Edgar Allan Poe Proves Stockfish Can't Exist

A summary of Edgar Allan Poe’s Maelzel’s Chess-Player. §1–§4, §6–10, §11–14, and §15–18 describe the physical appearance, (public) operation, and cultural/historical context of the chess robot; §5 and §19 actually present the argument that the robot can't be a “genuine” (or “pure machine”) mechanical chess player — that it must have a human operator. §5 sketches the outline of the argument: Abridged Original Verbiage It’s inconceivable that any physical …

Weird issues trying to transfer a domain (XYZ's EPP infrastructure broken?)

tldr: XYZ infrastructure is literally collapsing, they couldn't transfer in one of their own domains without a staff override. Initial transfer attempt Namecheap e-mails me the “transfer Authorization Code” Gen.xyz web interface claims “Invalid EPP Code” I contact Gen.xyz support Gen.xyz staff tells me“Please request a new EPP code from Namecheap” I contact Namecheap support via web chat “I need a new EPP for my domain, ishygddt.xyz; XYZ support …

EC point serialization formats

I looked into this when trying to make a piece of toy software to serialize and de-serialize *all* OpenSSH-supported public key formats. While OpenSSH uses standardized formats for private keys, the ssh-* AAAA/3NzaC0… format you're used to pasting into remote servers is actually a "proprietary" (though with freely-licensed spec and implementation) encoding—it's not JSON, and not any standardized BER/DER codec; instead, it's mostly a Length-Value encoding (think TLV without the T) …

IA5string definition

From ITU-T Rec. X.680 (02/21): C.5.7 IA5String [is] mapped into UniversalString by mapping each character into the UniversalString character that has the identical (32-bit) value in the BER encoding of UniversalString as the (8-bit) value of the BER encoding of IA5String[.] 41.6 The characters which can appear in the UniversalString type are any of the characters allowed by ISO/IEC 10646 [aka Unicode]. 43.8 For IA5String, [the] entire character set …