#Informationism

[billherbert23]

informationist tech: my robot butler fox

File under: things which never were and yet are now no longer there

(This appeared on Kona MacPhee's website, That Elusive Clarity, in 2012 as one of the ‘six things’ she asked me to list, kicking off a habit of thinking in, more usually, threes, fives, and sevens, as a limitation that enabled some retention and processing of ideas. More recently, ie last week, I had been wondering if the robot out of Lost in Space* was sentient, so it was nice to be reminded of this by encountering the phrase ‘robot butler’ on TwittereX.)

My robot butler fox is a Jeevesian mass of limbs, levers and oily tentacles emitting from this giant steel periwinkle shell on casters with inbuilt sock drawers and fridge components.

When you squeeze past the claws there's an interior shower unit, the curtain for which depicts physicists working on Hawkwind’s key problem of space rock, how to travel ‘sideways in time’, and a Corbie newspaper press (manufactured by real crows) that perfectly straightens and flattens The Dundee Courier and Advertiser until it is one molecule thick.

Also on the outside is that big clockface from Prague which tells the hours backwards, the direction in which (it sometimes feels) we are actually pointed, though if we were our teeth would be able to sculpt perfect meals from a throatful of undigested pap.

In the smaller convolutes are placed: an ant orchestra; the egg-scrambling device he constructed himself before I could explain what eggs were and now refuses to update; and what surely can't be a real fox's head in a bubble.

He wakes me with one freshly-baked fortune cookie and a cup of peppermint tea, its leaves gathered from the Cretan hills, with a sugar cube in it which he carves himself (sometimes it's a sugar pyramid).

My fortune this morning was 'You will meet a river cobbler' - as yet, I haven't.

*My Will Robinson child mind had assumed this robot and Robbie the Robot of Forbidden Planet were the same robot, but they are not and in fact engage in combat in an episode I do not recall, ‘War of the Robots’ - I’ll try to view this in the future and report back…

[girderednerve]

i have seen some well-deserved skepticism about 'representation' on the level of an individual work lately—i too am deeply tired of books which are very flawed on a craft level being recommended as 'representation' & all books by marginalized authors being assessed for their success in reflecting back what mainstream audiences already expect to find—but i maintain that representation does matter at the collection level (library shelves, publishers' catalogues, school curricula, etc.). it's frustrating that these two things have been conflated, especially because it makes it harder to talk about what a usefully diverse collection might look like, or how one might think about the ethical imperatives around forming a collection that is meant to serve the needs & interests of an active community of users. i work in a public library, where most of the discussion about representation is focused in fiction collections, especially youth collections. these conversations often collapse into a sort of inclusive posture without much content, i think in part because there isn't a robust framework for what library collections can or should accomplish for their users; do we hope to entertain, enlighten, inform, civilize?

[thewickerking]

This is random ignore everything else I've posted lately BUT. ARTFIGHT MUTUALS. im doing an artfight hitlist for the first time and u could be on it. Smiles . Fill out my google form. It's not done well. But forgive me

oh shit i don't post art a lot. Here are the attacks I did last year if that helps sway u one way or the other :3

[wumblr]

RIP youtube

It Always Kind Of Sucked

[unopenablebox]

yuletide discord server is really not succeeding at feeding me [social writing activity emotion that leads me to write] and i am instead wasting hours on [nonendorsed fic community server/archives] and it is making me irritable and also causing me to write using weird syntax as displayed here and i had like six hours to write my evil yuletide fic and didn't >:(

[sirenthestone]

I've accidentally conditioned myself that listening to music means being productive. I literally started my playlist just to chill to and ended up cleaning my room.

[winged-void]

They should make a "are you mad at me" that is taken neutrally and informationally every time and doesn't make everything worse when you ask it

[reverend-red]

and here’s-a my brother “luigi” now?

ur father and I have talked and ur the next mario

[frogshunnedshadows]

Was briefly infatuated with the idea of making one of those medieval folding almanac-type book-things and roughed out this layout. Folds up to 1/6th the full size, but can be read partially folded as only a calendar. Also pretty pleased with my sketchy little angel in the upper left.

