Cool use for the internet -- wasn't aware of that use.
You weren't aware that the Internet is used to transfer data? Please turn in your Slashdot ID card on the way out.
Seriously, though, with picture and video sharing with friends and relatives, online backup services, VoIP phones, and a host of other types of use that don't even start to touch some of the real hogs (Netflix downloads, etc.), just about any cap set by an ISP becomes too small very quickly.
Correct, it is technically "weasel words" that basically allow the cell phone company to write off any and all problems with service as something out of their control, thus increasing their profit.
Most x-ray machines and metal detectors won't identify most bomb material, but there are plenty of ways to identify explosives, none of which is currently in use by the TSA.
Right now, the only true explosives detection done by the TSA is the swabbing for residue on randomly selected passengers. I suspect that the TSA is not as stupid as they appear, as they keep getting bundles of money for essentially useless passenger scanning equipment. And, they will get more money once they convince everyone that naked pictures of passengers isn't catching all the possible threats.
Do you think that metal detectors to spot guns, knives, and grenades are worth using, as people board a plane?
Metal detectors and x-ray of luggage isn't particularly invasive, nor are they a possible health hazard. Since both have been in place for many years before 2001, and deal with a completely different kind of threat, are useful, and already paid for, so shouldn't be eliminated. But, they could be improved to decrease the time for each passenger.
I just spent a day of my life looking at open source CDDA ripping software (ones that take hours to get a perfect rip) for Windows
Pretty much all modern CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives now do this same thing in hardware, and the rip takes only the normal time.
With a drive that passes C2 error information to the ripping software, only actual error sectors need to be re-read, so you can rip at full speed unless there is an issue.
The 24 bit lossless release from late last year is a dramatically better mastering than I've heard before.
The 24-bit lossless could have been more accurate than the CDs, if they had not had the dynamic range compression applied, but at least some comparisons show that this is not case.
So, they might be "better" to some ears, but that seems to be the same group of ears that have remastered the Beatles albums before, with each one being worse than the last. The engineer doing the mastering on this last release admits to adding dynamic range compression, which by definition loses some of the original sound.
But what happens in 5-10 years, after the performance per price ratio has doubled a few more times? Now you're down to maybe a single month for a wealthy individual to be able to crack a significant, real-world password.
Since an exhaustive keyspace search increases the time by 256 for each extra character (and the TFA shows about 100x increase, probably because he didn't use every character), then even if performance doubled every year (unlikely), you'd still be at about a 10 CPU-days to crack an 8-character password, and over 1000 CPU-days to crack a 10-character password. So, yeah, if computers increase in speed by more than double their current increase, and Amazon (or some other company) has enough of them to rent to you, you could break a 10-character password for $50K or so in a week.
Of course, 10 years from now, we'll be using a hash function that takes 1000 times a long to compute, because it doesn't affect real password-checking speed (which is lightning fast compared to typing speed) on the 200GHz-equivalent processor.
As far as I can tell, salting only helps against rainbow table attacks.
Adding a salt also helps to increase the original keyspace, which increases the time to brute force.
As an example, in TFA the source input of the hashes were all 6 bytes. If the hash had been created by adding a 2-byte salt, that means the original user-generated password was only 4 bytes...definitely not very secure.
Note that TFA did not exhaustively compute all SHA1 hashes in 49 minutes, but it appears to have exhaustively searched the 6-byte keyspace in 49 minutes. If you use 8-byte passwords with a 4-byte salt, that increases the keyspace by a factor of 281,474,976,710,656, which means that you'd have to pay around $400 trillion to Amazon to exhaust that keyspace. Also note that unless you have absolute knowledge of how the salt is added (front, back, etc.), the keyspace jumps a lot just by adding a one-byte salt, since that character can be any value, not just restricted to easily typed characters.
So, the article is cute, but doesn't show that password cracking is now available to all for the price of a latte.
Anyone that really liked the Beatles would have already bought and ripped the remastered albums from last year though
If this last remastering followed in the progressively worse steps of the previous 3 or 4, I suspect that it would be hardly recognizable as the Beatles.
A quick Google shows that it's probably about the same dreck as the 2000 CDs, based on reviews from people who really know.
