A port no one is listening on is a damn wall. It does not do anything. It isn't a doorway. It's a blank featureless wall.
This too is wrong. To continue the metaphor, a port no one is listening on is a door with a deadbolt thrown on it. Anyone inside the house can open it up whenever they feel like it and start moving furniture in or out. A firewall can - at your option - leave it that way, add a fingerprint reader to the inside or brick up the doorway.
When your 500GB "disk" is directly addressable on the system bus and has the same latency as RAM, some of the design decisions in existing *nix look a bit questionable. Example: Does the additional work of implementing virtual memory (fundamental to most kernels) still make sense? How necessary is a file system *at all*? Could it be replaced with some other method of indexing data?
You certainly could just stick most of the storage in a ramdisk and run linux, but there might be massive performance gains to be had in the file (data?) serving and database spaces if the server software and the kernel it's running on are designed specifically for stable direct addressing of everything.
"Let me be clear – as in the physical space, cyber security CAN ONLY come at the expense of cyber privacy."
But as many others have noted, attempts are made to obscure or even reverse the perception of this tradeoff at every level. Heaven forbid anyone outside of our government should have to make an informed decision about this.
Without details about the attack vector and attacker behavior during and after the breach, we're left with "Well, someone broke in to their servers using [redacted] and then they did [redacted]." Totally frickin' useless for me when trying to secure our sites: "There's this horrible emerging threat that can fry your brand overnight, but we won't tell you what it is or give enough details for you to defend against it."
Meanwhile, the guys in timbucktooistan can now order the proven exploit kit from their favorite BBS.
Hmmm... Those studies concluded that the highly competent tend to overestimate the abilities of others, while the incompetent tend to underestimate them. Now, my argument was that everyone should at least not be prevented from using the (rather extensive) resources available to them to guide their own medical treatment. I take it you're arguing that my bias is preventing me from perceiving that most people are hopeless tools that would damage themselves if they attempted this? I suppose that's possible, but still think it should be allowed.
Man, I hope you aren't anywhere near the legislative process. People like you are why we can't have nice things.
I have ten times more motivation and available time to research than my doctor does; he's just trying to last through his 80 patients a day and not kill anyone. His training and experience are certainly valuable, but for the most part when I'm talking to a doctor s/he's either (a) a generalist with a little bit of familiarity with me and a little bit of familiarity with what might be wrong with me, or (b) a specialist that knows a great deal about one particular thing that *might* be wrong with me but knows exactly dick about me personally.
I, on the other hand, have excellent computer skills and search fu, can read, understand and critique research in some disciplines (a skill that is highly transferable, by the way), and know a great deal about myself. I'd *much* rather be able to manage my own treatment and consult with a doctor when I need insight or specialized skills.
Breaking the law and a patent disregard constitutional rights is a "flaw"? It's not "evil" to make a secret court that makes secret laws that nobody is allowed to see?
I think I'm as concerned about the NSA's overreach as the next guy, but it should be noted here that it wasn't the NSA that established those secret courts and National Security Letters; it was our Congress.
Their focus is mostly financial, but I really enjoy their world news reporting. Whenever I pick up a "normal" paper here, even (especially?) one of the "big" ones, it seems that they're trying to sell me an extreme viewpoint - and maybe some male enhancement products to go with it - rather than actually impart any information. The FT is much more reporting like I remember it used to be. Maybe because they actually charge enough for their paper to cover their costs.
Sounds like the government already has a nice thick file on you. So, you're perfectly welcome to enroll in Secure Flight, add another half-ream to the file, and have them treat you only half as badly. So are any of those other folk you mentioned. And for those of us that don't want that, why should we give up the last few tattered shreds of the illusion of privacy just to satisfy some bureaucrat's desire for efficiency?
I find it somewhat reassuring that I can still encounter a government employee who doesn't know my shoe size before I walk in the door. Even if that is really just an illusion these days, it's one I treasure.