[gaiaxygang]

i need to claim my spot on tumblr as the nut supanut guy like how in 2023 i was the perth and chimon lore guy

[tranquilwilds]

Be active in the things you care about!

Upset about misinformation spread by younger therians on tiktok? Instead of just reposting and being upset about it, go make a tiktok account and start posting informationally about therianthropy, try to include sources!

Want more alterhuman buddies on tumblr? Go interact with your community!! Reply in length to posts, and not just in tags, comment your thoughts, send in asks to blogs you think are cool saying hello! I do hope I speak for most when I say that everyone would be overjoyed to chat! Don’t be embarrassed or intimidated, we’re all in this together!

Want to help stop alterhumans aiding the fur farm industry? Post a list of resources and shops that sell actually humane fur and bones, and update it occasionally!

Tired of having no otherkin meetups in your area? Organize one! Start small, just a meetup and a few activities, you’ve got this!

Want alterhuman books? Congrats you’re a writer now! Want fictionkin music? Check out that cool musician right there, on the other side of the screen! Stained glass pieces, website building, art, woodworking, games, embroidery, streaming, and on and on! You can do whatever you put your mind to! Don’t wait for others to pick up the slack, you can be the first!

Good luck everycreature, and happy howling!

[thefrogman]

Back in the olden days, if you used the "keep reading" function on a Tumblr-dot-com post, it would

not get very many notes.

At all.

I am not sure exactly why.

I think people hated pressing an extra thing.

But maybe it was also a psychological phenomenon where, given the choice, they were unwilling to trust me with their time.

But if I sucked them in with a good story or a compelling image, they would get serious FOMO.

When I created a super high effort post-of-length I would get comments like, "This was way too long but before I realized it I was reading the last sentence."

That was a really good feeling.

I used to do tests to figure out the best posting strategies and I think I figured out you'd lose about 90% of your notes if you did a "keep reading" post.

So that notion was ingrained in my brain again and again from when I was very note-obsessed and I have since avoided the "keep reading" option almost like a conditioned response.

Just seeing that squiggly line appear still induces a Pavlovian fear.

But that was probably a decade ago and I did a new experiment. My story about replacing my mailbox did reasonably well with a strategically clickbaity "keep reading."

This was a promising result due to the fact that some people like to send me hate for writing a lengthy post.

I recently got a death threat for writing too much, which was a fun reminder of my M&M days (I melted men's rights activists' brains with a poorly worded analogy and they launched a years long harassment campaign).

It seems in present-era-Tumblr-dot-com many more people prefer pressing an extra thing rather than scrolling a bunch on their smartphone. The collective behavior has changed. And maybe I don't need to use tricks and running gags in order to get folks to "keep reading".

Unfortunately I started writing that ring light post a few months ago so I wasn't able to include that in the experiment. But I am going to try using the keep reading function in the future and as long as the average number of folks that usually read my longer posts continue to read my posts, that will be the standard approach.

I also tag these posts with "long post" so you can flag that if you wish.

While I am no longer in the audience-building phase of my Tumblr career, these essays and stories and educational posts take a considerable amount of time and effort to create, so I do want to make sure everyone who wants to read them is able to. But posts without hearts and reblogs can quickly die a gruesome algorithmic death. Even my most ardent followers would tell me things were not showing up on their dash. (I think replies help mitigate that, so if you like a long post, you can help with engagement.)

The collective noun is a "business" of ferrets.

Do you want to see a business of ferrets ready to do some business?

KEEP READING

I love writing and it is a huge catharsis for me. And I love sharing any knowledge I feel like I have the earned expertise to speak on with authority (technology, photography, light, fun ferret facts, etc). I wish I had the energy to be a photography teacher, but long posts on Tumblr are probably the best I can do for now.

