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a counterargument: lots of farm animals are fed field-grown grains, harvested the same way as everything else

but not all! cows in particular are more likely to eat wild scrub in areas like the american west, where there isnt enough water to support fields

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a newish strong anti-veg*n argument that ive heard passed around: harvesting grains/vegetables from fields hurts a lot of small rodents and other wildlife, thus making eating from fields less ethical than eating from barns

this is worth thinking about if youre veg*n

okay making a key pair is pretty easy looks like

successfully signed a test file, encrypted, decrypted, imported a key, were good to go

my public key is at ianmhines.com/public-key if any of you crypt nerds want it

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oh neat gnupg is already on my computer

and it looks like it can make keys for me

okay time to read some docs

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hmm there are these things called public key fingerprints which are hashes of a public key

these can supposedly be used to identify people?

but im not sure why these are any better than anything else, and i dont see any defense against ye olde ctrl+c ctrl+v

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okay so you have a function f(m,k)->e, where m is the message, k is the key, and e is the encrypted message

they are all integers because computer

furthermore, the public key and private keys are inverses for f: f(a,b)=1, f(f(m,a),b)=m, f(f(m,b),a)=m

right?

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...from me, and can only be read by you

hmm hmm HMM

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wait a minute, is asymmetrical encryption actually symmetrical, just in a bit more of a roundabout way? like, either key can encrypt, but the other one is needed to decrypt

ah, so this lets me send a message, encrypted with both my private and your public, that is for sure...

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oh so it looks like pgp signatures are just the message but encrypted

and theyre useful when sending things in unsecured ways, to verify the message hasnt been changed and is really from me

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you need an inverse to be able to decrypt messages, but it turns out there are (probably, assuming p!=np) functions with really nasty inverses

huh

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like, presumably you stick a number into a function, and it spits out a public/private pair of numbers

and there should (?) be some way of getting one from the other

hmm

i guess not all functions have inverses, which might make that tricky

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single key encryption makes sense to me - you take a number and a message, perform math, obtain encrypted message, then perform math but backwards with the same number to get decrypted message

but, given a public key, shouldnt it be possible to calculate the private key?

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some questions to hunt down:

how the Heck does asymmetrical encryption work

what are pgp signatures good for and how do they work

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it is time for me to be a real security nerd and finally obtain pgp key

but first: figuring out what the heck that means

tax fraud is objectively the funniest crime; discuss

its always a trip to look at the sky and remember how big it is

shits huge

jesus these things are dangerous

they taste just wholesome enough that im tempted to treat them like regular snacks

then i have to remind myself that they are desert

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