There is a hierarchy of trustworthiness with the judge at the top, and the dirty criminal at the bottom. Anything the police say will be believed over what you (the dirty criminal, otherwise why would you be arrested) say. Lawyers are above the police in that hierarchy.
Pick a nice, long, secure passphrase. Use it to secure a GPG keypair. Back up this keypair in multiple locations, and with multiple people who know "This is the key that encrypts all of my digital stuff. My family will need it when I die.".
Use that keypair to encrypt all of your important passwords and data. Back up the encrypted files in multiple locations. Make sure your family knows where these locations are, and why thy and the files they contain are important.
Download a copy of http://passguardian.com/ . Load the saved copy (preferably in an offline PC) in a browser, and use it to convert your passphrase into several N of M parts. ie: Create 10 parts, and require at least 6 to reconstruct the passphrase.
Use something like http://goqr.me/ (or any other generator) to create QR codes for the 10 secret shares. Laser print the text share, QR code and some instructions onto a business card sized piece of paper, and have them laminated.
You now have 10 waterproof, hard to damage cards, any 6 of which will unlock your digital data. Distribute them to trusted parties and locations with instructions to use the shares once they hear and confirm your death. These parties don't have to be literate enough to merge and decrypt the data themselves, they just need to know that it is possible with their share. On your death, they will arrange to bring the shares and data together, and even if they have to hire a nerd to help them, they will unlock what they need.
Alamo Drafthouse is banning them, and I doubt they care at all about the piracy thing - they ban talking and any sort of device use or distracting behavior flat out. People go there to watch the movie, if you want to play with your electronics instead, there are plenty of other places to go.
And from what I've read, if they catch you using your electronics, they'll help you get started finding those other places by escorting you to the parking lot.:)
$350-$500 puts you into the range of cheap trash and knock-off timepieces. Try adding a zero. Or two.
I'm a geek, and I've got a Pebble that I wear fairly regularly. But the watch I wear when I want to dress up a bit (or when I get tired of the cheesy plastic smart watch) is a Tag Heurer with an automatic movement. The Pebble is neat, and has IMHO the right balance of features and price. But it has no soul.
It's not encoding anything. Miners are basically doing sha256( sha256( block header info + random number )) until the result has (currently) about 15 leading zeros.
There is no room in the protocol to do anything else, or solve some sort of background problem.
This uses Shamir's Secret Sharing algorithm to take your password, and split it into a configurable number of pieces, and requires a subset of those shares to reconstruct the original. Take your master password, split it into 10 shares, and require 5 shares to reconstruct. Then distribute the 10 shares to secure locations and trusted people.
And the site runs entirely in Javascript. You can save it to a USB stick and run it from an offline PC, so you don't have to worry about your password being stolen.
Over the last couple of years, I've put a two to three thousand dollars into Bitcoin... I've made some bad decisions, and currently have "only" 20 BTC or so.
If the whole thing implodes, and those coins become worthless... I've had a hell of a ride, and think the couple of grand was well spent for the entertainment. On the other hand, if it takes off and Bitcoin turns out to be the next big thing like Ebay or Facebook, I can retire early.
What amazes me is that even after the recent stolen Bitcoin news, the prices have actually gone up. I'm still predicting that there will be a really major theft or attack against Bitcoin that will absolutely devastate it.
To date, there have been no successful attacks against the underlying Bitcoin protocol. There have been one or two serious client issues -- for example there was an incident a year ago where the latest version of the Bitcoin network software started creating blocks that older versions rejected. It was fixed in time, but if it hadn't there wouldn't have been hugely serious effects. All the miners would have been forced to upgrade. There was also an issue due to a buggy crypto implementation on Android that made some Bitcoin wallets vulnerable to theft.
It will be something stupid involving trust where nobody thought that another party would do something, but they will do it, and it will be devastating. Then everybody will cry and moan saying "Why didn't we protect against that?". Of course, I could be wrong, but I have no skin in this game so either way I'm not losing or gaining whether I'm right or wrong.
Again, there have been many problems with exchanges, service providers and outright fraud that have been related to Bitcoin, but these have all been problems with entities having poor security, and not being careful with how they integrate Bitcoin with their systems, not problems with Bitcoin itself. Those events would not have changed at all, if you had replaced Bitcoin with fiat in their operations.
If Bitcoin fails, it will be because it is regulated out of existence (which will be hard -- it is more likely to just be driven underground) or because it is deliberately attacked by a player with huge amounts of money to do so. Such an attack would likely be a government or group of "big money" interests willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in hardware to attack the block chain through mining.
