Finding a file which has an MD5 hash of either 000000000000000000000000000000XX or 000000000000000000000000000001XX for some pair of hexadecimal digits XX.
Computing the 2^100th bit of Pi (approximately -- the BBP algorithm has some factors of log thrown in, so I've dropped a factor of 2^19 to account for those).
FreeBSD 7.2 is coming out on Monday, too. (The release source code has been tagged; now it's just a matter of waiting for ISOs to build and bits to propagate to the mirrors.)
Also, one set of backups isn't enough. What if things broke before the last backup, and you need to go back further?
The phrase "set of backups" is rather ambiguous here -- but if you're using an intelligent backup system (like tarsnap) you'll have multiple snapshots stored.
This is less of a problem than it sounds. Your private keys don't change very often (in many cases, never); you don't need to access your backup-reading keys very often (ideally, never); and your private keys are small. It's a PITA to store your daily backups by printing them out and storing the paper in a safe deposit box; but that's an entirely reasonable thing to do with your private keys.
Unfortunately, backups normally inherently contain sensitive files like/etc/shadow which could be used by an attacker to gain access to the live server (Brute force attack)
And if you can't figure out how to do the above, use tarsnap, which is designed around the principle of an untrusted (and potentially conspiring with the NSA) backup system.
We must have different ideas of what "easy" means. To me, "set up a cron job which stores a backup online every hour" is easy, while "buy two hard drives and drive them between buildings each week" sounds like a lot of work.
There was a time when music was sold as sheet music. Somehow Joplin was making a $100,000 a week in the 1920's, even though it's fairly trivial to simply hand-copy someone-else's work.
Sheet music is cheaper than the cost of copying by hand. This doesn't mean that copyright laws were useless though -- without them, someone else could have set up their own printing press and started (cheaply) printing their own copies of Joplin's work.
Until recently, the only marginally profitable (in the economic sense) form of copyright violation was mass reproduction, requiring extensive capital costs. This made it easy to enforce copyright laws: You can't sell many thousands of copies of anything without attracting attention.
Everything changed when it became possible to make a profit by making a single illegal copy of something.
*Nobody* stands up in court and says "yes I did it, but this stuff shoulda been free in the first place".
Maybe not in exactly those words, but many important constitutional cases have been decided after the individuals charged said "I did X, but X shouldn't be illegal". In Loving v. Virginia, for example, Mr. and Mrs. Loving never denied being married -- rather, they argued that interracial marriage shouldn't have been illegal.
Google would have a very good argument against handing over data.
Google might have very good reasons to not want to hand over data, but under the PATRIOT act Google doesn't have the option of saying "sorry, we don't feel like giving you that data".
The only time Google has handed data over to a government agency...
I think you mean "the only time we know about...". Under the PATRIOT act it's entirely possible that Google has handed over lots of data to the US government but has been instructed that they're not allowed to tell anyone about it.
I agree, that's the most irritating call I've ever gotten. I normally hang up on telemarketers, but now I make a point of trying to keep that one on the line as long as possible.
The Webster dictionary is opinionated and attempts to dictate usage rather than describe it.
Many authors have used "Firstly" quite deliberately in analogy with "Secondly" and "Thirdly" -- to suggest that their usage was improper is akin to finding fault in the punctuation of E.E. Cummings; deliberate flaunting of common usage is not wrong in the way that an accidental error is.
Firstly is a real word; and according to the Oxford English Dictionary, has been in use ever since 1532. Quotations include "Walke thou fyrstly, walke thou lastly; Walke in the walke that standeth fastly" (1562), "A most delightful [ballad]... which has been laid firstly to Pope and secondly to me" (1723), and "These objects are twofold: firstly, to promote [etc.]" (1857).
Of course, in 1847 the word 'firstly' was accused of being a "ridiculous and most pedantic neologism" (falsely -- being over 300 years old, it was hardly a neologism), and I'll freely admit that it isn't a very *nice* word; but it's a word whether we like it or not.
