we widely distribute a standard library method for computing password entropy and let people pick what kind of strong password they want to remember
There are a few complications with this.
1) Humans are incapable of picking entropic passwords. They think they can, but they can't. So the measure we need isn't actually one of entropy, though it looks like that to computers. 2) Mostly due to (1) above, computers are incapable of correctly calculating the entropy of a human generated password. They can calculate the entropy of a string of characters if they presuppose that the string of characters was not generated by a human. 3) Even if we assume that humans can create entropic passwords, it's difficult for a human to estimate that entropy. What happens when the password entropy checker rejects "This shit tastes like chicken"? How does the human know how to make that password more acceptable? Is "shit this tastes like chicken" any better? How about "chicken like this tastes shit"? Or "Tastes chicken shit this like"? How does that even compare to a shorter string of letters, numbers, and symbols which don't form a word? To the person behind the keyboard, such a comparison is nonsensical. They computer can't reasonably say, "Please add 4 bits of entropy to your password," and saying that the password isn't strong enough without providing any guidance as to why will just be frustrating. 4) The library would need constant updating to be valid. Because "correct horse stable battery" and all of the permutations of that set of words (probably including pluralization and tense changes) are terrible passphrases now, but they would have been pretty good prior to Randall Monroe's comic. Each new song, book, poem, and speech decreases the value of passphrase word-sets. 5) Assuming you ignore (4) above, you still basically eventually run into what we have now--some people have good passwords, some people have bad passwords, and the biggest problem is still reusing passwords combined with site compromises.
Yes. It also turns out that you are free to vote for people who want to lower or reduce taxes. Don't forget that the government is made up of people, and which is (ostensibly) there to serve the people--it's not just some entity which exists on its own.
Well, bittorrent="a particular type or brand of car." Anyone talking about banning BitTorrent is talking about banning Datsuns on highways because 90% of people who use Datsuns are using them to speed.
You can. It's called number porting, and we've had it for a while. I don't know what the GP was talking about--maybe he was going to sarcasm, but it didn't come across.
If a hoax or threatening or terrorist telephone call is made from a payphone, either one run directly by the telephone company or one in privately owned premises such as a hotel or motorway services (gas station for those in the USA), the authorities would not confiscate the phone or arrest the owner of the premises. So should an open WiFi connection available to the public not be treated the same way as a payphone?
The phone won't have logs--the phone company will, and they will almost certainly share them with law enforcement. The phone cannot contain evidence of the wrongdoing--it won't have a cached copy of the threat. The phone company is also not the prime suspect in the case.
Particularly in a civil trial, the burden of proof is essentially "more likely than not." The standard for evidence gathering is even lower. It's perfectly reasonable to demand an image of a suspect's drive, assuming there is reasonable evidence that the illegal action was taken in the first place.
Would he? Maybe he wasn't infringing, but someone did it over his wireless access point? I'm guessing that you're assuming he actually did engage in copyright infringement, but maybe he didn't?
The alternative is that someone else did it on his open wifi. If he had locked it down, that probably wouldn't have happened.
Someone else pointed out that the likelihood that a person emitting radiation is going to commit a criminal act is negligible. This is because there are far fewer terrorists and other criminals than there are law-abiding citizens. Even if a tiny percentage of the population emits this level of radioactivity at a particular time, the false positive rate for a crime is still probably quite high. The question society has to ask is whether or not such a high false positive rate means that radioactivity in-and-of-itself should be a cause for a stop.
More problematically, the police officer will have no way to verify that it's a legal experiment. They will probably at best confiscate the device, and at worst arrest the scientist. As long as the scientist is cooperative, he'll probably only have to spend $20,000 on a lawyer and expert witness to prove that he wasn't doing anything dangerous, but he probably won't get his project back for 5-10 years.
It certainly wasn't a random stop. Maybe you should look up the definition of the word.
And "justified" doesn't require that they find that a crime was committed. So while I don't know if the stop was justified, your response doesn't actually adequately address that adjective.
