I wish more people knew about the Burroughs Large Systems[0] machines. I haven't written any code for them, but I got turned-on to them by a financial Customer who ran a ClearPath Series A MCP system (and later one of the NT-based Clearpath machines with the SCAMP processor on a card) back in the late 90s, and later by a fellow contractor who did ALGOL programming for Unisys in the mid-70s and early 80s. It seems like an architecture with an uncompromising attitude toward security, and an utterly parallel universe to what the rest of the industry is (except for, perhaps, the IBM AS/400, at least in the sense of being uncompromising on design ideals).
I liked the original $10 per year pricing because it was simple and easy to justify. The direction feels different after the management change, and I have less confidence now. The new website redesign does not help; the UI feels generic, looks auto-generated, and lacks polish and clarity. If you raise prices, you need to show clear value with better UX and visible improvements. Right now, I do not see enough improvement to justify a higher price. If pricing goes up, I will likely switch.
This just makes no sense, because before all why 10 million? There is no scientific or proven reason for this number by the proposing party. The SVP position paper is 38 pages of cherry-picked stats but nowhere do they demonstrate why 10 million is the breaking point rather than 9.5 or 11. It is a round number chosen for a slogan.
The Federal Council's official message to Parliament dismantles the whole thing. Real GDP per capita grew 0.82 percent annually between 2002 and 2022, comparable to Norway, Austria, and Denmark. EU and EFTA nationals are net contributors to Swiss social insurance, paying significantly more into AVS, AI, and APG than they receive back.
The SVP frames asylum seekers as the most urgent part of the problem, but recognized refugees make up about 1 percent of total residents. Meanwhile 64 percent of net migration in 2024 came from EU and EFTA countries, overwhelmingly people filling jobs. This is not an asylum crisis, it is labor migration the Swiss economy actively demands.
The initiative would likely require denouncing the ECHR, the Geneva Refugee Convention, and other human rights treaties to hit an arbitrary number. The guillotine clause means killing free movement also kills Schengen and Dublin. And the Federal Council already negotiated a safeguard clause with the EU that allows limiting immigration in justified cases without blowing up the entire bilateral relationship. That is a scalpel.
This initiative is a sledgehammer aimed at a number someone picked because it fits on a poster.
Sorry, not sorry, but facts don't care about feelings.
This feels pretty unsatisfying: something that’s been “considered harmful” for three decades should be deprecated and then removed in a responsible ecosystem.
(PGP/GPG are of course hamstrung by their own decision to be a Swiss Army knife/only loosely coupled to the secure operation itself. So the even more responsible thing to do is to discard them for purposes that they can’t offer security properties for, which is the vast majority of things they get used for.)
It is, in fact, signed by the author. It's just a PKI, so you intermediate trust in the author through an authority.
This is exactly analogous to the Web PKI, where you trust CAs to identify individual websites, but the websites themselves control their keypairs. The CA's presence intermediates the trust but does not somehow imply that the CA itself does the signing for TLS traffic.
Trusted Publishing doesn’t involve any signing keys (well, there’s an IdP, but the IdP’s signature is over a JWT that the index verifies, not an end signature). You’re thinking of attestations, which do indeed involve a local ephemeral private key.
Again, I must emphasize that this is identical in construction to the Web PKI; that was intentional. There are good criticisms of PKIs on grounds of centrality, etc., but “the end entity doesn’t control the private key” is facially untrue and sounds more like conspiracy than anything else.
On my web server where the certificate is signed by letsencrypt I do have a file which contains a private key. On pypi there is no such thing. I don't think the parallel is correct.
With Let’s Encrypt, your private key is (typically) rotated every 90 days. It’s kept on disk because 90 days is too long to reliably keep a private key resident in memory on unknown hardware.
With attestations on PyPI, the issuance window is 15 minutes instead of 90 days. So the private key is kept in memory and discarded as soon as the signing operation is complete, since the next signing flow will create a new one.
At no point does the private key leave your machine. The only salient differences between the two are file versus memory and the validity window, but in both cases PyPI’s implementation of attestations prefers the more ideal thing with respect to reducing the likelihood of local private key disclosure.
No? With let's encrypt the certificate is rotated, but the private key remains the same, and importantly, let's encrypt never gets to see it, and anything is logged.
I said “typically” because Let’s Encrypt doesn’t control key rotation: the issuance managing client (like Certbot) does.
But AFAICT, Certbot has rotated private keys automatically on reissuance since at least 2016[1]. There’s no reason not to in a fully automated scheme. I would expect all of the other major issuing clients to do the same.
I mean, it’s an ephemeral VM that you have root on. You don’t own it, but you control it in every useful sense of the word.
But also, that’s an implementation detail. There’s no reason why PyPI couldn’t accept attestations from local machines (using email identities) using this scheme; it’s just more engineering and design work to determine what that would actually communicate.
It might be worthwhile for someone to do this engineering work; e.g., to make attestations work even for folks that use platforms like Codeberg or self-hosted git.
Yeah, completely agreed. I think there's a strong argument to be made for Codeberg as a federated identity provider, which would allow attestations from their runners.
(This would of course require Codeberg to become an IdP + demonstrate the ability to maintain a reasonable amount of uptime and hold their own signing keys. But I think that's the kind of responsibility they're aiming for.)
Can you provide a source this? To my understanding, the GnuPG project (and by extension PGP as an ecosystem) considers itself very much alive, even though practically speaking it’s effectively moribund and irrelevant.
(So I agree that it’s de facto dead, but that’s not the same thing as formal deprecation. The latter is what you do explicitly to responsibly move people away from something that’s not suitable for use anymore.)
I would be very much surprised if GPG has ever really achieved anything other than allowing crypto nerds to proclaim that things were encrypted or signed. Good for them I guess, but not of any practical importance, unlike SSH, TLS, 7Zip encryption, etc.
Apple's Spatial Scene in the Photos app shows similar behavior, turning a single photo into a small 3D scene that you can view by tilting the phone. Demo here: https://files.catbox.moe/93w7rw.mov
It turns a single photo into a rough 3D scene so you can slightly move the camera and see new, realistic views. "Photorealistic" means it preserves real textures and lighting instead of a flat depth effect. Similar behavior can be seen with Apple's Spatial Scene feature in the Photos app: https://files.catbox.moe/93w7rw.mov
FYI, you don't even need browser translation. The piece already has an English version available. There's a language toggle in the navigation bar, and the English version is here: https://type.today/en/journal/spaces
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