Jeffrey Haas

BGP, BFD, beer.
Trying to not break the Internet for a living since 2000.

Signal: malleus_errata.14
Pronouns: He/Him/His

Last Notes

2026-07-12 17:43:25 UTC

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As someone that's about to go swimming in IETF for a week, I sympathize.
When I went reading through the activitypub specs a while ago, identity mechanisms were one of the things I had gone looking for and not found. PKI is where this stuff usually goes, and that's a very messy landscape.
At some point I was hoping to have time to go look at prior writing AP has been pondering for such things.

2026-07-12 13:54:30 UTC

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This thread feels like it's missing a lot of context.
A key is just a key - it proves nothing. It can be used for signing operations.
By analogy, if you lose your passport, you don't stop being you. The government that issued your passport doesn't say you stop being you. You've just lost a thing that helps with "proving" you are who you say you are - authentication.
The complexity in a lot of cryptography schemes is having to deal with lost/compromised keys: revocation.

2026-01-21 00:28:48 UTC

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As a third generation protocol geek, I wish authentication had gotten baked in a bit better. But, as you point out, we didn't have PKC in the toolbox at the right time.
As for general symmetric encryption, it was certainly one part horsepower (even now), but it was also that crypto just makes fragile things even more so. I mean, it took years before TCP stack were hardened enough to not blow up on their own, much less when you added crypto

2025-06-23 00:24:20 UTC

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We should be so lucky that they reinvent threading as usenet text readers gave us.

2025-02-13 14:39:33 UTC

I've been looking for alternatives to getting most of my print books from Amazon. I don't (yet) have a relationship with a local bookstore to try getting stuff local.
If I was wanting to borrow rather than buy, I'd be talking to my local library.
For the U.S., have you found better online options for buying your books? Direct to publisher half the time ends up pointing me back to Amazon.
#bookstodon @npub1ny7…uv57