@upofadown@mstdn.ca

Bruce Walzer 🇨🇦 @upofadown@mstdn.ca · Jul 22, 2026

Replying to @mxchara@seattle.pink

@mxchara@seattle.pink Spectrwm. Switched just recently. A tiling window manager with all my favourite tweaks in a 15 line config file. Where has this thing been all my life?

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Bruce Walzer 🇨🇦 @upofadown@mstdn.ca · Jul 11, 2026

Replying to @Quantensalat@scicomm.xyz

@Quantensalat@scicomm.xyz When the transistor is on, then the current through the inductance will ramp up. When the transistor turns off, the current will continue. That might mean that the voltage across the inductor will greatly increase (inductive spike) enough to cause some component to conduct in an abnormal way. Perhaps that is what is happening here? It might be interesting to look at the voltage across the source and drain of the transistor.

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Bruce Walzer 🇨🇦 @upofadown@mstdn.ca · Jul 10, 2026

Replying to @Quantensalat@scicomm.xyz

@Quantensalat@scicomm.xyz Would this fall under generic transformer magic? A transformer driven on the primary without a load on the secondary is just an inductor. That inductance keeps the transformer from taking power from the source. Adding a load to the secondary cause the changing magnetic flux in the coil to induce current in the secondary. That makes the primary no longer look like a pure inductance. It now looks somewhat resistive. So is the answer: because of the load?

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Bruce Walzer 🇨🇦 @upofadown@mstdn.ca · Jul 05, 2026

Replying to @adulau@infosec.exchange

@adulau@infosec.exchange Just to save others the bother, I get 145 years total to completely search the keyspace based on progress to date.

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Bruce Walzer 🇨🇦 @upofadown@mstdn.ca · Jul 01, 2026

Replying to @michaelharley@infosec.exchange

@michaelharley@infosec.exchange XMPP? I acknowledge it is boring, but sometimes you want something that just works.

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Bruce Walzer 🇨🇦 @upofadown@mstdn.ca · May 05, 2026

Replying to @delta@chaos.social

@delta @Yuvalne @rpgp @protonprivacy @Tutanota This is ultimately based on a new Autocrypt standard which is based on RFC-9580? That doesn't sound very interoperable to me. So a recipient would have to support Autocrypt2 and RFC-9580 (as opposed to LibrePGP). How likely is it that anything else will support that particular combination of standards?

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Bruce Walzer 🇨🇦 @upofadown@mstdn.ca · Apr 10, 2026

Replying to @HasSignalBeenHacked@infosec.exchange

@HasSignalBeenHacked Putting on my user hat... "OK. Signal has forward secrecy. So messages are gone after I receive them. Great!" Oh, you didn't turn on disappearing messages? Oh, right, then forensic tools like Cellebrite can get them. You have to turn on disappearing messages. The default is off. Oh, you did turn on disappearing messages? We send the messages in notifications. So the OS can keep them. Turns out Apple was doing that. There is an option you can turn on to prevent that. It is off by default. "I'll just delete the entire app!" No, sorry, the OS still has your messages... At what point does the usability get so bad that we can blame the messaging system? This same app had a usability issue that turned into a security issue just last year: End to End Encrypted Messaging in the News: An Editorial Usability Case Study (my article) https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=em:sg

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Bruce Walzer 🇨🇦 @upofadown@mstdn.ca · Apr 02, 2026

Replying to @announcements@mastodon.bsd.cafe

@announcements Fairly off topic, but I recently wrote an article about the GDPR thing that might be of interest: https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=pgpfan:gdpr

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Bruce Walzer 🇨🇦 @upofadown@mstdn.ca · Mar 09, 2026

Replying to @june@social.nouveau.community

@june This makes me wonder if this sort of bad behaviour is covered by an author's moral rights:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights

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Bruce Walzer 🇨🇦 @upofadown@mstdn.ca · Jan 27, 2026

Replying to @dima@dol.social

@dima GPG has a high performance symmetrical encryption mode now (OCB). If you make a new key it will put that mode in the preferences so it will get requested. So the performance thing might not have anything to do with RSA2048 vs Curve25519. It might just be that you made a new key. Otherwise I would not expect a performance difference significant enough to notice.

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Bruce Walzer 🇨🇦 @upofadown@mstdn.ca · Sep 27, 2025

Replying to @hko@floss.social

@hko@floss.social RNP (Thunderbird) is also explicitly supporting LibrePGP. So the two most deployed and used OpenPGP implementations support it. So we can't just ignore it, there is a definite problem here that we have to address. PGP has always had a severely minimalist culture due to the medium. You introduce new incompatible methods only with great care if you want to preserve interoperability. So strong moderation of new ideas is required as well as traditional. The RFC9580 proposal basically just threw this all out and accepted submissions with no real pushback. Fortunately the insecurity of RFC4880 was greatly exaggerated. So us users have the very reasonable option of just ignoring both proposals, just as long as we are allowed to.

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Bruce Walzer 🇨🇦 @upofadown@mstdn.ca · Sep 26, 2025

Replying to @hpk@chaos.social

@hpk@chaos.social @rpgp@mastodon.social Specifically, GnuPG is not following the other proposal for a new standard (RFC9580). That hardly makes it proprietary. The danger represented by the current standards schism will only be increased if we use misleading language.

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Bruce Walzer 🇨🇦 @upofadown@mstdn.ca · Sep 26, 2025

Replying to @rpgp@mastodon.social

@rpgp@mastodon.social GnuPG has proprietary features now? How much does this feature cost? Pretty sure that format is documented in the LibrePGP standard proposal.

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