1. Set up innocuous but vaguely credible profiles for lots of common names on [insert name of a "social network"].
2. Advertise under a banner like "Scottsville High identities - keep your boss off your back"
3. Sell the id, password and some small amount of boring data to clients whose name and school match.
4. I think you're onto a line of profit already.
In a little more detail... for a pretty low outlay you can set up a batch for a relatively large local school. You do nothing until someone contacts you wanting "their" name to feed to a rapacious Boss. Obviously, you set up common name profiles, or use a school yearbook, or something to improve your hit rate. When you've sold half your batch for "Scottsville High", you do another batch of them (e.g. the next year?), maybe bigger, and another batch for the other school in town.
Added (and charged-for!) services - maintain a stream of boring posts to "Joe Blogg's" account. "Went for walk in park, met Fred" sort of innocuous stuff.
The rapacious Boss gets bored and harasses someone else. The customer retains their job. You make a profit. Well, you make a profit if you price your time right, develop appropriate tools (one mouse and keyboard simultaneously driving ten browsers on ten FB "managed" accounts, is it possible?), outsource to starving Filipino children, etc. And if the customer very occasionally posts something to the profile, you're probably still (just) within the ToS as you're acting as an agent for the person who "owns" the profile.
Probably hard to get a business going. Might be easier doing it at a workplace with a particularly dick-waving Boss than advertising to the general populace. Might just become a morally defensible version of pulling the wings off flies (the Boss). Might work to obtain enough evidence of harassment to have the guy arrested in Church one Sunday.
Me, I'd just punch the Boss in the teeth (Hi, Mike. [grins]) after giving his wife and daughter the clap. Different forms of clap. But I'm not afraid of my Boss. And IIRC, his daughter isn't terribly ugly ; don't know about his wife though.
And if that doesn't work, he can still try Voodoo.
No he can't.
Homoeopathic remedies get more effective the lower the dose.
Therefore, once he starts to take a homoeopathic remedy, should he stop then the dose of the homoeopathic remedy, it's dose remaining in him will decrease. thus any subsequent course of (for example) Voodoo that he takes will simply claim a cure because of the lingering, strengthening effect of the homoeopathic remedy as it is flushed from his system.
QED, homoeopathy works.
For my next trick, I shall prove that homoeopathy kills all it's users once they stop buying their fix. Or do you want to take that one on? I'll get the cymbals ready.
TFS was probably written by an American, for whom all of Germany is "east".
Of course, we could make his head explode if we tell him that all of germany is simultaneously west of him.
On the subject... reactor site, play park, no problem. Probably less radioactive than the playgrounds of the schools at home. And I really should get that Geiger counter fixed.
Firstly, my error was a simple typo. So my finger didn't hit the r hard enough. Big deal.
Secondly,
you didn't check your own work before posting it where the world can see it.
Big deal - you've just shown the world that you're a sloppy worker, unable to QC yourself when you're acting for your own self about something that you're obviously interested enough in to comment in a (moderately well) respected public forum.
What are you going to expect people to conclude about your other work and activities?
Perhaps if Slashdot had a "preview my post before it becomes visible to the rest of the world, so that I can do my readership the minor honour of looking as if I give a shit about what I'm saying" button. Needs a snazzier title though. Suggestions?
(Two typos and one ambiguity caught. Preach <-> practice.)
Kiosk mode for blattering on to your colleagues about how iGreat iEverything iSteve iDoes iIs ?
Assuming (and I wouldn't deign to read the F-ing iArticle to find iOut), that the Safaria session is iSandboxed with an iVengance, iI can already just about see a use for it, and iI don't iClaim to be the (or even 'an') iFount of all iKnowledge and iLove.
(Yes, I did spot the typo ; I couldn't make up my mind whether that Mac browser which I replaced with FireFox, when I did have a Mac, browser is called Sahara, Siberia, or something similar. Whatever. Horses for courses.
Absolutely atrocious summary. And I agree, WTF is an eG8 ? [/self : Googles] It's either a Honda 'Civic' car model, or "The e-G8 Forum will be a unique gathering of the world's top Internet and digital leaders, not only from across the G8 nations."
