💾 Archived View for midnight.pub › replies › 5850 captured on 2023-04-20 at 01:22:37. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Very true, and you'd need to do 2¹³⁰ (~ 10³⁹) operations to even get within a fraction of a fraction of a chance of having a collision[1]!
But the point of this integer server isn't secrecy, it's annotation -- primarily providing a unique integer to a resource that can be uniquely shared over many different projects.... which is something you could also do with a random hash....
Hmm, you've raised a good point and now I feel stupid ;-)
1: https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/39641/what-are-the-odds-of-collisions-for-a-hash-function-with-256-bit-output
I mean, if you don't need secrecy you can just use a random 130-bit number and get equivalent collision resistance. That's basically what UUIDs are. Of course doing that misses the point of the number servers entirely (which I suspect is mostly for the fun of it).
That said there are some real world problems that involve getting everyone to agree on a number (most notably addressing). I mean, that's basically all IANA does.