I am amused at the amount of "HUR HUR, I USE SSL/TLS TO GET MY MAIL!!" posts. Very good. When you connect to your ISP or mail provider, it's quite possible (but far from guaranteed) that the NSA can't intercept the encrypted content. But how did that mail get to the mail server? (Or, if your sending, from your mail server to the recipients' mail server?)
It was almost certainly relayed via vanilla SMTP. Unencrypted. Via whatever network hops are needed, and probably through a couple of listening posts.
Not the case. I've got one of the fancy new keyless ignition vehicles, and I've tested this.
With the engine running, and with forward motion, three (maybe four) presses in quick succession or pressing and holding the the ignition switch for 2-3 seconds will kill the engine. You need to shift into park and press the brake to start again.
I thought it was interesting that there were two paths that would do this, both of which are a reasonably likely response in a panic situation -- tap the button a zillion times, or try to mash it into the engine compartment.
... and I *am* one of the system admins at my organization (a university), and I am part of the transition team from sendmail to Exchange, so I know the Exchange admins really well. That is the response that has been mandated that we give to people asking for IMAP access.
One of the few acceptable business cases so far has been a department that had several functional accounts that would be polled by fetchmail scripts that would read a message from the Inbox, detach the attachments, do some processing on them, and then leave them in a (unix) directory to be verified and acted on by a person. Rebuilding this process to use Exchange directly was deemed infeasible.:) They had IMAP turned on for two or three accounts.
"I'm sorry, our supported clients are Outlook, ActiveSync for mobile devices and Outlook Web Access. You're running Linux? OWA works fine in Firefox. If you can make a business case for it, we will activate IMAP for your account. 'I want to run Thunderbird.' is not a valid business case."
Also: Davmail handles calendaring really well. About the only thing I haven't been able to do is add a shared calendar that another co-worker has given me access to.
The first method came about from reading that one of the reasons that it is recommended that stuffing not be cooked in the turkey is that if the stuffing is cooked to a safe temperature, the meat is badly overcooked. My solution to this? Cook the turkey (following the usual oven method) with a heat exchanger to help cook the stuffing from the inside. 8 inches of 1" copper pipe, capped at both ends and 10 feet or so of 1/4" copper tubing tightly coiled into a 2-3" coil, and soldered into holes in one of the caps on the larger pipe, and the whole thing filled with water.
The large pipe was inside the turkey, the coil outside and exposed to the ambient oven temperature. The idea was that the oven would heat the water in the coil, and convection would circulate it into the turkey, cooking the stuffing from the inside. It seemed to actually work, too. The downside is the risk that one of the solder joints would fail after the water had heated up to ~300+ F. While that didn't happen the one time I tried it, the risk lead to the device forever after being referred to as "The Turkey Rocket". PS: Don't try this for your first dinner where you're inviting your parents and your girlfriends parents over. You might not survive.:)
Method #2 is a more recent method -- Sous vide cooking. You can't do a whole turkey, and skin of any kind is a bit of a lost cause, but skinless turkey breasts or drumsticks cooked at ~140F for 10 to 12 hours are amazing. More moist and tender than brined, and no risk of being too salty. And with wires everywhere, and an electronically controlled thermometer and heater, cooking doesn't get any geekier.
grnbrg
PS: If you're oven cooking, look up brining. It's easy, and makes a huge difference.
I'm as much a fandroid as anyone else, but GSIII vs iPhone 4s is a bit disingenuous. The iPhone 5 showed up part way through the 3rd quarter, didn't it?
How did the GSIII fare against the iPhone 4s plus the iPhone 5 numbers? Seems to me to be a more fair comparison....
Slashdot Mirror
There is a hierarchy of trustworthiness with the judge at the top, and the dirty criminal at the bottom. Anything the police say will be believed over what you (the dirty criminal, otherwise why would you be arrested) say. Lawyers are above the police in that hierarchy.
Pick a nice, long, secure passphrase. Use it to secure a GPG keypair. Back up this keypair in multiple locations, and with multiple people who know "This is the key that encrypts all of my digital stuff. My family will need it when I die.".
Use that keypair to encrypt all of your important passwords and data. Back up the encrypted files in multiple locations. Make sure your family knows where these locations are, and why thy and the files they contain are important.
Download a copy of http://passguardian.com/ . Load the saved copy (preferably in an offline PC) in a browser, and use it to convert your passphrase into several N of M parts. ie: Create 10 parts, and require at least 6 to reconstruct the passphrase.
