#weaker — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #weaker, aggregated by home.social.
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Daniel J. Bernstein (#djb, to those who know and love him [1]) has a new blog entry about the NIST post-quantum #cryptography standardization process that's been ongoing for some years. Also, follow him @djb .
If you're not aware of some of the controversy about how NIST is running this process, it's a must-read.
https://blog.cr.yp.to/20250423-mceliece.html
My $0.02: it sure looks like NIST is backstopping an attempt by the NSA to get everyone to standardize on cryptography #standards that the #NSA knows how to break.
Again.
Yes, they did it before. If you read up on the Dual_EC calamity and its fallout, and how this time it was supposed to be different - open, transparent, secure - then prepare to be disappointed. NIST is playing #Calvinball with their rules for this contest, yanking the rug out from under contenders that appear to be more #secure and better understood, while pushing alternatives that are objectively worse (#weaker encryption, less studied, poorer #performance).
Frankly, I think organizations outside of the #USA would be foolish to trust anything that comes out of #NIST's current work. Well, those inside the USA too, but some of those may be forced by law to use whatever NIST certifies.
[1] Some people think djb is "prickly", not lovable. Oddly, it seems that the only people who say this are those who are wildly incorrect about code/algorithms and are being gently but publicly corrected about by djb at the time
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Strongman rule is a fantasy.
Essential to it is the idea that a strongman will be your strongman.
He won't.
In a democracy, elected representatives listen to constituents.
We take this for granted, and imagine that a dictator would owe us something.
But the vote you cast for him affirms your #irrelevance.
The whole point is that the strongman owes us #nothing.
We get abused and we get used to it.Another illusion is that the strongman will unite the nation.
But an aspiring dictator will always claim that some belong and others don't.
He will define one group after another as the enemy.
This might feel good, so long as you feel that you are on the right side of the line.
But now #fear is the essence of life.
The politics of us-and-them, once begun, never ends.We dream that a strongman will let us focus on America.
But dictatorship opens our country to the worst the world has to offer.
An American strongman will measure himself by the #wealth and #power of other dictators.
He will befriend them and compete with them.
From them he will learn new ways to #oppress and to #exploit his own people.At least, the fantasy goes, the strongman will get things done.
But dictatorial power today is not about achieving anything positive.
It is about #preventing anyone else from achieving anything.
The strongman is really the weak man: his secret is that he makes everyone else #weaker.Unaccountable to the law and to voters, the dictator has no reason to consider anything beyond his own personal interests.
In the twenty-first century, those are simple: 👉 dying in bed as a billionaire.
To #enrich himself and to stay out of #prison, the strongman dismantles the justice system and replaces civil servants with loyalists. -
This less-than-transparent behaviour on the part of #NIST, when added to all their #machinations trying to obscure the deep involvement of the #NSA in the competition, instead attributing NSA's work to NIST itself, is troubling.
To a conspiratorially-minded person, Occam's Razor might suggest that it was NSA's #attempt to get the world to #standardize on #encryption that is much #weaker than claimed - i.e., encryption that they know they can already #break.
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Climate change is making trees bigger, but also weaker
#Environment #ClimateChange #Trees #CarbonDioxide #CO2 #CarbonCapture #Forests #Ecology #Europe #NorthAmerica #Wood #GlobalWarming #Forestry #Trunk #TreeRings #EarlyWood #BorealForests #Bigger #Weaker
https://the-14.com/climate-change-is-making-trees-bigger-but-also-weaker/