Well, in RSA you have to choose two prime numbers, multiply them, and keep them secret. p and q: pq =n . And n is made public.
I wonder if this probability, maybe coupled with concrete implementations, makes it for a more restricted set of guessing p and q.
That would be it.
I guess that given that this only introduces 'restrictions' on sequential prime numbers, doesn't really help at all, given that p and q should be random. Unless there's a shortcut applied in implementation that you find a random p and then q is the next prime number.
Hence my question to the community. But I only know that both RSA and DH rely on prime numbers.
That's a fair point. Yes, I thought the same thing too when I read this. It is only introducing restrictions on sequential prime numbers. I doubt it has any bearing on the factoring problem yet, at least not without more work that can connect this to the factoring problem.
Squatting can be easily prevented by reclaiming domain names without refund when the domain names have not been used or used illegitimately for more than a fixed threshold period of time.
Parking pages or any other use that intends to work around the restriction can be deemed illegitimate use.
> Parking pages or any other use that intends to work around the restriction can be deemed illegitimate use.
My personal domain doesn't even have an A record in the DNS, only an MX record because use it for all my email. By your definition that would be an "illegitimate use" and I should lose my domain...
Would it be an undue burden to require people like you to put up a page saying, "This is my personal domain which I use primarily for email."?
Can we just agree that nobody is posting the full proposed set of rules on HN, and nobody is trying to take away your domain?
Every time this solution to domain squatting is proposed, someone counters with your objection as if it's a huge problem with the idea, but it just isn't. Surely you can imagine a set of rules that shuts down a large number of domain squatters but allows your use case.
How do you write rules that allow "this is my personal domain that I use for email" and not squatting? Can't the squatters just say something along those lines?
And if they are a big company that owns hundreds of thousands of unrelated domains with no apparent email traffic, it would be pretty obvious that it's untrue.
So sure, a lot of small bad actors would get away with it. But it would could potentially take out the biggest bad actors.
If the squatters have to do that, then their squatting has no value to them. The point of squatters is to eventually sell the domain and if all the domains look "in use" (so no parking allowed), the amount of people sending offers will fall.
What a joke, within days of such rules being announced, a system would emerge to discover which domains might be willing to sell even though they would put up an “in-use” page.
Still much better than the current system. At least users who aren't familiar with it would just see the domain is "taken" and move along, not see a billion ads and a "contact us to buy" button. I've seen people who didn't even realize that was "outside the system" and thought that's how domains are supposed to be sold.
And either way, even a bad countermeasure would be better than nothing, as it would show that squatting is not longer tolerated. It would set a precedent for stricter regulation later on, because as it stands right now, ICANN is actively ignoring the problem and happily collecting their 14¢ fees.
As for a better solution, first ban all advertisement of peer-to-peer sales of domain names (so only registrars may offer a domain for sale). That should improve the situation significantly.
The "domain squatting" meme is intellectually dishonest and based on envy. People who buy zillions of domains must be allowed if people are allowed to buy as many stamps, boxes of paper, cars, jet skis or houses as they wish. It's called freedom, property rights and being consistent. If you want one of their domains that they registered and paid for before you so badly, inquire if they will sell it; if they choose to or not is their choice, and you are not entitled to it simply because you want it.
Domains are real estate. Periodic land reform / redistribution is a staple of human history, when things become patently unbalanced for society as a whole.
Is domain distribution patently unbalanced for society as a whole? What does that even mean? Should everyone be able to get a short dictionary word .com domain?
> Is domain distribution patently unbalanced for society as a whole?
Not entirely yet, or it would have already entered the political debate. However, in many ways the proliferation (and success) of alternative TLDs indicates that there is an issue. You shouldn't have to use an Indian Ocean domain because .com is squatted to the wazoo.
We have lived through the land-grab era, sooner or later the redistribution era will come.
> Should everyone be able to get a short dictionary word .com domain?
Considering there are less than a million 4-ascii-letter combinations, obviously not. But there could be more stringent criteria for assignment and revocation, like limits per-company and per-individual, escalating costs in a way that hoarding becomes uneconomical, banning parking (which is absolutely doable, you just need an actual human judge), and so on.
The difference between domain names and let's say cars or boxes of paper, as you put it, is so obvious, I didn't think it needed saying. It's that (usable) domains are a unique and finite, whereas all your other examples are neither. You can't just wait for the next batch of domains to come out of the factory and buy them from their manufacturer (new gTLDs were an attempt at that and failed miserably).
It's the same problem as land. We have more and more people that need it, yet the supply is by definition finite. Hoarding it for yourself not only contributes nothing to the community, it actively prevents others from doing so.
You are correct, but our entire economy is setup to reward the exact land hoarding that against which you are arguing. OP is asking why domain name ownership would be treated differently.
That doesn’t really explain the implementation. How would you know that two domains are owned by the same person without completely revamping the role of registrars?