Use something like http://goqr.me/ (or any other generator) to create QR codes for the 10 secret shares. Laser print the text share, QR code and some instructions onto a business card sized piece of paper, and have them laminated.
You now have 10 waterproof, hard to damage cards, any 6 of which will unlock your digital data. Distribute them to trusted parties and locations with instructions to use the shares once they hear and confirm your death. These parties don't have to be literate enough to merge and decrypt the data themselves, they just need to know that it is possible with their share. On your death, they will arrange to bring the shares and data together, and even if they have to hire a nerd to help them, they will unlock what they need.
Alamo Drafthouse is banning them, and I doubt they care at all about the piracy thing - they ban talking and any sort of device use or distracting behavior flat out. People go there to watch the movie, if you want to play with your electronics instead, there are plenty of other places to go.
And from what I've read, if they catch you using your electronics, they'll help you get started finding those other places by escorting you to the parking lot. :)
Corded phones didn't cost $350 - $500 either.
$350-$500 puts you into the range of cheap trash and knock-off timepieces. Try adding a zero. Or two.
I'm a geek, and I've got a Pebble that I wear fairly regularly. But the watch I wear when I want to dress up a bit (or when I get tired of the cheesy plastic smart watch) is a Tag Heurer with an automatic movement. The Pebble is neat, and has IMHO the right balance of features and price. But it has no soul.
It's not encoding anything. Miners are basically doing sha256( sha256( block header info + random number )) until the result has (currently) about 15 leading zeros.
There is no room in the protocol to do anything else, or solve some sort of background problem.
This.
I've probably contributed a "Mr. Test Testuser, 123 Main St, Somewhere, CA, 90210" password 1234 once or twice a year for the last decade....
You don't have to. Anyone with a writeable ${HOME}/.fonts can.
This could be really big.
http://passguardian.com/
This uses Shamir's Secret Sharing algorithm to take your password, and split it into a configurable number of pieces, and requires a subset of those shares to reconstruct the original. Take your master password, split it into 10 shares, and require 5 shares to reconstruct. Then distribute the 10 shares to secure locations and trusted people.
Example:
Password: 12345
Share 1: 801650d0edcbd0c3c949f
Share 2: 802c91a40a532182e3570
Share 3: 803ad177a79bc1420a1de
Any 2 shares can reconstruct the password.
And the site runs entirely in Javascript. You can save it to a USB stick and run it from an offline PC, so you don't have to worry about your password being stolen.
Who needs luck?
Over the last couple of years, I've put a two to three thousand dollars into Bitcoin... I've made some bad decisions, and currently have "only" 20 BTC or so.
If the whole thing implodes, and those coins become worthless... I've had a hell of a ride, and think the couple of grand was well spent for the entertainment. On the other hand, if it takes off and Bitcoin turns out to be the next big thing like Ebay or Facebook, I can retire early.
There are no regulated exchanges yet, and the unregulated ones occasionally disappear with all the money.
Sounds like PayPal. :)
Please can we see an end to the "it's not a real currency" posts. It's money and you can buy stuff with it. The end.
Heh. You waited too long for the punchline... Just about everyone started foaming before they got to the end.
Not everyone missed the bus, though. :golf clap:
What amazes me is that even after the recent stolen Bitcoin news, the prices have actually gone up. I'm still predicting that there will be a really major theft or attack against Bitcoin that will absolutely devastate it.
To date, there have been no successful attacks against the underlying Bitcoin protocol. There have been one or two serious client issues -- for example there was an incident a year ago where the latest version of the Bitcoin network software started creating blocks that older versions rejected. It was fixed in time, but if it hadn't there wouldn't have been hugely serious effects. All the miners would have been forced to upgrade. There was also an issue due to a buggy crypto implementation on Android that made some Bitcoin wallets vulnerable to theft.
It will be something stupid involving trust where nobody thought that another party would do something, but they will do it, and it will be devastating. Then everybody will cry and moan saying "Why didn't we protect against that?". Of course, I could be wrong, but I have no skin in this game so either way I'm not losing or gaining whether I'm right or wrong.
Again, there have been many problems with exchanges, service providers and outright fraud that have been related to Bitcoin, but these have all been problems with entities having poor security, and not being careful with how they integrate Bitcoin with their systems, not problems with Bitcoin itself. Those events would not have changed at all, if you had replaced Bitcoin with fiat in their operations.
