t die fast enough. I’ll still never understand why so many people praise Sun for its engineering culture when free software seemed so superior to me at the time.

My favorite anecdote exemplifying my opinion about Solaris at the time: you log into the console of your Sun workstation, running SunOS, with your Sun keyboard plugged in, and press backspace. It echoes ^H back to you. They couldn’t even figure out how to configure their own keyboards correctly out of the box.

Maybe in the 90s the standards were different. Maybe their tech was better. But by the time I ever used their software is was the butt of jokes.

Linux having better UI than proprietary Unices (except SGI) was true from the beginning. In 01993, even before package managers, the Linux standard was color rxvt, color ls, Seyon, fvwm with multiple virtual desktops (really important at 800×600), Emacs preinstalled, and you could termify your web browser and whatnot so you could run them at home on a dialup shell account. Proprietary Unices (except SGI) had monochrome xterm, vi (with no arrow key support), and typically either twm or mwm, which both looked like shit and still do. Suns sometimes had olwm but Sun had sort of abandoned Open Look by that point. If you had a Sun at home connected through a dialup shell account, you could forget about running any TCP/IP apps on your Sun. By 01996 the Linux world had slirp, so you didn't even have to termify your TCP/IP apps, while Solaris didn't even include a C compiler anymore.

CDE seems like somebody thought that the problem with Motif was that, although it was butt-ugly, it wasn't quite ugly enough.

And, yeah, backspace worked. Also automatic window resizing. And for years Solaris had a totally fatal TCP round-trip estimation bug which made TCP connections to Solaris machines over dialup incredibly slow. Linux was just dramatically more technically competent.

Sun did have a pretty amazing engineering culture. They shipped SPARC, Open Look, NeWS, Java, HotJava, HotSpot, NFS, Sun RPC, yp/NIS, Spring, ZFS, OpenBoot/Open Firmware, and I think even Sprite, and for a while they employed the Tcl team, bringing Tcl out of the stone age. But they sucked at fixing the fatal flaws in their actual products, and half the engineering achievements in my list above were murdered by Sun's incompetent management.

That's really an old-school UNIX convention that should have died with the move from teletypes to CRT terminals. The default behavior was that ERASE was # and KILL was @ (rather than backspace and Ctrl-C). It was typical for these to get set properly on logging in.

KILL isn't Ctrl-C. That's INTR, as you can verify in stty -a. KILL is Ctrl-U.

One of the other students in that class gave me a Mandrake Linux cd (It ran KDE) he taught me how to use SSH. After that I worked from home and submitted my assignments remotely. I have not looked back from Linux since.

I don't think it was limited to Sun. The first job I had out of university there were computers running HPUX also had CDE gave me flashbacks straight back to university. It definitely gave me the impression that all the commercial Unix companies were ancient Dinosaurs that had zero taste.

Sun got by because they had faster and more reliable hardware than what was available in the x86 space at the time. eBay's services ran on a handful of 64 CPU Starfire servers. And proprietary UNIX workstations had a bunch of specialized apps that weren't available on Linux at that point.

Linux took over the world because any licensing model that requires a per CPU license simply can’t work in a massively scalable situation like server farms and cloud.

Linux won on the server side because they got just as right as Unix. The crappy UI (windows) was the one that didn't work with shell scripting, didn't work with ssh, etc.

Once you have git and actions, I don't think that the language really matters all that much.

The exceptions were mostly hardware graphics accelerators in some labs, when my Linux PC had to do it in software. And I got myself a surplus DEC Multia (alpha) that was really fast with Linux for natively compiled code, beating my contemporary 486DX3-100. But, the PC was still faster for web browsing, because running Netscape on alpha meant doing x86 emulation!

Likewise, my ~90 MHz Pentium MMX laptop with Linux was faster at regular dev work on my work-supplied Sun Ultra workstation in the late 90s. (Edit: Hmm, I am not sure about this laptop anymore, it might have been 166 MHz??)

Due to my positive experiences, I was an aggressive early adopter (and frequent beta tester) of nearly every Linux ecosystem frontier for decades. E.g. 2D accelerators, 3D accelerators, SMP, large file support, gigabit ethernet, wireless ethernet, power management, virtualization, 64 bit architectures, SCSI/SATA/Firewire/e-SATA/NVME, hardware and MD-RAID, ext2/ext3/xfs/btrfs, ...

Somewhere, I still have a Red Hat 5 retail CD. I'm not sure, but I might have bought it at Borders Books rather than a computer shop. I know I bought a few CD-ROM collections at the bookstore.

Minix existed at the time too, I know because I ran it on an 8088 PC.

But within a few years, linux started gaining mindshare and was starting to replace proprietary unix especially on individual PCs.

It wasn't until mid 1992 that distros started to exist, and I'd say it took a bit of time for those to be complete enough to be usable for someone with a goal other than smoke-testing the kernel on their PC.

I can say for certain that I, a complete newbie, was able to boot SLS Linux floppies in early 1993, and within a couple months I was installing Slackware to HDD.

You also had SuSE, which really started as German-localized Slackware.

Linux took over in all the places where a good GUI didn't matter. In ran most of the Unix server software on hardware orders of magnitude cheaper than what was needed to run a commercial Unix. Windows ran on that same cheap hardware but was much more expensive for the same capability.

Despite Sun's marketing push Linux was really the dot in most of the dotcom darlings.

like smartphones ;-)

FWIW and for good reasons current Android UI is terrible for a desktop usage and ChromeOS is too limited for some people.

Then Intel came out with dual-core processors, which was the new hotness. So he wrote a followup page, literally titled "Pecked To Death By Ducks With Two Bills".

At the time, I thought they were funny, and made reasonable arguments. But in retrospect, they were just trying to distract the customers from the fact that Intel was overtaking them.

That wasn't even true back then.

Many early chinese kingdoms had coins as money and they were based on the rarity of the metal. And they began turning to shit when they started creating coins out of thin air, with hardly any rare metal in them: some kingdoms literally lost it all once they began hyper-inflating their currency by creating way too many coins (and at times there were so many worthless coins they couldn't even store them anymore).

I think coins made of metal are definitely part of the hierarchy of money.

And arguably Nixon "temporarily" ending the dollar's convertibility to gold in the early 1970s is an experiment for which we'll soon see the eventual result:

https://www.usdebtclock.org/

Oh sure, but that doesn't mean we have to accept as normal governments where leeches enriching themselves and their fat friends manage to create public debt of more than 100% of the GDP and make the money printer go brrrrrr everytime there is problem (which is another gigantic problem in itself).

A country like France is officially 57% of the GDP in public spending for terribly bad services in return. Poor education, hospitals in terribly bad shapes, no doctors in villages, insane taxation (France has 400 different taxes, more than six times the number of taxes Germany has, for example) and an insane number of useless public servants working on collecting those unnecessary taxes.

It's too easy of a mental shortcut to say: "We don't live in caves anymore, with the men hunting and the women feeding the kids, so everything we did was obviously perfect".

BTW we had universities, roads, ships, etc. at a time where the effective tax rate on farmers was something like 2% yearly.

And Greece and Rome were advanced civilizations.

"By extracting rents and taxes" makes a lot of heavy lifting: there's quite a difference between something like a reasonable yearly tax rate on income/production and a planned economy.