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  1. Re:Programming error on Ashley Madison's Passwords Cracked, Soon To Be Released · · Score: 5, Informative
    The salt is stored with the encrypted password, in cleartext. When the user logs in, the system combines the password they typed with the salt it knows in order to get the key. The main thing salt does is to prevent people with the same password from ending up with the same key, so that everyone needs to be attacked individually. Here's what a bcrypt key looks like from the AM files:

    $2a$12$p9Ctp8EvU1x9jc09dqslHeGxS/Ytu464Xs5Yn1/AkqMSqAAN.4coa

    The salt is p9Ctp8EvU1x9jc09dqslHe, the 22 characters that follow the $2a$12$. If you want to crack this password, make a guess, use bcrypt to combine it with that salt, and if they match you've cracked this password. This one is not hard to guess.

  2. Re:Why not in English? on Kazakh Professor Claims Solution of Another Millennium Prize Problem · · Score: 2

    If he's really solved the problem, he's probably in a hurry to get it written up as he may believe that others are close, using similar methods. In that case, he'd write it up in his native Russian and make it public. That way, he's got priority, and the translation can come anytime. But there will certainly be a translation, because many English speaking mathematicians will want to give his work close scrutiny.

  3. Passport Stamp on House Democrats Propose National Park On the Moon · · Score: 2

    Travel geeks would kill for that NPS passport book stamp!

  4. labor unions on Han Solo To Reportedly Return For Star Wars VII · · Score: 1

    It's clear that Han will be the main negotiator in the pension dispute with the Stormtroopers union. Thousands of aging clones, all with the same left kidney failure at the age of 63.

  5. Re:I consider that a pretty good analogy... on CTO Says Al-Khabaz Expulsion Shows CS Departments Stuck In "Pre-Internet Era" · · Score: 2

    Your distinction between life safety and computer security is good, but I think it's mainly due to the maturity of the two fields.

    People have been making buildings for thousands of years, and the first ones fell down for all kinds of reasons. The notion that a building should survive an airplane impact would have been ridiculous twenty years ago, now it sounds desirable. And twenty years from now, some other unforseen hazard will add to the list of design parameters.

    Computer security has a lot of threats which are understood and well described (brute force password attacks, man-in-the-middle, SQL injections, etc.) and many that aren't. And it's totally reasonable to blame software engineers if their systems fall to a well known, easily avoidable attack, that they left open by ignorance or incompetence.

  6. Re:Levels in a book on Nature Publishes a "Post-Gutenberg" Electronic Text · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've been working on and teaching a course (Math and the Art of M.C. Escher) from a non-linear online textbook for years now. The book we're using could never be a paper book, because it is too heavily illustrated, animated, and linked. It's also based of of learning modules (Explorations) rather than a linear read-through.

    I would love to provide paths through the book - my coauthor and I teach the course in quite different ways, and the other users of the 'book' do as well. But it's proven technically challenging. We host our book with Mediawiki, and maybe that was the wrong choice, but it's worked well in many ways. Is there a good model of how to provide discourses or ontologies? I haven't really seen such a thing in a serious text. WikiBooks, for example, doesn't really have such a thing - if they did, we'd jump on board.

    Unlike the book from TFA, though, we're not charging an arm and a leg for a dubious license. This makes me wonder how much of this 'innovative' biology book is really just to make a boatload of cash for the publisher. They must save a considerable sum on production costs, and the maintenance of this book sound quite a bit easier than the usual 'new edition every five years' model. They can gradually replace smaller parts when needed, rather than rebuild the whole book to justify selling a bunch of new copies.

  7. Re:Fucking scanner. on Why the Fax Machine Refuses To Die · · Score: 1

    Hi.. where can I buy one of these 'fucking' scanners? They sound like a lot more fun than my regular scanner.

  8. So what? on Antarctica's Ice Flow Fully Mapped For the First Time · · Score: 1

    An ice floe is a floating chunk of ice that is less than 10 kilometers (six miles) in its greatest dimension. Big whoop.

  9. Case in point - City Museum on Can a Playground Be Too Safe? · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The City Museum in St. Louis is a crazy, dangerous, and incredibly fun "playground" in an old industrial building. Most people who go there think it's incredibly fun. Some people who go there get seriously injured (often by exhibiting stupidity they should have learned to avoid on the playground).

    The musem's founder, Bob Cassilly, says that $1 of every $12 admission ticket goes to pay insurance, and he has posted a 'wall of shame' listing all the lawyers who have sued the museum.

    There's an excellent and relevant article in the WSJ about it: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304159304575183463721620890.html?KEYWORDS=city+museum

  10. Mathematica rules, CDF drools on Wolfram Launches Computational Document Format · · Score: 2
    I'm a huge fan of Mathematica, and use it all the time for mathematical work. The manipulate command they're leveraging for the CDF is incredibly elegant and simple, as advertised. However, from the Wolfram CDF faq:

    Can I remove the welcome screen, toolbar, or watermark logo I see when opening CDFs in CDF Player or viewing CDFs online with the web browser plugin?
    The presence of Wolfram branding is part of the FreeCDF licensing terms...