This is one of the many reasons I use torrents for such music...when you can no longer buy the original quality recording, and history indicates that nobody involved (artists, labels, etc.) cares about making that same quality available again.
As a general rule, 256kbps AAC is roughly considered to be equivalent to 320kbps MP3, since the AAC codec is a much better codec with superior sound quality.
With default encoder settings, AAC does have many advantages at low bitrates, and does fine at high bitrates, epecially compared to the average MP3 encoder, and especially on known hard-to-encode data (transients, for one).
But, a very good MP3 encoder (like LAME) with the right tweaks does as good or better as the average AAC encoder at the same bitrate. In general, it's much harder to tweak AAC, as the options are simply enormous, and it hasn't been around as long. You can also get into some very long encoding times in the quest for top quality with AAC. So, it's likely that MP3 can generate better audio at the same bitrate in the same amount of encode time.
Last, even if AAC sounds better, it also has the disadvantage of being more computationally expensive to decode, which results in shorter battery life. When the battery runs out, the quality of AAC audio isn't very good.;->
No, but the average person doesn't have a 1 TB hard drive in their phone
or laptop either.
You act like people download directly to their phone and don't store their music anywhere else. I think you are far more "niche" if you do this than if you want quality audio like I do. Also, it's pretty easy to upgrade a laptop hard drive, and 1TB goes for about $120.
My 32 GB phone has 2,234 tracks on it (most of them at 256 kb/s IIRC), which isn't a huge amount, but they have to coexist with everything else that's stored there.
So, you really do only store music on your phone? No computer of any kind? But, based the on average track size in my library, it would take about 50GB to store those music files losslessly. Sure, it won't fit on your phone, but it will fit on almost every reasonable computer hard drive, and <sarcasm>there are now 3 or 4 programs that allow you transcode files from one audio format to another and store those files on a portable device (like a phone), with very little effort.</sarcasm>
I unblocked each site listed in NoScript, one at a time, and still couldn't get the quiz.
Yep, definitely not worth the time. I'd rather see a Flash applet than play Russian roulette guessing which site is required for the content and which site will try to copy my hard drive to Nigeria.
Frankly, I've got a LOT of politicians in mind that I'd happily vote off the planet!!
I think I see a way to cover the cost of the trip.
First, you could have Survivor: Earth, where we do as you suggest (voting people to send to Mars).
Then, there would be Survivor: Mars. I'm not sure exactly how that would work, but having networks bid on the rights to show this stuff would easily fund the expeditions.
No, since that's only very slightly better than a ~192kbps MP3 created with finely tuned command line options to LAME, which is what I use for my MP3s.
Although, I do agree with one of the other responses...for much of current music, the CD is pretty crappy, too, mostly because of the loudness war, but that can make it even harder for any lossy compression to be accurate when they rely on psychoacoustic masking.
But, really, with terabyte drives selling for $50, why do we need lossy compression on our music? You can store about 3000 hours of lossless music per terabyte. Based on the average track size in my music library, that would be over 45,000 tracks. So, when it takes $50 to store $45K of music, why settle for lossy?
It took apple's $1 song to make it easier to pay than pirate music. Everyone won.
Except for people who want high-quality digital copies at a reasonable price.
It's now becoming very hard to get CD-quality audio without paying a significant premium. There are plenty of lossless codecs out there, but no vendor has stepped up and offered individual tracks in high quality. It's not like it takes any significant time to download, either...6–20 seconds for a 320kbps MP3 or 20–90 seconds for a 900kbps (or so) lossless file
Paswords are stupid and easy to crack with tricks because nobody uses AFSDWER$fq34agfre as a password. PASS PHRASES are far stronger and super easy to remember. Use at least 2 words with special characters and you are already 800X better off that everyone else.
Great advice...can you please force banks, etc., to allow such passwords?
Example 1: I recently signed up to be able to pay my car payment online, and the requirements were that both the username and password be at least 8 characters long but no longer than 12 characters, have at least one letter and one number, with no non-alphanumeric allowed. Although you could use mixed case, it was not a requirement.
