I would find it quite annoying to get any of those emails.
When I give you my email, it's not because I actually want to hear from you; it's because you've made it the only — or the least shady — way to sign up. I do not want to hear from you or answer your questions, especially before I've decided that I like your product and care about it.
So any such email I immediately mark as junk, and the fact that you sent it to me will go the "cons" column when evaluating your product vs the competitors.
Life must be really hard if you get to that point where a welcome email coming from a service you signed up for a trial is so "annoying" that you "immediately mark as junk".
I see where billme is coming from. I don't do it here (because I don't comment much, because I mostly use https://hackerweb.app for reading), but I do it on reddit.
Once you've left enough comments, a motivated party has a good chance of identifying you based on the intersection of your (relatively uncommon) interests, various bits and pieces of the personal info that you tend to drop in comments etc.
I don't see a single argument in the article why, conditional on:
1. Me deciding to send a given message
2. Me deciding to use email for that message
... I should send it over an unencrypted email rather than encrypted one.
I see arguments for using other systems like Signal. I see arguments for a false sense of security — i.e. if I didn't assume the email was secure, I'd write a different message.
But, again, for a given message being sent over an email, I just don't see any reason not to encrypt it if it provides at least some protection (and saying it doesn't would probably be too much hyperbole even for latacora). The authors sort of just declare out of nowhere:
> But email cannot promise security, and so shouldn’t pretend to offer it.
And if "pretending" meant rot13, I would agree. But even despite all its flaws, there's a sea of difference between rot13 and PGP. If I can publish the encrypted contents of my email publicly, and not even tptacek can decrypt it, then it's not pretending.
So, what is the downside of encrypting an email compared to not encrypting it? I can't think of any, and apparently the authors can't either, despite trying very hard.
> when you're down to guessing it's guaranteed to be safe
Sure. But, in a complex situation, it's rather hard to know whether "you're down to guessing". It seems like there's no more information to be extracted from the board, but you may be wrong. (At least I often am.) That said, you can cheat by pressing "Give me a hint", and it'll tell you whether it's safe to guess.
> Spot them all: the URL, the problem, the browser, how many tabs are open on that browser, the fact that this person has an unusual number of Facebook tabs open and probably isn’t overly invested in their job, some other applications that are open, that they leave system credentials in text files on their desktop, the time, the operating system, that they have a serious investment in someone named Alex, and whether the wifi is connected.
And that is precisely why I would crop my screenshot to only the relevant part.
It is done using symbolic algebra, not just assigning specific coordinates if that's what you're asking.
Let's say you're given three parallel lines. You can put your x axis along the first line. Then its equation is y = 0. The other two lines necessarily have equations y = a and y = b for some reals a and b. Then you calculate the other quantities involved via a and b and other parameters you have to introduce. At the end you calculate the coordinates of your three points and verify, symbolically, that they lie on the same line.
Yes, that's right. You end up with a system of equations and solve it. So what does "by coordinates" mean? Is the original commenter simply saying that the machine will always be able to solve that system? He's right if that is what he means. Originally it sounded like "the machine can read the diagram accurately".
Not necessarily, depending on where you're based.