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User: rekoil

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  1. Re:Parrot TV on Inventor of the TV Remote Control Dies · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I remember these. They weren't even electronic - each button on the remote caused a tine to be pulled and released which was tuned to a specific ultrasonic frequency. This is why the early remotes were called "clickers" - releasing the tine made a metallic clicking sound. It also meant that random ambient sounds that matched the target frequency could cause your TV to turn on/off, change channels, etc on its own.

    There were also remotes that weren't even wireless, with a 10' long tether wire to the unit. The advertised "advantage" of these was that they didn't need batteries.

  2. Re:So? on Huawei Claims 30Gbps Wireless 'Beyond LTE' · · Score: 1

    Hear hear. For example, my mother uses 3G (and soon LTE) for internet access to her home, which is a rural area that isn't served by either cable or DSL, and has no line-of-sight access for satellite service.

  3. Re:Better Writeup on Microsoft Issuing Unusual Out-of-Band Security Update · · Score: 1

    That's how perl was fixed - XOR each incoming key with a random value generated when the hash is initialized.

  4. Re:Changing a hash function... on Microsoft Issuing Unusual Out-of-Band Security Update · · Score: 1

    The real problem here is that it's fairly easy to compute a set of hash keys that are known to generate collisions on a specific hash table implementation. The easiest fix by far - the fix that perl implemented in 2003 - is to generate a random value when the hash is initialized, and XOR each incoming key with it before processing. That breaks collision prediction on the attacker's side quite effectively.

  5. Re:Priorities on Microsoft Issuing Unusual Out-of-Band Security Update · · Score: 1

    To be precise, it elements with equal *exit* hash values - the same hash key will simply overwrite prior values. Internally, the language runs a hash algorithm against the key and uses the resulting value to generate an index to the array that *actually* holds the key/value pair. If multiple keys hash to the same index, then the value will actually be another array, containing all the key/value pairs that mapped to that index. You then need to walk that index to find the key you're looking for.

    The downside of this, of course, is that if all of your keys map to the same hash value, then you have to walk the list of *all* key/value pairs to find your value. Producing this scenario on demand is how you kill servers with it.

    The "real" code fix so far is to transmute the key with a random value (generated at application startup, or at instantiation of the hash map) before running the hash algorithm, thus making it impossible to predict which keys will generate hash collisions. This is how perl was fixed this back in 2003 :)

    Most folks seem to simply be setting limits on the number of fields in POST (or the maximum size of a POST payload) for now until they can fix their code. Putting limits on the number of HTTP headers in a request is needed as well, as apache itself puts headers in a hash map.

  6. Re:Or was it just a lucky piggy back? on Was Conficker Stuxnet's Trojan? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Entirely plausible. Conficker's phone-home mechanism was an algorithm that hashed the current date/time to generate a nonsense domain name, which it would then try to look up and grab a payload from. All the Bad Guys had to do was register one a few hours in advance, put up the payload, and wait. The groups who were fighting the thing managed to decompile the algorithm and play it forward, generating a list of hundreds of thousands of domain names that they then took to the various registries to get blocked. Paul Vixie was a big part of this, and here's a pretty good article on the group.

    It would not surprise me at all if CIA/Mossad/etc managed to get one of those domains un-blocked and used to deliver the Stuxnet payload.

  7. Re:the reason she failed is that . . on Carol Bartz Is Out As Yahoo's CEO · · Score: 5, Interesting

    More to the point, it seemed that the biggest initiatives within Yahoo while I was there (from 2009 until early this year) were *all* centered around profit, not users - mainly, cost-cutting and ad tech. As if the goal wasn't to grow users, just grow revenue and profit per existing user. What opened my eyes was when the cost-cutting initiatives that made sense - primarily the data center consolidations, which definitely needed to get done ASAFP - started getting pushed back due to the need for quarter-to-quarter profit management. Bartz should have grown a pair, pushed forward the consolidation even if it meant missing the street for the quarter, allowing Yahoo to reap the rewards much sooner.

    I'll also never forget the quarterly all-hands meeting where the major product announcement for the quarter was...*full-page ads on the login page*.

    Sorry I didn't stick around to see Bartz go, but I couldn't risk her *not* going.

