What I would've loved is to set up a temporary Gmail password that was only valid for 1 week (in addition to my normal one) and use that while traveling.
Two-step authentication is a good option. It wouldn't do exactly what you want, because you'd need to keep using it after you got back (Internet cafe sniffers and the like would get your main password), but if you just turn it on and leave it on, it would keep you safe. On the computers you use regularly you can click the "remember verification" checkbox when you use it, so you'll only get prompted once per month for a one-time password, so in practice you don't have to do the second step very often -- except when using random machines while traveling.
For OTPs, there are multiple choices. The most convenient is a smartphone OTP app. If you don't have a smartphone, you can also have Google send you OTPs when you need them via SMS. For those times when you don't have service (e.g. international travel), carry a piece of paper in your wallet with a list of one-time passwords, crossing them off as you use them. If you get low on backup OTPs, use one to log in and then get some more.
Note: No I'm not criticizing the US military, or veterans. I'm a veteran. My point is that military forces do not provide "freedom", that must come from internal political and judicial processes, which must in turn arise from the desires and actions of the citizenry at large. Military forces just make it possible for us to do whatever we're going to do free of external coercion. What we choose to do, though, can go either way.
Sorry for the semi-OT post. It just struck a chord, in light of the recent holiday and the flurry of "thank a veteran" messages it always spawns.
... the more likely it is that you actually have an identity worth stealing.
And the more likely it is that you'll have a wealth of background to draw on when coming up with obscure-but-memorable (to you) bits of information you can combine and tweak to make a good password. I definitely notice this when comparing passwords my wife chooses with passwords my kids choose. She uses bits of old but important dates, parts of names of people she knew decades ago, etc. and comes up with some pretty good ones. I can mostly recognize where she got the pieces but doubt I'd ever be able to guess her password if she didn't tell it to me.
My kids, on the other hand, tend to pick simple names of favorite entertainment characters. Even when I try to get them to pick something more complex, they just don't seem to have much else to draw on. When I pointed out not long ago that one son's choice of his favorite pokemon's name as a password wasn't very hard to guess, he proceeded to pick a another pokemon with a longer name. When I talked him through the idea of picking several and using pieces of their names, the result was still not very good.
Perhaps all of this is just a result of not caring as much, but I think there's more to it.
(BTW, some are undoubtedly wondering why I force my family to give me their passwords. I don't. In fact I harp at them all regularly about how they shouldn't ever tell me their password. They roll their eyes and just blurt it out when I ask them to type it so that I can fix something on their account. I also find out their password when they forget their old password and I have to reset it for them. I used to change it to "changeme", but then I found out that just meant that my kids, at least, always had "changeme" as their password. So they actually have better security if I make them come up with something and tell it to me so I can set it. It also gives me a chance to make them think about whether or not they can remember the new password so I don't end up having to reset it again tomorrow.)
My brother-in-law has an equally... er... effective strategy. He set his SSID to "broken" in hopes that people wouldn't see that and decide not to try to use it. He also has WPA2 with a reasonable password, though.
If your SSID is non-broadcast, and your laptop is set to automatically connect to it, your laptop does that by continually broadcasting your SSID whenever it's not connected. So you're actually broadcasting your SSID to more people and places than if you set your router to broadcast it. Luckily, the SSID really has no security value.
I'm guessing from your spelling choices that you're in the UK?
Based on your comment and various others, it appears to me that Google Maps data in the US is very good, which has led to relatively little interest in OSM, which has led to OSM data not being so great. In some other industrialized countries the reverse has been true. Since Google isn't very good, there's greater interest in OSM, which leads to OSM data being very good.
Actually, Google does generate a lot of its own map data. Google buys whatever data they can, but in many areas have paid to create it themselves where the available data wasn't of sufficiently high quality. For city areas, where Google wants to provide complete coverage of 3D building models, Google bought Sketchup and then incented people to create models in various ways, including just paying them. Now Google is shifting to automated means of generating 3D models from other data (I'm not sure how much I can say here, so I'm being vague) and so has sold Sketchup to Trimble. I wouldn't be surprised if the same automated techniques are increasingly used to generate more 2D data as well.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, in fact in the same office as the Sketchup guys were. I've sat in on tech talks given by some of the people working on map data, and the above constitutes the information I'm sure I can share without violating confidentiality. I suspect that much of what I'm holding back is public knowledge, but I have to err on the side of caution.)
Google Maps keeps chugging along, as long as I don't end navigation on my current route.
That's still retarded. It's like when you turn off the stereo it burns all your CDs.
Is there no way to permanently (at least until you make a positive decision to remove it) store the data locally?