I know my posts are super long, but I try to make them as fun and informationally dense as I possibly can. I don't like wasting people's time if I can avoid it. Though maybe I should trust my follower's attention span a bit more. I have this fear that if I am not constantly entertaining, people will click away or unfollow.

I think a good business for a business of ferrets would be selling pool noodles that look like ferrets.

So as long as I get roughly the same amount of notes I will do the keep reading. And then maybe people can lay off on the mean comments and occasional requests to end my own life because I bloviated about soft light.

100% true ferret fact..

If you ask a ferret what their business is, they will crawl on your shoulder and whisper in your ear...

[signedkoko]

Could I pls get hcs about Vox having a fem! s/o who's close friends with Alastor's GN! s/o?? Like what's Vox's take on this friendship?? Because I feel like this is an interesting cocept lmao. Ty!! <3

Vox X Reader [Romantic]

In which your close friend is dating the enemy of Vox; Alastor

Vox was the looming eyes behind every device in all of hell, so much so that his reach was beyond just pride- psychologically and informationally, at least

He knew everyone's secrets, whereabouts, relationships

Or so he thought

Because it was more than surprising when one late afternoon at dinner, your name was called by a face he vaguely recalled, another sinner who snuck to your table to greet you in a warm embrace

Oh yes, he certainly would remember someone so close to his mortal enemy

" Darling, have I ever introduced you to my lovely best friend? I'm so sorry I never called! It's been so busy since I found this one over here...! "

You pointed to Vox, giggling, though the tv was far from amused at the situation unfolding across the table from him

" Have I introduced you to my new boyfriend? He's super classy! "

As your friend spoke, a looming shadow closed in and wrapped its arm around your friends waist, another hand just inches from landing on your shoulder

That same hand was smacked away with a sudden screech of the heavy table moving and several glasses rattling

The whole restaurant had gone silent as Vox stood over you, claws digging into Alastors wrist and holding it high above your head

" My oh my! Was offering a kind embrace to my beloved's closest friend too much for you? "

Alastors voice was one you, yourself, recognized

Ah.

So you and your friend had a similar taste for media based overlords

nice

Vox was ticked off more than Alastor seemed to be, so you carefully pushed him away from the deer-like demon and made distance so Vox wasn't so worried about you being near him

" Let's talk later! Maybe we can set something up- just us two! "

Your friend called over their shoulder as they dragged Alastor back to their corner of the restaurant

Vox is just bewildered that of all people in hell, with SO many options, of course your closest friend had to be dating that asshole

" No double dates "

" I figured "

Author's Note - Teehee hi voxxxx its me koko your favourite writerrr 🖤Thank you so much for requesting!! I was a bit unsure of your request based off wording so I hope I caught it right!

[paper-mario-wiki]

i need input on this. it's an intro to a song im maybe writing. or maybe it'll just stay as this short little poem.

i feel like my writing is becoming too, like, informationally dense. im worried about cramming in multiple double/triple/quadruple entendres but i feel as though the way that im doing it comes across as inelegant. like, im going for "thoughtful" and coming off as "pretentious".

can you tell, like, what im saying in this song? additionally, do the things with multiple meanings come across properly? like, can you pick out all the puns and stuff? or is it just kind of nonsense?

line-by-line translation under the cut:

1. Bitter melancholy twice a day like I invested in a broken crop

Bitter melancholy/bitter melon. twice a day/broken clock. a break crop (alluding to the bitter melon) is a staggered or inconsistent crop. This is me lamenting time I feel I've wasted on something I still consider inadequate by comparing it to an investment in a broken clock, which is only right twice a day.

2. I spit disappointing like a ticker for a pocket stock

Spitting/stock ticker tape, but also ticker like a clock. Continuing the disappointing investment motif. Pocket stock means a stock that plummets suddenly or abruptly. This is a personal statement about how I feel about my current ability to write lyrics.