Speaking as someone who's developed C++ template libraries for a bunch of different projects, I've gotta say that that's the best description I've yet heard.
Yes, definitely. I personally decided not to make at least eight flights (that I undoubtedly would have made) since they started this stupid crap, and only made the three flights I did because there was no practical way around being physically present outside reasonable driving distance. Of the people I know, I would guess at least half have cancelled or avoided at least one flight they would otherwise have taken recently, representing a significant fraction of their overall travel.
Flying in the U.S. is a godawful degrading experience these days. I remember when it used to be exciting. Frickin' sucks.
In my hypothetical offline-validator scenario, it doesn't have to scale because it's not running at transaction time. Go ahead and reset the password, generate a bunch of new fake hashes and store the index of the "real" one in the same log that will be picked up for validation later on. With asymmetric encryption, the log could be stolen outright and be of no use at all to an attacker.
That said, I'd probably lean towards an online validator just so I could stick attackers in a honeypot and keep them from messing with my users. Though, as someone else pointed out here, by far the most likely use for the stolen passwords is not on my site, but to use them to log into bank accounts.
The second DB doesn't have any of the the password hashes, it just knows which one is correct. It's a single table of (userid, hashid) where hashid is just some small integer.
The idea seems to be that the second system can be a smaller, less complicated single-function server, easier to harden and could be running a different OS/Webserver/DB stack. You could (by sacrificing real-time validation) even have the second system entirely firewalled off and unreachable to an attacker, just polling the login servers to validate the sessions at some small interval.
If the second system goes down, one approach would be to just accept any of the passwords until it comes back up. Then check the logs of what happened while it was offline and act accordingly (invalidate sessions, raise alarms, whatever).
Overall, I like the idea tremendously. It seems like it's not quite all there yet, but we're probably going to start implementing some variant of it immediately.
I think this whole tablet euphoria ends much like netbooks - a niche that garners a lot of attention and ramp up, peaks and then declines to its real, niche level.
What the heck, I'll bite. iPad-style tablets are probably the most important advance in general-purpose computing hardware since IBM launched their PC. I don't mean that as hyperbole, either. iOS and Android have made modestly powerful computers easy to understand and use by regular people. They are the present and future of consumer computing. Desktop and laptop PCs are and have always been a professional product, overcomplicated and poorly suited to the "workflow" of regular life, and they are rightfully being abandoned by everyone that doesn't actually need what they offer: A ridiculously powerful workstation with a bunch of overlapping windows, a disc burner, huge local hard drives and/or the latest graphics hardware.
If anything, I think the "home desktop computer" is going to quickly become a weird niche product.
I'm not sure firing her was an over-reaction. Her employer is trying to be a five-nines service provider. Her poor judgement got their services DDoS'd off the net for 5 hours today. Sounds like a pretty good case for firing to me.
Incidentally, I'm working with a customer of that company right now, and their downtime caused us a bunch of extra work. But I'm not bitter. Not at all.
It's quite possible to change the email address associated with an Apple account, and dissociate the old address, as long as you can log into it. Just takes a few clicks and a couple of "click this link" emails.
I am sure that a 4 letter password that I remember is safer then ANY other password written on a post-it note taped to monitor.
Not necessarily; a 4-letter password can be brute-forced in a fraction of a second with most services, or in a couple of hours even with those that introduce delays after login failure, but to get the 26-letter password from your monitor they have to breach physical security at your company. That's usually not too hard ("Hi, someone said a toilet on the third floor is leaking?"), but it does have to be targeted.
For the rest, I agree with you. The policies you mention seem ill-conceived and poorly implemented.
...there is no good reason to expose bare, public variables on anything but the simplest, most struct-like objects.
Having also worked on (and lead) large game and non-game projects, I must respectfully completely disagree with you. The compiler might be able to boil someInstance.SetThing( someInstance.GetThing()*2 ) down to a couple of lines of assembly, but my eyeballs can parse someInstance.thing *= 2 much, much faster and (more to the point) more accurately. I think your potential for weird bugs just increases with the complexity of your syntax (and it's no trickier to catch one in a debugger than the other).