Now, if there was probable cause (like, say, a bunch of wires and what appears to be a remote detonator sitting on the seat, or the police ask him to step out of the vehicle and frisk him and find a weapon), they'd be able to search the vehicle without a warrant and arrest him if they found probable cause to believe he was committing a crime.
Why? A bunch of wires is way more likely to be a hobbyest than a bomb. And what does a detonator look like? Do the police know, or do they know what Hollywood says a detonator looks like?
I have a laptop for doing work and a tablet for entertainment (reading books, watching movies.) I used to read on my laptop, but I found that I get considerably better battery life out of the tablet. The tablet is also considerably lighter, so if I'm travelling, it's nice to have it with me while I'm walking around.
With a bluetooth keyboard, I could possibly start doing away with the laptop. There are too many times that I want to multitask, though--read a reference while doing actual work. Plus, the tablet's mine and the laptop is work's. The separation of duties is nice.
* Data loss: I would combine an always running network backup (CrashPlan is my favorite) with a periodic backup to an external hard drive (Time Machine, or also CrashPlan). Dropbox is not really good enough for this, although it mitigates some of the problem.
I don't like Dropbox because the data is unencrypted and they have a poor securityhistory. However, they keep the data and even version it for you, and they're nearly ubiquitously available. I'm curious--why do you think that it's not good enough?
I'm a little on the paranoid side. I don't enter passwords into systems I don't trust. I might not travel to stare at a screen, but that doesn't mean that I don't want to check my e-mail while I'm not at home.
And as another responder replied, if the criminal is not too smart they aren't going to be wiping the hard drive. But even more than that: they're usually too lazy, or in too much of a hurry. They want a working phone or computer they can use or sell
Emphasis mine.
Anecdotally, our university will watch for MAC addresses of stolen computer equipment. According to one of the network guys, they've never had a hit. The equipment is sold on ebay before it is ever turned on on campus.
What blows my mind is that no one ever buys it and then takes it to campus.
FreeBSD's commercial clients... probably more routers, etc, using Linux today than BSDs.
Almost certainly, since the majority of consumer-grade wireless routers are probably running Linux.
If you look at enterprise-grade routers, it's probably BSD (Juniper). by a long shot, though. For switches, I think HP is still #2, and I believe they run Linux (though Juniper is #3 and use BSD.) Of course, in no case is BSD or Linux code touching your packets--all that is done in silicon.
No, that's not the point. The person to whom I replied said
A thought occurs: If the prices of sms were extremely cheap (about $ 0.001), would the increased sms usage eat into voice usage to the point where some of the US capacity issues disappeared?
The point is that lots of people get unlimited text plans, which brings the cost per message to even less than the GP's suggestion (from $0.0001 to $0.00) and it hasn't alleviated the capacity issues.
These days, most people who want to text get unlimited plans, and everyone else prefers talking (and I guess some use Facebook, BBM, or iMessages.) I happen to prefer some form of messaging, but I know plenty of people who prefer talking--even a few who outright block SMS.
Yes, but I think a lot of people are still stuck on legacy family plans from 2004 or so, so they're paying per message still.
I think they'll let you tack on SMS to existing plans. In fact, I can add, drop, or modify an SMS plan on my phone (Verizon) without signing a new contract.
My roommate (who can well afford it) is trying to avoid the SMS tax on his pay as you go phone, so I have to email him if I want a timely response, and hope he's near a computer. It's really annoying if I want to see if we're low on dishwashing detergent or whatever.
I use about 40 minutes per month, so maybe I'm not one to talk, but why can't you just call him?
It's a common excuse. It worked for the Catholic Church, too. "We don't have enough Priests, so instead of excommunicating the ones who diddle little kids, we'll just move them to a new parish."
The point? It's to move people to digital downloads and streaming services, where you don't get all this crap, but where the studio has more control over the content (they can disable playback.)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I think we emailed you then locked you out, so if you were on-line, you could choose a new password then and there
Sounds absolutely ripe for phishers to send fake e-mails.
we widely distribute a standard library method for computing password entropy and let people pick what kind of strong password they want to remember
There are a few complications with this.
