If the database is compromised, there's a good chance the salt is too.
If the attacker is aiming to compromise a specific account, you are right. But if they grabbed a database, they'd be just aiming to break as many as they can. Generating the hash is the computationally expensive part, much more so than comparing it to a stored hash. So the obvious method is to iterate through possible passwords (Brute or dictionary), salt, hash... and then compare this hash against every stored hash in the hope at least one would match. If you used the username as part of they hash, they'd need to salt and hash every potential password for every user - making their attack many times slower.
Using a constant salt also makes it possible to correlate, to see when two users have the same password set, which can reveal information such as which users are using weak passwords or if more than one account is associated with one person.
It is, yes. But it means you can't construct a salt-specific table, or compare a single hashed salted-password with every password on the stolen database to find a match. If you use the username as part of the hash, then the attacker needs to run their brute force on every single user individually.
As the salt is known and fixed, it'd still be fairly efficient when bruting a large number of passwords at once as would be obtained from a stolen database. A trivial change would make life substantially harder for an attacker: change sha1(mypassword+'slashdot.org') to sha1(mypassword+username+'slashdot.org')
"What is this deadly thing that is chasing humanity and necessitates the environmental destruction of the past 100-150 years?"
A return to those hellish days when people had to repair broken things rather then throwing out and buying new, and not everyone could afford to take a holiday on another continant?
I think reveal codes would go against Microsoft's basic philosophy: Computers that anyone can use without understanding the underlying technology. They built their empire, and massively expanded the entire industry, with that approach. It's a good approach to things too, so long as you have decent tech-support around for the unavoidable times when a problem can only be solved by someone who understands at a deeper level.
I tend to clamshell packaging with a blowtorch. It's the universal opening tool. It cuts through packaging like, appropriatly, a hot flame through plastic.
About the toughest effect to render software-wise would be the alpha blend fade, x=ta+(1-t)b. With a little adjustment work, you can do that using only integer math. That's one addition, one subtraction, two multiplications and three copies. All on three color channels. 21 operations per pixel. At 1920x1080, that's 43 million operations per frame. The P133 would indeed struggle, though it could still be made to work using a few optimisations (Like masking only those areas which differ between the frames, and pre-computing values for background colors) which would reduce the processing needs to a fraction of the most basic implimentation. But even without any optimisations at all, and taking half the cycles for overhead like memory moves, a 1GHz single-core processor of the type found in even the cheapest computer of some years back and easily outperformed by the dual-core ghz chips of most tablets would be able to render that demanding effect at 23fps. And as I said, that's using the 'idiot's basic rendering' method, which any competent programmer could improve upon by an order of magnitude or two. So, no, there is no need for hardware rendering of office documents. Sure, it might be nice to have for saving a little power on mobile devices if your powerpoint is full of overdone transitions, but software fallback is always an option and so the presence of either graphics hardware or the directX api should not be a requirement. That it is a requirement is purely a business decision, not a technical one: MS is increasingly upset over the refusal of many users to update from Windows XP, an OS which MS wishes were considered entirely obsolete but which remains 'good enough' that so many see no reason to leave. Withholding office is Microsoft's way of making sure they do leave XP at last.
There is a very conceivable case in which you would prefer software: If you wish to run on platforms which may not have the hardware, or the software to make use of that hardware. In the case of office apps, the power savings from hardware acceleration of graphics would be too small to be concerned with, and performance ceases to be an issue once you are already able to render at rates beyond human perception using software.
Two-dimensional processing of some very simple math. I could run those in real-time on a P-133! Just because you can hardware accelerate something doesn't mean you should.
Vista too was home-user focused. Perhaps a relic - until XP, they did have two completly seperate windows lines for home (95/98/me) and business (nt/2k).
It also lets you do a one-click publish of your document to your facebook account, or edit documents from Microsoft's cloud as easily as if they were local.
So, still nothing useful. MS is trying so hard to find new features to add, but the word processor was really perfected the day someone incorporated the first spellchecker.
I walked into one once without permission and started taking photos. Eventually security caught me and I was just politely asked to leave and escorted off side.
It was the result of a mix-up due to an English college asking an American webdesign firm to do some work for which they hired an English (And amateur, to save money) photographer. Somewhere in the translation, 'Oxford university college' became 'Oxford university,' a mostly-seperate organisation, and as a result I was dispatched to take photos of the wrong site. Thus getting kicked off the campus. Twice: The second time for trying to go to their library to ask if I could contact the webdesign firm for clarification.
This was actually proposed, decades ago. The plan was to make it economical by venting a portion of the plasma stream directly out of a tokamak into the recycleable materials. There isn't a material built that wouldn't vaporise instantly on exposure to raw fusion plasma, and the hydrogen fuel is cheap (The process would produce hydrogen as one of the output elements that could be fed straight back into the reactor). The plan failed because no-one was able to make a tokamak fusion reactor that actually worked properly.
Most of the political conservatives I've debated seem to favor smaller government, except for... something. The something varies. The biggest conflicts seem to be in the slightly awkward alliance between political conservatives who want the government as small as possible and the social conservatives who view the government as societies way of enforcing public morality. Thus they end up campaigning for small government, except where abortion is concerned, or pornography, or drugs, or broadcast obscenity or indecency, or government-erected religious monuments, or a hundred or so other exceptions to the point where the small-government call begins to look empty.
