If the passsword is stored as a hash on the server, then it is more resistant to attacks against the storage of the server. However, this does require the password be transmitted over the wire in one way or another on every connection.
What an utter nonsense.
Server stores hash, client computes hash, transmits hash, server compares hash. Not very hard. For additional security, you should encrypt the whole session with a session key derived from the server's public key.
Good question. They reflash the BIOS of your PC without you noticing it and get the data before it is encrypted. Or they use an existing backdoor in the BIOS. Or they hack and reflash the firmware on other devices like e.g. your wireless router. Or they hijack existing upgrade mechanisms of software on your PC (using bogus DNS services) to put a rootkit on it. Perhaps they have control of an SSL certificate authority and can successfully launch a man in the middle attack. Perhaps they can control the default DNS server of your ISP - or did you change it? Or there is a working exploit in your operating system they could use to install a rootkotit. They could also combine any these methods.
Just some ideas. There seem to be many ways. The question is whether it's worth the efforts. My guess is that only a few governments can successfully spy on almost all communications already, the US being at #1 position. But perhaps not even the US does it routinely/untargeted. Just a guess though.
I'm getting sooo tired of these endless lawsuits. In the end we, the customers, pay for this nonsense
Of course, it's not possible, but still I'd like to see mandatory "made by assholes" sticker on all products made by these companies. Depending on the number of software patents, aggressive lawsuits, and so on, an independent organisation should "award" them. Call it customer protection.
Apple iPhone - made by assholes Microsoft Windows - made by assholes Sony Playstation - made by assholes...
Of course, that would mean that almost all things you can buy would have a "made by assholes" sticker.
"Sir, I bought this Linux CD in your shop, but it doesn't have a 'made by assholes' sticker. Are you sure it's genuine?"
Look at Austin Meyers, he wrote the X-Plane flight simulator, beat Microsoft at it, and made millions of dollars. If you're smart, start your own business. It's not less work but you'll be your own boss and can choose your own work time and pace. In any case don't go for big stock market companies, they might sack you any time, managers will boss you around, the company gets all the copyright and credits, and it might get sold out at any time (see e.g. Sun).
Sorry, no matter how you put it, that doesn't look too good for the US.
Relative poverty is a wonderful thing. It allows you to say that a man who own his own home, his own car, a computer, 60" TV, stereo, etc is "poor" if he lives in Eagle Pass TX, but "rich" if he lives three miles farther west in Piedras Negras.
Thanks, but I prefer the old-fashioned notion of absolute poverty.
I barely start discussions on./ because it’s so obviously pointless, but I have to comment on this comment. Comparing different countries in terms of absolute poverty has been popular in the US to make things look better than they are but is flawed methodology for basically a bazillion of reasons: exchange rates, different prices for different goods, different demands and needs, etc. To give you an example, if you can't afford a car in India, nobody gives a shit, but if you can't afford a car in the US you might not even be able to work unless you live in a city like NY. That put aside, I just can’t imagine any way to spin the fact that relative poverty has been continually increasing in the US as good news.
While it doesn’t look so bad in terms of absolute poverty in international comparisons, the US is still far worse off than the majority of European countries, except for south-European countries like Portugal and Spain. You can dig up the statistics on your own.
There are many other measures of poverty, like e.g. the following one that doesn’t look too good for the US either:
Sadly most people in the US are irrational when it comes to data like this, they just cherry-pick the statistics they like to hear. Apparently people in the US get hammered the message that the US is the greatest and richest country into their brain from early childhood on.
You're right that the standard measure used in the study is relative, you're wrong that different measures were used for different countries:
Across twenty-one countries with fully comparable data, the overall poverty rate for all persons using the 50 percent poverty threshold varies from 5 percent in Finland to 20 percent in Mexico. The poverty rate is 17 percent in the United States, the second highest of all nations and the highest of all rich nations. The average rate of poverty is 10 percent across the twenty-one countries we observe here (Figure 1). Higher overall poverty rates are found, as one might expect, in Mexico, but also in Anglo-Saxon nations (United States, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom), and southern European nations (Greece, Spain, Italy) with a relatively high level of overall inequality. But even so, Australian, Canadian, and British poverty remain below U.S. levels.
Timothy M. Smeeding: Poorer by Comparison. Pathways (Winter 2009), 3-5.
Sorry, no matter how you put it, that doesn't look too good for the US.