I hate to say it, but "domain squatters" pay for domains like everyone else. You have to take the shit with the sugar in a free society, not shit on everyone's personal liberties with Code of Conducts or "occupation" requirements. There's no perfect policy or "solution" that can fix every moral panic without causing other problems. And not every moral panic needs to be fixed either. That's life, sorry.
The fact that they can pay for it doesn't mean they're entitled to it as a logical matter.
I'm not saying a fix is or isn't needed, but there are all kinds of things we restrict despite ability to pay. For example, you can't buy a social security number without a person or a physical address without physical land to tie it to.
Yep. Busy bodies and control freaks shouldn't be allowed anywhere near power because they will abuse it and subject others to their fascist views. People should be allowed to do whatever they legally please with their domains.. it's their property, so long as they continue "leasing" them.
Domain names are a limited resource and some are more valuable than others. They should be treated more like the way we treat land, where highly valuable land is heavily taxed to incentivize people to actually use it or sell it.
You come across as possibly stuck in a scarcity and/or entitlement mindset too. There are effectively an unlimited supply of domains, and you're perfectly free to pick another one. If you want the right to register as many unregistered domains as you wish, bid on registered ones and generally live in a free society, you must accept that there are some unpreventable problems that come with it: like suicidal idiots with knifes, jerks who cut you off in traffic and "domain squatters." Aren't there bigger things to worry about, rather than worrying about what other people are doing with their property? It's not yours, after all, just because you covet it like Golum.
I'm not sure why you think domains are property. When you "buy" a domain you're really leasing the right to use it for a fixed length of time. And anyway, the system of assigning names is not fixed upon stones sent to us from the heavens. Our goal should be to have a system that is as useful and fair as possible.
Why is it such a big problem that you have to pay more than $7 for a single word .com? Is it just that it feels unfair to you for someone to be profiting like this?
I’ve been more than happy to buy domains from these squatters, they’re usually willing to accept prices far lower than the value I can extract from said domains.
> Is it just that it feels unfair to you for someone to be profiting like this?
There are other reasons, but I'm a bit confused why this isn't something you find objectionable.
In theory, a free market should incentivize people to create value. But here's a case where people are literally removing value which was previously available, and getting paid to do it: if there ever was a perverse incentive, this is it.
From reading your comments, it seems like you think that anything that "freedom" = "anything the free market does". This is pretty fundamentally misguided, because if you don't have any rules to prevent people from amassing too much power, you just end up with rules set forth by whoever you've let take power. If you refuse to make rules, you're simply accepting the rules made by someone who doesn't refuse to make rules.
I guess you're technically correct in that the several thousands of $ these domains usually go for is "more than 7$" and in fact, I don't have a problem paying a high price for something valuable to me. I have a problem paying an unpredictable unregulated price to a completely third party just because they "got there first". Buying from a squatter benefits the squatter (a 3rd party) and to some extent the providers (registries, registrars, ICANN), but harms the end consumer. To me, that is the exact opposite of how things should be done. Consumer first, companies second, random third parties last.
I agree that probably wouldn't work for land, which is why I support a higher tax on unused land/realestate instead, to incentivise owners to keep lowering the prices until it sells, instead of setting the price to something unreasonable and holding it for years and years until people get desperate enough.
But I seem to have gone off track. Any situation where the consumer gets screwed because a completely third party wants to line their pockets is a situation I don't want to see. Namesquatting, ticket scalping, that thing where a company buys up the whole used market on something and then re-sells it for a premium, etc. are all examples of that and I am yet to hear a good argument for them other than "I have the right to be a capitalist dick with no regard for others", which I do not consider a basic human right.
Okay so the complaint is essentially “this doesn’t feel fair!”. I guess this really does come down to envy, just as another commenter pointed out.
>but harms the end consumer
It doesn’t though, without the second hand market someone would be using that domain for something silly and you wouldn’t get it anyway.
> Consumer first, companies second, random third parties last
But companies are the primary consumers in the domain name market. Internet end users benefit from squatting because the companies doing something with value are the only ones who end up actually using the good domains.
Because without the secondary market there’d be no incentive for anyone to give up a domain. At least now the domains actually end up with parties willing to pay a fair price for them.
Nobody is proposing we get rid of the secondary market, so you can stop proposing that straw man argument.
I'm not saying we should get rid of the secondary market. I'm saying the secondary market should consist of entities who are making a good-faith effort to make use of the domains, not middlemen who actively suck value out of the system while contributing nothing.
Of course ticket scalping is fine, many venues go out of their way to enable it.
I’ve often benefited from the scalpers by being able to buy last minute tickets. Same goes for domain squatters.
You think squatting is bad? Ok. What if my low-effort personal website was “doctor.com” and someone emailed me an offer of $2M for it, should I be allowed to accept that?
I don’t think there’s a meaningful distinction to be made there.
How hard do you think it would be for those people to automate setting up basic template websites for all of domains they are hoarding?
If we were to apply this, as with any poorly thought-out rule, only legitimate users will be affected. Anyone proposing an "easy" solution to a complex problem should think twice before speaking.