3. People in the bleachers asking me if I could really drop

Bleachers/drop like a basketball game, but also dropping like dropping music, but also also dropping like the pocket stock from the previous line. Referring to the people who are very kindly encouraging me whenever i post my music.

4. Peacefully inform them if I make it then I'd rather stop

(This line I feel I could do better on) "If I make it" like making a basketball shot, continuing the basketball motif. This is about how I'd prefer not to make a career out of music.

5. Scared that I can't offer more than practice I could never top

Straightforwardly continuing the basketball/writing skill motif, and making a statement about how I'm worried that I've already put my best work out somehow, in the form of the silly stuff i write.

6. This is just a vessel for my motivation

Short, poetic way of saying "but im gonna keep doin it anyway cuz it's fun and i want to" by referring to the song itself as a vessel for the motivation i have to make something, good or bad.

[max-levchin]

Shamir Secret Sharing

It’s 3am. Paul, the head of PayPal database administration carefully enters his elaborate passphrase at a keyboard in a darkened cubicle of 1840 Embarcadero Road in East Palo Alto, for the fifth time. He hits Return. The green-on-black console window instantly displays one line of text: “Sorry, one or more wrong passphrases. Can’t reconstruct the key. Goodbye.” 

There is nerd pandemonium all around us. James, our recently promoted VP of Engineering, just climbed the desk at a nearby cubicle, screaming: “Guys, if we can’t get this key the right way, we gotta start brute-forcing it ASAP!” It’s gallows humor – he knows very well that brute-forcing such a key will take millions of years, and it’s already 6am on the East Coast – the first of many “Why is PayPal down today?” articles is undoubtedly going to hit CNET shortly. Our single-story cubicle-maze office is buzzing with nervous activity of PayPalians who know they can’t help but want to do something anyway. I poke my head up above the cubicle wall to catch a glimpse of someone trying to stay inside a giant otherwise empty recycling bin on wheels while a couple of Senior Software Engineers are attempting to accelerate the bin up to dangerous speeds in the front lobby. I lower my head and try to stay focused. “Let’s try it again, this time with three different people” is the best idea I can come up with, even though I am quite sure it will not work. 

It doesn’t. 

The key in question decrypts PayPal’s master payment credential table – also known as the giant store of credit card and bank account numbers. Without access to payment credentials, PayPal doesn’t really have a business per se, seeing how we are supposed to facilitate payments, and that’s really hard to do if we no longer have access to the 100+ million credit card numbers our users added over the last year of insane growth. 

This is the story of a catastrophic software bug I briefly introduced into the PayPal codebase that almost cost us the company (or so it seemed, in the moment.) I’ve told this story a handful of times, always swearing the listeners to secrecy, and surprisingly it does not appear to have ever been written down before. 20+ years since the incident, it now appears instructive and a little funny, rather than merely extremely embarrassing. 

Before we get back to that fateful night, we have to go back another decade. In the summer of 1991, my family and I moved to Chicago from Kyiv, Ukraine. While we had just a few hundred dollars between the five of us, we did have one secret advantage: science fiction fans. 

My dad was a highly active member of Zoryaniy Shlyah – Kyiv’s possibly first (and possibly only, at the time) sci-fi fan club – the name means “Star Trek” in Ukrainian, unsurprisingly. He translated some Stansilaw Lem (of Solaris and Futurological Congress fame) from Polish to Russian in the early 80s and was generally considered a coryphaeus at ZSh. 

While USSR was more or less informationally isolated behind the digital Iron Curtain until the late ‘80s, by 1990 or so, things like FidoNet wriggled their way into the Soviet computing world, and some members of ZSh were now exchanging electronic mail with sci-fi fans of the free world.

The vaguely exotic news of two Soviet refugee sci-fi fans arriving in Chicago was transmitted to the local fandom before we had even boarded the PanAm flight that took us across the Atlantic [1]. My dad (and I, by extension) was soon adopted by some kind Chicago science fiction geeks, a few of whom became close friends over the years, though that’s a story for another time. 