I'm sure the social and political conservative factions would be at each other's throats by now if they didn't have a common enemy to fight in the liberal faction.
Microsoft. Very nearly all PCs sold run Windows: All MS need do is declare in some future point that OEMs must make secure boot manditory in order to use a Windows OEM license. At that point, non-locked computers would quickly become very rare. You'd still be able to buy them from niche suppliers, at a higher price due to the lack of economy of scale, but it'd mean no more repurposing something second-hand and largely eliminate the price advantages of linux.
Because for DRM to function requires the hardware be locked down in some manner to prevent tampering - otherwise the user would simply be able to study it and find a way to alter it to disable the DRM or copy the data off in unencrypted form. It's impossible to impliment any effective DRM on hardware the user has effective control over. Secure Boot then becomes a DRM enabling technology: By ensuring those critical OS files aren't tampered with, it also ensures the user hasn't intentionally edited them to break DRM.
Due to the niche factor, it'd also be more expensive. If Microsoft does declare secure boot must be manditory at some future date, which seems dangerously likely based on their past behavior, then those who want to run linux may only be able to do so on specialist or server hardware that costs far more. This eliminates one of Linux's major advantages, the price, as well as making it difficult for new users to start dabbling.
Those nine factions are all forced to vote for one of two parties. They can only act for themselves at the lowest levels of government - once you get to the state legislature and above, they must pick either the republican or democrat side.
The sneaky departments working to harm someone in politics may not be affiliated with their opponent. It's quite possible that, for example, a dirty tricks organisation might try to dig up dirt on Obama funded by the oil industry, with no connection to any republican politician. There's also the rogue staffer issue - an underling, desperate to get ahead in the political game, can resort to underhanded means without their boss even knowing. This situation is also indistinguishable without a lot of inside information from the boss knowing, but throwing an underling out as a scapegoat rather than admit he authorised whatever they did.
Strict constructionalists are the ones who debate over the exact meaning of the comma placement in the second amendment. Real complications come from the chain of rulings though - often a long series of precidents can be followed, each one building inevitably from the last, until by the end the supreme court came up with something which appears to make no sense when looked at in isolation.
Slashdot Mirror
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy
(My own reference to a fallacy is, naturally, close but incorrect)
Because to be that type of success, you need considerably salesmanship talent, connections in the right places and a fair bit of luck.
If the database is compromised, there's a good chance the salt is too.
If the attacker is aiming to compromise a specific account, you are right. But if they grabbed a database, they'd be just aiming to break as many as they can. Generating the hash is the computationally expensive part, much more so than comparing it to a stored hash. So the obvious method is to iterate through possible passwords (Brute or dictionary), salt, hash... and then compare this hash against every stored hash in the hope at least one would match. If you used the username as part of they hash, they'd need to salt and hash every potential password for every user - making their attack many times slower.
Using a constant salt also makes it possible to correlate, to see when two users have the same password set, which can reveal information such as which users are using weak passwords or if more than one account is associated with one person.
It is, yes. But it means you can't construct a salt-specific table, or compare a single hashed salted-password with every password on the stolen database to find a match. If you use the username as part of the hash, then the attacker needs to run their brute force on every single user individually.
As the salt is known and fixed, it'd still be fairly efficient when bruting a large number of passwords at once as would be obtained from a stolen database. A trivial change would make life substantially harder for an attacker: change sha1(mypassword+'slashdot.org') to sha1(mypassword+username+'slashdot.org')
"What is this deadly thing that is chasing humanity and necessitates the environmental destruction of the past 100-150 years?"
A return to those hellish days when people had to repair broken things rather then throwing out and buying new, and not everyone could afford to take a holiday on another continant?
I think reveal codes would go against Microsoft's basic philosophy: Computers that anyone can use without understanding the underlying technology. They built their empire, and massively expanded the entire industry, with that approach. It's a good approach to things too, so long as you have decent tech-support around for the unavoidable times when a problem can only be solved by someone who understands at a deeper level.
I tend to clamshell packaging with a blowtorch. It's the universal opening tool. It cuts through packaging like, appropriatly, a hot flame through plastic.
About the toughest effect to render software-wise would be the alpha blend fade, x=ta+(1-t)b. With a little adjustment work, you can do that using only integer math. That's one addition, one subtraction, two multiplications and three copies. All on three color channels. 21 operations per pixel. At 1920x1080, that's 43 million operations per frame. The P133 would indeed struggle, though it could still be made to work using a few optimisations (Like masking only those areas which differ between the frames, and pre-computing values for background colors) which would reduce the processing needs to a fraction of the most basic implimentation. But even without any optimisations at all, and taking half the cycles for overhead like memory moves, a 1GHz single-core processor of the type found in even the cheapest computer of some years back and easily outperformed by the dual-core ghz chips of most tablets would be able to render that demanding effect at 23fps. And as I said, that's using the 'idiot's basic rendering' method, which any competent programmer could improve upon by an order of magnitude or two. So, no, there is no need for hardware rendering of office documents. Sure, it might be nice to have for saving a little power on mobile devices if your powerpoint is full of overdone transitions, but software fallback is always an option and so the presence of either graphics hardware or the directX api should not be a requirement. That it is a requirement is purely a business decision, not a technical one: MS is increasingly upset over the refusal of many users to update from Windows XP, an OS which MS wishes were considered entirely obsolete but which remains 'good enough' that so many see no reason to leave. Withholding office is Microsoft's way of making sure they do leave XP at last.
