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Lobsters on Delphi: the good and the bad
2021-02-18 00:20
lobsters
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→ Lobsters: 26 Years... of Delphi
Aaw, look at that, the good and the bad on a single page.
2021-02-25 20:12
diytotp
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Recently, I've got a few things asking to enable two-factor-authentication, and I started using the Google Authenticator app.
I kind of like it. It's a simple enough app, there's a shared secret involved, but it gets pretty close to being airgapped and perfectly forward secure and all of those things. So I got thinking... What would it take to start using it for myself, in those little software things I create now and then...
Is there black magic or stick whittling involved? Nah, a little searching around, and it all appears to be cleanly described in RFC's 6287 and 4226... There has to be a warning here about not rolling your own crypto, but the world of hashing and encrypting really is interesting! I did SHA1 and HMAC before, and Unix' time apparently is UTC... So all you need* is the correct format of URL to put into a QR-code to load up a new key in the app. Then you can use this code to generate the 'current' pass-code for the secret:
github.com/stijnsanders/tools/.../crypto/totp.pas
*: and apparently base32-encoding, HashUtils was missing that...
205B random strings and no 'Delphi'
2021-02-28 18:48
randomdelphi
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→ Delphi-PRAXiS: Can Delphi randomize string 'Delphi'?
Ah, that takes me back. A while ago at work I got someone baffled by this statement: It is said that a thousand monkeys banging away on keyboards could at some moment in infinite time produce the complete work of Shakespeare (and that the combined internet forums are a living counter-proof). Now if you search online you can find an XML download of the combined works of Shakespeare, so it's not hard to find the relative occurance of each letter of the alphabet. One can guess this will have rougly the same values per letter as the total of the English language. So, then, if you take 'random' by its definition, and the monkey's produce text at 1/26 probability for each letter in the alphabet, therefore they'll never reach a point in time where they (re)produce the works Shakespeare.
Now, I'm not a real philosopher, or a statistician, so my thesis could be complete fiction and based on nothing, but sometimes you really got to take a lesson from practice. In theory, in infinite time, it's ofcourse possible that something really really inherently possible could emerge out of a random system, but there are characteristigs to anything random, and there are exponential things at play that soon but experimantal set-ups like with the link above, that they probably would produce the expected outcome in a time-span that exceeds the number of years we've got left before the sun sheds its outer layers and devours the earth, complete with a set of silicon-based machines churning away at putting a series of random characters in sequence and comparing them of some neat stories of a long gone English playwright.