  8. Re:So... on Court Renders $3 Judgment Against Spamhaus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm guessing the $3 comes from $1 for each of the three charges in the original suit - the lowest amount a US Judge is allowed to award a plaintiff. In other words: "I have to decide in your favor, but I'll be damned if you actually get anything out of it".

  9. Re:This is a sad day for the tech world on Steve Jobs Resigns As Apple CEO · · Score: 1

    Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Michael Bloomberg, Brin/Page, Zuck, and Larry Ellison would all like to have a word with you.

  10. Re:It depends on contracts on Music Copyright War Looming · · Score: 3, Informative

    "Work For Hire" provisions are unenforceable in recording contracts because US copyright law is rather specific about what can be considered a work for hire - and sound recordings are not on the list. It was briefly added in 1999 but was removed a year later.

  11. Courtney Love talked about this... on Music Copyright War Looming · · Score: 1

    http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2000/06/14/love/print.html

    Apparently a "work for hire" provision did get slipped into federal copyright law - and I mean literally slipped in while no one was paying attention. After Love's speech brought attention to this, the provision was repealed a year later.

    So unless the laws get changed again (and the RIAA *will* try), the artists have the upper hand. Sad to imagine how much they'll spend in legal fees to get to their money though.

  12. Re:Just harder on Ask Slashdot: Am I Too Old To Learn New Programming Languages? · · Score: 1

    As a 39-year-old who switched from perl to python about 3 months ago, I can agree with this statement.

  13. Re:BitchX anyone? on When Software Offends · · Score: 1

    No, unfortunately...I think I just renamed it 'irc' or 'company-irc' or similar.

  14. And GMail gets a pass? on Why Yahoo Should Abandon Email Scanning · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is this the same scanning that Google does with GMail? If so, why no outcry there?

  15. BitchX anyone? on When Software Offends · · Score: 2

    True story - when I was implementing an internal IRC network for a former employer, I was instructed to add BitchX to our desktop UNIX builds - but rename the binary.

  16. Re:This reminds me.. on Space Invaders: The Movie · · Score: 1

    Or Royksopp's video for "Happy Up Here"...

  17. Re:That's not Facebook's problem on Facebook Trapped In MySQL a 'Fate Worse Than Death' · · Score: 3, Informative

    The RPC system they're using is Thrift (http://thrift.apache.org/)., which they developed because JSON was becoming a bottleneck. And yeah, there's a metric crapload of memcached in their data centers as well. The multi-hour outage Facebook had late last year was due to a near-complete failure of the memcached layer, resulting in an overload of requests to the main mysql farms.

  18. Re:Wasn't there... on Don't Fly If You Just Had Surgery! · · Score: 1

    It was TWA 840. Not finding any references to the bomb being carried in a body cavity, but I remember hearing it in news reports at the time.

  19. Wasn't there... on Don't Fly If You Just Had Surgery! · · Score: 1

    ...a bomb in the 80s that was left aboard by a woman who snuck it on...um..."internally"?

  20. 1Password FTW on Cheap GPUs Rendering Strong Passwords Useless · · Score: 1

    Shameless plug follows...

    Seriously, once you're free from having to remember your own passwords, you can make them as long and complex as you like, and you can use a different *truly random* password for every login, so one compromise won't lead to others. There are freeware workalikes, but none that match 1P's feature set (syncing, browser auto-fill/change plugins, etc). Highly recommended.

  21. Re:Too good on Why Has Blu-ray Failed To Catch Hold? · · Score: 1

    I'll point out that CGI rendered to film is done at 2,000 lines per frame - that's about twice the resolution of 1080p. So theatergoers would have noticed this as well.

  22. Re:Money on Expensify CEO On 'Why We Won't Hire .NET Developers' · · Score: 2

    That's why you run apache with mod_mono on a Linux box instead.

  23. Re:Upgrades. on Air Force Supercomputer Made From PS3's · · Score: 1

    Came here to say exactly that. Done in one :)

  24. Re:Correct on Why Doesn't Every Website Use HTTPS? · · Score: 2

    Yes, you can configure a proxy server (squid, pound, varnish, etc) to cache SSL content. However, client browsers don't and won't.

  25. Re:Correct on Why Doesn't Every Website Use HTTPS? · · Score: 1

    I'm curious as to why this is - I'm guessing that it had been decided that if the data should be encrypted in transit, then it should not be saved unencrypted on the client's system.