I think that translates into "bunch of self-important non-entities who Dilbert would be ashamed to be associated with".
A journalist friend used to teach journalism before he retired. Apart from requiring students to develop skill at shorthand, he also taught them "Who, What, Where, When, Why", the five big questions to be answered in any news item.
When I was in school, PCs were made by IBM, cost around a years realistic salary for a recent graduate (this was 4 years before graduating), CDs were unknown or vanishingly rare, floppy discs were 5.25inch diameter (or 8inch).
Oh, hang on - you didn't even get media !? What did they write the code on - laser-etched pits in the side of a chocolate teapot?
"their", not "they're" (I don't know if English is is your first language ; it's not for my wife and she insists that I correct her, "otherwise, how else will I learn?" ; sadly, this is an old-school Russian school teacher's attitude, not that present in most modern British teachers)
But to answer the point, I think it's coincidence.
To generate a Wachterhauser system, you need at least three interacting catalytic cycles where some of the components in one cycle are also components of the other cycle ; these cycles themselves then need to be arranged cyclically, which I think implies a minimum of three cycles, each of at least two component. With 65,000 components in your original mix, you will then have (crudely) 65,000 * 64,999 * 64,998 * 64,997 * 64,996 * 64,995, which gives you around 7.5Ã--10^28 possible cycles. There's probably redundant cycles in there.
I've neglected the possibility of systems where the same component reappears at several points in the cycle. But that's still going to leave a respectable number of possibilities to be examined.
I think the closeness of the numbers is pure coincidence.
This stuff gave me headaches over a week or so to understand. IIRC (and I'm several days travel from my bookshelves), I got to understand these things by reading Manfred Eigen's book... (help me, Amazon!) "Steps Towards Life" Manfred Eigen, Ruthild Winkler-Oswatitsch, Paul Woolley (Author, Translator), ISBN-10: 019854751X... not Wachterhauser's original publications. But ye Gods, I remember it being hard work!
Getting some hard number-crunchers onto studying this sort of model... sounds like a good idea to my brain cells. They're cringing at the thought that I may have to read that stuff again!
I know I've missed out at least one umlaut in Wachterhauser's name, if I haven't horribly misspelled it. And another umlaut in "umlaut". But it's the end of a 12-hour shift, and I haven't got the energy to fight with Slashdot's inability to handle most scripts.
MOST of These people come to complain here to post their knee-jerk paran...
FTFY
Some of us do try to raise the level of discourse, but it's like Compuserve in the months after they let the AOLers in - so many people seem to think this is an entertainment medium and don't realise that they're actually the ones putting on the performance.
It's one of the third class of solutions to the general "P=NP?" range of problems, described by many (DNA in particular) to be an SEP. For the generic case of these, under fairly wide conditions, a problem P that is in the set SEP, is indeed, "NP" (No Problem).
and why would passing one allow you to know hypothetical problems with Star Wars tech.
I think it should be clear now.
Just as a matter of interest, who is Slashdot UID #42?
Protip: keep a VM around with an old copy of XP installed.
Protip : that's going to cost some significant money, as well as the no-doubt voluminous licensing issues. What's a (legal) install disc of XP cost these days? And when did you last see one in the wild?
(XP and it's activation fiasco came along about the time of me moving from Win3.11/DOS/ Slackware to Win2k/SUSE, and then stopping buying desktops at all and getting lumbered with a laptop with Vista on it and no Win2K drivers for it's graphics and NIC. So a few months after that, I dropped a new hard drive in and Mandrake-d it. Now that I think about it, I'm not sure that I've ever seen a retail install disc for XP, only ones that were licensed to be used on specific hardware at Work - Dells generally.)
Oh, sorry, did you include the prospect of using stolen (illegally used, unlicensed) software on the list of things that you'd sink to? Yeuch!
I once worked at a place and a guy that worked for me drove his lawnmower to work one day because his car was out of commission.
That's quite bizarre, because it implies several weird things - that the lawn mower was taxed, licensed and safe to drive on the road (which must take time to arrange, unless it had been done previously) ; that the lawnmower travelled significantly faster than walking pace ; that there weren't taxi companies around that could do the transport job faster if the distance was significant ; that the guy was unwilling to walk a mile or so if he had to wait more than a few minutes for the taxi.
Someone driving a lawnmower along the pedestrian pavements at 40 miles per hour across miles of town... hmmm, I'll bet that he had some conversations with the cops on the way. which would really have helped with getting him to work on time.
Having used these non-connected "challenge-response" devices for several years for accessing confidential data for clients, they do seem reasonably secure. Simply doubling the key length is good ; making it time-dependent is also good (but you have to accept the occasional authentication failure when someone phones you in mid-access).
BUT, having received two of the devices for different banks, and accidentally taken the wrong one out to work with me, I discovered that using BANKA card with BANKB reader would produce valid codes for BANKA. So, there is hidden re-use of the same techniques. Which didn't surprise me in the slightest (why do you think I tried the swap?), but it would be slightly more convincing if they admitted to it.
where the former three are mostly one to one (mailing lists are one to a finite number) where as twitter messages are one to many (larger finite number - towards infinity).
Rather more importantly, email and web pages (blogs etc) are generally "pull" services, where the user needs to make some action to "pull" the data towards them, whereas Twitter works as a "push" channel with the data being pushed out to people who have elected to have that data pushed at them (in some way).
I guess that things like RSS and Atom feeds blur the distinction. But I can't really give a large enough shit to find out in detail. And I'm considering whether to unsubscribe from Twitter because the three tiny firehoses I sip from are already far too distracting.
Another significant distinction is that Twitter has a nearly universal reach (potentially) ; the number of mobile phones (and therefore SMS recipients) is rapidly approaching the planet's population. Not an infinite number, but large enough.
No it wouldn't. "kz.google.com" could be hosted in the Glorious Nation of Tuvalu for all that means. Which is not "hosting inside the country" by any stretch of the imagination. The Kazakh government want any server in the domain.kz to be served from a server physically located in Kazakhstan.
There's also a strong hint that they want anyone who has both example.com and example.kz to redirect traffic from example.com to example.kz (which is located intraterritorially). Which is probably what makes Google gag more, because if the policy was followed by more countries it would require Google to set up operations in nearly 200 countries, with locally employed staff under local laws. It's hard enough for conventional small companies to keep track of a dozen-odd sets of laws for operating in major countries ; having nearly 200... not nice. Not being able to choose to put one moderate-size data centre to cover all the 'Stans, but instead having to run a half-dozen tiny data centres in a half-dozen countries with a half-dozen staffs under another half-dozen legal systems...
Nope, I can strongly sympathise with Google on this one.
The human population of the planet in 2100 is going to be closer to it's population in 1900, than to it's population in 2000.
That'll happen either in a planned, managed and equitable manner, or in a chaotic bloodbath. It's up to a combination of the intelligence and foresight of politicians and the forbearance of the populations to choose which way it's going to happen.
I'm pretty sure which way it's going to go. But I'm not terribly concerned. It's not going to hurt my children. Your children are your responsibility.
[I'll add that I'm unclear on whether the human species will be anything approaching stable by 2100. I'd like to think so, but somehow I doubt it. Resources are, after all, finite.
I got to the 4th character and knew that the subject was not going to be on my shopping list.
But I read on anyway and it still sounds bizarrely bizarre. Like, you're going to have friends round to play a multi-player game, and they're not going to bring their own laptop? Weird concept. How are you going to swap porn and jack off together. Yeuch - the very idea of jacking off onto someone else's keyboard is... strangely appealing.
On the other hand, there's probably lots of reactors that are already known to be unsafe which should NOT be tested, they should simply be decommissioned as rapidly as possible.
Yep. There's two in particular that never passed any sort of safety review which need shut down as soon as possible - the fusion reactor currently looming up over the horizon through the window, and the fission reactor a few tens of metres below my feet.
Shut them all down! That's what I say. Drill more for easy-to-access oil in politically safe countries (can't do Greenland though ! : it's got appealingly fluffy white bears !). Shut down those radioactive ash-spewing carbon dioxide generators too - they're too dangerous to consider using. Hydroelectric dams are producing smelly methane as they silt up, so we'd better open the spill ways, drain the reservoirs, then dynamite the dams.