Example 2: A set of integrated systems at a client use Active Directory as a single sign-on to authenticate. The AD password requires at least one of lower, upper, number, and symbols, and must be at least 8 characters long. But, because some of the systems that use AD to validate the authentication are broken, you can't use a password of more than 8 characters, and some of the input systems don't allow every special character to be typed, so you definitely can't use Unicode characters.
Also, I'm not sure how true this is for other people, but for me, most files in torrents have an abhorrent naming convention, and just going into my giant default "Bittorrent Downloads" directory doesn't work well.
Vuze allows you to rename the files in the torrent on the fly, so that you can have them named whatever you want, with no problems when sending to peers.
From what I read, is that the PETN explosive put inside the toner cartridge looks just like toner powder through an X-Ray machine. At least one of these packages was screened through normal processes and was not detected.
Wasn't there a story a while back about how it was "too expensive" to equip airports with bomb-sniffing hardware?
Since it's not too expensive to equip airports with devices that violate the privacy of the passengers and obviously don't stop explosives from getting on board, it's clearly about passenger abuse, not passenger safety.
the data-driven facts say that we don't have enough highly educated Americans to do the jobs our economy is currently producing
Based on the quality of the employees in some of the companies that my company works with, it seems to me that a lot of the "need" is driven by the fact that it takes 3-4 people to do the job of one truly competent person.
My observation is not aimed at any specific group of persons (including H-1B holder). But, when the standard process in a company to deal with a problem is to have a "working session" where 5-10 people are on a conference call while one of them is actually trying to fix the problem live, and is doing things like "man ln" (I am only very slightly exaggerating here), it's pretty stupid. And, all because that $500-2000/hour being wasted is just more "billable hours" on a contract that cannot be canceled until 5 years from now, so it's just SOP.
They're aiming this at rural areas, and they will almost certainly be using more transmitters with a lower power than TV, so 10,000 people is probably a lot more than you'd actually get per transmitter.
More transmitters turns out to be far worse if they are close enough together to cause collisions.
The solution to this would be to run a really high speed line 50-200 miles into the wilderness and put a tiny transmitter in the town. But, then it becomes a case where the last mile is far easier than the rest, so why not just use DSL (or regular WiFi).
The assumption I made in my post was that they would be re-purposing already existing TV transmitters after they stop broadcasting TV, and that the existing TV antenna would be used (as the summary states). Building a bunch of new transmitters that use the vacant TV frequencies is just "cellular network" with a different name.
Perhaps the person who changes bios settings to tweak them out is the same type of person who would soup up a car to get the most performance possible from them.
Or, get the performance that you should get in the first place if the person who picked the default settings for the BIOS was competent.
I would expect that Macs would be even worse about picking the safest defaults, based on the mantra of "it just works".
2-3 movies of 90 minutes each a week ok let's see.
For a household of 4 people (not at all uncommon outside of/. readers), around one hour of video entertainment (movie, TV, etc.) per week per person seems like almost nothing to me.
And, if you are using Hulu, Netflix, etc., as a replacement for cable TV, then 5 hours per week per person isn't outrageous, either.
Sure, compression will reduce those sizes, but a single DVD isn't large enough to store a 1080p movie.
Yes, actually, it is.
Using h.264, 10Mbps will result in very high quality for a 1920x1080/24p source. With full bitrate DTS at 1.5Mbps, that will give you just under 2 hours worth of movie on a dual layer DVD. Using a more reasonable 6-8Mbps for the video (still more than enough), almost every movie will fit in 9GB.
There are many reasons that 20-30GBs are used on BluRay titles (extras, lossless audio, etc.), but actual picture quality generally isn't one of them.
MY 2, T1 lines are truly unlimited. I can saturate them at 100% for 900 days in a row and they wont/cant say crap about it.
Of course you can saturate a 3Mbps line for 900 days in a row...that's what you get for having such a slow line.;)
Seriously, I've had as much as 114% utilization on my 25/15Mbps for short peaks, but there's no way I can run even close to 100% for more than a few days. I've averaged about 40% usage over the past year, so that's around 6Mbps or so each way.
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Cool use for the internet -- wasn't aware of that use.
You weren't aware that the Internet is used to transfer data? Please turn in your Slashdot ID card on the way out.
Seriously, though, with picture and video sharing with friends and relatives, online backup services, VoIP phones, and a host of other types of use that don't even start to touch some of the real hogs (Netflix downloads, etc.), just about any cap set by an ISP becomes too small very quickly.
This is not "legalese"
Correct, it is technically "weasel words" that basically allow the cell phone company to write off any and all problems with service as something out of their control, thus increasing their profit.
Ok, skip the explosives screening.
That's exactly what TSA is doing right now.
Most x-ray machines and metal detectors won't identify most bomb material, but there are plenty of ways to identify explosives, none of which is currently in use by the TSA.
Right now, the only true explosives detection done by the TSA is the swabbing for residue on randomly selected passengers. I suspect that the TSA is not as stupid as they appear, as they keep getting bundles of money for essentially useless passenger scanning equipment. And, they will get more money once they convince everyone that naked pictures of passengers isn't catching all the possible threats.
Do you think that metal detectors to spot guns, knives, and grenades are worth using, as people board a plane?
Metal detectors and x-ray of luggage isn't particularly invasive, nor are they a possible health hazard. Since both have been in place for many years before 2001, and deal with a completely different kind of threat, are useful, and already paid for, so shouldn't be eliminated. But, they could be improved to decrease the time for each passenger.
I just spent a day of my life looking at open source CDDA ripping software (ones that take hours to get a perfect rip) for Windows
Pretty much all modern CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives now do this same thing in hardware, and the rip takes only the normal time.
With a drive that passes C2 error information to the ripping software, only actual error sectors need to be re-read, so you can rip at full speed unless there is an issue.
The 24 bit lossless release from late last year is a dramatically better mastering than I've heard before.
The 24-bit lossless could have been more accurate than the CDs, if they had not had the dynamic range compression applied, but at least some comparisons show that this is not case.
So, they might be "better" to some ears, but that seems to be the same group of ears that have remastered the Beatles albums before, with each one being worse than the last. The engineer doing the mastering on this last release admits to adding dynamic range compression, which by definition loses some of the original sound.
But what happens in 5-10 years, after the performance per price ratio has doubled a few more times? Now you're down to maybe a single month for a wealthy individual to be able to crack a significant, real-world password.
Since an exhaustive keyspace search increases the time by 256 for each extra character (and the TFA shows about 100x increase, probably because he didn't use every character), then even if performance doubled every year (unlikely), you'd still be at about a 10 CPU-days to crack an 8-character password, and over 1000 CPU-days to crack a 10-character password. So, yeah, if computers increase in speed by more than double their current increase, and Amazon (or some other company) has enough of them to rent to you, you could break a 10-character password for $50K or so in a week.
Of course, 10 years from now, we'll be using a hash function that takes 1000 times a long to compute, because it doesn't affect real password-checking speed (which is lightning fast compared to typing speed) on the 200GHz-equivalent processor.
As far as I can tell, salting only helps against rainbow table attacks.
Adding a salt also helps to increase the original keyspace, which increases the time to brute force.
As an example, in TFA the source input of the hashes were all 6 bytes. If the hash had been created by adding a 2-byte salt, that means the original user-generated password was only 4 bytes...definitely not very secure.
Note that TFA did not exhaustively compute all SHA1 hashes in 49 minutes, but it appears to have exhaustively searched the 6-byte keyspace in 49 minutes. If you use 8-byte passwords with a 4-byte salt, that increases the keyspace by a factor of 281,474,976,710,656, which means that you'd have to pay around $400 trillion to Amazon to exhaust that keyspace. Also note that unless you have absolute knowledge of how the salt is added (front, back, etc.), the keyspace jumps a lot just by adding a one-byte salt, since that character can be any value, not just restricted to easily typed characters.
So, the article is cute, but doesn't show that password cracking is now available to all for the price of a latte.
Anyone that really liked the Beatles would have already bought and ripped the remastered albums from last year though
If this last remastering followed in the progressively worse steps of the previous 3 or 4, I suspect that it would be hardly recognizable as the Beatles.
A quick Google shows that it's probably about the same dreck as the 2000 CDs, based on reviews from people who really know.
This is one of the many reasons I use torrents for such music...when you can no longer buy the original quality recording, and history indicates that nobody involved (artists, labels, etc.) cares about making that same quality available again.