If Bitcoin fails, it will be because it is regulated out of existence (which will be hard -- it is more likely to just be driven underground) or because it is deliberately attacked by a player with huge amounts of money to do so. Such an attack would likely be a government or group of "big money" interests willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in hardware to attack the block chain through mining.
That's what she said. :)
I am amused at the amount of "HUR HUR, I USE SSL/TLS TO GET MY MAIL!!" posts. Very good. When you connect to your ISP or mail provider, it's quite possible (but far from guaranteed) that the NSA can't intercept the encrypted content. But how did that mail get to the mail server? (Or, if your sending, from your mail server to the recipients' mail server?)
It was almost certainly relayed via vanilla SMTP. Unencrypted. Via whatever network hops are needed, and probably through a couple of listening posts.
grnbrg
And really, bitcoin is Skype - for money...
One of the more interesting quotes I've seen recently is:
Bitcoin isn't a currency. It's a Money Over Internet Protocol.
Which is about right.
grnbrg.
Not the case. I've got one of the fancy new keyless ignition vehicles, and I've tested this.
With the engine running, and with forward motion, three (maybe four) presses in quick succession or pressing and holding the the ignition switch for 2-3 seconds will kill the engine. You need to shift into park and press the brake to start again.
I thought it was interesting that there were two paths that would do this, both of which are a reasonably likely response in a panic situation -- tap the button a zillion times, or try to mash it into the engine compartment.
2009 Nissan Cube, if you care. Or if you don't.
grnbrg.
What exactly is ominous about a "no connection" error?
A communications disruption can mean only one thing -- invasion!
--
grnbrg
... and I *am* one of the system admins at my organization (a university), and I am part of the transition team from sendmail to Exchange, so I know the Exchange admins really well. That is the response that has been mandated that we give to people asking for IMAP access.
One of the few acceptable business cases so far has been a department that had several functional accounts that would be polled by fetchmail scripts that would read a message from the Inbox, detach the attachments, do some processing on them, and then leave them in a (unix) directory to be verified and acted on by a person. Rebuilding this process to use Exchange directly was deemed infeasible. :) They had IMAP turned on for two or three accounts.
grnbrg.
"I'm sorry, our supported clients are Outlook, ActiveSync for mobile devices and Outlook Web Access. You're running Linux? OWA works fine in Firefox. If you can make a business case for it, we will activate IMAP for your account. 'I want to run Thunderbird.' is not a valid business case."
Also: Davmail handles calendaring really well. About the only thing I haven't been able to do is add a shared calendar that another co-worker has given me access to.
grnbrg.
When I'm using Linux, I'm using Thunderbird, but I can't access my school's email server because Thunderbird can't do Exchange.
http://davmail.sourceforge.net/
grnbrg.
Geeky sous vide setup:
http://www.grnbrg.org/images/sousvide.jpg
Not mine, just an image I found online, but mine didn't look too much different.
grnbrg.
The first method came about from reading that one of the reasons that it is recommended that stuffing not be cooked in the turkey is that if the stuffing is cooked to a safe temperature, the meat is badly overcooked. My solution to this? Cook the turkey (following the usual oven method) with a heat exchanger to help cook the stuffing from the inside. 8 inches of 1" copper pipe, capped at both ends and 10 feet or so of 1/4" copper tubing tightly coiled into a 2-3" coil, and soldered into holes in one of the caps on the larger pipe, and the whole thing filled with water.
The large pipe was inside the turkey, the coil outside and exposed to the ambient oven temperature. The idea was that the oven would heat the water in the coil, and convection would circulate it into the turkey, cooking the stuffing from the inside. It seemed to actually work, too. The downside is the risk that one of the solder joints would fail after the water had heated up to ~300+ F. While that didn't happen the one time I tried it, the risk lead to the device forever after being referred to as "The Turkey Rocket". PS: Don't try this for your first dinner where you're inviting your parents and your girlfriends parents over. You might not survive. :)
Method #2 is a more recent method -- Sous vide cooking. You can't do a whole turkey, and skin of any kind is a bit of a lost cause, but skinless turkey breasts or drumsticks cooked at ~140F for 10 to 12 hours are amazing. More moist and tender than brined, and no risk of being too salty. And with wires everywhere, and an electronically controlled thermometer and heater, cooking doesn't get any geekier.
grnbrg
PS: If you're oven cooking, look up brining. It's easy, and makes a huge difference.
How did the GSIII fare against the iPhone 4s plus the iPhone 5 numbers? Seems to me to be a more fair comparison....
grnbrg.
How many is a brazilian?!
Well played, sir.