AlyssaRowan

Joined 12 years ago

Karma
1,768
Submissions
554
Member since
Jun 1
Snarky ex-reverser; often cryptic; occasionally vaguely cryptologic

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/akr; my proof: https://keybase.io/akr/sigs/5gHSklAXllHnQJvYGdQJkduHKCZZ8mQJdvtUAIhJ4HI ]

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Recent submissions

Comment · 5 months ago
It's a straight line from Jesusonic to Reaper: Jesusonic JSFX script is in Reaper, and there's a whole selection of stock JS plugins that come with it and it's actually quite easy to program.
Comment · 7 months ago
It is, of course, only a matter of time - just like kernel-level copy protection and Sony's XCP - before something like Vanguard in particular is exploited and abused by malware.

Himata is correct, too. After DMA-based stuff, it'll be CPU debugging mode exploits like DCI-OOB, some of which can be made detectable in kernel mode; or, stealthier hypervisors.

Comment · 7 months ago
Well, it's less of a technology problem than it is an industry one. You can have multiple entries in the genre list and they're freeform, for example Ambient;Electronic, in both ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4. For Vorbis Comments, you have multiple GENRE= tags. Some players support this.

In my interactions with distributors, it seems streaming services tend to support up to two genre classifications; though they're pretty outdated and general (even more general and dated than the Winamp genre list). I don't think they use the metadata presented much in the classification; in fact Spotify does its own estimation of 'energy' and other subjective emotions using various classifier algorithms.

Comment · 8 months ago
I do a similar thing — also with AHK! — and I don’t intend to stop. I think probably the AI/LLM bubble will pop before I consider changing my habits there.

Tip: Patterns like “It’s not just X, it’s Y” are a more telltale sign of LLM slop. I assume they probably trained on too much marketing blurb at some point and now it’s stuck.

Comment · 1 year ago
All kinds of self-published stuff, lots of which later became commercial. You will have heard of some of it, for sure. Darude - Sandstorm? That was from there. DragonForce were big in the power metal category. The band that became Linkin Park came from there. And then hundreds of thousands of indie artists (including an earlier me).

The RIAA's action there destroyed vast amounts of music, pretty much the equivalent of if someone just aggressively deleted Bandcamp and Soundcloud put together and everything on it because they were upset they didn't control it all. I will never forgive them for that.

Comment · 1 year ago
Basically all of my friends use it. I insist. I trust it; I don't trust WhatsApp (not because WA's crypto is weak, just because I don't trust who runs it now).
Comment · 1 year ago
I mean, that brute-forceability was a reason for the newer v3 addresses; the v2 ones just weren't long enough.

(As told to me by Alec, they bruteforced the first bit, but found a very coincidentally attractive one for a backronym among the candidates and chose that.)

They did the first 8 characters of the v3.

Comment · 2 years ago
Oh yeah, no, that's ridiculous. I'm moving.
Comment · 2 years ago
You didn't even need Caetla. You could do that straight-up with the original ROMs for some of the cartridge series (FCD), and X-Link from DOS (or, if you were prepared to get involved with a bit of spicy linux 2.3, bitbang the parallel port yourself from the /dev/ interface for it at the time, the protocol was really simple). You get a live memory monitor you can watch (made it really easy to make cheat codes or look inside stuff for fun), and you can write and debug anything you want - in many ways it was nicer than the official Psy-Q kit Sony adopted, I thought.

Except to be fair, I didn't have a C toolchain, but R3000 assembly language is really nice when you get used to the delay slot.

Comment · 2 years ago
They're all actually AI powered, generally some form of real-time RNN trained on identifying and isolating voice content from background noise or music.

rnnoise2 is an open-source model that does very well. There also are things like Waves Clarity VX, the Nvidia Broadcast (Audio Effects SDK) too, as well as plenty of other solutions like Supertone Clear, Krisp, etc etc etc.

Comment · 2 years ago
My memory there is a bit fuzzy, but saying there was no official Mozilla web browser feels misleading. The Mozilla Suite (which I used for a while even in the 'milestone' versions) contained a fully functional web browser, Navigator - it was just really heavy and cumbersome because it also had the mail client Communicator and the other stuff like the IRC client and it was very new, very raw, rough-edges software built on this new XPCOM stuff. Very 'kitchen sink', inspired by the Netscape 'SeaMonkey' suite (SeaMonkey I believe lives on under that name). It wasn't based on the OG Netscape source code very much at all - while an attempt was made to develop that, it was so bad it was basically thrown in the bin and rewritten from scratch - which is where Gecko comes from.

K-Meleon and so forth was an attempt to take the core Gecko components out of the Mozilla Suite and just have a small simple browser built in it. Having seen that and a few others which had the same kind of idea but were native, Phoenix, which became Firebird, which became Firefox, was... kind of a grassroots disruptive community effort to try the same sort of minimum-viable-product browser thing in XPCOM as a cross-platform experiment, which rapidly gained adoption when people started realising how much faster and better it was to build it that way from the ground up instead. It certainly didn't feel like it was "AOL Time Warner" sponsored. If anything, it felt kind of chaotic. Nobody did a detailed name search because it was an experimental side project.

That worked so well, Thunderbird the email client was forked off too (during the Firebird era), and if I recall Sunbird (the calendar part)?

Comment · 3 years ago
If they were restricting controllers from the start, that would be one thing, and controller exclusivity is something every console manufacturer right back to Atari has always thought about from the very beginning - mostly for cash-grab reasons, but also, much later on, with this very excuse. It's why the original XBox's USB controllers were a different shape.

But to me this feels like a clear-cut case of interoperability, unilaterally and unconditionally removed after the fact of the sale of both millions of consoles and controllers (both first-party and not). Are they sure they want to do that? Now?

This also reminds me very much of Sony's removal of OtherOS in the PS3, and I draw the analogy with what happened to the console's security afterwards very much in mind.

Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
That was Digital Research’s GEM, which Atari had licenced for the GUI of TOS (they threw it together quite quickly). There was a whole thing about GEM and inspiration from Xerox PARC and Apple; that’s largely the reason why the Atari version was the only version that really made it to any kind of brief success.
Comment · 4 years ago
It was never unusual for cypherpunks to use nyms. Amongst the many ideological and practical reasons, for example worries about if authorities would treat a creation and its creator hostilely — it separates the creator from the creation and lets you judge the creation purely on its own merits (whatever those may, or may not, be).

I do appreciate your curiosity, but thank you for understanding. To date, to my knowledge, no-one ever guessed correctly, and maybe that's for the best. If they'd have wanted anyone to know who they were: they'd have said. They never have, and likely never will. I don't think you'll ever see anything from the genesis block or those keys. It's got to feel incredibly strange, yes, but remember: they _wanted_ to walk away from the whole thing, and I feel strongly that deserves respect.

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