Rosio Pavoris a blog

The Catholic Church is an organisation of worthless vultures and thieves.
Remembering the dead is important, of course, and it’s important for people to be with their family when they’re at their emotionally most vulnerable. That makes it all the more disgusting when these ghouls pervert these occasions to make them all about themselves and their little cult, pushing the deceased—and the family—entirely to one side, and hiding them behind stock one-size-fits-all prayers (they had grandchildren read prayers calling him “opa”; not a single one of us ever called him anything but “bonpapa”) and bullshit stories (because obviously glorified accounts of God raining death down on the Israelites are very relevant to my grandfather).

Anyway, that was the wake. Funeral’s tomorrow.

The point of these posts on cryptography is mainly to demonstrate that while cryptography may seem like a very arcane field that’s next to impossible for the layperson to get into, it’s actually reasonably straightforward. Still, there are some pitfalls one should watch out for.
A famous one of these involves block ciphers.

Suppose you want to encrypt your data, and you pick a block cipher to do it. Let’s say you pick AES, reasoning that since NIST thinks it’s good enough to encrypt top secret documents, it must be pretty good.
AES has a block size of 128 bits, but the data you want to encrypt is much larger than that. So what happens? You divide the data into 128-bit blocks and encrypt each one separately, right?

Well, yes. This is the way things were done for a long time.¹
The problem, though, is that identical 128-bit segments of plaintext also encrypt to identical segments of ciphertext. For certain datasets this isn’t a huge problem, but for many, it means that a lot of patterns in the plaintext are in fact preserved in the ciphertext, no matter how awesome your cipher is.
By way of illustration, take a look at this illustration I shamelessly stole from Wikipedia:

The picture on the left is our plaintext. The picture on the right is that data encrypted by dividing it into blocks and just using some block cipher on each of those blocks separately.
While the data can’t be extracted completely anymore, it’s still quite obviously Communist propaganda, and no less incriminating than the original.

Read the rest of this entry »

My last three exams were two days ago (three exams on a single day, because as usual, the KHL administration is made of incompetence), so now I suppose I has spring break.
We’re only supposed to get one week, like everyone else, but for some reason we get two this year (though our exams also started a week earlier than usual, cutting into our Christmas break). So I have nearly three, which is interesting.

I guess I’ll be moving to Leuven next semester. Our department is moving to a new building, which is in Heverlee (which is a deelgemeente of Leuven).
The old building was within walking distance of Leuven’s main train station, and Tienen’s train station is within walking distance of my house (or nearly so), and the train trip itself is like ten minutes, so I’ve been going back and forth between Tienen and Leuven every day for the past four years.
Heverlee, though, is in the middle of nowhere, and pretty much unreachable except by bus, and buses make me angry.
But apparently my mom knows someone whose daughter has a student room in Heverlee who won’t be needing it next semester, so I should be getting that.

I’m not looking forward to having to use KotNet.

You want to know why I dislike Apple?

In large part, obviously, it’s because they’re made of closed-source nubbery¹ and both developer- and user-hostile practices. And because they’re the largest pusher of DRM in the industry right now, thanks to iTunes. And because they market mediocre products as being the Holy Grail and Excalibur rolled into one, and sell them at enormously inflated prices.

However, Microsoft does all of that (much of it to a much lesser extent than Apple, of course, but because of their monopoly position, the effects are felt much more keenly), and shockingly, I dislike Microsoft less than I dislike Apple.
Why?

Because of the fanboys.

Case in point, this.
When I first saw it, I thought it was a joke. Perhaps they finally realised how ridiculous they were being, and they decided to parody themselves (as others have done before). Seriously, “thinnovation”? “Rethinking conventions”? “Mobile computing has a new standard”?

Unfortunately, they seem to be serious.
Yes, it’s thinner than other laptops (because what we really needed was flimsier laptops). It also doesn’t have an optical drive, it’s about two-thirds as fast as the average laptop on the market nowadays, it has a 13.3-inch screen², and it costs well over three times what you’d pay if you got the equivalent specs in a PC laptop.
The only slightly interesting thing about it seems to be the SSD option, only it adds $1000 to the price.

Even if they didn’t intend this as a joke, it should be obvious that it is one all the same.

Except that the fanboys are eating it up. Just like they did for the iPhone. Just like they did for the iPod.³
All of these are overpriced, mediocre products with better, cheaper alternatives, but they’re popular because they have the Mac logo stamped into them.
It’s sad when even people who are famous for their intelligence and rationality fall victim to this fanboyism.

