matthew green (the most obnoxious cryptocurrency fuckboy in existence) points to a microsoft presentation as the first indication DUAL_EC_DRBG might be backdoored https://web.archive.org/web/20260410063603/http://rump2007.cr.yp.to/15-shumow.pdf

Results on extractors from x coordinates of EC points of prime curves suggest truncating off the top bitlen/2 bits is reasonable.

nobody ever says where these "results" come from but i was under the impression the top bits were the safe ones? maybe that's just for the regular finite field arithmetic and not for the fucked up elliptic curve form?

I quite literally could not care any less about Harry and Mhehghan. They are the Kardashians to me. Not real people. Nothing they ever do will ever have any impact on my life, other than to momentarily make me have to scroll a bit quicker. I wish them all the very best. Or the worst. Or in between. Or not at all. It doesn't matter.

the basic problem with the evil NSA elliptic curve RNG is that it output way too many bits per round (32 bytes?????) and elliptic curves are just a way to obfuscate finite field arithmetic

Found an interesting new malware loader which creates a fake Windows lock screen to phish the user's system login password. The fully-modular loader also bridges multitude different programming languages, including: Python, C#, C++, and PowerShell.

This extensive use of cross-language components, along with shipping an entire runtime environment, lead to us dubbing it SynkLoader (Sink Loader), because it brings everything but the kitchen sink.

While the original loader runs all of its modules in memory only, we were able to collect them by reverse engineering the command-and-control protocol, then building our own version of the loader which logs everything to disk.

Additionally, we were able to to lure the operator into thinking they had a reverse shell on our honeypot system. This allowed us to watch as they attempted to execute PowerShell commands, which were being printed to our system's console instead of being run.

Full analysis: https://expel.com/blog/synkloader-when-you-throw-in-everything-but-the-kitchen-sink/

@nartagnan @XavCC

Je me permet de corriger, l'absence de terre, ce n'est pas quelque chose auquel on peut faire attention en attendant. En l'absence de terre, un grille pain qui dysfonctionne, une lampe avec les fils abîmés à l'intérieur du pied, ou un lave-linge défectueux deviennent des objets mortels pour les humains et les animaux.

Pour essayer de faire avancer vers des solutions : il me semble qu'il est possible de verser le loyer sur un compte protégé, mais le propriétaire ne le reçoit pas, ça lui met la pression pour qu'il fasse son boulot.
Mais il vaut mieux se rapprocher d'un avocat ou d'une association de défense des locataires.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG aha so now that i understand like 5% more about CSPRNGs i can now say it's MUCH more likely that the IBM paper advocating to extract more bits from the discrete log problem was trying to fuck everyone over

the whole concept of checking an OS for safety by hash is just completely flawed because who sets the hash to check?????

Excuse me nectarine tree, you do realise it’s still winter yeah?

Trump admin calls for more spaceports to handle surge in launches

"We probably need another site that's capable of heavy and super heavy launch capability."
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/trump-admin-calls-for-more-spaceports-to-handle-surge-in-launches/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social