Management won't say "no". They'll say, "That sounds good. Do it, but don't change the date for our next release." And everyone will hate the new guy forever.
However, I just want to ask, can we just have a giant, 10 year study of several locations among the map from Antarctica to Chile, seeing if cars or power plants may or may not have an adverse affect on weather? I'm getting tired of hearing this story, but I also know that there might be SOMETHING man-made affecting our weather.
I don't think that would help. If I understand the theory correctly, it's that high atmospheric CO2 is affecting our climate by trapping more energy in the system, and localized weather events (such as a heat wave in Australia or a less-than-usually-cold snap in Antarctica) are expected to reflect that change in an average, aggregate sort of way.
Of course, it's just a theory, and one that has a number of dubious advantages:
* it's easy to model with our (comparitively) crude systems.
* it appeals to our inner guilt over raping the planet.
* it's extremely difficult to disprove (see crude systems above).
On the other hand, lots of really smart people seem to agree that it beats out a hotter sun, too much pavement, some other natural or manmade aerosol, God's wrath, "natural" climate change, whatever that might be, and angry space bunnies as a cause for the planet changing its average temperature.
I did. Immediately. My professional use of paint and page layout programs is now limited enough that CS2 does everything I need and most of what I want, and there's no way I could justify the outlay for CS6 or their cloud service. Heck, I used PS CS2 for pro photography work for a couple of years. It might be seven-year-old software, but it's still miles better than anything else you can get for less than a few hundred bucks even today.
but we do need some system that doesn't require large amounts of CPU time or other resources.
Why? CPU time is dirt cheap if you can concentrate your task. The bandwidth (a much scarcer resource) is already being spent, and better decisions will just tend to reduce your costs there. To me this smacks of laziness, not efficiency.
Slashdot Mirror
Great. Now I've got coffee all over my monitor.
A port no one is listening on is a damn wall. It does not do anything. It isn't a doorway. It's a blank featureless wall.
This too is wrong. To continue the metaphor, a port no one is listening on is a door with a deadbolt thrown on it. Anyone inside the house can open it up whenever they feel like it and start moving furniture in or out. A firewall can - at your option - leave it that way, add a fingerprint reader to the inside or brick up the doorway.
When your 500GB "disk" is directly addressable on the system bus and has the same latency as RAM, some of the design decisions in existing *nix look a bit questionable. Example: Does the additional work of implementing virtual memory (fundamental to most kernels) still make sense? How necessary is a file system *at all*? Could it be replaced with some other method of indexing data?
You certainly could just stick most of the storage in a ramdisk and run linux, but there might be massive performance gains to be had in the file (data?) serving and database spaces if the server software and the kernel it's running on are designed specifically for stable direct addressing of everything.
This plane was reportedly fully autonomous, using GPS to navigate a pre-set route. So yeah, that's a drone, not RC.
"Let me be clear – as in the physical space, cyber security CAN ONLY come at the expense of cyber privacy."
But as many others have noted, attempts are made to obscure or even reverse the perception of this tradeoff at every level. Heaven forbid anyone outside of our government should have to make an informed decision about this.
Without details about the attack vector and attacker behavior during and after the breach, we're left with "Well, someone broke in to their servers using [redacted] and then they did [redacted]." Totally frickin' useless for me when trying to secure our sites: "There's this horrible emerging threat that can fry your brand overnight, but we won't tell you what it is or give enough details for you to defend against it."
Meanwhile, the guys in timbucktooistan can now order the proven exploit kit from their favorite BBS.
Meh.
Hmmm... Those studies concluded that the highly competent tend to overestimate the abilities of others, while the incompetent tend to underestimate them. Now, my argument was that everyone should at least not be prevented from using the (rather extensive) resources available to them to guide their own medical treatment. I take it you're arguing that my bias is preventing me from perceiving that most people are hopeless tools that would damage themselves if they attempted this? I suppose that's possible, but still think it should be allowed.