Though the fanboys are often fond of whining about people complaining about the price (which is a nice tactic, since there’s the implicit accusation that if you don’t like Apple, you must be too poor to afford their stuff), this isn’t even primarily about that. I wouldn’t use one of these if it were given to me for free (I’d probably sell it on eBay and buy six real computers with the money). It’s just a shitty crippled laptop.

And don’t even get me started on the software.
Yes, everything “just works”. Everything is supposed to “just work”. Even Windows can generally manage to make everything “just work”, and it’s expected to run on much more disparate hardware. Fuck, even Linux “just works” pretty much all of the time (at least the distros aimed at the general public). You don’t get bonus points for having everything “just work”, especially not when you determine entirely what hardware it “just works” with.
It’s the least we expect.

Now, it’s not all bad. Mac OS is an alright OS for people who are afraid of computers, and people who are a bit slow, and very small children. If you’re the type of person who needs a Fisher-Price computer, Macs are an alright choice (though certainly not the best; maybe they were ten years ago, but not anymore).

Apple used to be a decent company. In the late ’70s, they were great. In the ’80s and early-to-mid ’90s, they certainly didn’t suck hugely. Somewhere between then and now, though, they’ve become a profit-obsessed corporation that makes Microsoft looks friendly.
The problem is just that the older userbase apparently hasn’t noticed (I’m not sure why; perhaps because Apple is an identity⁴ as well as a brand to many people, so they tend to turn a blind eye to its failings), and with the iPod, a lot of mouth-breathing 14-year-olds were brought in.

Not that there aren’t any Windows fanboys. Last time I checked there were at least four of them (most of them VB “developers”), and they’re at least as obnoxious as the Apple kids. The difference is just that they’re generally ridiculed, and nobody really pays any attention to them.
Linux and the others⁵ have fanboy issues as well, of course (and Ubuntu and the like are making that worse), but at least they generally won’t bend over while handing over their wallets and looking smug for doing so for the glory of Tux. (We’re just smug because we’re actually better than you.)

Anyway. I forget if I had a point, so my point will be this: I won’t hate you for using a Mac⁶, but for fuck’s sake, stop pretending your Fisher-Price computer is the best thing ever just because you’re afraid of leaving your comfort zone.

¹ But still OSS advocates generally tend to see Apple users as an ally in the War against Microsoft. It boggles the mind.

² My mom’s $400 Dell has a 15.4-inch screen, and it’s not that much heavier than the MacBook Air.

³ The iPod in particular bothers me, because it actually forced better products out of the market through the magic of DRM-based vendor lock-in iTunes. There are still very good MP3 players out there, but the market is certainly poorer for Apple having entered it.

⁴ Cult.

⁵ I haven’t seen any Plan 9 fanboys yet, though. Does Plan 9 even have users?

⁶ Though I will think less of you for it, especially if you’re old enough to know better and able to make your own decisions.

Apart from being a fine game, Tetris is also a perfect mirror of the human condition. For a while the game is entertaining, and we seem to have mastered it and are having fun. Then, something goes wrong—a rash mistake, or an unfulfilled wish, and we’re fighting to repair the damage, but we’ve been thrown off-balance, and everything is piling up. Blocks that were once orderly and harmonious are jumbled and filled with holes, and our cup is on the verge of running over. There’s always a point at which we stop planning for the future, and realize that we don’t have one—all we can do is cling to the present and concentrate, focus our minds on what it’s like to be alive, to play the game, before it’s all over.

You were waiting for a four-by-one block that never came.

Sometimes we resist to the bitter end, moving blocks left and right without thought or care, just to hang on, and sometimes we accept the inevitable and pull the blocks down to us, smiling inwardly at the great joke. The rest is silence.

Made it myself. Minimalist and bright, now with 20% more /prog/snake.
I doubt IE will play nice with the transparency (I’m in no position to test), and Firefox has its own approach to font sizes, but it’s adequate.
I don’t know if I’ll be keeping it, but too many other blogs are using the one I was using before.

(Can you tell I’m supposed to be studying?)

Edit: okay, having checked on my parents’ computer, apparently IE just ignores transparency, which is fine, but it doesn’t seem to allow overlapping divs (IE 6, at least; dunno about 7), which is not. Not that I can be bothered to fix it.

Edit 2: Good thing <!--[if IE]> exists. Now if only it would work.