Comments on: Self Binding Service

By: James

James — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 04:13:51 +0000

For the encryption key, if there is a good reason to get it back earlier, you can enlist your friends to help (cf the TI calculator key). But if not, your friends will (hopefully) refuse to help.

By: bhyde

bhyde — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:48:36 +0000

Tyler – My favorite book about this is Anisle’s Breakdown of Will. It’s a bit dense, but short. If you click on the will power link at the top you can read my other postings on the topic and I’ve got a little half formed wiki of notes.

Funny that you should mention the robot thing. He actually talks about a syndrome where people get extremely good at the self control thing, but they loose all spontaneity and hence much of the joy in life is drained away.

By: bhyde

bhyde — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:45:30 +0000

Cory – I love it when people admit to the tricks they use for this stuff, thanks!

Your right, some tutorial stuff would be good.

By: bhyde

bhyde — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:44:09 +0000

Brendan - Oh hacking base libraries, sneaky. Fun. There is an app for the mac Mac Freedom that locks out the internet entirely for a period. Don't tell, but it tinkers with the firewall. I use it.

By: Tyler Prete

Tyler Prete — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:54:33 +0000

This comment really isn’t about your service, but about the entire idea of self binding. I struggle with this myself all the time… I can’t decide whether it’s better to create a system to try and force myself to do the things I want to do, or rather to work on my will-power and just do them. I have this vision of turning myself into a robot, and while I know that is crazy, I find the structure/flexibility trade-off difficult. Any insights here? Readings you’d recommend?

By: cory

cory — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:07:26 +0000

I think this is an awesome idea. Your site could use a faq/tutorial section to remind me how to encrypt/decrypt my stuff.

I once encrypted my IM client in college and had my friend choose the password and promise to only reveal it to me after I’d finished my term paper.

By: Brendan Taylor

Brendan Taylor — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:50:29 +0000

Similar to Jukka’s suggestion, I’ve seriously considered patching libc to blacklist time-wasting hostnames. It takes a bit more effort to reverse than changes to /etc/hosts.

By: bhyde

bhyde — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:31:12 +0000

Oh – neat – that’s sort of like putting the ice cream at the back of the fridge. There are some amusing examples of people addressing the temptation problem by making it tediously difficult like your example.

By: Jukka Zitting

Jukka Zitting — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:01:48 +0000

Here’s an alternative that doesn’t depend on a third party: Once you’ve encrypted the stuff you want to keep safe, you keep only a part of the private key. The more bits you keep (or the more CPU power you have), the faster you can get your data back through brute force.