Man, I hope you aren't anywhere near the legislative process. People like you are why we can't have nice things.
I have ten times more motivation and available time to research than my doctor does; he's just trying to last through his 80 patients a day and not kill anyone. His training and experience are certainly valuable, but for the most part when I'm talking to a doctor s/he's either (a) a generalist with a little bit of familiarity with me and a little bit of familiarity with what might be wrong with me, or (b) a specialist that knows a great deal about one particular thing that *might* be wrong with me but knows exactly dick about me personally.
I, on the other hand, have excellent computer skills and search fu, can read, understand and critique research in some disciplines (a skill that is highly transferable, by the way), and know a great deal about myself. I'd *much* rather be able to manage my own treatment and consult with a doctor when I need insight or specialized skills.
Breaking the law and a patent disregard constitutional rights is a "flaw"? It's not "evil" to make a secret court that makes secret laws that nobody is allowed to see?
I think I'm as concerned about the NSA's overreach as the next guy, but it should be noted here that it wasn't the NSA that established those secret courts and National Security Letters; it was our Congress.
www.ft.com
Their focus is mostly financial, but I really enjoy their world news reporting. Whenever I pick up a "normal" paper here, even (especially?) one of the "big" ones, it seems that they're trying to sell me an extreme viewpoint - and maybe some male enhancement products to go with it - rather than actually impart any information. The FT is much more reporting like I remember it used to be. Maybe because they actually charge enough for their paper to cover their costs.
Sounds like the government already has a nice thick file on you. So, you're perfectly welcome to enroll in Secure Flight, add another half-ream to the file, and have them treat you only half as badly. So are any of those other folk you mentioned. And for those of us that don't want that, why should we give up the last few tattered shreds of the illusion of privacy just to satisfy some bureaucrat's desire for efficiency?
I find it somewhat reassuring that I can still encounter a government employee who doesn't know my shoe size before I walk in the door. Even if that is really just an illusion these days, it's one I treasure.
...code bumming kludge...
BAHAHAHAHA
Speaking as someone who's developed C++ template libraries for a bunch of different projects, I've gotta say that that's the best description I've yet heard.
*tips hat*
Yes, definitely. I personally decided not to make at least eight flights (that I undoubtedly would have made) since they started this stupid crap, and only made the three flights I did because there was no practical way around being physically present outside reasonable driving distance. Of the people I know, I would guess at least half have cancelled or avoided at least one flight they would otherwise have taken recently, representing a significant fraction of their overall travel.
Flying in the U.S. is a godawful degrading experience these days. I remember when it used to be exciting. Frickin' sucks.
*shrug*
In my hypothetical offline-validator scenario, it doesn't have to scale because it's not running at transaction time. Go ahead and reset the password, generate a bunch of new fake hashes and store the index of the "real" one in the same log that will be picked up for validation later on. With asymmetric encryption, the log could be stolen outright and be of no use at all to an attacker.
That said, I'd probably lean towards an online validator just so I could stick attackers in a honeypot and keep them from messing with my users. Though, as someone else pointed out here, by far the most likely use for the stolen passwords is not on my site, but to use them to log into bank accounts.
Some responses (informed by the actual paper):
The second DB doesn't have any of the the password hashes, it just knows which one is correct. It's a single table of (userid, hashid) where hashid is just some small integer.
The idea seems to be that the second system can be a smaller, less complicated single-function server, easier to harden and could be running a different OS/Webserver/DB stack. You could (by sacrificing real-time validation) even have the second system entirely firewalled off and unreachable to an attacker, just polling the login servers to validate the sessions at some small interval.
If the second system goes down, one approach would be to just accept any of the passwords until it comes back up. Then check the logs of what happened while it was offline and act accordingly (invalidate sessions, raise alarms, whatever).
