Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | mydeskistoosm's commentslogin

So what happened? Why aren't we in a world of abundant energy?


It's because safety wasn't the obstacle to nuclear energy, cost was.

Also, I don't think passive safety of CANDU is what's meant by passive safety of HTGRs. The latter can survive losing cooling and everyone just walking away (in theory); I suspect the CANDU melts down in that situation, even if the chain reaction does stop.


If you use these reactors, you have no other reason to produce weapons grade uranium. That's the only thing that sticks out to me.


Dealing with nuclear waste is still a thing, even with safe reactors. Here in the US, we can't seem to find a permanent place to bury waste.

Don't forget, either: Nuclear waste isn't just spent fuel. The reactor core remains radioactive after the plant is decommissioned.

That's one of the things that nuclear fusion proponents seem to forget. Even without the spent fuel problem, fusion reactors still produce nuclear waste.


Turns out a steam based thermodynamic cycle is expensive even with "free" energy.


Current price of Nuclear in Ontario (generated by CANDU reactors) is 5.9 cents per kWh.


That is very expensive. Given that they came online in the 70s and early 80s we can assume the initial capital investment is paid off by now and that cost is only the marginal running cost. (OPEX)

Now, currently we are building solar farms in desert areas for ~1.5 cent per kWh. Including both CAPEX and OPEX. On-shore wind is built at ~3 cents per kWh and ~6 cents per kWh for off-shore.

This is where the explosion of renewables is coming from, they currently undercut the marginal cost of traditional power sources.


Sorry, that's what the consumer pays. It includes transmission to the home.



Now tell us what happened the last time they tried to buy more nuclear plants.


Simple answer; Infinite greed and lust for (political) power…


> already good enough

Are they? I was under the impression they required some sort of subsidy and/or restrictions on natural gas production to be competitive.


Depends on the market. You are probably talking about Northern America, with cheap fracking gas which is slowly coming to an end.


> management... all come from eng for a few levels until you start hitting VP roles.

And then where do they come from? Ivy league MBAs or IB?

No shade at those guys, just curious. I'm early-career and I've got interests in finance and programming. It seems like I see fewer engineers running the show, as if committing to programming as a career tops-out at a certain point because you're missing certain experience. Though, I don't know enough to know what that special sauce is.


some of them are still eng background but it's long enough ago that they're not really technical at all anymore. others are what you said, I guess for the most part. engineering and managing engineers are sort of similar, or at least you can see how one might be valuable to the other. engineering and managing managers are way further apart, so I'm not surprised that technical people have less presence the further up you go


Someone in the thread said "it's the same in finance vs crypto now".

I wonder how tapering and rate hikes will affect this relationship. I have dabbled in weird edge-case-crypto territory, and even with all the scams, there's so much cool stuff and promise. But I don't know if it's sustainable given the overall economic context we're heading into.


Were the records of payment a method to keep track of who might be using it?


Lol people paid for it? That was in the era of WinRAR and WinZip. There must be dozens of people that paid for those pieces of software


you're doing something neat with your Us but I, unfortunately, came of age after lots of the cool times were over. All the hackers got jobs in industry and it feels like if I poke anything that isn't hackthebox I'll either A. have the FBI up my ass immediately or worse, B. have created a record somewhere of having committed one felony or another that will appear at an appropriate time for someone else and inappropriate time for me.


You've surely heard about Tor, socks proxies, VPNs, SSH tunnels.


This comes up at "have created a record somewhere of having committed one felony or another that will appear at an appropriate time for someone else and inappropriate time for me."

I.e. you make one opsec mistake now, nobody's perfect - and then many years later when someone will finally care, this will be used to identify you, there's loads of examples like that of investigations/convictions where the people did know how to use "Tor, socks proxies, VPNs, SSH tunnels" and used them properly almost always.