Hey, I'm in the mood for digging out facts today. Perhaps the knowledge is there and lung cancer is decreasing, but nevertheless overall there is much more cancer than 50 years ago. Check it out:
Regarding computers, cellphones, and microwaves you're right though, and if you define "assets" in this way it might be totally okay that the average salary of a CEO was 39 times higher as that of a worker in 1970 and is now 1039 times higher, or that 21.9 percent of all US children are in poverty, a poverty rate second only to that of Mexico’s.
But does that matter? As long as as a society everyone is getting better does it matter that some are getting better faster than others?
Good point, but I doubt that everyone is getting better. If you define "getting better" in terms of the availability of cell phones and color TVs as another poster did, then, perhaps, the answer is yes. But check out these facts:
Notice that the average real income of a worker has basically not increased although worker's productivity has increased. There are reasonable doubts about whether living quality has increased at all during the past 50 years, although definitely many things have have improved (e.g. there is more gender equality and much less racism nowadays). In summary, it looks pretty bad. For example, check out the poverty statistics.
According to the Center for American Progress (a rather ironical name), the income of the bottom 50% of all Americans has increased by 6% from 1979 to 2007. During the same period the income of the top 1% of all Americans has increased by 229%.
Similarly, according to Cornell's CSI, in 2004 the net assets of the median household in the U.S. equaled approximately $82,000, which is an inflation-adjusted increase of 79% since 1962. Meanwhile, the net assets of the top 1% of the richest households in the US increased to $15 million in 2004 (a 263% increase since 1962).
The bottomline is: Only a small percentage of Americans lives in abundance in comparison to 50 years ago. The rest seems to be a little bit better off than they used to be, but in any case the gap between normal and low incomes and the insanely rich has become incredibly huge.
I essentially agree with him but don't think the bubble will burst. FB et. al. will rather face the slow agonizing decline of AOL and, right now, MySpace. So few companies are actually offering products for social networks that their decline will hardly be noticed.
But, yes, it is sad how much talent is wasted and how companies that offer no real product can be considered significant for future business.
I somehow disagree. If they gave up the requirement that it has to run on the Java VM, they could just hire a CS graduate to write a wrapper around typed racket. The whole thing would take someone who is familiar with Racket no more than a few months. A real hacker might even be able to do it in a few weeks.
Skype almost certainly already has a backdoor somewhere in its convoluted malware Spaghetti code. Regarding Hotmail, well, perhaps they figured out that it's not secure anyway...
I've watched a few of his videos. Sure, the videos are threatening, but this doesn't deserve or need prison, this guy needs a therapy. He has obvious mental problems that should be treated. Why do people in the US put mentally ill people into prison? He'll get out of it even more deranged as before!
Re:The most annoying thing about Facebook...
on
The Facebook Obsession
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I doubt very much the 500 million are unique at all.
Of course not. Facebook is going to hit the public stock market and this number is just part of the hype to increase the value. The number of accounts is a meaningless figure anyway -- you can bet that the vast majority of accounts are completely unused. In violation of European privacy laws you cannot even delete your FB account, so they've probably included my own account I've canceled long ago in this number, too.
In the long run FB will likely suffer the same fate as AOL, because they don't have anything valuable to offer. They just happened to offer the right waste of time at the right time. There will be a new waste of time for the masses by another Internet bubble company soon.
I think that those people who take the time, effort, money and energy to create complicated software algorithms should be rewarded.
Nobody is against that. It's called salary.
Or wait a minute....you don't really think that the people that made all the fancy patented algorithms get rewarded for the patent or that they even hold the patent for their work themselves, do you? Because that is definitely very rarely the case.
Sending unsolicited, paid SMS to the whole contact list of a person with a specially crafted trojan seems to be a more serious offence than the one-time copyright infringement of not paying for a $ 2.10 app, which actually not even qualifies as petty theft (because infringement is not theft).
Basically, the developer has created a malware/trojan version of this app and for this he might (and, in my opinion, also should) get into serious legal trouble. In other words, what a jerk...especially, if you take into account what kind of a stupid application he sells.
Well, you can ignore it. The good thing about FB is that it is absolutely useless and a total waste of time, so you won't be missing anything when you cancel your account.
