The researchers say that the words are not picked uniformly at random, so it's actually fewer bits than that.
It's not hard to see why apple makes it this way: it's so that it's easy for you to share the password with people, and so that it's uniformly easy to type in on smartphones and tablets which reliably have only alphanumerics (and minimal punctuation) on the default keyboard.
Most people don't care about this stuff, and if you do you can change it. Apple understands that ease-of-use is king. That's why they make money.
It depends on the purpose. If it's for identification and tracking, then you should put both: "natural hair color" and "intentional hair color (if different)". If it's for casual identification, you might only want the latter. If it's for discriminatory purposes in a eugenic regime, you probably want the former. (Yes, the last one is meant to be silly.)
Take Lasik. we've pretty much worked out where Lasik is safe: mostly everywhere which doesn't involve changes in ambient pressure. So drivers licenses should have only the corrected vision restrictions, if their purpose is to regulate motor vehicle operation.
Gender can formally be analyzed similarly. For some purposes, "natural" gender is important, while for other purposes the assigned gender is. If the database field is to track the former, then there's no problem; transgendered individuals can just say, "yeah, the government/corporation cares about that for some silly reason" and go on with their lives. If it's the latter, then yes, it should be updated immediately; otherwise it's a serious failure of the system.
If I got ticketed or my vehicle impounded for driving without lenses after I got Lasik, I'd be pretty pissed off. Hell, if the cop even verbally accuses me of it, I'd be pretty pissed off. I don't see why it's less of a failure to not update the gender field, if that is what it is meant to represent.
Of course the issue is that people don't actually understand when gender matters and when it doesn't, let alone why or how; or, at least, there is not yet consensus. This is how humans hash out these difficulties: messily. It still beats the alternative, all told.
However, pragmatically speaking: since the field can be updated upon petition, it seems obvious to me that it is meant to be tracking the current gender (as assigned, if applicable). In this case, it should be handled better.
Tangentially, it's worth noting that both Greek and Chinese mythology (and probably most of the others I haven't looked at) involve significant figures undergoing a sex change. Clearly this has been on the minds of humanity for several millennia. It shouldn't be surprising that we have a fair number of early adopters of the nascent technology. That is to say, it's not a "modern perversion." It's an ancient aspiration (or perversion, I guess, depending on your preferences) enabled by modern technology.
Even more tangentially, the magical properties of someone's "True Name" are now becoming a real issue thanks to data mining and the like. Whatever side of each issue you take, we do live in awesome times.
genetically speaking, kidney donors still have both kidneys; dyed hair is still blonde; lasik patients still can't see for shit; and despite a corrected cleft palate, you're still a disgusting freak.
So yes, this is a logically consistent defense of the Fifth Amendment -- but realize that it implies we're living under a criminal justice system that can't find its ass with both hands, and perhaps that's the larger problem that should be addressed.
done! until you propose a viable fix, let's keep the fifth amendment.
btw, that viable fix would include changing human nature. there's a reason why "regulated adversity" works fairly well, be it in economics or law; without it, you have to trust a higher power implicitly.
you call this problem "incompetence," but really what you need to be worried is malice.
look, here's my point: hacking is about privilege escalation. fine, i get it. but at that point, the presence of a camera at all is a problem, right? unless it has a hardware-level switch, which nothing has any more, it can be exploited.
so, why does it matter at this point whether the camera is intended to be always on or not? the only harm it can do is in cases where someone can hack enough to get into your xbox and read the camera data, but for some reason doesn't have enough access to turn on the camera. fine, but this really seems like a vanishingly small number of cases...
and there is a very simple solution anyway: 0.5" of black tape. done.
okay... but any peripheral can be hacked, and since game consoles allow remote updates, there's probably been a remote wake-up-from-sleep packet already, which can also be forged.
sorry, i just don't find this very significant. you can always just unplug the stupid thing if you're worried about it.
my question is, what do you expect the mic to do? there are two nefarious possibilities:
1: data-mining for commercial purposes: utterly ridiculous. even text mining emails for consumer preferences sucks; the usable signal you can extract from digitized casual conversation is pretty much zero. maybe they can derive some kind of aggregate statistics on when people are active in their homes, but why would they bother doing something so trivial?
2: spying for law enforcement: the negative pr from being caught doing this (which i'm sure microsoft knows would be inevitable, if they did it...) would be so strong as to potentially destroy microsoft entirely. incredibly unlikely.
and then there is the more mundane possibility:
1. voice activation is just a low-cost, cheesy gimmick that seems cool and might move a few units.
the latter is much more likely to me, but if you have any hard evidence behind these rumors i'd love to hear it.
From your description, it sounds more like the government is bullshit.
And, yes, the legislative and executive branches are totally fucked and act exactly as you describe.
The sad thing is that the judicial branch is currently the last hope for reasonable rulings, which is probably why the corporate media is focusing so much on "judicial activism." It's the last target.
I think that beyond heuristic, that's actually the right way to go, apart from the fact that cracking programs evolve with time and you might be better off trying to predict a few steps ahead. The Shannon entropy is an approximation mostly because it assumes that the cracker is using the same search space as where the password is defined (and that you're sampling the password from a probability space).
But how in the hell do you get to Kolmogorov complexity? I know what it is, and I sort of see what you're getting at but not quite. Could you firm up your claim a bit?
Just because a password requires a long program to generate it, doesn't mean that it is secure. I mean, if everyone else in the world used the exact same high-KC password, then that wouldn't be a very good choice for me to use, would it?
If we assume that a password is somehow randomly chosen (which seems like at least a good approximation to what is necessary), then the expected Kolmogorov complexity is equal to the Shannon entropy anyway. Hm.
coherent english phrases have approximately one bit of entropy per character. your sentence wouldn't be that unusual if crackers were using the appropriate tools (which of course they aren't).
the xkcd example works better because it's nonsense. to see it intuitively, "eats cherry" is a common 2-gram (although salaciously ambiguous out of context) whereas "horse battery" is uncommon (as is its referent).
It's a bit sui generis. It's using a substantial portion of the copyrighted work, yes, but it's transposing it to an entirely different medium.
A book review can summarize the entire plot, because doing so doesn't substitute for the experience of reading the book.
This is sort of, but not quite, like playing through the entire game. Does watching it substitute for playing it? It doesn't seem like it to me, at least in some cases.
According to my principle, it would come down to how much of the game is just a slightly interactive movie. For example, hours of tetris gameplay should be allowed since 1) it's still an infinitesimal fraction of the total possible amount of tetris gameplay, 2) the skill of the player is frankly a much more substantial portion of the work than the tetris game itself is. In contrast, a playthrough of ff7 would be less kosher and a playthrough of indigo prophecy/fahrenheit would be completely forbidden.
It's an autoupdater (surprise, surprise) called keystone (com.google.keystone.agent and com.google.keystone.daemon) which presumably got installed with chrome and/or the gtalk plugin. There are many complaints about it.
Interesting; explains a lot I suppose. Why is MTP so hard to get right? It's just a freaking protocol; it'd probably be comprehensible to someone fresh out of the 70s.
I counted it once and if you wanted access to the most Google products, you would want to use Windows. Maybe things have changed. Internally they use mac, sure (probably with plenty of VMs), but their products (either due to design or acquisition of other companies) most consistently targeted Windows, which is of course the majority market.
I guess I'm not surprised that Google services suck in general; I'd just never known any Windows user to complain about it.
Does Windows still need third-party apps for literally everything, or have they fixed that (I haven't used it since XP)? If it does, then it's not surprising that there will be conflicts. I know that the Google services will screw up a totally vanilla Mac.
A similar google service on my MacBook causes the keyboard to stutter every few hours and occasionally disables the camera until I reboot. There's a way to disable it, but I haven't bothered yet. However, the process is incredibly similar to this one for disabling applemobiledeviceservice on Windows.
Mac users don't complain because iTunes on Mac doesn't have this problem, or much of any problem that I've noticed. This is either because Apple doesn't know how or care to code for Windows, or because it's a conspiracy to get iPhone and iTunes users to buy Macs because "Windows is slow." In my opinion, it's probably a mixture. Apple just doesn't have as much incentive to provide a good Windows experience, so they don't bother, knowing that this will probably convert a few suckers to Mac.
Similarly, Google services don't seem to screw up Windows or Linux, and Google's MTP support for Mac (MTP is required for Nexus 4) is ridiculously minimal. It's an analogous situation. Vendors for system X don't care about system Y, news at 11.
The solution seems simple. Sell your iPhone to a Mac user, and buy an Android device. Why would you even buy an iPhone for Windows? I use a Mac and I still won't buy one.
Slashdot Mirror
The researchers say that the words are not picked uniformly at random, so it's actually fewer bits than that.
It's not hard to see why apple makes it this way: it's so that it's easy for you to share the password with people, and so that it's uniformly easy to type in on smartphones and tablets which reliably have only alphanumerics (and minimal punctuation) on the default keyboard.