1) Humans are incapable of picking entropic passwords. They think they can, but they can't. So the measure we need isn't actually one of entropy, though it looks like that to computers.
2) Mostly due to (1) above, computers are incapable of correctly calculating the entropy of a human generated password. They can calculate the entropy of a string of characters if they presuppose that the string of characters was not generated by a human.
3) Even if we assume that humans can create entropic passwords, it's difficult for a human to estimate that entropy. What happens when the password entropy checker rejects "This shit tastes like chicken"? How does the human know how to make that password more acceptable? Is "shit this tastes like chicken" any better? How about "chicken like this tastes shit"? Or "Tastes chicken shit this like"? How does that even compare to a shorter string of letters, numbers, and symbols which don't form a word? To the person behind the keyboard, such a comparison is nonsensical. They computer can't reasonably say, "Please add 4 bits of entropy to your password," and saying that the password isn't strong enough without providing any guidance as to why will just be frustrating.
4) The library would need constant updating to be valid. Because "correct horse stable battery" and all of the permutations of that set of words (probably including pluralization and tense changes) are terrible passphrases now, but they would have been pretty good prior to Randall Monroe's comic. Each new song, book, poem, and speech decreases the value of passphrase word-sets.
5) Assuming you ignore (4) above, you still basically eventually run into what we have now--some people have good passwords, some people have bad passwords, and the biggest problem is still reusing passwords combined with site compromises.
Yes. It also turns out that you are free to vote for people who want to lower or reduce taxes. Don't forget that the government is made up of people, and which is (ostensibly) there to serve the people--it's not just some entity which exists on its own.
Well, bittorrent="a particular type or brand of car." Anyone talking about banning BitTorrent is talking about banning Datsuns on highways because 90% of people who use Datsuns are using them to speed.
He can also sell the phone for more than he paid for it. If he gets a $200 subsidized phone, he can possibly get $350 or more.
You can. It's called number porting, and we've had it for a while. I don't know what the GP was talking about--maybe he was going to sarcasm, but it didn't come across.
If a hoax or threatening or terrorist telephone call is made from a payphone, either one run directly by the telephone company or one in privately owned premises such as a hotel or motorway services (gas station for those in the USA), the authorities would not confiscate the phone or arrest the owner of the premises. So should an open WiFi connection available to the public not be treated the same way as a payphone?
The phone won't have logs--the phone company will, and they will almost certainly share them with law enforcement. The phone cannot contain evidence of the wrongdoing--it won't have a cached copy of the threat. The phone company is also not the prime suspect in the case.
Particularly in a civil trial, the burden of proof is essentially "more likely than not." The standard for evidence gathering is even lower. It's perfectly reasonable to demand an image of a suspect's drive, assuming there is reasonable evidence that the illegal action was taken in the first place.
Would he? Maybe he wasn't infringing, but someone did it over his wireless access point? I'm guessing that you're assuming he actually did engage in copyright infringement, but maybe he didn't?
The alternative is that someone else did it on his open wifi. If he had locked it down, that probably wouldn't have happened.
Someone else pointed out that the likelihood that a person emitting radiation is going to commit a criminal act is negligible. This is because there are far fewer terrorists and other criminals than there are law-abiding citizens. Even if a tiny percentage of the population emits this level of radioactivity at a particular time, the false positive rate for a crime is still probably quite high. The question society has to ask is whether or not such a high false positive rate means that radioactivity in-and-of-itself should be a cause for a stop.
More problematically, the police officer will have no way to verify that it's a legal experiment. They will probably at best confiscate the device, and at worst arrest the scientist. As long as the scientist is cooperative, he'll probably only have to spend $20,000 on a lawyer and expert witness to prove that he wasn't doing anything dangerous, but he probably won't get his project back for 5-10 years.
It certainly wasn't a random stop. Maybe you should look up the definition of the word.
And "justified" doesn't require that they find that a crime was committed. So while I don't know if the stop was justified, your response doesn't actually adequately address that adjective.