There is a very conceivable case in which you would prefer software: If you wish to run on platforms which may not have the hardware, or the software to make use of that hardware. In the case of office apps, the power savings from hardware acceleration of graphics would be too small to be concerned with, and performance ceases to be an issue once you are already able to render at rates beyond human perception using software.
Two-dimensional processing of some very simple math. I could run those in real-time on a P-133! Just because you can hardware accelerate something doesn't mean you should.
Vista too was home-user focused. Perhaps a relic - until XP, they did have two completly seperate windows lines for home (95/98/me) and business (nt/2k).
It also lets you do a one-click publish of your document to your facebook account, or edit documents from Microsoft's cloud as easily as if they were local.
So, still nothing useful. MS is trying so hard to find new features to add, but the word processor was really perfected the day someone incorporated the first spellchecker.
I walked into one once without permission and started taking photos. Eventually security caught me and I was just politely asked to leave and escorted off side.
It was the result of a mix-up due to an English college asking an American webdesign firm to do some work for which they hired an English (And amateur, to save money) photographer. Somewhere in the translation, 'Oxford university college' became 'Oxford university,' a mostly-seperate organisation, and as a result I was dispatched to take photos of the wrong site. Thus getting kicked off the campus. Twice: The second time for trying to go to their library to ask if I could contact the webdesign firm for clarification.
This was actually proposed, decades ago. The plan was to make it economical by venting a portion of the plasma stream directly out of a tokamak into the recycleable materials. There isn't a material built that wouldn't vaporise instantly on exposure to raw fusion plasma, and the hydrogen fuel is cheap (The process would produce hydrogen as one of the output elements that could be fed straight back into the reactor). The plan failed because no-one was able to make a tokamak fusion reactor that actually worked properly.
Most of the political conservatives I've debated seem to favor smaller government, except for... something. The something varies. The biggest conflicts seem to be in the slightly awkward alliance between political conservatives who want the government as small as possible and the social conservatives who view the government as societies way of enforcing public morality. Thus they end up campaigning for small government, except where abortion is concerned, or pornography, or drugs, or broadcast obscenity or indecency, or government-erected religious monuments, or a hundred or so other exceptions to the point where the small-government call begins to look empty.
I'm sure the social and political conservative factions would be at each other's throats by now if they didn't have a common enemy to fight in the liberal faction.
Sanctions? Yes. They'd stall for a decade, then face a billion-dollar fine. After securing a market worth hundreds of billions. Net win for Microsoft.
Microsoft. Very nearly all PCs sold run Windows: All MS need do is declare in some future point that OEMs must make secure boot manditory in order to use a Windows OEM license. At that point, non-locked computers would quickly become very rare. You'd still be able to buy them from niche suppliers, at a higher price due to the lack of economy of scale, but it'd mean no more repurposing something second-hand and largely eliminate the price advantages of linux.
Because for DRM to function requires the hardware be locked down in some manner to prevent tampering - otherwise the user would simply be able to study it and find a way to alter it to disable the DRM or copy the data off in unencrypted form. It's impossible to impliment any effective DRM on hardware the user has effective control over. Secure Boot then becomes a DRM enabling technology: By ensuring those critical OS files aren't tampered with, it also ensures the user hasn't intentionally edited them to break DRM.
Due to the niche factor, it'd also be more expensive. If Microsoft does declare secure boot must be manditory at some future date, which seems dangerously likely based on their past behavior, then those who want to run linux may only be able to do so on specialist or server hardware that costs far more. This eliminates one of Linux's major advantages, the price, as well as making it difficult for new users to start dabbling.
For now. Secure boot is Microsoft building a big 'destroy linux' button and promiseing they won't push it.
Those nine factions are all forced to vote for one of two parties. They can only act for themselves at the lowest levels of government - once you get to the state legislature and above, they must pick either the republican or democrat side.
The sneaky departments working to harm someone in politics may not be affiliated with their opponent. It's quite possible that, for example, a dirty tricks organisation might try to dig up dirt on Obama funded by the oil industry, with no connection to any republican politician. There's also the rogue staffer issue - an underling, desperate to get ahead in the political game, can resort to underhanded means without their boss even knowing. This situation is also indistinguishable without a lot of inside information from the boss knowing, but throwing an underling out as a scapegoat rather than admit he authorised whatever they did.
Or torrent.
Strict constructionalists are the ones who debate over the exact meaning of the comma placement in the second amendment. Real complications come from the chain of rulings though - often a long series of precidents can be followed, each one building inevitably from the last, until by the end the supreme court came up with something which appears to make no sense when looked at in isolation.