The correct number of files to have on your desktop is zero.

Apple cancelled my order. Twice. So guess I am switching to Linux for my desktop/daily driver. So far discovered that Pop_OS! new COSMIC desktop requires restart if you ever want to change mouse speed. Spending an hour making a mouse not move 20x faster than it should is peak Linux. It's so annoying but I'm gonna make it work. I am sustained by a deep loathing of Microsoft and Apple.

I bought a new computer. It's a Mac. Mac is the worst option for a main workstation except for Windows (obviously) and Linux. Leaving me with....Mac. I use Linux all day every day but always CLI only and inside VMs/containers that are always set up for specific purposes. Really just not feeling like ever having to fight to make a webcam work in a zoom meeting or something yet so I just doubt Linux desktop is ever gonna be a thing for me.

Cypherpunks dox people.

"Junk data" wtf, not very cypherpunk of you @calle

If a midwit becomes aware that he is a midwit, does he cease to be a midwit?

I peaked at 1960 at blitz chess. Don't get to play so much these days, so dropped down below 1700. Anyone here play?

Mining is centralized. The concern around objectionable content is met with appeals to decentralization of mining - i.e a Bitcoin network that doesn't exist. Until now, what has already been "technically possible" with storing nasty stuff in the chain wasn't. 1. "The" mempool was protected because everyone would filter a sick 100kb OP_RETURN along with *all* OP_RETURNs greater than 83 bytes. 2. The blockchain was protected because the few miners there are in the world would reject directly submitted malicious content. This left one option for sabotage: an attacker mining a CSAM OP_RETURN directly into the chain themselves. Referring to something as impractical as that as "technically possible" is entirely frivolous and it would have been laughable if it had ever happened. An "Unknown" pool finds a block that has a giant 1MB MP4 of something appalling in it? Obvious sabotage that we would universally eschew and I'm confident we would be able to resolve after the fact. Now however the situation has changed. F2Pool solicits this stuff directly from the p2p network and Libre Relay nodes along with Core 30 release candidates are willingly relaying it. There is now an anonymous, p2p network for this attack that's free to access and there is a miner who will oblige it. The combination of the above, in practice, drops the cost from six figures ($$$,$$$) to three ($$$) and makes it possible to do anonymously. But more importantly, the mechanism of the attack makes the resulting content appear to have been endorsed by the network at the policy level rather than come as a result of a circumvention that exploits crude consensus rules. If you still cannot understand the significance of that then you must simply not be aware of the changes that Bitcoin has undergone with all the malicious tweaking of late and the sheer desire there is to take Bitcoin out. Again: The p2p network has protected itself from attack due to sane default mempool policies, while the blockchain has been inaccessible to attackers due to pools not wanting to be on the hook for blocks containing malicious data. Those technically-circumventable factors are now gone and there is no practical limitation to the attack beyond cleaning some coins, and paying a couple hundred bucks in transaction fees to get unacceptable content into the chain. If the network isn't going to protect itself from malicious, consensus-valid activity then the only option left is changing consensus and doing a soft fork to limit OP_RETURNs and perhaps other known types of data carrying. That idea entered the arena on the mailing list on Friday from someone vocally against Knots (@PortlandHODL) and was received positively by the Core devs who responded. Some embellishment was offered by Luke (add additional data carrying types) to which there was not so much response. Without community support a fork fails. It's possible if even the Core 30 proponents are OK with limiting this stuff at the consensus level though that there is community support and thus it could be the way forward. I dislike it because it abandons spam mitigation occurring at the policy level which is where it belongs but the current environment isn't giving us a lot to work with. It is probably appropriate to characterize the fork as defense we never needed against a specific type of attack versus spam mitigation in general which will have to be continue in parallel. Fork?

Bitcoin was not conceived of or designed as a system where random people would voluntarily run FTP servers and store random files forever for free. That is being backward rationalized into a monetary system where that kind of architecture must exist for other reason but the incentive issue remains. No one is going to do this for you, even if they want to for other purposes. They are going to defend themselves. They always have been, and are having to switch client to be able to continue doing so due to Bitcoin Core's negligence and downright malice.

CORRECTION: NO HE DOESN'T ACTUALLY.

What level of cope is this? View quoted note →

Today I learnt that `su` and `su -` do not do the same thing.

Knots:

People seems to be enjoying the lack of Knots propaganda here so I'll commit to making more effort and getting out of the twitter echo chamber.

Knots 29 is out! View quoted note →

Neutral monetary network = Defensible Neutral file storage = Indefensible This necessarily means maintaining the ability to discriminate between monetary activity and file storage. This is self evidently the only way Bitcoin can realistically continue to exist without centralized gatekeepers having to moderate everything for us because we couldn't handle it ourselves.

Old methods of storing evil stuff required obfuscation: they would need to break it up into multiple chunks and reassembly would require specific software and knowledge of what the data is and how to reconstruct and interpret it exactly. The old formats looked like this: "Hi, I'm a Bitcoin transaction, here's my first output of 45 outputs - <filepart1>, here's my second output <filepart2>, here's my third output<filepart3>" along with a tonne of other stuff that has to get parsed out when processing the highly obfuscated material. This is thankfully also true of inscriptions. OP_RETURN however is just a dump for raw, serialized data. It's not the same. It says the equivalent of "Hi I'm a Bitcoin transaction, here's an unspendable output: <file> end". This wasn't a problem for tiny OP_RETURNs i.e their current limit of 80 bytes. If they're permitted to be 100kb, that's where the abuse begins. And that's the end of plausible deniability. When the stuff gets processed - which it has to be for your node to verify that they are valid transactions - then you just have a raw, unadulterated file that will trigger primitive antivirus/forensics software to alert the user: "Hi, you have CP on your computer." You now need a licence to run a Bitcoin node, everyone thinks you're disgusting if you do, and they're not even wrong.