Russia Putin is throwing their future away on the fields of Ukraine over a strip of land, it’s so mind-numbingly stupid evil.

Let’s face it, it’s a countries leader(s) that decide to feed their population into a meat grinder, not the people themselves. At this point there may ne little the average Russian can do to stop the process, at least, without significant retribution from the same government.

Interestingly, whilst Wikipedia does say that, the language in RFC 1591 (Domain Name System Structure and Delegation) only says:

There are a set of what are called “top-level domain names” (TLDs). These are the generic TLDs (EDU, COM, NET, ORG, GOV, MIL, and INT), and the two letter country codes from ISO-3166.

Likewise, in ICANN’s PRINCIPLES FOR THE DELEGATION AND ADMINISTRATION OF COUNTRY CODE TOP LEVEL DOMAINS, they say:

‘Country code top level domain’ or ‘ccTLD’ means a domain in the top level of the global domain name system assigned according to the two-letter codes in the ISO 3166-1 standard

In neither case do they actually limit two letter TLDs to being country codes, they only state that all country codes in ISO 3166-1 are ccTLDs. In the RFC, the author does suggest it is unlikely that any other TLDs will be assigned, but this has obviously been superseded with the advent of gTLDs. Thus I still consider it likely that the .io TLD will simply transition to being a commercial one, rather than a country one.

Having said all that, it’s entirely possible I’ve missed some more recent rule that tightens this up and only allows two letter domains from ISO 3166-1. If I have I’d be glad of a pointer to it.

You’re probably correct, but it’ll still have to be competitive with other TLDs, so it probably wont go too high.

It’ll get eliminated as a country code, yes, but that leaves it available as a generic TLD. Seen as it will be available and is obviously lucrative, someone will register it and, presumably allow domains to be registered under it. Off the top of my head, I think it costs $10,000 and you have to show you have the infrastructure to support the TLD you register, so an existing registrar is the most likely. That figure is probably out of date, it’s been many years since I checked it, but the infrastructure requirement is the more costly part anyway.

I very much doubt that the .io TLD will vanish, too many big companies use it. Seen as non-country TLDs are allowed, I suspect that as soon as the country code goes away an existing registrar will buy it and .io domains will carry on.

What?!?? I just tap my finger on the glowy thinking rock and demons/faye/angels take my messages to other people’s thinking rocks and bring me their responses. I don’t believe in all that ‘electricity’ witchcraft!

Seriously, yes burial uses a fair bit of space, which is part of the reason cremation is increasing in popularity in many places. Even with burials though, many graveyards reuse plots after some number of years, once the previous body has decomposed to save space. For those wanting a more ecologically friendly method than cremation, there’s the option of resomation too.

It’s a safe and reliable way to dispose of a corpse that might be diseased, will smell bad as it decomposes, and would certainly attract scavengers if left lying around. The same goes for cremation, it really just depends on local custom.

Taxes don’t work like that. It’s only the portion above a level that’s taxed at that level.

If you’re talking about being able to regain access with no local backups (even just a USB key sewn into your clothing) your going to need to think carefully about the implications if someone else gets hold of your phone, or hijacks your number. Anything you can do to recover from the scenario is a way an attacker can gain access. Attempting to secure this via SMS is going to ne woefully insecure.

That being said, there are a couple of approaches you could consider. One option is to put an encrypted backup on an sftp server or similar and remember the login and passwords, another would be to have a trusted party, say a family member or very close friend, hold the emergency codes for access to your authentication account or backup site.

Storing a backup somewhere is a reasonable approach if you are careful about how you secure it and consider if it meets your threat model. The backup doesn’t need to contain all your credentials, just enough to regain access to your actual password vault, so it doesn’t need to be updated often, unless that access changes. I would suggest either an export from your authentication app, a copy of the emergency codes, or a text file with the relevant details. Encrypt this with gpg symmetric encryption so you don’t have to worry about a key file, and use a long, complex, but reconstructable passphrase. By this I mean a passphrase you remember how to derive, rather than trying to remember a high entropy string directly, so something like the second letter of each word of a phrase that means something to you, a series of digits that are relevant to you, maybe the digits from your first friend’s address or something similarly pseudo random, then another phrase. The result is long enough to have enough entropy to be secure, and you’ll remember how to generate it more readily than remembering the phrase itself. It needs to be strong as once an adversary has a copy of the file they jave as long as they want to decrypt it. Once encrypted, upload it to a reliable storage location that you can access with just a username and password. Now you need to memorize the storage location, username, password and decryption passphrase generator, but you can recover even to a new phone.

