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democrates's activity in the archive.

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  1. Is the search still sent in the clear? on Google To Encrypt All Keyword Searches · · Score: 1

    If I search for "cipher revelation" I get this in the url bar -
    https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&tab=ww#hl=en&q=cipher+revelation

    Does all of this travel in the clear or are the http request args seperated from the dns query and encrypted?

  2. Win8 may be a predictable slash and burn stratagem on Apple Devices To Outsell Windows For First Time Ever In 2013 · · Score: 1

    Microsoft must look with cold calculating green eyes at Apple's success in selling overpriced consumer devices, apps, and content.
    The traditional personal computer allows customers to install third party software creating no additional revenue for Microsoft. With a fiduciary duty to shareholders to maximise revenue, Microsoft strategists seem to be hell bent on the goal of selling millions of client devices that customers can only use to buy apps and content through Microsoft's online facilities.
    To achieve this vision, a world of walled garden consumer devices, it looks like they are willing to follow Apple and abandon the general purpose computer.

  3. Re:other way around on Russian Lie Detector ATM · · Score: 1

    Precisely, that is the most important observation imho.

    Making additional personal data available for identity thieves is just plain reckless.

  4. Re:Lots of patterns on FBI Wants You To Solve Encrypted Notes From Murder · · Score: 1

    Ok possibly delimiters, but he has spaces, lines, and brackets to delimit.

    I'm seeing this guy as coming at it from a completely different perspective compared with textbook cryptography, because he started inventing it when he was a boy. Like a programmer, he probably honed his system over time.

    In his scheme, SE is used so much it could be an abbreviation for the status of something he's observing, eg if he was single and straight it's possible he was looking at women and SE stands for "Seems Easy", whereas "South East" is unlikely as other compass directions don't appear. Other letters could be initials for people.

    Where was he and what was he doing when he'd write these notes? Looking at tv, reading comic books? I'm betting the key to this cipher is not a traditional cryptography key, it's dispersed in the minutiae of his life.

  5. Re:Lots of patterns on FBI Wants You To Solve Encrypted Notes From Murder · · Score: 1

    There's another thing that gets me about this. This guy takes privacy measures, and since no similar notes were found in a regular search of his residence, maybe he has a stash well hidden under a loose floorboard or something...

    If these are notes he uses short term and then discards, they may well be trivial, but still might yield information that places him and/or others in the days preceding his murder and thereby open a new line of inquiry.

    But why would he go to the trouble of encoding trivial information. Maybe it was it for fun, control, a sense of achievement/feeling smarter than the rest, or was he hiding something... Could be a mix of motivations, and a mix of topics being recorded, but knowing one motivation to record secret notes would narrow the field.
    I wonder at exactly what age he first started and what events occurred in his life before or around that time, the first motivation could well have carried on, eg he notices girls and starts recording things about them.
    While no-one in his family can decipher the notes, do any of them have any idea WHY he started keeping notes, they'd need to think back, painful as it may be...

  6. Re:Lots of patterns on FBI Wants You To Solve Encrypted Notes From Murder · · Score: 2

    This is something originally developed by a boy so most likely it evolved over the years to include multiple methods. It may use shorthand/abbreviations, bad grammer, mis-spelling, and slang. A single cipher method is highly unlikely.

    It's probably simple in that it will have one step between plaintext and ciphertext, and words are not transposed. Also it looks like numerics are not encoded

    Brackets or a line around a section could seperate trips, days, people he met, conversations on the phone, or anything, but we can probably safely assume they're in chronological order.

    That 71,74,75 sequence could be revealing. Could they be house numbers, was he a train-spotter, is it a long term plan for his old age?

    And could "NCBE" mean "No Change Behind Eddies" referring to a fruitless search for change dropped by drunks behind Eddies Bar or something?

    What this job needs is detailed knowledge of his life; people, places, interests, habits etc. because without that background there's no way to determine what he's referring to. If all such data were dumped into a database to make a word index, that could help (maybe not so useful I just thought it up).

    But FBI, if background info can't be released, at least make large size scans of those notes available in TIFF format (>12bit) so people have a chance to see what the letters are in the noisy parts.

  7. Re:Fukushima? on Mini Drone Detects Breathing and Motion · · Score: 1

    Exactly, working in dangerous conditions such as nuclear plants is often touted as a good reason to fund robot development.

    Instead they gave us dancing robots http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZzLAsHiGHU

    We get the warm fuzzy feeling, but it's probably a fatal dose of radiation from the spent fuel rods that robots could have made safe.

  8. Fukushima? on Mini Drone Detects Breathing and Motion · · Score: 2

    TEPCO workers can't see what's going on in those reactor buildings without taking huge personal risk.

    If they used something like this to survey they'd know where to aim the fire hoses instead of waiting until there's another plume of smoke from the spent cores they're missing. Just saying.