Don't even get me started on the raptor-mincing windmills. They should never have been allowed, not even for grinding corn a millennium ago - couldn't people see what they would lead to?
Tidal power - that the thing to go for. The tremendous untapped tidal power of the steppes of Asian, the Sahara, and the American Prairies. That's where we'll get safe unlimited power for our Intertubes.
While your example "kCw]^7qwKR+3" would pass most complexity tests, so would "con9ass%dom8hole7", which as a combination of syllables of my wallet contents, where I keep my wallet, and a few numbers and a special character. Methods of constructing usable passwords while avoiding the easiest-to-bruteforce errors don't necessarily result in "character salad", and can be reasonably memorable. If you access your work's bank details from the office, then your mnemonics shouldn't be in your living room ; similarly, your domestic banking password mnemonics probably shouldn't be located in the toilet at work.
Most of the task is dedicated to avoiding dictionary attacks. Then you increase the symbol base. And you want a minimal length of password. These rules do not dictate "character salad" (though they do allow it).
Slashdot Mirror
2. Advertise under a banner like "Scottsville High identities - keep your boss off your back"
3. Sell the id, password and some small amount of boring data to clients whose name and school match.
4. I think you're onto a line of profit already.
In a little more detail ... for a pretty low outlay you can set up a batch for a relatively large local school. You do nothing until someone contacts you wanting "their" name to feed to a rapacious Boss. Obviously, you set up common name profiles, or use a school yearbook, or something to improve your hit rate. When you've sold half your batch for "Scottsville High", you do another batch of them (e.g. the next year?), maybe bigger, and another batch for the other school in town.
Added (and charged-for!) services - maintain a stream of boring posts to "Joe Blogg's" account. "Went for walk in park, met Fred" sort of innocuous stuff.
The rapacious Boss gets bored and harasses someone else. The customer retains their job. You make a profit. Well, you make a profit if you price your time right, develop appropriate tools (one mouse and keyboard simultaneously driving ten browsers on ten FB "managed" accounts, is it possible?), outsource to starving Filipino children, etc. And if the customer very occasionally posts something to the profile, you're probably still (just) within the ToS as you're acting as an agent for the person who "owns" the profile.
Probably hard to get a business going. Might be easier doing it at a workplace with a particularly dick-waving Boss than advertising to the general populace. Might just become a morally defensible version of pulling the wings off flies (the Boss). Might work to obtain enough evidence of harassment to have the guy arrested in Church one Sunday.
Me, I'd just punch the Boss in the teeth (Hi, Mike. [grins]) after giving his wife and daughter the clap. Different forms of clap. But I'm not afraid of my Boss. And IIRC, his daughter isn't terribly ugly ; don't know about his wife though.
No he can't.
Homoeopathic remedies get more effective the lower the dose.
Therefore, once he starts to take a homoeopathic remedy, should he stop then the dose of the homoeopathic remedy, it's dose remaining in him will decrease. thus any subsequent course of (for example) Voodoo that he takes will simply claim a cure because of the lingering, strengthening effect of the homoeopathic remedy as it is flushed from his system.
QED, homoeopathy works.
For my next trick, I shall prove that homoeopathy kills all it's users once they stop buying their fix. Or do you want to take that one on? I'll get the cymbals ready.
Of course, we could make his head explode if we tell him that all of germany is simultaneously west of him.
On the subject ... reactor site, play park, no problem. Probably less radioactive than the playgrounds of the schools at home. And I really should get that Geiger counter fixed.
I was in two minds about whether to get a copy ; now I've decided that I've got to, even if I have to get a (slightly pirated) windows drive to do it.
After a slamming like that, it's got to be good (for certain values of "good")
you didn't check your own work before posting it where the world can see it.
Big deal - you've just shown the world that you're a sloppy worker, unable to QC yourself when you're acting for your own self about something that you're obviously interested enough in to comment in a (moderately well) respected public forum.
What are you going to expect people to conclude about your other work and activities?
Perhaps if Slashdot had a "preview my post before it becomes visible to the rest of the world, so that I can do my readership the minor honour of looking as if I give a shit about what I'm saying" button. Needs a snazzier title though. Suggestions?
(Two typos and one ambiguity caught. Preach <-> practice.)
Kiosk mode for blattering on to your colleagues about how iGreat iEverything iSteve iDoes iIs ?
Assuming (and I wouldn't deign to read the F-ing iArticle to find iOut), that the Safaria session is iSandboxed with an iVengance, iI can already just about see a use for it, and iI don't iClaim to be the (or even 'an') iFount of all iKnowledge and iLove.
(Yes, I did spot the typo ; I couldn't make up my mind whether that Mac browser which I replaced with FireFox, when I did have a Mac, browser is called Sahara, Siberia, or something similar. Whatever. Horses for courses.
I think that translates into "bunch of self-important non-entities who Dilbert would be ashamed to be associated with".
A journalist friend used to teach journalism before he retired. Apart from requiring students to develop skill at shorthand, he also taught them "Who, What, Where, When, Why", the five big questions to be answered in any news item.
[SIGH]
Oh, hang on - you didn't even get media !? What did they write the code on - laser-etched pits in the side of a chocolate teapot?
But to answer the point, I think it's coincidence.
To generate a Wachterhauser system, you need at least three interacting catalytic cycles where some of the components in one cycle are also components of the other cycle ; these cycles themselves then need to be arranged cyclically, which I think implies a minimum of three cycles, each of at least two component. With 65,000 components in your original mix, you will then have (crudely) 65,000 * 64,999 * 64,998 * 64,997 * 64,996 * 64,995, which gives you around 7.5Ã--10^28 possible cycles. There's probably redundant cycles in there.
I've neglected the possibility of systems where the same component reappears at several points in the cycle. But that's still going to leave a respectable number of possibilities to be examined.
I think the closeness of the numbers is pure coincidence.
This stuff gave me headaches over a week or so to understand. IIRC (and I'm several days travel from my bookshelves), I got to understand these things by reading Manfred Eigen's book ... (help me, Amazon!) "Steps Towards Life" Manfred Eigen, Ruthild Winkler-Oswatitsch, Paul Woolley (Author, Translator), ISBN-10: 019854751X ... not Wachterhauser's original publications. But ye Gods, I remember it being hard work!
Getting some hard number-crunchers onto studying this sort of model ... sounds like a good idea to my brain cells. They're cringing at the thought that I may have to read that stuff again!
I know I've missed out at least one umlaut in Wachterhauser's name, if I haven't horribly misspelled it. And another umlaut in "umlaut". But it's the end of a 12-hour shift, and I haven't got the energy to fight with Slashdot's inability to handle most scripts.
It's bedtime for this tired geologist.
FTFY
Some of us do try to raise the level of discourse, but it's like Compuserve in the months after they let the AOLers in - so many people seem to think this is an entertainment medium and don't realise that they're actually the ones putting on the performance.
Are you telling me that you had your dick cut in half lengthwise but left attached and (partly) plumbed up because you got a Windows7 Phone?
Wow, I think M$ must be trying to erase the memory of Bob by building up for an even bigger marketing disaster. I'm (almost) impressed.
It's one of the third class of solutions to the general "P=NP?" range of problems, described by many (DNA in particular) to be an SEP. For the generic case of these, under fairly wide conditions, a problem P that is in the set SEP, is indeed, "NP" (No Problem).
I think it should be clear now.
Just as a matter of interest, who is Slashdot UID #42?
Protip : that's going to cost some significant money, as well as the no-doubt voluminous licensing issues. What's a (legal) install disc of XP cost these days? And when did you last see one in the wild?
(XP and it's activation fiasco came along about the time of me moving from Win3.11/DOS/ Slackware to Win2k/SUSE, and then stopping buying desktops at all and getting lumbered with a laptop with Vista on it and no Win2K drivers for it's graphics and NIC. So a few months after that, I dropped a new hard drive in and Mandrake-d it. Now that I think about it, I'm not sure that I've ever seen a retail install disc for XP, only ones that were licensed to be used on specific hardware at Work - Dells generally.)
Oh, sorry, did you include the prospect of using stolen (illegally used, unlicensed) software on the list of things that you'd sink to? Yeuch!
That's quite bizarre, because it implies several weird things - that the lawn mower was taxed, licensed and safe to drive on the road (which must take time to arrange, unless it had been done previously) ; that the lawnmower travelled significantly faster than walking pace ; that there weren't taxi companies around that could do the transport job faster if the distance was significant ; that the guy was unwilling to walk a mile or so if he had to wait more than a few minutes for the taxi.
Someone driving a lawnmower along the pedestrian pavements at 40 miles per hour across miles of town ... hmmm, I'll bet that he had some conversations with the cops on the way. which would really have helped with getting him to work on time.
Video, or it didn't happen.
BUT, having received two of the devices for different banks, and accidentally taken the wrong one out to work with me, I discovered that using BANKA card with BANKB reader would produce valid codes for BANKA. So, there is hidden re-use of the same techniques. Which didn't surprise me in the slightest (why do you think I tried the swap?), but it would be slightly more convincing if they admitted to it.
When do the bombs start landing on Bush?
Rather more importantly, email and web pages (blogs etc) are generally "pull" services, where the user needs to make some action to "pull" the data towards them, whereas Twitter works as a "push" channel with the data being pushed out to people who have elected to have that data pushed at them (in some way).
I guess that things like RSS and Atom feeds blur the distinction. But I can't really give a large enough shit to find out in detail. And I'm considering whether to unsubscribe from Twitter because the three tiny firehoses I sip from are already far too distracting.
Another significant distinction is that Twitter has a nearly universal reach (potentially) ; the number of mobile phones (and therefore SMS recipients) is rapidly approaching the planet's population. Not an infinite number, but large enough.
There's also a strong hint that they want anyone who has both example.com and example.kz to redirect traffic from example.com to example.kz (which is located intraterritorially). Which is probably what makes Google gag more, because if the policy was followed by more countries it would require Google to set up operations in nearly 200 countries, with locally employed staff under local laws. It's hard enough for conventional small companies to keep track of a dozen-odd sets of laws for operating in major countries ; having nearly 200 ... not nice. Not being able to choose to put one moderate-size data centre to cover all the 'Stans, but instead having to run a half-dozen tiny data centres in a half-dozen countries with a half-dozen staffs under another half-dozen legal systems ...
Nope, I can strongly sympathise with Google on this one.
That'll happen either in a planned, managed and equitable manner, or in a chaotic bloodbath. It's up to a combination of the intelligence and foresight of politicians and the forbearance of the populations to choose which way it's going to happen.
I'm pretty sure which way it's going to go. But I'm not terribly concerned. It's not going to hurt my children. Your children are your responsibility.
[I'll add that I'm unclear on whether the human species will be anything approaching stable by 2100. I'd like to think so, but somehow I doubt it. Resources are, after all, finite.
But I read on anyway and it still sounds bizarrely bizarre. Like, you're going to have friends round to play a multi-player game, and they're not going to bring their own laptop? Weird concept. How are you going to swap porn and jack off together. Yeuch - the very idea of jacking off onto someone else's keyboard is ... strangely appealing.
Yep. There's two in particular that never passed any sort of safety review which need shut down as soon as possible - the fusion reactor currently looming up over the horizon through the window, and the fission reactor a few tens of metres below my feet.
Shut them all down! That's what I say. Drill more for easy-to-access oil in politically safe countries (can't do Greenland though ! : it's got appealingly fluffy white bears !). Shut down those radioactive ash-spewing carbon dioxide generators too - they're too dangerous to consider using. Hydroelectric dams are producing smelly methane as they silt up, so we'd better open the spill ways, drain the reservoirs, then dynamite the dams.
Don't even get me started on the raptor-mincing windmills. They should never have been allowed, not even for grinding corn a millennium ago - couldn't people see what they would lead to?
Tidal power - that the thing to go for. The tremendous untapped tidal power of the steppes of Asian, the Sahara, and the American Prairies. That's where we'll get safe unlimited power for our Intertubes.
Three hours now. Which means that my next trip to work will be taking 9 hours, plus flying time. Then the boat.
Which of course assumes that civil war doesn't break out in the transfer country. Again. This quarter.
... and says it all.
Most of the task is dedicated to avoiding dictionary attacks. Then you increase the symbol base. And you want a minimal length of password. These rules do not dictate "character salad" (though they do allow it).