But which ones are really setup by the NSA to get said evidence that will be inconvenient for him at some point in the future? (I suspect Tor, and at least a few of the commercial VPN providers)


Some recent news out of the commercial VPN universe... From a cryptographer professor at Johns Hopkins: https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/14493567426896896... Kape, an Israeli 'adware' company that renamed itself to distance itself from its prior history as an adware company, recently bought up ExpressVPN and several other services and rebranded itself as a VPN services company. Kape also bought VPN ranking websites and juiced the rankings (into positions #1 and #2) for the VPN companies that it just bought: https://restoreprivacy.com/kape-technologies-owns-expressvpn... I suspect that Kape is probably a CryptoAG repeat - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG - and is doing double duty for the US IC along with the Israelis, but it could be just a pure Israeli shop too.


The CryptoAG story is super interesting for seeing how super powers handle the issue, thx for the wikipedia.


Oof, what VPN is the best for privacy nowadays?


It might be true. But what if you chain multiple defenses, each one in states that do not get well with each other? Every investigation will need collaboration.


True, but your last hop to you is usually the most important one. It’s all about a risk analysis on how likely and cheap it would be to use it vs the cost to you if someone does. And keeping in mind that a lot of these agencies have to burn their budget or risk losing it.


Tor is very slow, and VPNs will rat you out immediately.


If I am online, I assume some entity somewhere can maliciously access what I am doing. My goal is to secure it enough so that entity has to be a state actor. Tor is not a silver bullet, even if used properly, because anyone (including state actors) can stand up a Tor node: https://nusenu.medium.com/tracking-one-year-of-malicious-tor...


set up your own testing environments.


As long as your country allows you to even own the tools...


Which countries don’t?


I have no idea about the global situation, but in Germany there was a lot of discussion when they introduced §202c StGb 15 years ago.

- https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/08/new_german_ha...

- https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__202c.html

However, it seems it is not about owning the tools, but rather about creating them.


Can you suggest some news sources?


You can't post something like this and not post the video.



This isn't it, but Terrance Tao does the entire cosmic distance ladder:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ne0GArfeMs


Waterwheel, then, no?


A waterwheel is just hydro power, which is itself just an indirect form of solar power.


Technically every form of power is an indirect form of solar power.


Not fission nor geothermal nor tidal power, nor fusion, if it ever arrives. But most of the other ones.

(You can say that some of them, like fission, rely on heavy metals produced sort-of in a star. But still that wasn't from our sun.)


Not nuclear! :)


All elements used in fission reactors can only come to be due to supernovae. So I guess not from our sun, but another star.


Is it even really relevant anymore?


Yeah I thought hashcat pretty much superseded it, especially with its amazing GPU acceleration.

Nevertheless, nice of them to open source it.


No. They seem to have been doing a few puff PR pieces recently. Can’t imagine anyone under 30 knows or cares about them.

I guess their main claim to fame was being the first “hacker” group to do PR moderately well and transition into decent careers. Not really even an interesting footnote in history.


Human, I'm 28, been in InfoSec for ~10 years. Granted, I was lucky enough to be interested in and peruse this as a professional branch when I graduated college in 2016. I am also an adjunct professor at my local university, where I make it a salient point to remind my students of the history of hacking. We talk about this still.

I also start every semester off with the opening scene of Hackers - the best hacking movie ever made :)


> I'm 28 ... adjunct professor ... We talk about this still.

I'm a decade older, and am relieved to see this.

> Hackers - the best hacking movie ever made :)

Counterpoint: _Sneakers_: the thinking person's hacking movie.


I still vote for Wargames :-)


Ferris Bueller's Day Off has some inspiring hacks :^)


Hah. That it does! I like the parallel with "Die Hard is the best Christmas movie".


Everyone knows Brazil is the best christmas movie


That’s got data encrypting algorithms, you’ll never get through that!


> Counterpoint: _Sneakers_: the thinking person's hacking movie.

Lacks the soundtrack. I always work to music to help focus.