As a general rule, 256kbps AAC is roughly considered to be equivalent to 320kbps MP3, since the AAC codec is a much better codec with superior sound quality.
With default encoder settings, AAC does have many advantages at low bitrates, and does fine at high bitrates, epecially compared to the average MP3 encoder, and especially on known hard-to-encode data (transients, for one).
But, a very good MP3 encoder (like LAME) with the right tweaks does as good or better as the average AAC encoder at the same bitrate. In general, it's much harder to tweak AAC, as the options are simply enormous, and it hasn't been around as long. You can also get into some very long encoding times in the quest for top quality with AAC. So, it's likely that MP3 can generate better audio at the same bitrate in the same amount of encode time.
Last, even if AAC sounds better, it also has the disadvantage of being more computationally expensive to decode, which results in shorter battery life. When the battery runs out, the quality of AAC audio isn't very good. ;->
No, but the average person doesn't have a 1 TB hard drive in their phone or laptop either.
You act like people download directly to their phone and don't store their music anywhere else. I think you are far more "niche" if you do this than if you want quality audio like I do. Also, it's pretty easy to upgrade a laptop hard drive, and 1TB goes for about $120.
My 32 GB phone has 2,234 tracks on it (most of them at 256 kb/s IIRC), which isn't a huge amount, but they have to coexist with everything else that's stored there.
So, you really do only store music on your phone? No computer of any kind? But, based the on average track size in my library, it would take about 50GB to store those music files losslessly. Sure, it won't fit on your phone, but it will fit on almost every reasonable computer hard drive, and <sarcasm>there are now 3 or 4 programs that allow you transcode files from one audio format to another and store those files on a portable device (like a phone), with very little effort.</sarcasm>
When you're going to get SuperBowl-like numbers for weeks on end, you can afford to pay $50M or so per week for rights to the content.
Seriously, when shows like Dancing With the Stars can sell $6M per hour in commercials, how much would Real People Dying on Mars be able to sell?
I unblocked each site listed in NoScript, one at a time, and still couldn't get the quiz.
Yep, definitely not worth the time. I'd rather see a Flash applet than play Russian roulette guessing which site is required for the content and which site will try to copy my hard drive to Nigeria.
Frankly, I've got a LOT of politicians in mind that I'd happily vote off the planet!!
I think I see a way to cover the cost of the trip.
First, you could have Survivor: Earth, where we do as you suggest (voting people to send to Mars).
Then, there would be Survivor: Mars. I'm not sure exactly how that would work, but having networks bid on the rights to show this stuff would easily fund the expeditions.
256kbps AAC isn't good enough for you?
No, since that's only very slightly better than a ~192kbps MP3 created with finely tuned command line options to LAME, which is what I use for my MP3s.
Although, I do agree with one of the other responses...for much of current music, the CD is pretty crappy, too, mostly because of the loudness war, but that can make it even harder for any lossy compression to be accurate when they rely on psychoacoustic masking.
But, really, with terabyte drives selling for $50, why do we need lossy compression on our music? You can store about 3000 hours of lossless music per terabyte. Based on the average track size in my music library, that would be over 45,000 tracks. So, when it takes $50 to store $45K of music, why settle for lossy?
It took apple's $1 song to make it easier to pay than pirate music. Everyone won.
Except for people who want high-quality digital copies at a reasonable price.
It's now becoming very hard to get CD-quality audio without paying a significant premium. There are plenty of lossless codecs out there, but no vendor has stepped up and offered individual tracks in high quality. It's not like it takes any significant time to download, either...6–20 seconds for a 320kbps MP3 or 20–90 seconds for a 900kbps (or so) lossless file
Paswords are stupid and easy to crack with tricks because nobody uses AFSDWER$fq34agfre as a password. PASS PHRASES are far stronger and super easy to remember. Use at least 2 words with special characters and you are already 800X better off that everyone else.
Great advice...can you please force banks, etc., to allow such passwords?
Example 1: I recently signed up to be able to pay my car payment online, and the requirements were that both the username and password be at least 8 characters long but no longer than 12 characters, have at least one letter and one number, with no non-alphanumeric allowed. Although you could use mixed case, it was not a requirement.