I hope I'm wrong but I find it entirely credible that in the not so near but also not too distant future writing programs -- be it for yourself, for OSS, or for small commerce -- will become an unlawful underground activity. All software and information will be controlled by a small group of huge stock enterprises, the sole survivors of the first international patent and copyright war. Unless they work for one of those giants, programmers will have to meet conspiratively in old cellars, private apartments, and unknown bars but often these meetings, which are only announced by mouth to mouth propaganda, will be interrupted and dispersed by violent police raids, often resulting in people getting killed, arrested, or being sued for statutory damages of 75 trillion dollar.
Hopefully, if this is going to happen it will be a bit like Half Life 2 (except, perhaps, for the aliens).
At any rate the real problem is that colleges offer degrees in "computer science" but not "software engineering".
I agree that both disciplines should be taught and many people studying CS should rather learn software engineering. (Although, to be honest, what people call "software engineering" is mostly just programming and not engineering at all, but that's another issue.)
But that's not the fault of CS and there are plenty of reasons not to have much OOP in a CS introduction and instead having more functional programming theory (syntax & semantics, computability, etc.) and discrete math rather than trivialities about (mostly outdated) object systems.
I think what they mean by anti-modular is that OO, particularly in languages with bad module systems like e.g. C++, sometimes encourages the abuse of object encapsulation for modularization. Class hierarchies are supposed to reflect a natural ontology, whereas modules are supposed to organize the source code into independent libraries. Sometimes these coincide, but most of the time they don't. So no, I fully disagree. While it sounds a bit harsh to say that OO is anti-modular, there is some truth to it and the claim is certainly not ridiculous.
OO languages are definitely also anti-parallel, because object systems are based on mutation. At least in all OO languages I'm aware of (plenty) objects are mutable structures. Mutation and concurrency really don't fare well.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention that you should use salts, of course.
If the passsword is stored as a hash on the server, then it is more resistant to attacks against the storage of the server. However, this does require the password be transmitted over the wire in one way or another on every connection.
What an utter nonsense.
Server stores hash, client computes hash, transmits hash, server compares hash. Not very hard. For additional security, you should encrypt the whole session with a session key derived from the server's public key.
Good question. They reflash the BIOS of your PC without you noticing it and get the data before it is encrypted. Or they use an existing backdoor in the BIOS. Or they hack and reflash the firmware on other devices like e.g. your wireless router. Or they hijack existing upgrade mechanisms of software on your PC (using bogus DNS services) to put a rootkit on it. Perhaps they have control of an SSL certificate authority and can successfully launch a man in the middle attack. Perhaps they can control the default DNS server of your ISP - or did you change it? Or there is a working exploit in your operating system they could use to install a rootkotit. They could also combine any these methods.
Just some ideas. There seem to be many ways. The question is whether it's worth the efforts. My guess is that only a few governments can successfully spy on almost all communications already, the US being at #1 position. But perhaps not even the US does it routinely/untargeted. Just a guess though.
Well, perhaps these are possible, although perhaps not in the way we imagine now. I'm not saying that, I'm just loosely paraphrasing Michio Kaku.
I'm getting sooo tired of these endless lawsuits. In the end we, the customers, pay for this nonsense
Of course, it's not possible, but still I'd like to see mandatory "made by assholes" sticker on all products made by these companies. Depending on the number of software patents, aggressive lawsuits, and so on, an independent organisation should "award" them. Call it customer protection.
Apple iPhone - made by assholes ...
Microsoft Windows - made by assholes
Sony Playstation - made by assholes
Of course, that would mean that almost all things you can buy would have a "made by assholes" sticker.
"Sir, I bought this Linux CD in your shop, but it doesn't have a 'made by assholes' sticker. Are you sure it's genuine?"
Look at Austin Meyers, he wrote the X-Plane flight simulator, beat Microsoft at it, and made millions of dollars. If you're smart, start your own business. It's not less work but you'll be your own boss and can choose your own work time and pace. In any case don't go for big stock market companies, they might sack you any time, managers will boss you around, the company gets all the copyright and credits, and it might get sold out at any time (see e.g. Sun).
Sorry, no matter how you put it, that doesn't look too good for the US.
Relative poverty is a wonderful thing. It allows you to say that a man who own his own home, his own car, a computer, 60" TV, stereo, etc is "poor" if he lives in Eagle Pass TX, but "rich" if he lives three miles farther west in Piedras Negras.
Thanks, but I prefer the old-fashioned notion of absolute poverty.
