The first book that came out on XMLDSig, "Secure XML: The New Syntax for Signatures and Encryption", written by the chair of the working group, spent over half of its 500 pages wrestling with canonicalization, and even then it read more as a 250-page problem statement than a solution.
And that was before you got into deliberately malicious content that actively subverts the signature process.
“There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.”
The problem with this is the assumption that there's a simpler way to do all of this, and if only we could stop looking for large and complex solutions we could just land on the simple ones.
I listed a number of solutions, all built by different people, at different times, in different orgs, and some of those solutions (OAuth, SASL) being much more organic in how they evolved, and yet all are ultimately large and complex.
I think that hints at the problem space being... large and complex and requiring large and complex solutions.
What we _can_ do is avoid adding complexity unnecessarily, but what looks like a simplification today (e.g., picking the best current encoding system) might look like a terrible mistake in twenty years.
There are obscene amounts of "forged" stamped surveys and engineering drawings floating around.
Not like altering lines or anything material (I can already imagine the breathless replies being typed about how it's "antisocial" if someone's deck doesn't meet setbacks by 1ft or something) but changing text to remove references that would indicate other survey work was done that they don't wanna submit to public record, changing a labeled distance by a couple feet to make something that already exists technically compliant.
Like with everything else it's the little guys sticking their necks out. The big guys can afford good surveyors who "get it" and don't need to be told when a difference within the bounds of measurement error and will have four or five figure implications or that a survey result is so unfavorable that they should just call the client, bill whatever they would have charged as a consulting fee and not screw their client with the liability of a paper trail.
Sometimes the software is just not available online, or it doesn't work well if cracked.
Students giving out free Microsoft licenses they could access through their University to people they knew was a thing, because Microsoft activation hacks had all kinds of problems.
My personal favourite UI was HyperNeWS built on Sun's NeWS.
Edit: Writing PostScript and having no discernible security probably didn't make NeWS a great fit for the world of the Internet - but it was a lot of fun.
Yeah that fits. I was in London (though not the City) and it was definitely that sort of scene.
Thinking about it, we moved to Dell as part of the run up to IPO, and I suspect had we not done so Sun would have been much harder to deal with afterwards.
What I recall from that time is Sun were very happy they'd sold a huge pile of servers to be the core of Interlink, and a whole load of people went off to work on that.
Citrix is still everywhere you need a client that can do things a web browser can’t—like run ancient VB4 software or talk to device hardware—deployed at scale.
Citrix was bought out by PE for $16.5B a few years ago, under the (sadly correct) assumption they hadn’t been charging their customers enough money for this essential tech.
Well, I guess at one extreme we have the Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism of the Culture and the other, at best, serfdom in the cobalt mines?
I do agree that on out current trajectory the latter does seem more likely.
Louis chude sokei provides some insights into the historic intertwinedness of race and technology, including the term robot and its epistemological connection to race riots in the US, early to recent sci fi (from victorian age to the apparently adequate representation of rastafarianism as in mel gibson)
It is a great read to sensitise oneself to a different perspective as machine as the other of human thtough the lens of the history of people who were considered just that (machines&other)
This was a kind of example, and not really the point of my comment.
Though to illustrate further, there are many examples one might find of US acting undemocratically even 40 years ago.
So, politicians will talk, governments will be in power, and the observers will discuss. My invitation was simply to discuss known facts not political rhetoric. And main facts are largely absent and unknown.
Right… so why do you think the US imposed tariffs? Germany is already seeing gigantic problems via declining exports because of China. Are they going to stop exports to the United States too?
The EU can’t add any more “trade bazooka” than it already has. Canada doesn’t change anything in that dynamic.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c04g5x1wq5vo
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