Overall, I like the idea tremendously. It seems like it's not quite all there yet, but we're probably going to start implementing some variant of it immediately.
I think this whole tablet euphoria ends much like netbooks - a niche that garners a lot of attention and ramp up, peaks and then declines to its real, niche level.
What the heck, I'll bite. iPad-style tablets are probably the most important advance in general-purpose computing hardware since IBM launched their PC. I don't mean that as hyperbole, either. iOS and Android have made modestly powerful computers easy to understand and use by regular people. They are the present and future of consumer computing. Desktop and laptop PCs are and have always been a professional product, overcomplicated and poorly suited to the "workflow" of regular life, and they are rightfully being abandoned by everyone that doesn't actually need what they offer: A ridiculously powerful workstation with a bunch of overlapping windows, a disc burner, huge local hard drives and/or the latest graphics hardware.
If anything, I think the "home desktop computer" is going to quickly become a weird niche product.
I'm not sure firing her was an over-reaction. Her employer is trying to be a five-nines service provider. Her poor judgement got their services DDoS'd off the net for 5 hours today. Sounds like a pretty good case for firing to me.
Incidentally, I'm working with a customer of that company right now, and their downtime caused us a bunch of extra work. But I'm not bitter. Not at all.
It's quite possible to change the email address associated with an Apple account, and dissociate the old address, as long as you can log into it. Just takes a few clicks and a couple of "click this link" emails.
I am sure that a 4 letter password that I remember is safer then ANY other password written on a post-it note taped to monitor.
Not necessarily; a 4-letter password can be brute-forced in a fraction of a second with most services, or in a couple of hours even with those that introduce delays after login failure, but to get the 26-letter password from your monitor they have to breach physical security at your company. That's usually not too hard ("Hi, someone said a toilet on the third floor is leaking?"), but it does have to be targeted.
For the rest, I agree with you. The policies you mention seem ill-conceived and poorly implemented.
Having also worked on (and lead) large game and non-game projects, I must respectfully completely disagree with you. The compiler might be able to boil someInstance.SetThing( someInstance.GetThing()*2 ) down to a couple of lines of assembly, but my eyeballs can parse someInstance.thing *= 2 much, much faster and (more to the point) more accurately. I think your potential for weird bugs just increases with the complexity of your syntax (and it's no trickier to catch one in a debugger than the other).
Management won't say "no". They'll say, "That sounds good. Do it, but don't change the date for our next release." And everyone will hate the new guy forever.
However, I just want to ask, can we just have a giant, 10 year study of several locations among the map from Antarctica to Chile, seeing if cars or power plants may or may not have an adverse affect on weather? I'm getting tired of hearing this story, but I also know that there might be SOMETHING man-made affecting our weather.
I don't think that would help. If I understand the theory correctly, it's that high atmospheric CO2 is affecting our climate by trapping more energy in the system, and localized weather events (such as a heat wave in Australia or a less-than-usually-cold snap in Antarctica) are expected to reflect that change in an average, aggregate sort of way.
Of course, it's just a theory, and one that has a number of dubious advantages:
On the other hand, lots of really smart people seem to agree that it beats out a hotter sun, too much pavement, some other natural or manmade aerosol, God's wrath, "natural" climate change, whatever that might be, and angry space bunnies as a cause for the planet changing its average temperature.
Smart-ass. Parentheses are a type of bracket.
I did. Immediately. My professional use of paint and page layout programs is now limited enough that CS2 does everything I need and most of what I want, and there's no way I could justify the outlay for CS6 or their cloud service. Heck, I used PS CS2 for pro photography work for a couple of years. It might be seven-year-old software, but it's still miles better than anything else you can get for less than a few hundred bucks even today.
but we do need some system that doesn't require large amounts of CPU time or other resources.
Why? CPU time is dirt cheap if you can concentrate your task. The bandwidth (a much scarcer resource) is already being spent, and better decisions will just tend to reduce your costs there. To me this smacks of laziness, not efficiency.