The second option is to generate the emergency, or backup, codes to your authentication account, or the storage you sync it to, and have someone you trust keep them, only to be revealed if you contact them and they’re sure it’s you. To be more secure, split each code into two halves and have each held by a different person.

There’s an easier and more reliable way to limit replication; don’t hive them the means to create a small but essential part, and instead load the first probe woth many copies of it and have each replica take a set percentage.

For instance, have the probe able to replicate everything but its CPU, and just load up a rack of them on probe 0. Every time it replicates itself it passes half of its remaining stock to the replica and they both carry on from there.

The article says:

The photons travel through a resonant metasurface, where they mingle with a pump beam.

From that, I think it’s suggesting it needs a separate beam of photons to amplify the signal, much like a transistor needs a supply current to amplify the signal it gets.

They also say:

This new tech also captures the visible and non-visible (or infrared) light in one image as you look through the ‘lens.’

Which sounds like it produces an image showing both the IR and visible spectrum in the visible range.

Mind you, re-readind it, most of the article just talks about IR, so I’m not certain what it’s actually doing. It could just be transparent to the visible spectrum. It wouldn’t be much good for driving if it did that though, the windscreen blocks a lot of IR and you’d need IR headlights!

The material captures visible light too, so headlights would be brighter, but I wonder if there’s a way to reduce the contrast by either filtering out some wavelengths (like driving glasses) or the material simply not boosting it’s output past a certain level?

The device captures visible and infrared light, just like a typical night vision scope. They’re working on expanding the spectrum too, which could lead to some interesting and useful results. I understand that, for instance, skin cancers are more visible under certain UV wavelengths, so imagine a doctor being able to just put on a pair of glasses that convert that wavelength to give you a once over during a checkup.

It doesn’t really matter whether the FMR is one in a hundred or one in a million, for the uses it’s being put to it’s still too high. If it was only being used as one factor for authenticating someone (I.e. the ‘thing for are’) but still required the other factor(s) (the ‘thing you know’ and the ‘thing you have’) then it’d be adaquate.

As it stands, when it’s being used either to pick someone out without further scrutiny, or to make payments with no further checks, it’s simply unacceptable. There’s good arguments to say it’s not just the error rate is unacceptable, but that the technology simply shouldn’t be used in those scenarios as it’s entirely inappropriate, but that’s a separate discussion.

F-ing brilliant.

It’s the same problem with a drive like this, or any long term archive, you either store the data unencrypted and rely on physical security, or make sure you store the encryption key and algorithm for the same length of time, in which case you still need the physical security to protect that instead. In both cases you need to make sure you preserve a means to read the data back and details of the format its in so you can actually use it later.

Paper is actually a pretty good way of storing a moderate amount of data long term. Stored correctly it’s unlikely to physically degrade, the data is unlikely to suffer bitrot and it can be read back by anything that can make an image in the visible spectrum. That means you can read it, or take a photo and use OCR to convert it into whatever format is current when the data is needed.

That may be your perfect search engine, I jyst want proper boolean operators on a sesrch engine that doesn’t think it knows what I want better than I do, and doesn’t pack the results out with pages that don’t match all the criteria just for the sake of it. The sort of thing you described would be anathema to me, as I suspect my preferred option may be to you.

Hackers aren’t the only way to meddle in an election, just the easiest to categorize and deal with.

Maybe a good pair of headphones and the careful application of some spray paint? Mask and holes or areas you don’t want to colour, then apply several light coats until suitable pinkness is achieved. I suspect you’ll get bonus points for personalisation.

Depending on what sort of shirt it is, could you considered sewing an interesting patch over the area? Take a sort of ‘visible mending’ approach? That way it just becomes one more memory associated with the shirt.