Lacks? No way. Sneakers' score features Branford Marsalis, which is very different feel to Hackers (which is also great), but imo very evocative of the the playfulness, mystery, & intrigue of the crypto storyline.


Both have good soundtracks, but Hackers is still better. ;-)


> I also start every semester off with the opening scene of Hackers - the best hacking movie ever made :)

Great soundtrack. Respect.


L0pht put hacking and infosec on the map for arguably hundreds of people. They were and still are incredibly talented.


Indeed. I had the good fortune to work with DilDog before he co-founded Veracode. I count him in the top ten of talented co-workers across a three decade career.


I work with him now at his current gig. Totally agree. Constantly learning new things from him.


I would say they were the first group that got many Windows sysadmins to start thinking about OS security.


I’m under 30 and certainly wouldn’t relegate L0pht to a mere footnote in history.


Nice to hear this. I’m late 30s, and l0pht was a huge inspiration to me.


They testified in front of the U.S. Senate in 1998. That's more than a footnote might do, in my opinion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVJldn_MmMY


> Not really even an interesting footnote in history.

This just feels like you have an axe to grind.


Having a bias is not the same thing as being wrong


I was going to object to your "under 30" quip, then realized I haven't been under 30 for quite a while. Oops.


I'm in the same boat, and it's really amazing how quickly things change. I was explaining to a coworker the other day how much more optimistic we were in the 90s, and when he casually mentioned that he was born in 2000, I suddenly felt really old.


> I'm in the same boat, and it's really amazing how quickly things change.

The number of candles on my birthday cake seems to change the fastest. I ask for hexadecimal whenever possible.


It's been disappointing to see that Beto O'Rourke doesn't get asked more questions about his present-day commitment to the Cult of the Dead Cow's agenda.


If you care about the history of the scene you'll know the name regardless of your age.


Would you do a guy a favor and lay some links or at least breadcrumbs such that I might start learning my history? I'm picking up programming at a relatively advanced age (31) and don't have the time to do deep hunts for stuff like I did when I was in my 20s BUT I want to keep security right in mind as I write everything I make.


ahh..this is i feel going to be a controversial take, but it isnt said with malice.

the history of mudge and l0pht are more interesting than they are useful. if you want to get 202X security chops though, digging up the past isnt really the way. its more of a thing to do a deep dive into because youre interested, not because you expect anything out of it.

there are other researchers like gruqg who chronicle the exploits of old teams like l0pht and ACIDBITCHEZ under the guise of teaching the new wave about LOL hacking (living off the land), but i personally think they are doing it more for the reasons one writes a history book; cause its interesting.

if you want to learn LOL, read mandiant APT markers. thats how modern hacking is done, its really not at all like it used to be. i myself am happy to offer the following ocunterpoint though; the number one ranked hackerone bugbounty is dawgyg, an ex blackhat whose come in and dominated the bb scene in a huge way. i counter my counter point with the thousands of guys who make a solid living doing bug bounty who do not posess the old skills. they arent a requirement to make it in modern sec, because things are just different.

they were a bunch of badass cowboys who became the first to "make it". big boy jobs, wide spread respect in the community, inspiring a generation like egypt etc who went on to do metasploit work.

i am keen as a BEAN for grugqs book to come out, because to me, its fascinating, interesting and inspiring. mudge has been my personal hero since i found out about him when i was in highschool, but that was long after their reign was done and they were corporate.

i think the following anology works well too; lopht are comparable to van halen; when they both burst onto their scenes, almost noone else was doing what they did, and noone else before had gotten as big.

but time marches on, and other people do something new, and suddenly evh isnt as flashy as the new crop.


Under 30 here and have only ever seen Hashcat as the predominantly used software for cracking hashes


Hashcat can’t dump password hashes. L0phtcrack can and it has been a core feature for 20 years. I suppose a decent career is founding a security unicorn, Veracode. :)


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: