What I hate is when those stupid sites require a complicated password, claiming that "password" is not secure enough, and "pa$23sw0rd97" isn't good enough because it doesn't have any capital letters, etc.
Then there are the places which I *want* to be secure that refuse to let me have a better password because the rules are too stupid. Such as no upper case letters allowed, no special characters except dash, or password is too long. I haven't seen this at a bank, but I have seen it in modern MMOs for example who should know better than to let a database designer too lazy to scrub the input be in charge of security rules.
This is the problem, in a nutshell. People just don't care about even their banking passwords.
But what are the stats there? The article didn't claim what "123456" was the most popular banking password, only that it was the most popular password. I don't see stupid passwords as a problem if they're used in situations where it doesn't matter.
Of course I can't be bothered to spend a couple days mining all that data from questionable web sites just to get some actual useful information out of it, but the original article could have done so instead of just having yet another funny article that doesn't really mean much as it's presented with no context.
For many sites, 123456 is a perfectly fine password, but possibly too long. Too many sites require registering to do the most basic of mundane things, and the visitors don't care if anyone steals their throwaway account.
A better set of data would be to know what was the most common password on a banking site which should be considered high security by most users, versus twitter which should be medium security (possibility of causing embarrassment), versus a forum for some game you just want help on which is low priority unless you were stupid enough to use your real name, versus the site requiring a registration in order to get a free coupon.
What if you don't own the game, and just want to see your friend demo it? Or your friend is showing you how to find the secret level, but without all the hassle of making a video. Yes, it's not very special I agree.
There are a few other uses but those come with drawbacks of having to add strangers to your friends list. Which maybe says it all right there; it's about social networking, so if you still think twitter or instagram are a bit weird then no way would this make sense.
Very good point. I fear we get too many knee jerk reactions in opposite directions though; from those who want to ban all new tools, versus those who want to encourage them with minimal to no oversight.
Sort of agree, however the reason is not that the corporations are cooperating willingly with the governments, but instead because they don't want the hassle that comes from refusing. It's time and money to mount a legal defense.
There are other ways to demonstrate endianness, and that method doesn't seem the easiest. Just demonstrate that there are multiple ways to split a value into constituent bytes then show how the different methods don't cooperate with each other. Of course if the class still has to be taught big versus little endian then they're probably still at a stage where 'union' is over their heads as well. I think it's a good idea to teach some assembler early, or at least computer architecture concepts, and do this before more advanced programming.
I wouldn't worry about pack/unpack and whether they were implemented correctly any more than I would worry about the C compiler implementing unions correctly.
I'd say that if indentation for blocks is the biggest complaint that can be raised about Python then it must be a near perfect language. So many newcomers to Python can't get past that one thing for some reason and dig deep enough to find out whether there are other actual problems with the language. I remember when people complained about C because it didn't have BEGIN and END and used all sorts of odd characters as operators, but get people used to it and it becomes the standard against which other languages are compared.
And for what it's worth, since so many people don't even know this, Python is not the first or only language to use indentation as part of syntax.
Mostly because Python is primarily written as an interpreter, at least the most common versions of it. And interpreters typically want good runtime performance. A python compiler for python would be relatively straight forward.
You can teach some useful data structures in Python. Hash tables, balanced trees, priority queues, and so on. Python actually implements a lot of its data structures in Python. Many high level languages do that, including Smalltalk which really had no higher level primitive construct than an array.
I'm a big fan of low level languages and that's what I use every day. I also used to be a teaching assistant at a university. And doing some advanced tree handling in C would be cumbersome for students a lot of times not because of the concepts but the details that get in the way.
It is, but I use it. Knives are harmful, but they are also tools that can be very useful if used properly. "Goto considered harmful" is too often misinterpreted as a religious prohibition.
The thing is we have learned from the over usage of gotos, and almost no one creates a mess of spaghetti code from scratch anymore because almost every single language makes it easier to use structured programming. For BASIC, most of us have learned through tragic experience that it's not good for beginners or veterans. Even BASIC evolved, it is not the language from the late 70s anymore. Still it's not great, but it serves as a suitable tool to keep non-programmer managers distracted while real work gets done.
Right and just how big is the programming market in the Mono world?.NET was created solely as an attempt to kill Java and portability, and Mono is only tolerated because its usage is so small and because it occasionally serves as a distraction.
And probably gave him a small year end bonus, whereas the upper executives are getting millions each in compensation from the same invention. Even if an executive is doing an awful job and gets fired they still keep the gold. What is the problem with *sharing* the benefit? No one is asking that the individual inventor receive all the benefits and the company gets none, yet this law is going the other way so that the inventor will get no tangible benefits other than an attaboy.
It is not necessarily the monetary part that is the motivation for researchers. However not getting the money is absolutely a negative motivation when it becomes clear that your company is not treating you fairly.