When my local phone company was having a labour dispute, they blocked the union website.
That is true, but leaves out some rather important details -- like the fact that the blocked website contained photos, addresses, and phone numbers of company managers and of workers who decided to cross the picket lines, and encouraged harassment of said individuals; and that threats of violence had been made against those managers and workers.
I'm not saying that Telus was right in blocking the website, but this wasn't merely a labour dispute.
After looking at the available options, I decided that there was nothing which met my criteria for convenience, efficiency, and security. So I decided to create my own.
how is that rash of knife crime coming out? I've noticed a lot more stories about stabbings on the Beeb.
One advantage of knives is that they're easier to aim. I have yet to hear a story about a drive-by knifing in which the culprit missed his target but accidentally killed someone who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
If someone really wants to kill someone else, it's very hard to stop him. But getting them to use knives instead of guns at least cuts down on the collateral damage.
*I love how STABLE just sticks out, like BSD wasn't stable before. Ha!*
"7-STABLE" is FreeBSD-speak for "this implements the FreeBSD 7 API/ABI, and any program you write or compile for an earlier release will work just fine on a later release". In other words, the Application Programming/Binary Interfaces won't change in incompatible ways.
This is in contrast to Linux, where updating to a new kernel (belonging to the same "stable" kernel branch, or even applying security patches) can make programs break until you recompile them.
Slashdot Mirror
in CTR mode you can easily flip bits of the cyphertext then make a new MAC.
No. MAC != hash. You cannot compute a new MAC unless you have the MAC key.
I mean what else is "2^119" hard to solve?
Finding a file which has an MD5 hash of either 000000000000000000000000000000XX or 000000000000000000000000000001XX for some pair of hexadecimal digits XX.
Computing the 2^100th bit of Pi (approximately -- the BBP algorithm has some factors of log thrown in, so I've dropped a factor of 2^19 to account for those).
Sorting a list of 31 elements using bogo-sort.
If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone say "if I had a nickel", I'd have a lot of nickels.
The RELENG_7 branch moves directly from -PRERELEASE to -STABLE. The -RELEASE is cut from the RELENG_7_2 branch.
FreeBSD 7.2 is coming out on Monday, too. (The release source code has been tagged; now it's just a matter of waiting for ISOs to build and bits to propagate to the mirrors.)
Also, one set of backups isn't enough. What if things broke before the last backup, and you need to go back further?
The phrase "set of backups" is rather ambiguous here -- but if you're using an intelligent backup system (like tarsnap) you'll have multiple snapshots stored.
Don't forgot user passwords stored in cleartext by Subversion and unencrypted SSH passwords.
Err... as I was saying, the fact that people have sensitive information on their systems is why backups should be encrypted...
If private keys are used, how are they backed up?
This is less of a problem than it sounds. Your private keys don't change very often (in many cases, never); you don't need to access your backup-reading keys very often (ideally, never); and your private keys are small. It's a PITA to store your daily backups by printing them out and storing the paper in a safe deposit box; but that's an entirely reasonable thing to do with your private keys.
Unfortunately, backups normally inherently contain sensitive files like /etc/shadow which could be used by an attacker to gain access to the live server (Brute force attack)
This is why backups should be encrypted.
And if you can't figure out how to do the above, use tarsnap, which is designed around the principle of an untrusted (and potentially conspiring with the NSA) backup system.
We must have different ideas of what "easy" means. To me, "set up a cron job which stores a backup online every hour" is easy, while "buy two hard drives and drive them between buildings each week" sounds like a lot of work.
There was a time when music was sold as sheet music. Somehow Joplin was making a $100,000 a week in the 1920's, even though it's fairly trivial to simply hand-copy someone-else's work.
Sheet music is cheaper than the cost of copying by hand. This doesn't mean that copyright laws were useless though -- without them, someone else could have set up their own printing press and started (cheaply) printing their own copies of Joplin's work.