I barely start discussions on ./ because it’s so obviously pointless, but I have to comment on this comment. Comparing different countries in terms of absolute poverty has been popular in the US to make things look better than they are but is flawed methodology for basically a bazillion of reasons: exchange rates, different prices for different goods, different demands and needs, etc. To give you an example, if you can't afford a car in India, nobody gives a shit, but if you can't afford a car in the US you might not even be able to work unless you live in a city like NY. That put aside, I just can’t imagine any way to spin the fact that relative poverty has been continually increasing in the US as good news.
Yes, absolute poverty has declined in the US:
Absolute Poverty US
While it doesn’t look so bad in terms of absolute poverty in international comparisons, the US is still far worse off than the majority of European countries, except for south-European countries like Portugal and Spain. You can dig up the statistics on your own.
There are many other measures of poverty, like e.g. the following one that doesn’t look too good for the US either:
Poverty Index
Or, how about food security in the US:
Hunger in US
Sadly most people in the US are irrational when it comes to data like this, they just cherry-pick the statistics they like to hear. Apparently people in the US get hammered the message that the US is the greatest and richest country into their brain from early childhood on.
Enough said.
You're right that the standard measure used in the study is relative, you're wrong that different measures were used for different countries:
Across twenty-one countries with fully comparable data, the
overall poverty rate for all persons using the 50 percent poverty
threshold varies from 5 percent in Finland to 20 percent in
Mexico. The poverty rate is 17 percent in the United States,
the second highest of all nations and the highest of all rich
nations. The average rate of poverty is 10 percent across the
twenty-one countries we observe here (Figure 1). Higher overall
poverty rates are found, as one might expect, in Mexico, but
also in Anglo-Saxon nations (United States, Australia, Canada,
Ireland, and the United Kingdom), and southern European
nations (Greece, Spain, Italy) with a relatively high level of
overall inequality. But even so, Australian, Canadian, and British
poverty remain below U.S. levels.
Timothy M. Smeeding: Poorer by Comparison. Pathways (Winter 2009), 3-5.
Sorry, no matter how you put it, that doesn't look too good for the US.
Hey, I'm in the mood for digging out facts today. Perhaps the knowledge is there and lung cancer is decreasing, but nevertheless overall there is much more cancer than 50 years ago. Check it out:
Cancer Figures 1930-2010 as PDFs
Regarding computers, cellphones, and microwaves you're right though, and if you define "assets" in this way it might be totally okay that the average salary of a CEO was 39 times higher as that of a worker in 1970 and is now 1039 times higher, or that 21.9 percent of all US children are in poverty, a poverty rate second only to that of Mexico’s.
But does that matter? As long as as a society everyone is getting better does it matter that some are getting better faster than others?
Good point, but I doubt that everyone is getting better. If you define "getting better" in terms of the availability of cell phones and color TVs as another poster did, then, perhaps, the answer is yes. But check out these facts:
20 Facts about Social Inequality
Notice that the average real income of a worker has basically not increased although worker's productivity has increased. There are reasonable doubts about whether living quality has increased at all during the past 50 years, although definitely many things have have improved (e.g. there is more gender equality and much less racism nowadays). In summary, it looks pretty bad. For example, check out the poverty statistics.
According to the Center for American Progress (a rather ironical name), the income of the bottom 50% of all Americans has increased by 6% from 1979 to 2007. During the same period the income of the top 1% of all Americans has increased by 229%.
Similarly, according to Cornell's CSI, in 2004 the net assets of the median household in the U.S. equaled approximately $82,000, which is an inflation-adjusted increase of 79% since 1962. Meanwhile, the net assets of the top 1% of the richest households in the US increased to $15 million in 2004 (a 263% increase since 1962).
The bottomline is: Only a small percentage of Americans lives in abundance in comparison to 50 years ago. The rest seems to be a little bit better off than they used to be, but in any case the gap between normal and low incomes and the insanely rich has become incredibly huge.
I essentially agree with him but don't think the bubble will burst. FB et. al. will rather face the slow agonizing decline of AOL and, right now, MySpace. So few companies are actually offering products for social networks that their decline will hardly be noticed.
But, yes, it is sad how much talent is wasted and how companies that offer no real product can be considered significant for future business.
I'm no Donald Trump but isn't that what business is? Battling competitors for market share?