A year or so after the move to Chicago, our new sci-fi friends invited my dad to a birthday party for a rising star of the local fandom, one Bruce Schneier. We certainly did not know Bruce or really anyone at the party, but it promised good food, friendly people, and probably filk. My role was to translate, as my dad spoke limited English at the time. 

I had fallen desperately in love with secret codes and cryptography about a year before we left Ukraine. Walking into Bruce’s library during the house tour (this was a couple years before Applied Cryptography was published and he must have been deep in research) felt like walking into Narnia. 

I promptly abandoned my dad to fend for himself as far as small talk and canapés were concerned, and proceeded to make a complete ass out of myself by brazenly asking the host for a few sheets of paper and a pencil. Having been obliged, I pulled a half dozen cryptography books from the shelves and went to work trying to copy down some answers to a few long-held questions on the library floor. After about two hours of scribbling alone like a man possessed, I ran out of paper and decided to temporarily rejoin the party. 

On the living room table, Bruce had stacks of copies of his fanzine Ramblings. Thinking I could use the blank sides of the pages to take more notes, I grabbed a printout and was about to quietly return to copying the original S-box values for DES when my dad spotted me from across the room and demanded I help him socialize. The party wrapped soon, and our friends drove us home. 

The printout I grabbed was not a Ramblings issue. It was a short essay by Bruce titled Sharing Secrets Among Friends, essentially a humorous explanation of Shamir Secret Sharing. 

Say you want to make sure that something really really important and secret (a nuclear weapon launch code, a database encryption key, etc) cannot be known or used by a single (friendly) actor, but becomes available, if at least n people from a group of m choose to do it. Think two on-duty officers (from a cadre of say 5) turning keys together to get ready for a nuke launch. 

The idea (proposed by Adi Shamir – the S of RSA! – in 1979) is as simple as it is beautiful. 

Let’s call the secret we are trying to split among m people K. 

First, create a totally random polynomial that looks like: y(x) = C0 * x^(n-1) + C1 * x^(n-2) + C2 * x^(n-3) ….+ K. “Create” here just means generate random coefficients C. Now, for every person in your trusted group of m, evaluate the polynomial for some randomly chosen Xm and hand them their corresponding (Xm,Ym) each. 

If we have n of these points together, we can use Lagrange interpolating polynomial to reconstruct the coefficients – and evaluate the original polynomial at x=0, which conveniently gives us y(0) = K, the secret. Beautiful. I still had the printout with me, years later, in Palo Alto. 

It should come as no surprise that during my time as CTO PayPal engineering had an absolute obsession with security. No firewall was one too many, no multi-factor authentication scheme too onerous, etc. Anything that was worth anything at all was encrypted at rest. 

To decrypt, a service would get the needed data from its database table, transmit it to a special service named cryptoserv (an original SUN hardware running Solaris sitting on its own, especially tightly locked-down network) and a special service running only there would perform the decryption and send back the result. 

Decryption request rate was monitored externally and on cryptoserv, and if there were too many requests, the whole thing was to shut down and purge any sensitive data and keys from its memory until manually restarted. 

It was this manual restart that gnawed at me. At launch, a bunch of configuration files containing various critical decryption keys were read (decrypted by another key derived from one manually-entered passphrase) and loaded into the memory to perform future cryptographic services.

Four or five of us on the engineering team knew the passphrase and could restart cryptoserv if it crashed or simply had to have an upgrade. What if someone performed a little old-fashioned rubber-hose cryptanalysis and literally beat the passphrase out of one of us? The attacker could theoretically get access to these all-important master keys. Then stealing the encrypted-at-rest database of all our users’ secrets could prove useful – they could decrypt them in the comfort of their underground supervillain lair. 

I needed to eliminate this threat.

Shamir Secret Sharing was the obvious choice – beautiful, simple, perfect (you can in fact prove that if done right, it offers perfect secrecy.) I decided on a 3-of-8 scheme and implemented it in pure POSIX C for portability over a few days, and tested it for several weeks on my Linux desktop with other engineers. 

