Peter Todd @pete@petertodd.org

So I'm thinking a good setup for DoS attack resistance would be to run the calendar servers themselves on reasonably fast machines to answer calendar db queries quickly (esp cache misses), and maybe use anycast'd on the front end w/ submitted digest aggregation to limit the geographical impact of a DoS attack.

The latter might not be relevant: a fast Rust calendar implementation can probably serve more bandwidth than I can afford on a single reasonably fast box. 😂 Modern hw is amazing.

There's two issues OTS calendars have re: DoS attack: each calendar server query is a database lookup (hence disk IO), and submitted digests take about a second or two to complete, so you have all the overhead of maintaining a connection until that finishes. The usage pattern makes CDN's not all that useful, as there's little opportunity for caching.

The good side, is the protocol is very low resource compared to most, and all the relevant calendar data easily fits into ram (<16GB right now).

Anycast works fine for short-lived TCP connections, so it'd probably work fine for scaling up OpenTimestamps infrastructure. I'd really like to avoid being vulnerable to DoS attack, as I've got competitors that are straight up scammers. Currently it wouldn't take that much effort DoS attack OTS into the ground. Wouldn't take much to fix either! But better to be prepared in advance if it can be done cheaply.

TIL BuyVM offers Anycast VPS's: https://buyvm.net/anycast-vps/

Very tempted to find an excuse to use that. 😂

https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/01/10/are-the-covid-vaccines-safe-and-effective/

Re: the Astra-Zeneca vaccine:

"The British and Brazilian arms were single-blind, while the South African arm was double-blind. ... This is strange, and really quite unforgivable, because it makes it much easier for the researchers to manipulate the results... There is no reason why a big, well-financed study like this shouldn’t use a double-blind methodology across all trial arms."

WTF.

Read the rest of the article, that's not even the only thing wrong with the trial.

What's the current state-of-the-art in Lightning donation addresses? As in, something I could put in a tweet?

IIUC keypay can pay to a node id. But there isn't a QR code standard for it yet.

My OTS calendar servers are running low on funds, so I actually have a practical use-case for this in the very near future. :)

Lol, BitPay is so hilariously useless.

For research purposes I actually went through that nonsense. They wanted a photo of my passport (NOT a scan!), a selfie which had to be taken on my phone (uploading a photo was NOT good enough), and of course my address and date of birth.

...and after all that nonsense, the invoice timed out, so I couldn't pay anyway. So I don't know if they still do the payment protocol nonsense - BitPay is such a joke that they probably do. 😂

How accurate is this translation?

https://web.archive.org/web/20210316045923/https://www.tv2.no/a/13886747/

https://mooseyanon.medium.com/github-f-ck-your-name-change-de599033bbbe

"Anyways at least one good thing as come from all this, I now know how to rename my master branch `fuck-github`."

Reminder: Sweden hasn't done any worse than the EU average.

Overall mortality figures confirm this: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps

Lockdown achieve nothing.

https://www.blogto.com/arts/2021/03/toronto-photographer-captured-all-vacant-stores-queen-west/

Endless destruction.

https://blog.yossarian.net/2021/03/16/totally_safe_transmute-line-by-line

Totally Safe™ transmute()

tl;dr: /proc/self/mem 😂

I've been saying for literally months that manufacturing was a potential problem, because what was tested may not be what was actually produced due to the challenges in scaling up manufacturing. Sure enough, turns out the regulators shared my concerns.

https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n627

"EMA scientists worried about “truncated and modified mRNA species present in the finished product.”" "Commercial manufacturing was not producing vaccines to the specifications expected, and regulators were unsure of the implications."

So not only do we have a problem with failure to report side effects, as AstraZeneca admitted(1). But the type of side effects could vary on a batch-to-batch basis, making statistics difficult to collect.

1) https://mastodon.petertodd.org/@pete/105890505769548109