Off the top of my head and according to what he meant by single number:
- As a single entity: I usually think in decimal so you could write a "single" decimal number (e.g. 234) and convert it to binary and the 1 and 0 character mean Yes / No.
- As a single character: You could just write a random character (e.g. ॐ ), specifying that is has to be interpreted as a number in Base N+1 and ॐ + 1 = 10. This is useless though.
I'm guessing they used something like scallion [0] or Shallot [1].
Bench marking Shallot on an Intel 3350P@3.10GHz:
time ./shallot ^a -> 0.09 sec user
time ./shallot ^aa -> 0.12 sec user
time ./shallot ^aaa -> 0.12 sec user
time ./shallot ^aaaa -> 0.47 sec user
time ./shallot ^aaaaa -> 5.92 sec user
time ./shallot ^aaaaaa -> 118 sec user
Unfortunately OpenCL doesn't work with the nouveau drivers so I can't test scallion.
Who knows how much they spent trying to brute force that onion address.
My primary browser has JS, cookies and plugins completely disabled, and when I open a link and get nothing but a white page it is pretty frustrating.
I understand that with these settings i'm not going to see any fancy animations, menus, ads, games, ecc but I at least expect to see some text.
I don't expect nothing else, if I can get some text I'm happy.
My distro's tor setup (arch in this case) should default to not being an exit node, relevant default lines in the torrc:
ExitPolicy accept *:6660-6667,reject *:* # allow irc ports but no more
ExitPolicy accept *:119 # accept nntp as well as default exit policy
ExitPolicy reject *:* # no exits allowed
Installing via `pacman -S tor` and enabling via `systemctl enable tor.service` doesn't start an exit node / relay but a simple client.
This probably isn't to difficult to implement, hell I could even try to write something like that right now and put it on github. (I would have simply sent you an email but you don't have one in your profile)
EDIT: You will need python3 since I used input(), and this probably is my first python script so it's a bit messy:
So I decided to actually write down every time my arch install stopped working.
I only managed to continue doing so for a couple of months and it's only representative of my pc so take it with the usual grain of salt. I usually run pacman -Syu every day.
That being said in 2 months I had these problems:
05/10/2013 Slim changed the xsession name, I had to edit manually slim.conf
14/10/2013 linux-ck kernel upgrade broke xorg so I had to downgrade until it was fixed
29/10/2013 xmobar template had to be slightly modified
02/11/2013 Calibre didn't start, imagemagik was broken, had to downgrade until it was fixed
So 4 problems in 2 months. I'm sure I didn't write down everything since it was a little tedious.
Would i recommend you use it on a production server? Is the time you spend on paying attention worth it? I haven't the foggiest.
Coursera has a nice course on Machine Learning[0] and the 4th and 5th week deal with Neural Networks specifically if anyone wants to learn more and get his hands dirty with octave/matlab code.
Yeah I'm doing that right now. I find it relatively easy, it's a good introduction course, gives a good overview, but you probably want to take a follow-up course that builds on top of that one to really get into ML. (I'm aiming for the Neural Networks course on Coursera, and then I want to look into decision trees and Bayesian networks)