Hasnain says:

“Meanwhile, anyone who answers the phones can see the anger is not letting up. The phone rings every five minutes, said one staffer for a lawmaker who believes the outrage is “starting to die down.” The callers are growing more diverse in age, identity and party affiliation.

“The pressure is going to continue to mount and these members are going to have to figure out how to reposture themselves, because their positions are not sustainable,” one senior adviser said. “Every day this conflict looks more grotesque, more visibly catastrophic.””

Hasnain says:

Kudos to these students for standing up, speaking out, and even being arrested. Beautifully written letter.

“And we must heed. Palestinians are our cousins, our peers at Brown, natives of the land, human beings whose lives matter. You shall not oppress a stranger.

We write these words from the diaspora, and it is from here that we wish to better our world. As we grapple with millennia of Jewish struggle and survival, we will not abandon our Palestinian cousins and peers, or let them stand alone. This genocide cannot continue.

Not in our names. With or without our names: Never. “

Hasnain says:

RIP Omegle.

“The battle for Omegle has been lost, but the war against the Internet rages on. Virtually every online communication service has been subject to the same kinds of attack as Omegle; and while some of them are much larger companies with much greater resources, they all have their breaking point somewhere. I worry that, unless the tide turns soon, the Internet I fell in love with may cease to exist, and in its place, we will have something closer to a souped-up version of TV – focused largely on passive consumption, with much less opportunity for active participation and genuine human connection. If that sounds like a bad idea to you, please consider donating to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that fights for your rights online.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you to everyone who used Omegle for positive purposes, and to everyone who contributed to the site’s success in any way. I’m so sorry I couldn’t keep fighting for you.”

Hasnain says:

“The main trouble I have with how most cost management efforts are structured is that they assume Engineering has made all the right choices to build cost-aware and cost-effective systems.

As any capable engineer will attest, this is a very bad assumption.”

Hasnain says:

“And we are done!

[A screenshot from Cities: Skylines 2 at night ]

I tried not to make this into an in-depth graphics study, but I think I failed. Hope you learned something new”

Hasnain says:

This paragraph left me speechless (for hopefully obvious reasons)

““If this really goes bad, we want to be able to point to our past statements,” a senior U.S. official said. The official said the administration is particularly worried about a narrative taking hold that Biden supports all Israeli military actions and that U.S.-provided weapons have been used to kill Palestinian civilians, many of them women and children. The Defense Department has said the U.S. is not putting any limits or restrictions on the weapons it’s providing Israel. “

Hasnain says:

Let’s all agree to condemn the deaths of innocent civilians everywhere, please. Regardless of which side of the conflict they’re on.

“This is demoralizing work, to have to speak constantly in the vernacular of tragedies and atrocities, to say: Look, look. Remember? That other suffering that was eventually deemed unacceptable? Let me hold it up to this one. Let me show you proportion. Let me earn your outrage. Absent that, let me earn your memory. Please.

I don’t hesitate for a second to condemn the killing of any child, any massacre of civilians. It is the easiest ask in the world. And it is not in spite of that but because of that I say: Condemn the brutalization of bodies. By all means, do. Condemn murder. Condemn violence, imprisonment, all forms of oppression. But if your shock and distress comes only at the sight of certain brutalized bodies? If you speak out but not when Palestinian bodies are besieged and murdered, abducted and imprisoned? Then it is worth asking yourself which brutalization is acceptable to you, even quietly, even subconsciously, and which is not.

Name the discrepancy and own it. If you can’t be equitable, be honest.”

Hasnain says:

Felt myself nodding along the whole time - Elie always puts thoughts to paper way better than I can. Worth a read.

“I am neither Israeli or Palestinian, nor am I an expert on Middle Eastern geopolitics, terrorism, security, or colonization. I am an expert in American constitutional law, which, in this situation, is as useful as being an expert in sand-castle construction during a tsunami. As such, I have little to add to the current international conflagration and the foreign policy discourse around it. Instead, I have tried to read, listen, learn, and generally not say anything that could be used by the most morally bankrupt people to justify the murder of children.”

Hasnain says:

“So how far did we come? The original Python program was going to take 2.9 years to complete at k=5. Our final Rust program only takes 8 minutes on the same dataset. That is roughly a 180,000x speedup. A summary of the key optimizations:

Use Rust’s compiler optimizations.
Hash numbers instead of strings.
Use (indexed) vectors instead of hashmaps.
Use bit-sets for efficient membership tests.
Use SIMD for efficient bit-sets.
Use multi-threading to split the work over many cores.
Use batching to avoid a bottleneck at work distribution.”

Hasnain says:

Yikes.

“All jabber.ru and xmpp.ru communications between these dates should be assumed compromised. Given the nature of the interception, the attacker have been able to execute any action as if it is executed from the authorized account, without knowing the account password. This means that the attacker could download account's roster, lifetime unencrypted server-side message history, send new messages or alter them in real time.

End-to-end encrypted communications, such as OMEMO, OTR or PGP, are protected from the interception only if both parties have validated the encryption keys. The users are asked to check their accounts for new unauthorized OMEMO and PGP keys in their PEP storage, and change passwords.

We tend to assume this is lawful interception Hetzner and Linode were forced to setup based on German police request.
Another possible, although much more unlikely scenario is an intrusion on the internal networks of both Hetzner and Linode targeting specifically jabber.ru — much harder to believe but not entirely impossible.

As of 20 Oct 2023, we’re still waiting for the adequate reply from Hetzner and Linode to our inquiries.”