Most people don't care about this stuff, and if you do you can change it. Apple understands that ease-of-use is king. That's why they make money.
why do you care so much, and what does government have to do with anything?
i see what you're getting at, but i would pick math.
It depends on the purpose. If it's for identification and tracking, then you should put both: "natural hair color" and "intentional hair color (if different)". If it's for casual identification, you might only want the latter. If it's for discriminatory purposes in a eugenic regime, you probably want the former. (Yes, the last one is meant to be silly.)
Take Lasik. we've pretty much worked out where Lasik is safe: mostly everywhere which doesn't involve changes in ambient pressure. So drivers licenses should have only the corrected vision restrictions, if their purpose is to regulate motor vehicle operation.
Gender can formally be analyzed similarly. For some purposes, "natural" gender is important, while for other purposes the assigned gender is. If the database field is to track the former, then there's no problem; transgendered individuals can just say, "yeah, the government/corporation cares about that for some silly reason" and go on with their lives. If it's the latter, then yes, it should be updated immediately; otherwise it's a serious failure of the system.
If I got ticketed or my vehicle impounded for driving without lenses after I got Lasik, I'd be pretty pissed off. Hell, if the cop even verbally accuses me of it, I'd be pretty pissed off. I don't see why it's less of a failure to not update the gender field, if that is what it is meant to represent.
Of course the issue is that people don't actually understand when gender matters and when it doesn't, let alone why or how; or, at least, there is not yet consensus. This is how humans hash out these difficulties: messily. It still beats the alternative, all told.
However, pragmatically speaking: since the field can be updated upon petition, it seems obvious to me that it is meant to be tracking the current gender (as assigned, if applicable). In this case, it should be handled better.
Tangentially, it's worth noting that both Greek and Chinese mythology (and probably most of the others I haven't looked at) involve significant figures undergoing a sex change. Clearly this has been on the minds of humanity for several millennia. It shouldn't be surprising that we have a fair number of early adopters of the nascent technology. That is to say, it's not a "modern perversion." It's an ancient aspiration (or perversion, I guess, depending on your preferences) enabled by modern technology.
Even more tangentially, the magical properties of someone's "True Name" are now becoming a real issue thanks to data mining and the like. Whatever side of each issue you take, we do live in awesome times.
genetically speaking, kidney donors still have both kidneys; dyed hair is still blonde; lasik patients still can't see for shit; and despite a corrected cleft palate, you're still a disgusting freak.
During a feeding frenzy, a shark which is accidentally bitten and begins bleeding will often be eaten by another shark.
So yes, this is a logically consistent defense of the Fifth Amendment -- but realize that it implies we're living under a criminal justice system that can't find its ass with both hands, and perhaps that's the larger problem that should be addressed.
done! until you propose a viable fix, let's keep the fifth amendment.
btw, that viable fix would include changing human nature. there's a reason why "regulated adversity" works fairly well, be it in economics or law; without it, you have to trust a higher power implicitly.
you call this problem "incompetence," but really what you need to be worried is malice.
strictly speaking, complete randomness is perfectly balanced.
yeah, everyone except for smg. i call that episode "buffy the autotune slayer."
look, here's my point: hacking is about privilege escalation. fine, i get it. but at that point, the presence of a camera at all is a problem, right? unless it has a hardware-level switch, which nothing has any more, it can be exploited.
so, why does it matter at this point whether the camera is intended to be always on or not? the only harm it can do is in cases where someone can hack enough to get into your xbox and read the camera data, but for some reason doesn't have enough access to turn on the camera. fine, but this really seems like a vanishingly small number of cases...
and there is a very simple solution anyway: 0.5" of black tape. done.
okay... but any peripheral can be hacked, and since game consoles allow remote updates, there's probably been a remote wake-up-from-sleep packet already, which can also be forged.
sorry, i just don't find this very significant. you can always just unplug the stupid thing if you're worried about it.
my question is, what do you expect the mic to do? there are two nefarious possibilities:
1: data-mining for commercial purposes: utterly ridiculous. even text mining emails for consumer preferences sucks; the usable signal you can extract from digitized casual conversation is pretty much zero. maybe they can derive some kind of aggregate statistics on when people are active in their homes, but why would they bother doing something so trivial?
2: spying for law enforcement: the negative pr from being caught doing this (which i'm sure microsoft knows would be inevitable, if they did it...) would be so strong as to potentially destroy microsoft entirely. incredibly unlikely.
and then there is the more mundane possibility:
1. voice activation is just a low-cost, cheesy gimmick that seems cool and might move a few units.
the latter is much more likely to me, but if you have any hard evidence behind these rumors i'd love to hear it.
horses have an average of 19hp. you'd only need about 7.
