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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 25th, 2023

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  • That assumes that an adversary has control of the browser

    No it doesn’t, if they intercept an encrypted password over HTTPS they can resend the request from their own browser to get access to your account

    The big reason you don’t want to send passwords over https is that some organizations have custom certs setup

    What is the problem with that? The password is secure and only shared between you and the site you are intending to communicate with. Even if you sent an encrypted password, they wrote the client side code used to generate it, so they can revert it back to its plaintext state server side anyways

    It is better to just not send the password at all.

    How would you verify it then?

    If not sending plaintext passwords was best practice then why do no sites follow this? You are literally posting to a site (Lemmy) that sends plaintext passwords in its request bodies to log-in




  • The word ‘decipher’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I’m wondering if they socially engineered or just found it written somewhere in the house?

    You can plausibly brute force up to 4, maybe 5 words of a seed phrase. It takes longer than a normal password because every seed phrase is technically valid, so the only way to know if your brute force is successful is to generate thousands of addresses at each of the different derivation paths you may expect funds to exist at.

    The same seed phrase is used for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero, etc, but each currency uses the seed phrase to generate addresses in a slightly different standard. Additionally, each wallet uses a slightly different variation of that. Within each wallet is a notion of accounts, and within each account you could have dozens of addresses. You need to generate each of those addresses, and scan each cryptocurrencies blockchain to see if those addresses have ever been used.

    Realistically one of three things happened: his seed phrase was written down and they found it, it was password protected or on a drive with weak AES encryption and they cracked THAT instead, or finally, he used a hardware wallet and they exploited a firmware vulnerability to lift the PIN and transfer out funds and/or read the seed from the device





  • That’s not really machine learning though. If you wanted to go way back, AI research goes back to implementations of hebbian learning in computer science back in the 1950s as a way of emulating human neurons. I was merely pointing out that AI was a computer science “dead end” until restricted Boltzmann machines were revisited by Hinton et al back in 2008 or so, and that 99% of the growth in the field has happened since the early 2010s when we reached a turning point where deep learning models could actually outperform classical statistical models like regression and random forests






  • Homeowners aren’t signing contracts where they agree to use exactly 450MW of power at a constant rate 24/7 for the entire year. The problem with “Free market” utilities is that they are reliant on private sector contracts like this to fund expansion

    From a business perspective, if the grid can handle the residential load 99.9% of the year, paying these businesses to cut usage during that other 0.1% of the time is a LOT cheaper than expanding their service to add one more decimal place of uptime that sits idle for the entire year

    Cloud platforms like AWS/Google/Azure do something similar, where you can rent unused servers for pennies on the dollar with the expectation they can be reprovisioned by someone else on a seconds notice