Until recently, the only marginally profitable (in the economic sense) form of copyright violation was mass reproduction, requiring extensive capital costs. This made it easy to enforce copyright laws: You can't sell many thousands of copies of anything without attracting attention.
Everything changed when it became possible to make a profit by making a single illegal copy of something.
*Nobody* stands up in court and says "yes I did it, but this stuff shoulda been free in the first place".
Maybe not in exactly those words, but many important constitutional cases have been decided after the individuals charged said "I did X, but X shouldn't be illegal". In Loving v. Virginia, for example, Mr. and Mrs. Loving never denied being married -- rather, they argued that interracial marriage shouldn't have been illegal.
I didn't say that Yahoo and Microsoft were any better than Google. I wouldn't trust any of them with my data.
Google would have a very good argument against handing over data.
Google might have very good reasons to not want to hand over data, but under the PATRIOT act Google doesn't have the option of saying "sorry, we don't feel like giving you that data".
The only time Google has handed data over to a government agency...
I think you mean "the only time we know about...". Under the PATRIOT act it's entirely possible that Google has handed over lots of data to the US government but has been instructed that they're not allowed to tell anyone about it.
*Sound of fog horn*
I agree, that's the most irritating call I've ever gotten. I normally hang up on telemarketers, but now I make a point of trying to keep that one on the line as long as possible.
The Webster dictionary is opinionated and attempts to dictate usage rather than describe it.
Many authors have used "Firstly" quite deliberately in analogy with "Secondly" and "Thirdly" -- to suggest that their usage was improper is akin to finding fault in the punctuation of E.E. Cummings; deliberate flaunting of common usage is not wrong in the way that an accidental error is.
Firstly is a real word; and according to the Oxford English Dictionary, has been in use ever since 1532. Quotations include "Walke thou fyrstly, walke thou lastly; Walke in the walke that standeth fastly" (1562), "A most delightful [ballad]... which has been laid firstly to Pope and secondly to me" (1723), and "These objects are twofold: firstly, to promote [etc.]" (1857).
Of course, in 1847 the word 'firstly' was accused of being a "ridiculous and most pedantic neologism" (falsely -- being over 300 years old, it was hardly a neologism), and I'll freely admit that it isn't a very *nice* word; but it's a word whether we like it or not.
When my local phone company was having a labour dispute, they blocked the union website.
That is true, but leaves out some rather important details -- like the fact that the blocked website contained photos, addresses, and phone numbers of company managers and of workers who decided to cross the picket lines, and encouraged harassment of said individuals; and that threats of violence had been made against those managers and workers.
I'm not saying that Telus was right in blocking the website, but this wasn't merely a labour dispute.
After looking at the available options, I decided that there was nothing which met my criteria for convenience, efficiency, and security. So I decided to create my own.
I'm looking for beta testers: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2008-05-06-tarsnap-beta-testing.html
how is that rash of knife crime coming out? I've noticed a lot more stories about stabbings on the Beeb.
One advantage of knives is that they're easier to aim. I have yet to hear a story about a drive-by knifing in which the culprit missed his target but accidentally killed someone who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
If someone really wants to kill someone else, it's very hard to stop him. But getting them to use knives instead of guns at least cuts down on the collateral damage.
For the forseeable future, yes. Commits to SVN are being replicated into CVS, so all the existing CVS infrastructure will continue working.
Rachel Mardsen has been accused of harassment in the past.
Not just accused, but found guilty of harassment.
*I love how STABLE just sticks out, like BSD wasn't stable before. Ha!*
"7-STABLE" is FreeBSD-speak for "this implements the FreeBSD 7 API/ABI, and any program you write or compile for an earlier release will work just fine on a later release". In other words, the Application Programming/Binary Interfaces won't change in incompatible ways.
This is in contrast to Linux, where updating to a new kernel (belonging to the same "stable" kernel branch, or even applying security patches) can make programs break until you recompile them.