    They've got to be kidding if they expect anyone to make serious use of an 'open' format that requires a proprietary player with advertising all over it. Compare with PDF, which is not 'free' but at least seamlessly operates with, say LaTeX.

  11. Re:We got in at a good time on Why Johnny Can't Code and How That Can Change · · Score: 1

    Those good times are coming back. For the '90s and most of 00's, home computers got harder to program and universities used C/C++ to introduce programming, which meant novices were faced with a steep learning curve and got to write code that produced, say, and ASCII histogram of some random numbers. Now, there's a trend towards Python, Java, and other languages with simple, powerful library sets built in so that students can write easy programs that do interesting things - in particular graphics and/or games. I think it's kind of a waste of time to "de-emphasize" programming, though - the more coding you do the better you get. But that doesn't mean you're wasting your time if you code in some very high level game description language. As long as you're being required to handle abstract concepts and explicitly describe what you mean, you're learning how to program.

  12. Inherent Speculation on Amir Taaki Answers Your Questions About Bitcoin · · Score: 1

    I get paid in US$, and expect to get paid in US$ for some time. If I get myself some bitcoin, I'm now involved in currency speculation whether I like it or not. I don't go out and buy a bunch of Euros so I'm ready to purchase things from France at some point - I wait until I (rarely) need to, and then convert at that moment. AT discourages speculation, but that is the only thing to see here!

  13. Re:Charming, but pointless on Practical "Smell-o-Vision" System Being Developed · · Score: 1

    Yes - the smells won't leave the room. They should design a "personal Smell-O-Vision" that you wear. Or better still, just get a bio-implant that triggers the scent receptors directly.

  14. Threading standard on Biggest Changes In C++11 (and Why You Should Care) · · Score: 1

    One of the best things that I see as a CS educator is that the threading package is now part of the STL. Teaching threading using PTHREADS always hid the concepts in a layer of obscurity. And usually, if something's obscure when you teach it, it will be a source of mistakes for novices and pros alike. Just the simplicity of async() and the creating of threads and mutexes makes this worth the price of admission.

  15. Re:No, wikipedia has to remain ad free on Should Wikipedia Just Accept Ads Already? · · Score: 1
    Wikipedia is a major educational resource, and should remain ad-free. Many educational media producers fight difficult (and often losing) battles against advertising and the corporate influence it brings.

    Through slashed state budgets, ad-supported textbooks have gained some traction in our schools. If educators saw no problem with advertising we would have had ads galore many years ago. The fact that most school textbooks are ad-free is a testament to a large number of intelligent people deciding that ads will erode the quality of information.

    Scientific journals are also nearly free of ads, sometimes with a page or two at the back selling other books by the publisher. Again, advertisements would give the impression (and probably the reality) that journal content is not free of interference from interested parties.

    As another model, consider PBS, which provides informational and educational programming. It, too, was once free of ads but has slipped on that front and now runs psuedo-ads before and after shows. Still, PBS runs massive pledge campaigns instead of a full slate of advertising. So again, there is huge pressure to gain revenue through advertising, but PBS has resisted.

    So, many organizations seem to agree that advertising is a bad thing for educational content. And I think Wikipedia has benefitted tremendously from its lack of dependency on the corporate world, because volunteer contributors feel like their work is being used for the public good, rather than as yet another way to enrich a corporation.

    Finally, Wikipedia has managed to make the volunteer/donor model work for many years. They clearly shouldn't give it up easily. Probably governments worldwide should contribute to their mission. If they are $7 million short, that's a drop in the bucket for even a single country. The gobal educational benefits of having a quality reference tool available anywhere, for free, are certainly worth national and international support.

  16. Re:Prior Art: on Apple Seeks Patent On Operating System Advertising · · Score: 1

    More prior art: The television set. The program will not continue until the ads have played.

  17. Re:WWOOOSSSHHHH!!! KKRRCK-BOOOOMM!!!! on NASA In Colbert Conundrum Over Space Station · · Score: 1
    Indeed, Colbert is providing a valuable service, in that he will discourage organizations from making important decisions via public opinion polls in the future.

    Colbert has simply shown how inherently vulnerable these votes are to manipulation. PZ Myers has been doing this sort of thing for years.

    Public poll competitions are a thinly disguised publicity stunt. Frequently, they simply demean and trivialize the event they are promoting. In the case of NASA, this poll has been a farce from day one.

  18. Warranty no help in this situation on Should Apple Give Back Replaced Disks? · · Score: 2, Informative
    This happened to me, too. In September, I had a complete hard drive crash in my MacBook. It was still under warranty, so I took it to the store, and was offered the same deal (only w/o the $160 charge). The bulk of my data was backed up, but there were some things I was worried about losing and a few others I knew I'd lost. I wanted to keep the possibility of sending the drive to a recovery firm while still getting my computer back, but Apple makes no provision for that. They insist on keeping the dead drive.

    It was worth it for me to just buy a new (and bigger) drive so I could keep the old one. I still haven't decided if the lost data is worth the effort of recovery, but at least I have that option now.

  19. Re:LOGO vs. BASIC on Forty Years of LOGO · · Score: 1

    The turtle does, in fact, have a friendly face.