Example 2: A set of integrated systems at a client use Active Directory as a single sign-on to authenticate. The AD password requires at least one of lower, upper, number, and symbols, and must be at least 8 characters long. But, because some of the systems that use AD to validate the authentication are broken, you can't use a password of more than 8 characters, and some of the input systems don't allow every special character to be typed, so you definitely can't use Unicode characters.
Also, I'm not sure how true this is for other people, but for me, most files in torrents have an abhorrent naming convention, and just going into my giant default "Bittorrent Downloads" directory doesn't work well.
Vuze allows you to rename the files in the torrent on the fly, so that you can have them named whatever you want, with no problems when sending to peers.
From what I read, is that the PETN explosive put inside the toner cartridge looks just like toner powder through an X-Ray machine. At least one of these packages was screened through normal processes and was not detected.
Wasn't there a story a while back about how it was "too expensive" to equip airports with bomb-sniffing hardware?
Since it's not too expensive to equip airports with devices that violate the privacy of the passengers and obviously don't stop explosives from getting on board, it's clearly about passenger abuse, not passenger safety.
Is it wrong that part of me is hoping some would-be terrorist puts a bomb inside a screaming baby?
the data-driven facts say that we don't have enough highly educated Americans to do the jobs our economy is currently producing
Based on the quality of the employees in some of the companies that my company works with, it seems to me that a lot of the "need" is driven by the fact that it takes 3-4 people to do the job of one truly competent person.
My observation is not aimed at any specific group of persons (including H-1B holder). But, when the standard process in a company to deal with a problem is to have a "working session" where 5-10 people are on a conference call while one of them is actually trying to fix the problem live, and is doing things like "man ln" (I am only very slightly exaggerating here), it's pretty stupid. And, all because that $500-2000/hour being wasted is just more "billable hours" on a contract that cannot be canceled until 5 years from now, so it's just SOP.
They're aiming this at rural areas, and they will almost certainly be using more transmitters with a lower power than TV, so 10,000 people is probably a lot more than you'd actually get per transmitter.
More transmitters turns out to be far worse if they are close enough together to cause collisions.
The solution to this would be to run a really high speed line 50-200 miles into the wilderness and put a tiny transmitter in the town. But, then it becomes a case where the last mile is far easier than the rest, so why not just use DSL (or regular WiFi).
The assumption I made in my post was that they would be re-purposing already existing TV transmitters after they stop broadcasting TV, and that the existing TV antenna would be used (as the summary states). Building a bunch of new transmitters that use the vacant TV frequencies is just "cellular network" with a different name.
Perhaps the person who changes bios settings to tweak them out is the same type of person who would soup up a car to get the most performance possible from them.
Or, get the performance that you should get in the first place if the person who picked the default settings for the BIOS was competent.
I would expect that Macs would be even worse about picking the safest defaults, based on the mantra of "it just works".
2-3 movies of 90 minutes each a week ok let's see.
For a household of 4 people (not at all uncommon outside of /. readers), around one hour of video entertainment (movie, TV, etc.) per week per person seems like almost nothing to me.
And, if you are using Hulu, Netflix, etc., as a replacement for cable TV, then 5 hours per week per person isn't outrageous, either.
Sure, compression will reduce those sizes, but a single DVD isn't large enough to store a 1080p movie.
Yes, actually, it is.
Using h.264, 10Mbps will result in very high quality for a 1920x1080/24p source. With full bitrate DTS at 1.5Mbps, that will give you just under 2 hours worth of movie on a dual layer DVD. Using a more reasonable 6-8Mbps for the video (still more than enough), almost every movie will fit in 9GB.
There are many reasons that 20-30GBs are used on BluRay titles (extras, lossless audio, etc.), but actual picture quality generally isn't one of them.
MY 2, T1 lines are truly unlimited. I can saturate them at 100% for 900 days in a row and they wont/cant say crap about it.
Of course you can saturate a 3Mbps line for 900 days in a row...that's what you get for having such a slow line. ;)
Seriously, I've had as much as 114% utilization on my 25/15Mbps for short peaks, but there's no way I can run even close to 100% for more than a few days. I've averaged about 40% usage over the past year, so that's around 6Mbps or so each way.