Why not?
Eh, recently there are about as many slashdot articles about "gun" as there are about "GNU". Check it:
https://www.google.com/search?q=gun&as_qdr=m&as_sitesearch=slashdot.org
https://www.google.com/search?q=gnu&as_qdr=m&as_sitesearch=slashdot.org
From your description, it sounds more like the government is bullshit.
And, yes, the legislative and executive branches are totally fucked and act exactly as you describe.
The sad thing is that the judicial branch is currently the last hope for reasonable rulings, which is probably why the corporate media is focusing so much on "judicial activism." It's the last target.
I think that beyond heuristic, that's actually the right way to go, apart from the fact that cracking programs evolve with time and you might be better off trying to predict a few steps ahead. The Shannon entropy is an approximation mostly because it assumes that the cracker is using the same search space as where the password is defined (and that you're sampling the password from a probability space).
But how in the hell do you get to Kolmogorov complexity? I know what it is, and I sort of see what you're getting at but not quite. Could you firm up your claim a bit?
Just because a password requires a long program to generate it, doesn't mean that it is secure. I mean, if everyone else in the world used the exact same high-KC password, then that wouldn't be a very good choice for me to use, would it?
If we assume that a password is somehow randomly chosen (which seems like at least a good approximation to what is necessary), then the expected Kolmogorov complexity is equal to the Shannon entropy anyway. Hm.
Not sure, but his username makes it kind of funny in any case.
coherent english phrases have approximately one bit of entropy per character. your sentence wouldn't be that unusual if crackers were using the appropriate tools (which of course they aren't).
the xkcd example works better because it's nonsense. to see it intuitively, "eats cherry" is a common 2-gram (although salaciously ambiguous out of context) whereas "horse battery" is uncommon (as is its referent).
i know what copyright is, thanks.
and yes, it does matter.
It's a bit sui generis. It's using a substantial portion of the copyrighted work, yes, but it's transposing it to an entirely different medium.
A book review can summarize the entire plot, because doing so doesn't substitute for the experience of reading the book.
This is sort of, but not quite, like playing through the entire game. Does watching it substitute for playing it? It doesn't seem like it to me, at least in some cases.
According to my principle, it would come down to how much of the game is just a slightly interactive movie. For example, hours of tetris gameplay should be allowed since 1) it's still an infinitesimal fraction of the total possible amount of tetris gameplay, 2) the skill of the player is frankly a much more substantial portion of the work than the tetris game itself is. In contrast, a playthrough of ff7 would be less kosher and a playthrough of indigo prophecy/fahrenheit would be completely forbidden.
It's an autoupdater (surprise, surprise) called keystone (com.google.keystone.agent and com.google.keystone.daemon) which presumably got installed with chrome and/or the gtalk plugin. There are many complaints about it.
Interesting; explains a lot I suppose. Why is MTP so hard to get right? It's just a freaking protocol; it'd probably be comprehensible to someone fresh out of the 70s.
I counted it once and if you wanted access to the most Google products, you would want to use Windows. Maybe things have changed. Internally they use mac, sure (probably with plenty of VMs), but their products (either due to design or acquisition of other companies) most consistently targeted Windows, which is of course the majority market.
I guess I'm not surprised that Google services suck in general; I'd just never known any Windows user to complain about it.
Does Windows still need third-party apps for literally everything, or have they fixed that (I haven't used it since XP)? If it does, then it's not surprising that there will be conflicts. I know that the Google services will screw up a totally vanilla Mac.
A similar google service on my MacBook causes the keyboard to stutter every few hours and occasionally disables the camera until I reboot. There's a way to disable it, but I haven't bothered yet. However, the process is incredibly similar to this one for disabling applemobiledeviceservice on Windows.
Mac users don't complain because iTunes on Mac doesn't have this problem, or much of any problem that I've noticed. This is either because Apple doesn't know how or care to code for Windows, or because it's a conspiracy to get iPhone and iTunes users to buy Macs because "Windows is slow." In my opinion, it's probably a mixture. Apple just doesn't have as much incentive to provide a good Windows experience, so they don't bother, knowing that this will probably convert a few suckers to Mac.
Similarly, Google services don't seem to screw up Windows or Linux, and Google's MTP support for Mac (MTP is required for Nexus 4) is ridiculously minimal. It's an analogous situation. Vendors for system X don't care about system Y, news at 11.
The solution seems simple. Sell your iPhone to a Mac user, and buy an Android device. Why would you even buy an iPhone for Windows? I use a Mac and I still won't buy one.