Top all-time · #13065
Oliver Nash
Personal blog · olivernash.org · on HN as ocfnashmathprogrammingsecurity
Oliver Nash's personal blog at olivernash.org covers math, programming and security. Since 2015, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 16 times, most often “DNA of a Password Disaster (2014)”. The last post was in 2020, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Oliver Nash's posts on security theatre in banking, a bikeshare-based estimate of real working hours, and a tricky prisoner logic puzzle. Comments mostly just cite or link them.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- DNA of a Password Disaster (2014)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-11-16
- /2015/11/18/security-theatre-at-allied-irish-banks-act-2/index.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-03-07
What Hacker News says?
I think it's unlikely the lights happened to send the right IR pattern. I once hooked a TV remote up to a logic analyser to have a look and here's how the on/off signal looked for this brand: http://olivernash.org/2010/01/03/the-telly-terminator/rc6-6-... Some further details here: http://olivernash.org/2010/01/03/the-telly-terminator/ Of course it's still possible!
Comment linking /2010/01/03/the-telly-terminator/
on “Reverse engineering a mysterious UDP stream in my hotel (2016)”Submitted Security Theatre at Allied Irish Banks (details) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis is a good piece but I have one nit: it is incorrect to say "thermite [...] will not detonate." I was shocked to discover this first hand some years ago: http://olivernash.org/2009/11/12/fun-with-thermite/index.htm... I can still recall the echoing boom of that (copper) thermite.
Comment linking /2009/11/12/fun-with-thermite/index.html
on “Anatomy of a Moral Panic”Submitted Poring over Poncelet (2018) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI love this write up, and while the solutions discussed are excellent, I think the general-purpose FM Index data structure might work even better. I confess I'd have to read this post more closely to be sure, but I find the FM Index data structure so appealing, I'm always looking for excuses to promote it! The FM Index is ideally suited to the problem of repeatedly searching a large fixed corpus for many different s…
Comment linking /2014/01/03/dna-of-a-password-disaster/index.html
on “A journey to searching Have I Been Pwned database in 49μs”Submitted Magnetic Core Memory Reborn as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI am the other commenter! The special icosahedron functions can be expressed in many ways but perhaps the most elementary _explicit_ representation is as particular Gaussian hypergeometric functions. See this repo for example: https://github.com/ocfnash/icosahedral_quintic The special functions are used here: https://github.com/ocfnash/icosahedral_quintic/blob/master/q... Geometrically these functions locally invert…
Comment linking /2012/02/05/on-kleins-icosahedral-solution-of-the-quintic/index.html
on “Why is the Quintic Unsolvable?”Submitted DNA of a Password Disaster (2014) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI presume you've been looking at my presentation here http://olivernash.org/2019/07/06/coq-imo/index.html which I confess is quite concise; apologies if it is too terse. Reusing the notation of my post, here's how the formula arises. The argument based on counting cells that are either row/column good/bad requires the following of the parameter k: 1. k-1 < r/m 2. k-1 < c/n 3. k−1 < cr/(c(m-1) + r(n-1)) These are equ…
Comment linking /2019/07/06/coq-imo/index.html
on “The Future of Mathematics? [pdf]”Submitted Visualising International Math Olympiad Results as a story · 1 points
HN discussionTheir security appears to be superior to at least some of the traditional banks, which is laughably poor. http://olivernash.org/2015/11/18/security-theatre-at-allied-...
Comment linking /2015/11/18/security-theatre-at-allied-irish-banks-act-2/index.html
on “App-Only Banks Rise in Europe and Aim at Traditional Lenders”Another HNer put this together and I thought it was really interesting with regards to determining real expected working hours vs reported hours. (Using bikeshare ride data to determine peak hours and length of workday) http://olivernash.org/2011/02/02/dublin-bikes-revisited/inde...
Comment linking /2011/02/02/dublin-bikes-revisited/index.html
on “Average annual hours worked per country”xkcd calls it the "hardest logic puzzle in the world". I think this one is a lot harder: http://olivernash.org/2009/10/31/yet-another-prisoner-puzzle...
Comment linking /2009/10/31/yet-another-prisoner-puzzle/index.html
on “The Logic Puzzle You Can Only Solve with Your Brightest Friend”Urgh. They probably do store the unhashed pin/password rather than the quadratically-many 4 x N\choose 3 combinations. Still, at least an account with known username is guarded with a secret from a space of size 10^3 x k^3, for k =~ 70 or so. With AIB, that space has size 1000 and for a time, they were revealing a little account information when provided only with the user id: http://olivernash.org/2015/11/18/securi…
Comment linking /2015/11/18/security-theatre-at-allied-irish-banks-act-2/index.html
on “What Is Your Bank’s Security Banking On?”> A total of 52,734 North Carolina consumers were affected. And also 152,989,508 email addresses were leaked, with sufficient information to derive the password in many cases. I got interested in this at the time and was pretty stunned at how easily I could mine passwords: http://olivernash.org/2014/01/03/dna-of-a-password-disaster/...
Comment linking /2014/01/03/dna-of-a-password-disaster/index.html
on “Adobe To Pay $1M For Data Breach, Bolster Security, North Carolina AG Says”