Ha! And I thought business was about offering an innovative product with features and a price that makes people buy it...silly me!
I somehow disagree. If they gave up the requirement that it has to run on the Java VM, they could just hire a CS graduate to write a wrapper around typed racket. The whole thing would take someone who is familiar with Racket no more than a few months. A real hacker might even be able to do it in a few weeks.
That is exactly what I thought as well.
Skype almost certainly already has a backdoor somewhere in its convoluted malware Spaghetti code. Regarding Hotmail, well, perhaps they figured out that it's not secure anyway...
I've watched a few of his videos. Sure, the videos are threatening, but this doesn't deserve or need prison, this guy needs a therapy. He has obvious mental problems that should be treated. Why do people in the US put mentally ill people into prison? He'll get out of it even more deranged as before!
I doubt very much the 500 million are unique at all.
Of course not. Facebook is going to hit the public stock market and this number is just part of the hype to increase the value. The number of accounts is a meaningless figure anyway -- you can bet that the vast majority of accounts are completely unused. In violation of European privacy laws you cannot even delete your FB account, so they've probably included my own account I've canceled long ago in this number, too.
In the long run FB will likely suffer the same fate as AOL, because they don't have anything valuable to offer. They just happened to offer the right waste of time at the right time. There will be a new waste of time for the masses by another Internet bubble company soon.
I think that those people who take the time, effort, money and energy to create complicated software algorithms should be rewarded.
Nobody is against that. It's called salary.
Or wait a minute....you don't really think that the people that made all the fancy patented algorithms get rewarded for the patent or that they even hold the patent for their work themselves, do you? Because that is definitely very rarely the case.
Sending unsolicited, paid SMS to the whole contact list of a person with a specially crafted trojan seems to be a more serious offence than the one-time copyright infringement of not paying for a $ 2.10 app, which actually not even qualifies as petty theft (because infringement is not theft).
Basically, the developer has created a malware/trojan version of this app and for this he might (and, in my opinion, also should) get into serious legal trouble. In other words, what a jerk...especially, if you take into account what kind of a stupid application he sells.
A continuum would be even better:
+3 I want to have your baby! / +2 love / +1 like / 0 meh / -1 dislike / -2 hate / -3 GODWIN FTW / -4 Belongs on idle.slashdot.org
I know it's nitpicking but this doesn't look like a continuum to me...
Well, you can ignore it. The good thing about FB is that it is absolutely useless and a total waste of time, so you won't be missing anything when you cancel your account.
I hope I'm wrong but I find it entirely credible that in the not so near but also not too distant future writing programs -- be it for yourself, for OSS, or for small commerce -- will become an unlawful underground activity. All software and information will be controlled by a small group of huge stock enterprises, the sole survivors of the first international patent and copyright war. Unless they work for one of those giants, programmers will have to meet conspiratively in old cellars, private apartments, and unknown bars but often these meetings, which are only announced by mouth to mouth propaganda, will be interrupted and dispersed by violent police raids, often resulting in people getting killed, arrested, or being sued for statutory damages of 75 trillion dollar.
Hopefully, if this is going to happen it will be a bit like Half Life 2 (except, perhaps, for the aliens).
This outcome could have been easily prevented if they had used licensed copies of Windows 7 for their spam net.
At any rate the real problem is that colleges offer degrees in "computer science" but not "software engineering".
I agree that both disciplines should be taught and many people studying CS should rather learn software engineering. (Although, to be honest, what people call "software engineering" is mostly just programming and not engineering at all, but that's another issue.)
But that's not the fault of CS and there are plenty of reasons not to have much OOP in a CS introduction and instead having more functional programming theory (syntax & semantics, computability, etc.) and discrete math rather than trivialities about (mostly outdated) object systems.
I think what they mean by anti-modular is that OO, particularly in languages with bad module systems like e.g. C++, sometimes encourages the abuse of object encapsulation for modularization. Class hierarchies are supposed to reflect a natural ontology, whereas modules are supposed to organize the source code into independent libraries. Sometimes these coincide, but most of the time they don't. So no, I fully disagree. While it sounds a bit harsh to say that OO is anti-modular, there is some truth to it and the claim is certainly not ridiculous.
OO languages are definitely also anti-parallel, because object systems are based on mutation. At least in all OO languages I'm aware of (plenty) objects are mutable structures. Mutation and concurrency really don't fare well.