Except usually those headlines are followed by some sort of story. In this case there's nothing. Some journalist having a slows news day decides to put Windows 10 into a headline without having a story to go with it. It's not even good speculation, and cites another journalist who doesn't have good speculation. Can't people just wait a couple days for the official disinformation to be released?
I admitted earlier that I got the golf vs vacation wrong, but your point is confusing. How does Obama appear now? Are presidents not allowed to golf? Can they smile now and then? What exactly is wrong with getting in some small recreation while multitasking? The president golfing is not shameful, however it is shameful that so many voters are being tricked into thinking this is a scandal.
You're right. It's total days of vacation that Obama is behind on, that used to be the talking points meme. I guess when the fact checking disproved that it switched over to golf? Vacation is good, as long as it's not golf?
He's golfed a lot less than most recent presidents, he has catching up to do.
But what sorts of morons honestly think the president either has to stay in the white house all the time, or who think that the president when not in DC does not actually do any work?
There are cases that people have seen where two foreign engineers are hired to replace one engineer, most often as outsourced labor. Those two engineers are not individually better than the one replaced engineer, very often the two of them together are not even better. So the engineer who is doing the best is being replaced by substandard people.
So your advice is stop being our best. Don't bother being good engineers because they'll always be able to hire inexpensive labor to do the simplistic stuff like engineering. Instead we should aim for jobs that even the poor undeveloped countries don't want to do. What's left? Can't do science, can't do engineering, can't do manual labor, can't do housekeeping, can't do construction, all those jobs are able to be done more cheaply elsewhere. Could be lawyers, all those executives need people to help them avoid the law, but not everyone has the capability of being a lawyer and we already have far to many of them in the country already. Could be artists, but they're already starving today.
Do we tell our children today to stop becoming scientists, mathematicians, and engineers, because it will be impossible to compete by being good at the job and instead they must compete by being the cheapest? STEM is going to be this century's equivalent of the interchangeable factory floor worker, only without the unions fighting on their side? (mostly because the same people worshipping at the free market altar are the same ones who are dismantling the unions)
Slashdot Mirror
What I hate is when those stupid sites require a complicated password, claiming that "password" is not secure enough, and "pa$23sw0rd97" isn't good enough because it doesn't have any capital letters, etc.
Then there are the places which I *want* to be secure that refuse to let me have a better password because the rules are too stupid. Such as no upper case letters allowed, no special characters except dash, or password is too long. I haven't seen this at a bank, but I have seen it in modern MMOs for example who should know better than to let a database designer too lazy to scrub the input be in charge of security rules.
Why complicate it?
This is the problem, in a nutshell. People just don't care about even their banking passwords.
But what are the stats there? The article didn't claim what "123456" was the most popular banking password, only that it was the most popular password. I don't see stupid passwords as a problem if they're used in situations where it doesn't matter.
Of course I can't be bothered to spend a couple days mining all that data from questionable web sites just to get some actual useful information out of it, but the original article could have done so instead of just having yet another funny article that doesn't really mean much as it's presented with no context.
For many sites, 123456 is a perfectly fine password, but possibly too long. Too many sites require registering to do the most basic of mundane things, and the visitors don't care if anyone steals their throwaway account.
A better set of data would be to know what was the most common password on a banking site which should be considered high security by most users, versus twitter which should be medium security (possibility of causing embarrassment), versus a forum for some game you just want help on which is low priority unless you were stupid enough to use your real name, versus the site requiring a registration in order to get a free coupon.
I suspect that's been done already.
What if you don't own the game, and just want to see your friend demo it? Or your friend is showing you how to find the secret level, but without all the hassle of making a video. Yes, it's not very special I agree.
There are a few other uses but those come with drawbacks of having to add strangers to your friends list. Which maybe says it all right there; it's about social networking, so if you still think twitter or instagram are a bit weird then no way would this make sense.
Very good point. I fear we get too many knee jerk reactions in opposite directions though; from those who want to ban all new tools, versus those who want to encourage them with minimal to no oversight.
Sort of agree, however the reason is not that the corporations are cooperating willingly with the governments, but instead because they don't want the hassle that comes from refusing. It's time and money to mount a legal defense.
Because kids love videos and have forgotten how to type coherently?
Gotta get those kids indoctrinated into a corporation early or they may grow up to be free thinkers!
There are other ways to demonstrate endianness, and that method doesn't seem the easiest. Just demonstrate that there are multiple ways to split a value into constituent bytes then show how the different methods don't cooperate with each other. Of course if the class still has to be taught big versus little endian then they're probably still at a stage where 'union' is over their heads as well. I think it's a good idea to teach some assembler early, or at least computer architecture concepts, and do this before more advanced programming.