  9. Re:Netflix on Linux-Friendly, Internet-Enabled HDTVs? · · Score: 1

    Agreed, the type of convergence they're selling in this case is simply locking together several technologies which are developing at different rates into one device. That tradeoff is fine for a mobile phone but for home entertainment on the big, abstraction gets you more flexibility and is environmentally more sensible due to scale economies in manufacture of commodity items and individual items lasting longer.

    It's predictable that the manufacturers would still seek to differentiate their products with longer feature lists in the battle of the brands to preserve margins, they're getting some bites but along with the alternative tech trend you've highlighted, people are spending more time online at the expense of traditional couch potatoing. While most people will still get a big living room screen, it's not the priority spend it was.

  10. Best of luck in the future Alan on Alan Cox Quits As Linux TTY Maintainer — "I've Had Enough" · · Score: 1

    And Linus, maintainer hatred is a disease.

  11. Re:Filesize is a hint on Choosing Better-Quality JPEG Images With Software? · · Score: 1

    Lol, noise is indeed a poor word for information loss.

  12. I bet some collector has them on NASA Releases Restored Apollo 11 Video, But Originals Lost · · Score: 1

    When something of high value goes missing it's usually due to theft rather than incompetence.

  13. Filesize is a hint on Choosing Better-Quality JPEG Images With Software? · · Score: 1

    less compression = bigger file

  14. You've got to brand linux yourself on Enterprise FOSS Adoption Beyond Linux Servers? · · Score: 1

    Your suits probably drive BMW's and Mercedes, their mentality is to go for the big brand.

    You can sell linux as the Tesla Roadster - less well known and very different, but new, exciting, and the way of the future.

    If I'm right about these guys your best bet is to price Linux at 10% more than any other solution.

  15. It's the data stupid on Long-Term Personal Data Storage? · · Score: 1

    Dude, storage tech is in constant flux so your mission is to keep copying your data onto current storage media using redundancy to protect against corruption.

    You're constantly adding ever greater volumes to your collection anyway, so that works out cheaper and more convenient in the long term.

    Even if some storage media last decades, the devices that read them will be a pain to maintain in years to come and may not be accessible on future computers, I'm keeping an old pc just to use my 10yo scanner for pete's sake, even Nasa can't access some of their own Apollo mission data.

    Now, in 2038 will you be able to open a Microsoft Publisher file with any program? Page and text format for example is information, lossless retrieval must represent the original, open formats are your only hope.

  16. It's also safer on Google Zeitgeist 2008 · · Score: 1

    If you mis-type a url in the 'address' bar there may be a pirate site waiting, google saves your butt from these ne'er do wells.

  17. I swear by blackstrap molasses on How to Deal With an Aging Brain? · · Score: 1

    Because I can't get the darn lid off.

  18. Re:Self-centered, even in kindness on A Few Firefox 3 Followups · · Score: 3, Funny

    Great example of crud re-use.

    PS If the IE cake gives the Moz team indigestion, is that down to ACID compliance?

  19. Where are politicians on this? on Astronomers Say Dying Sun Will Engulf Earth · · Score: 1

    All life on earth gone in one billion years, the single most crucial issue facing the earth and I haven't heard one politician stating what they intend to do about it.

    Politicians must get behind the urgent job of colonising new planets, and given the journey times this should be ready to roll by half time, otherwise we'll end up in a last 500 million year rush, as usual.

  20. Careful there Vicar on Companies That Clean Up Bad Online Reputations · · Score: 1

    The number one danger is posting to bulletin boards. I got the 2600.com hope conference dvd special with a private dick presentation on the state of the art in stealation of private data, and it scared me.

    Never use your real name, always post anonymously, always, without fail.

  21. Whither the treehuggers on Wildlife Returning To Chernobyl · · Score: 2, Funny

    Boars are stomping her corn cobs? Better toughen up lady, any day Monsanto will sue for infringing their holy patents on mutant crops. It's Greenpeace who really confuse me though, they're always on about biodiversity, then we get lots of new lifeforms in Chernobyls valley of the muties and they're cribbing more than ever. No pleasing some people.

  22. Chill the still on Microsoft Hires Director of Linux Interoperability · · Score: 3, Funny

    Cut the guy some slack, they're probably holding his family hostage. Seriously though, MS issue recruitment staff with MIB memory blanker gizmos. You meet, POOF!, and then believe them when they say "We are your friends! Ak. Akak Ak Ak!"

  23. Too Short on Details on MIT Wirelessly Powers a Lightbulb · · Score: 1

    They've left out the most important thing - how easy will it be to steal Ned Flanders' broadcast energy?

  24. I know what's really eating him on Microwave Experiments Cause Sponge Disasters · · Score: 1

    Like all crackpots who complain about things, the microwave accident is just a trigger event for an underlying psychosis.

    It's obvious to any reader of "Monthly Sicko"(tm) that the guy's been repressing a deep persecution complez, ever since he lost his job on The Green Mile.