Step 1: generate the polynomial coefficients for 8 shard-holders.

Step 2: compute the key shards (x0, y0)  through (x7, y7)

Step 3: get each shard-holder to enter a long, secure passphrase to encrypt the shard

Step 4: write out the 8 shard files, encrypted with their respective passphrases.

And to reconstruct: 

Step 1: pick any 3 shard files. 

Step 2: ask each of the respective owners to enter their passphrases. 

Step 3: decrypt the shard files.

Step 4: reconstruct the polynomial, evaluate it for x=0 to get the key.

Step 5: launch cryptoserv with the key. 

One design detail here is that each shard file also stored a message authentication code (a keyed hash) of its passphrase to make sure we could identify when someone mistyped their passphrase. These tests ran hundreds and hundreds of times, on both Linux and Solaris, to make sure I did not screw up some big/little-endianness issue, etc. It all worked perfectly. 

A month or so later, the night of the key splitting party was upon us. We were finally going to close out the last vulnerability and be secure. Feeling as if I was about to turn my fellow shard-holders into cymeks, I gathered them around my desktop as PayPal’s front page began sporting the “We are down for maintenance and will be back soon” message around midnight.

The night before, I solemnly generated the new master key and securely copied it to cryptoserv. Now, while “Push It” by Salt-n-Pepa blared from someone’s desktop speakers, the automated deployment script copied shard files to their destination. 

While each of us took turns carefully entering our elaborate passphrases at a specially selected keyboard, Paul shut down the main database and decrypted the payment credentials table, then ran the script to re-encrypt with the new key. Some minutes later, the database was running smoothly again, with the newly encrypted table, without incident. 

All that was left was to restore the master key from its shards and launch the new, even more secure cryptographic service. 

The three of us entered our passphrases… to be met with the error message I haven’t seen in weeks: “Sorry, one or more wrong passphrases. Can’t reconstruct the key. Goodbye.” Surely one of us screwed up typing, no big deal, we’ll do it again. No dice. No dice – again and again, even after we tried numerous combinations of the three people necessary to decrypt. 

Minutes passed, confusion grew, tension rose rapidly. 

There was nothing to do, except to hit rewind – to grab the master key from the file still sitting on cryptoserv, split it again, generate new shards, choose passphrases, and get it done. Not a great feeling to have your first launch go wrong, but not a huge deal either. It will all be OK in a minute or two.

A cursory look at the master key file date told me that no, it wouldn’t be OK at all. The file sitting on cryptoserv wasn’t from last night, it was created just a few minutes ago. During the Salt-n-Pepa-themed push from stage, we overwrote the master key file with the stage version. Whatever key that was, it wasn’t the one I generated the day before: only one copy existed, the one I copied to cryptoserv from my computer the night before. Zero copies existed now. Not only that, the push script appears to have also wiped out the backup of the old key, so the database backups we have encrypted with the old key are likely useless. 

Sitrep: we have 8 shard files that we apparently cannot use to restore the master key and zero master key backups. The database is running but its secret data cannot be accessed. 

I will leave it to your imagination to conjure up what was going through my head that night as I stared into the black screen willing the shards to work. After half a decade of trying to make something of myself (instead of just going to work for Microsoft or IBM after graduation) I had just destroyed my first successful startup in the most spectacular fashion. 

Still, the idea of “what if we all just continuously screwed up our passphrases” swirled around my brain. It was an easy check to perform, thanks to the included MACs. I added a single printf() debug statement into the shard reconstruction code and instead of printing out a summary error of “one or more…” the code now showed if the passphrase entered matched the authentication code stored in the shard file. 

I compiled the new code directly on cryptoserv in direct contravention of all reasonable security practices – what did I have to lose? Entering my own passphrase, I promptly got “bad passphrase” error I just added to the code. Well, that’s just great – I knew my passphrase was correct, I had it written down on a post-it note I had planned to rip up hours ago. 