I wouldn't worry about pack/unpack and whether they were implemented correctly any more than I would worry about the C compiler implementing unions correctly.
I'd say that if indentation for blocks is the biggest complaint that can be raised about Python then it must be a near perfect language. So many newcomers to Python can't get past that one thing for some reason and dig deep enough to find out whether there are other actual problems with the language. I remember when people complained about C because it didn't have BEGIN and END and used all sorts of odd characters as operators, but get people used to it and it becomes the standard against which other languages are compared.
And for what it's worth, since so many people don't even know this, Python is not the first or only language to use indentation as part of syntax.
Mostly because Python is primarily written as an interpreter, at least the most common versions of it. And interpreters typically want good runtime performance. A python compiler for python would be relatively straight forward.
You can teach some useful data structures in Python. Hash tables, balanced trees, priority queues, and so on. Python actually implements a lot of its data structures in Python. Many high level languages do that, including Smalltalk which really had no higher level primitive construct than an array.
I'm a big fan of low level languages and that's what I use every day. I also used to be a teaching assistant at a university. And doing some advanced tree handling in C would be cumbersome for students a lot of times not because of the concepts but the details that get in the way.
It is, but I use it. Knives are harmful, but they are also tools that can be very useful if used properly. "Goto considered harmful" is too often misinterpreted as a religious prohibition.
The thing is we have learned from the over usage of gotos, and almost no one creates a mess of spaghetti code from scratch anymore because almost every single language makes it easier to use structured programming. For BASIC, most of us have learned through tragic experience that it's not good for beginners or veterans. Even BASIC evolved, it is not the language from the late 70s anymore. Still it's not great, but it serves as a suitable tool to keep non-programmer managers distracted while real work gets done.
Right and just how big is the programming market in the Mono world? .NET was created solely as an attempt to kill Java and portability, and Mono is only tolerated because its usage is so small and because it occasionally serves as a distraction.
Well, it's marginally useful if you're stuck in Microsoft's corner of computing or if you wish to succumb to their way of thinking.
And probably gave him a small year end bonus, whereas the upper executives are getting millions each in compensation from the same invention. Even if an executive is doing an awful job and gets fired they still keep the gold. What is the problem with *sharing* the benefit? No one is asking that the individual inventor receive all the benefits and the company gets none, yet this law is going the other way so that the inventor will get no tangible benefits other than an attaboy.
It is not necessarily the monetary part that is the motivation for researchers. However not getting the money is absolutely a negative motivation when it becomes clear that your company is not treating you fairly.
Except usually those headlines are followed by some sort of story. In this case there's nothing. Some journalist having a slows news day decides to put Windows 10 into a headline without having a story to go with it. It's not even good speculation, and cites another journalist who doesn't have good speculation. Can't people just wait a couple days for the official disinformation to be released?
I admitted earlier that I got the golf vs vacation wrong, but your point is confusing. How does Obama appear now? Are presidents not allowed to golf? Can they smile now and then? What exactly is wrong with getting in some small recreation while multitasking? The president golfing is not shameful, however it is shameful that so many voters are being tricked into thinking this is a scandal.
You're right. It's total days of vacation that Obama is behind on, that used to be the talking points meme. I guess when the fact checking disproved that it switched over to golf? Vacation is good, as long as it's not golf?
Which is worse, meeting with unknown D list celebrities, versus meeting with Halliburton execs?
He's golfed a lot less than most recent presidents, he has catching up to do.
But what sorts of morons honestly think the president either has to stay in the white house all the time, or who think that the president when not in DC does not actually do any work?
Adding security features gets in the way of the primary goal, which is to sell the product to unsuspecting companies.
There are cases that people have seen where two foreign engineers are hired to replace one engineer, most often as outsourced labor. Those two engineers are not individually better than the one replaced engineer, very often the two of them together are not even better. So the engineer who is doing the best is being replaced by substandard people.
So your advice is stop being our best. Don't bother being good engineers because they'll always be able to hire inexpensive labor to do the simplistic stuff like engineering. Instead we should aim for jobs that even the poor undeveloped countries don't want to do. What's left? Can't do science, can't do engineering, can't do manual labor, can't do housekeeping, can't do construction, all those jobs are able to be done more cheaply elsewhere. Could be lawyers, all those executives need people to help them avoid the law, but not everyone has the capability of being a lawyer and we already have far to many of them in the country already. Could be artists, but they're already starving today.
Do we tell our children today to stop becoming scientists, mathematicians, and engineers, because it will be impossible to compete by being good at the job and instead they must compete by being the cheapest? STEM is going to be this century's equivalent of the interchangeable factory floor worker, only without the unions fighting on their side? (mostly because the same people worshipping at the free market altar are the same ones who are dismantling the unions)