Now, if there was probable cause (like, say, a bunch of wires and what appears to be a remote detonator sitting on the seat, or the police ask him to step out of the vehicle and frisk him and find a weapon), they'd be able to search the vehicle without a warrant and arrest him if they found probable cause to believe he was committing a crime.
Why? A bunch of wires is way more likely to be a hobbyest than a bomb. And what does a detonator look like? Do the police know, or do they know what Hollywood says a detonator looks like?
I have a laptop for doing work and a tablet for entertainment (reading books, watching movies.) I used to read on my laptop, but I found that I get considerably better battery life out of the tablet. The tablet is also considerably lighter, so if I'm travelling, it's nice to have it with me while I'm walking around.
With a bluetooth keyboard, I could possibly start doing away with the laptop. There are too many times that I want to multitask, though--read a reference while doing actual work. Plus, the tablet's mine and the laptop is work's. The separation of duties is nice.
* Data loss: I would combine an always running network backup (CrashPlan is my favorite) with a periodic backup to an external hard drive (Time Machine, or also CrashPlan). Dropbox is not really good enough for this, although it mitigates some of the problem.
I don't like Dropbox because the data is unencrypted and they have a poor security history. However, they keep the data and even version it for you, and they're nearly ubiquitously available. I'm curious--why do you think that it's not good enough?
I'm a little on the paranoid side. I don't enter passwords into systems I don't trust. I might not travel to stare at a screen, but that doesn't mean that I don't want to check my e-mail while I'm not at home.
And as another responder replied, if the criminal is not too smart they aren't going to be wiping the hard drive. But even more than that: they're usually too lazy, or in too much of a hurry. They want a working phone or computer they can use or sell
Emphasis mine.
Anecdotally, our university will watch for MAC addresses of stolen computer equipment. According to one of the network guys, they've never had a hit. The equipment is sold on ebay before it is ever turned on on campus.
What blows my mind is that no one ever buys it and then takes it to campus.
Almost no DVDs have MSRP of $5.
FreeBSD's commercial clients... probably more routers, etc, using Linux today than BSDs.
Almost certainly, since the majority of consumer-grade wireless routers are probably running Linux.
If you look at enterprise-grade routers, it's probably BSD (Juniper). by a long shot, though. For switches, I think HP is still #2, and I believe they run Linux (though Juniper is #3 and use BSD.) Of course, in no case is BSD or Linux code touching your packets--all that is done in silicon.
*Cough* bullshit. BULLSHIT!
Stallman could have changed his mind. Precompiled headers weren't introduced until the mid 2000s.
No, that's not the point. The person to whom I replied said
A thought occurs: If the prices of sms were extremely cheap (about $ 0.001), would the increased sms usage eat into voice usage to the point where some of the US capacity issues disappeared?
The point is that lots of people get unlimited text plans, which brings the cost per message to even less than the GP's suggestion (from $0.0001 to $0.00) and it hasn't alleviated the capacity issues.
These days, most people who want to text get unlimited plans, and everyone else prefers talking (and I guess some use Facebook, BBM, or iMessages.) I happen to prefer some form of messaging, but I know plenty of people who prefer talking--even a few who outright block SMS.
Yes, but I think a lot of people are still stuck on legacy family plans from 2004 or so, so they're paying per message still.
I think they'll let you tack on SMS to existing plans. In fact, I can add, drop, or modify an SMS plan on my phone (Verizon) without signing a new contract.
My roommate (who can well afford it) is trying to avoid the SMS tax on his pay as you go phone, so I have to email him if I want a timely response, and hope he's near a computer. It's really annoying if I want to see if we're low on dishwashing detergent or whatever.
I use about 40 minutes per month, so maybe I'm not one to talk, but why can't you just call him?
In the US, don't most People who text usually get an unlimited plan?
It's a common excuse. It worked for the Catholic Church, too. "We don't have enough Priests, so instead of excommunicating the ones who diddle little kids, we'll just move them to a new parish."
The point? It's to move people to digital downloads and streaming services, where you don't get all this crap, but where the studio has more control over the content (they can disable playback.)
lol popo omw