Another person, same error. Finally, the last person, JK, entered his passphrase. No error. The key still did not reconstruct correctly, I got the “Goodbye”, but something worked. I turned to the engineer and said, “what did you just type in that worked?”

After a second of embarrassed mumbling, he admitted to choosing “a$$word” as his passphrase. The gall! I asked everyone entrusted with the grave task of relaunching crytposerv to pick really hard to guess passphrases, and this guy…?! Still, this was something -- it worked. But why?!

I sprinted around the half-lit office grabbing the rest of the shard-holders demanding they tell me their passphrases. Everyone else had picked much lengthier passages of text and numbers. I manually tested each and none decrypted correctly. Except for the a$$word. What was it…

A lightning bolt hit me and I sprinted back to my own cubicle in the far corner, unlocked the screen and typed in “man getpass” on the command line, while logging into cryptoserv in another window and doing exactly the same thing there. I saw exactly what I needed to see. 

Today, should you try to read up the programmer’s manual (AKA the man page) on getpass, you will find it has been long declared obsolete and replaced with a more intelligent alternative in nearly all flavors of modern Unix.  

But back then, if you wanted to collect some information from the keyboard without printing what is being typed in onto the screen and remain POSIX-compliant, getpass did the trick. Other than a few standard file manipulation system calls, getpass was the only operating system service call I used, to ensure clean portability between Linux and Solaris. 

Except it wasn’t completely clean. 

Plain as day, there it was: the manual pages were identical, except Solaris had a “special feature”: any passphrase entered that was longer than 8 characters long was automatically reduced to that length anyway. (Who needs long passwords, amiright?!)

I screamed like a wounded animal. We generated the key on my Linux desktop and entered our novel-length passphrases right here. Attempting to restore them on a Solaris machine where they were being clipped down to 8 characters long would never work. Except, of course, for a$$word. That one was fine.

The rest was an exercise in high-speed coding and some entirely off-protocol file moving. We reconstructed the master key on my machine (all of our passphrases worked fine), copied the file to the Solaris-running cryptoserv, re-split it there (with very short passphrases), reconstructed it successfully, and PayPal was up and running again like nothing ever happened. 

By the time our unsuspecting colleagues rolled back into the office I was starting to doze on the floor of my cubicle and that was that. When someone asked me later that day why we took so long to bring the site back up, I’d simply respond with “eh, shoulda RTFM.” 

RTFM indeed. 

P.S. A few hours later, John, our General Counsel, stopped by my cubicle to ask me something. The day before I apparently gave him a sealed envelope and asked him to store it in his safe for 24 hours without explaining myself. He wanted to know what to do with it now that 24 hours have passed. 

Ha. I forgot all about it, but in a bout of “what if it doesn’t work” paranoia, I printed out the base64-encoded master key when we had generated it the night before, stuffed it into an envelope, and gave it to John for safekeeping. We shredded it together without opening and laughed about what would have never actually been a company-ending event. 

P.P.S. If you are thinking of all the ways this whole SSS design is horribly insecure (it had some real flaws for sure) and plan to poke around PayPal to see if it might still be there, don’t. While it served us well for a few years, this was the very first thing eBay required us to turn off after the acquisition. Pretty sure it’s back to a single passphrase now. 

Notes:

1: a member of Chicagoland sci-fi fan community let me know that the original news of our move to the US was delivered to them via a posted letter, snail mail, not FidoNet email! 

[kingofthewilderwest]

Saying this 94% tongue in cheek, but for the longest time I've felt like masters students are the most 'informationally dangerous'.

Bachelor's students know the rough basics. You know what you can trust them on and what's out of their scope.

PhD candidates might tell you when they have a knowledge gap. They're in the throes of research so you can judge their highly-specific ramblings have some basis in reality.

Masters students are graduate students so they tell people they know shit and they believe they know shit because they've been exposed to some obscurer stuff. They know just enough shit to get themselves, their mouths, and their claims in serious trouble.