gioi
Joined 13 years ago
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447
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57
Member since
Aug 16
Recent submissions
Comment · 11 years ago
I'm not a physicist either. As a student, some years ago I asked my physics teacher if this conception was right, but I only got pretty elusive answers. It turns out that general relativity and quantum mechanics are not 100% coherent on this point. I suggest you to read this short, a-bit-technical-but-not-too-much essay on the problem: http://quasars.org/photon.txt
Comment · 11 years ago
Thank you for your answer and for your time.
My language of choice for the bot was Clojure. I was interfacing with libaxolotl-java and basically rebuilding libtextsecure in Clojure (that was months ago).
Yesterday, when I discovered libtextsecure-java (while exploring Github repositories, by the way, I didn't notice your website had been updated in the meantime), I started a rewrite, using README as my primary source of documentation (the only piece of doc I could find, actually).
Ok, so what's this `KeyHelper`? Ok, I'll search on Github. Fine, it's actually `org.whispersystems.libaxolotl.util.KeyHelper` - luckily I knew it was in a completely different project. The same goes for `AxolotlStore`, which is actually `org.whispersystems.libaxolotl.state.AxolotlStore`, and it's not even mentioned on libaxolotl-java README because the latter is outdated.
Then: what is `TrustStore`? Good luck finding out that! Basically it is a wrapper around a binary file - which I had to download from TextSecure source repo without knowing what there was inside, and which by the way is encrypted with the password whisper (documentation: nowhere - thank you @AsamK for your textsecure-cli sources on github).
Ok, and finally figuring out - turning to TextSecure-Server docs - what is a signaling key, what are the specifics for the client-generated password (which by the way is sent over SSL via Basic authentication - probably not the most secure method ever, but probably there are many reason for that) and what is an install ID, I finally had the opportunity to debug obscure security problems on Java and to meet in person a Fedora bug https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1167153). Not to mention the fact that apparently libtextsecure-java doesn't work over websockets but only over GCM (https://github.com/WhisperSystems/libtextsecure-java/pull/5) - however I won't be surprised if it did.
A really nightmarish experience. Maybe this summer I'll try to reimplement libtextsecure in another language and then document thoroughly my efforts. Who knows.
Comment · 11 years ago
Just yesterday I was trying to get a bot working on the TextSecure platform. A vastly disappointing experience: almost not existing libraries, sparse and incomplete documentation, unstable protocol breaking without any kind of notice (https://github.com/JavaJens/TextSecure/issues/6, for example). And still no way to register without a phone, which would be amazing for this kind of project: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/issues/1085
I think Telegram is succeeding in what TextSecure is failing: attracting a widespread community of developers. This is only a confirmation, in my opinion.
EDIT: and, by the way, while Telegram security is no good, I wonder why we cannot have both (security & developer-friendliness)
Comment · 11 years ago
Sightly off-topic but:
Do we really need user agent? What are good reasons we should keep on using them? I could find none...
Comment · 12 years ago
It makes me remember John Locke's An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding[0]
> The Indian before mentioned [...], saying that the world was supported by a great elephant, was asked what the elephant rested on; to which his answer was—a great tortoise: but being again pressed to know what gave support to the broad-backed tortoise, replied—SOMETHING, HE KNEW NOT WHAT
-- [0] http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10615/pg10615.txt, 2nd book, chapter XXIII, paragraph 2
Comment · 12 years ago
Actually you could. They are called "deterministic builds".
But this would require some kind of effort from project maintainers.
Comment · 12 years ago
Later this summer, Signal for iPhone will be expanded to support text communication compatible with TextSecure for Android.
Comment · 12 years ago
Flask, under the hood, uses Werkzeug routing. Basically, this is a wrapper over Werkzeug, just like Flask routing is.
Comment · 12 years ago
Am I the only one who thinks that routes should be defined near views, just like default Flask does?
Comment · 12 years ago
28.58 mph == 45.995 km/h [0], BTW.
[0] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=28.58+mph+in+kilometers...
Comment · 12 years ago
Thanks for sharing! Unfortunately, bytes representations are wrong.
As you may now, there is a difference between kilobytes (KB) and kibibytes (KiB), megabytes (MB) and mibibytes (MiB) et cetera. 1 KiB = 1024 bytes = 1.024 KB.
Please check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix and fix your library :)