No posts lately  Tags: my blog.
I haven't posted anything in a while, I know. I feel like I don't have much to write about anymore, and it's also more pressuring to write now that I have a real audience. Most blogposts were written during the time that I was still developing the website, and I just wrote for myself. I could always decide later whether I publicized it or not. Reading back, the quality mostly sucks, so that's why I'm trying to write original and quality content now. But it's not working.

Bitcoin  Tags: privacy, security, other.
You know laws and banks right? Financial constructions, interest rates (the magic multiplication of your money), inflation (the magic disappearing of your money), etc. Transferring money across borders is subject to taxes that I don't even know of (why do they mention donations are tax-deducible on Wikipedia and The Internet Archive?), and your bank usually makes you pay a fee.

Paypal partially fixes this, but they are blocked in over 60 countries. Why? Not because of Paypal's own interest surely; the more users they have, the more money they can make.

IPv6  Tags: networking, tutorials.
Since I couldn't find a clear all-you-need to know guide about IPv6, I'll attempt writing one.

For everyone who doesn't want to know everything about it, I wrote some shorter pieces.
What you need to know as...

PHP's in_array is slow - this works faster  Tags: programming, webdevelopment.
I think this is best explained by example, so here's a simple script to load a file into the memory, removing duplicate lines:
<?php
    $handle = fopen("myfile.txt", "r");
    $lines = array();
    while ($line = fgets($handle))
        if (!in_array($line, $lines))
            $lines[] = $line;
    
    fclose($handle);

This works fine if you don't mind waiting for a minute or ten until it did all the millions of lines. If you're like me, you will probably want to make it run in under thirty seconds.

How does SSL work?  Tags: security, networking.
Crosspost from security.stackexchange.com/questions/how-does-ssl-work.

General

SSL (and its successor, TLS) is a protocol that operates directly on top of TCP. This way, protocols on higher layers (such as HTTP) can be left unchanged while still providing a secure connection. Underneath the SSL layer, HTTP is identical to HTTPS.

When using SSL/TLS correctly, all an attacker can see on the cable is which IP and domain you are connected to, roughly how much data you are sending, and what encryption and compression is used. He can also terminate the connection, but both sides will know that the connection has been interrupted by a third party.