This is a very myopic view of what domains are used for. Putting up web pages is certainly a huge use-case, but it’s not the only one (email, server naming, iot naming, network infra naming, etc).
An unrelated question. For those using Vim, what plugins do you use to get a SLIME-like development environment?
I have read great things about SLIME and how it helps in hot-reloading code into a Lisp REPL using Emacs. But is it necessary to learn Emacs to do Lisp? Are the plugins for Vim good enough?
I use evil-mode in emacs with the emacs lisp interface that works with Franz's Allegro Common Lisp.
I really like it, and do the vast majority of my development in it as a common lisp developer.
It's no longer support and has some bugs, so I've been meaning to set up SLIME, but a previous developer gave me a config that worked out of the box, so I've been using that.
I don't use vim, but supposedly Paul Graham, the creator of this site uses vim for lisp. You really don't need that many fancy tools. Vim already has a visual hint for matching parens. It's nice to load stuff into the lisp image while you are typing but a quick keybind to switch to an external REPL and reload a file gets the job done.
Linux was crafted with just a basic editor, no IDE features.
Unix was crafted without even a display to see the code being typed.
Fancy tools are nice but not required.
But that said, SLIME in Emacs is the best. It's macro expansion buffer with really helps to understand what a macro does, or make things clear while crafting your own macros. Auto completion is great, although it only works for what is loaded int he live image, it doesn't scan source files for completion like a traditional IDE. Just load everything and completion is great.
I started learning Common Lisp in vim with slimv, which works pretty well. After a while, I switched to emacs with evil-mode, because I could port my vim config to emacs pretty easily by finding emacs plugins for equivalent extensions.
I posted it to Hacker News too but it did not get enough traction. The comparison table is towards the end of the post. Overall, I prefer Slimv because it supports Scheme and Clojure as well.
Sure, but note they're NeoVim-specific(the terminal buffer works a bit differently there). And I adapted them to work without my other custom shortcuts, so they're longer(and even more indecipherable for sane people...I'm sure this could be done in a cleaner way).
Open a terminal running SBCL on the right with "\ls":
> Makesite.py is "sold" as an alternative to Jekyll for people who prefer Python.
That's a really strange argument to make. If you see the README, it mentions, "But then did you yearn to use something even simpler to generate your blog? Do you like Python? Perhaps the thought of writing your own static site generator crossed your mind but you thought it would be too much work? If you answered "yes" to these questions, then this project is for you."
Makesite.py is being presented as a do-it-yourself blogging solution with makesite.py serving as a good starting point to start hacking. It is very different from Jekyll. How does it make sense to mention Pelican which is, if anything, similar to Jekyll and not similar to Makesite.py?
In fact I have written more than one DIY static site generators for small sites in the distant past. The bottom line of my experience was: they don't worth the effort. You will start missing features sooner than you think, and it will be entirely up to you to implement them from scratch. Instead of actually adding content to your site, you'll end up adding features to your feature-strapped hack.
In the presence of excellent tools like Jekyll or Pelican that are also fairly easy to use and extend, I'd need a concrete use-case before going DIY. If there is no concrete use-case, the DIY static generators is just another version of the "not invented here" syndrome. Just my 2¢.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Some people prefer full-blown feature-rich static site generators like Jekyll or Pelican or Hugo. Some people like to write their own minimal static site generator. To each their own.
There are plenty of environments where deviating from spec (even when fixing an apparently trivial bug) would not be ok without assessing the situation for potential unintended behaviors.
High-risk systems where a software bug could result in loss of life - aviation, submarine tech, defense, medical etc. Edit: This is for throwing exceptions on undefined behavior.
For unlimited threads I imagine scenarios exist particularly when scalable computing is so popular. Large high traffic web stores such as Amazon/Ebay, financial institutions, etc. Either way, the problem shouldn't be solved by an individual developer on a project making things up as they go - its a problem that probably needs to be defined at a framework layer, and discussed within the team of developers and requirements definers.
If the strcp() macro is used with a function as the first argument (or an expression that has side-effects), it's not obvious at the call site (or, probably, intended by the programmer) that the argument will be evaluated twice.
expecting this to copy the beginning of the string "foobar" into a newly-allocated 4-byte buffer. Oops... this will actually call malloc twice (leaking the first buffer), and it won't have written the intended '\0' into the buffer that actually ends up getting used, so all bets are off...
If strcp were a function, its first argument would be evaluated just once, and it would work as intended.
with arXiv the TeX source is available for download (under the "Other formats" link), which I think is what arXiv-vanity uses. I imagine it would be really tough to go reliably from arbitrary PDF to HTML without screwing up the math and figures.
I mean firefox' built in pdf-reader is javascript based. I imagine it renders to a canvas instead of to html, but it doesn't seem like an impossibility to render to html in any case.
PDFs can be annoying on a small tablet or phone. It seems like I used to have more display options, but I tried to catch up on some reading on my last flight and I couldn't find an option to reflow the text.