Not along a route, but you can cache any number of 10 mile-side squares (up to storage limits -- and most phones have a lot of storage). Go into Settings, then Labs, then enable the pre-cache feature. Then long-tap on the centerpoint of the area you want to pre-cache. Tap the bubble that pops up, and then tap "pre-cache" at the bottom of the dialog. It'll take a minute to download that square, but then you'll have cached map data (map only; no satellite, etc.)
I live in an island which is 5km wide and 40km long. Cities and everything else is organized across the 40*1 km range. So the whole cache thing is useless for me.
Why is that? You cache two 10-mile (24 km) squares and you have your whole island cached. Plus a great deal of water, but ignore that.
I think he was including more than just mobile. The clue is that he contrasted Google's offering against "iOS and Mac". So the total market under consideration includes not just phones and tablets but also laptops and desktops. And, clearly, a solution that is available on essentially all platforms (including iOS and OSX) has an advantage over one that's tied to iOS and OSX. Of course, that presumes that Apple won't make their mapping solution available on non-Apple platforms. I don't know if they will or won't, but it's an implicit assumption which should be called out.
Any government that holds secret wars is extremely corrupt. That taxpayer pays for tinkering that almost always causes more trouble, giving the secret agencies more work and more demands on the taxpayers.
Yeah, damned the government for keeping the actual date and location of D-Day as a state secret </stupid>
Operational security in a declared war is completely different from a secret war.
I know there are all sorts of craziness for bills, but wouldn't something like a Git repository be ideal? that way, you can have the hash of the exact version of the bill your voting on, so the people know stuff wasn't 'slipped in' before it becomes law. Oh, wait, that is probably a 'feature'
I really need to get some time to work on it some more, but that was exactly the idea I had a few years ago when I set up github repositories to track the US Code and Utah Code.
Of course, the only data I had easy access to was the codified law, some time after it was passed and went into effect, so my repos only track changes at that point. But, yes, what would be perfect is a distributed version control system that tracks the changes. Each legislator, each committee, each house would have its own fork, as would special interest groups, etc., even individual citizens with ideas about how to improve the law. Everyone could hack on their copies, push and pull changes, etc., all tracked by version history, and with official versions merging changes at point of adoption.
Imagine being able to run "annotate" on the law to find out where each bit of it came from! Of course, true sources would still often be obscured.
My next step, BTW (should I ever get time to hack on it), is to build a web UI that allows easy navigation of the code. I need to switch to pulling the XML version of the US Code from Cornell, then create some XSLT filters to hide some of the extraneous stuff and convert the links into a functional form and some stylesheets to present the code nicely, and finally create a web interface that allows the changes to be navigated and summarized.
You don't even really need the GPG signatures. If someone edits a law for propaganda purposes, the original version should always be there for reference.
+1.
If there were a concern about partisans being able to break in and alter the version being distributed, that would be legitimate -- but GPG signatures would address it. Outside of that... it has always been possible for people to create fake versions of documents and try to pass them off as the real thing, and yet this doesn't appear to have been an issue for pending legislation in the past.
No.... I'm suggesting that the algorithm presented above, which only ever displays the single highest scoring design, is biased against designs that haven't yet had a chance to be viewed by anybody, and thus have not had an opportunity to get a positive response, when people are already showing some favor towards others.
What you're missing is the implied assumption that all of the options will fail most of the time, and that all options are initialized with maximum scores. The goal is to find the design that best motivates the user to take some action (e.g. click a link), and the assumption is that most of the time the user will not take that action. By starting all of the choices at a high value, they will all gradually converge downward to their true effectiveness rate, at which point the most effective will be chosen nearly all of the time. During the convergence process, the "leader" may change, but if the current leader isn't the true best, as it gets driven towards it's true rate, it will eventually dip under one of the others.
If, by chance, a more effective option has a really bad run early on and gets pushed below the true effectiveness rate of another option, it would never recover -- which is why the author includes an occasional randomly-selected choice. If there is a large difference between the effectiveness of the options this is really unlikely to happen, but in the rare event it happens the randomization will eventually fix it. The author also covers a method of handling the case where the audience preferences drift over time, by including the ability to "forget" old input via simple exponential decay.
The only really bad thing about this approach is that it assumes you don't have a lot of repeat visitors. If you do, they'll be annoyed by seeing different versions, apparently at random (from their perspective).
It's ok, look around, most of the people you work with are pricks, your boss is....so are the people at the gym, in the super-market, and everywhere. So am I, and so are you, most likely.
Fact is, most people are pricks. So what?
Right, because it's a boolean attribute. Frequency and degree aren't relevant.
Do you seriously believe that? There is absolutely no way the terrorists ever had even the remotest hope of overthrowing our government. Your statement is one of the most ludicrous I've ever read on this whole topic -- and mountains of idiocy have been spouted.
Slashdot Mirror
Encrypt everything.
You read into my comments things that aren't there, just as you over-extrapolate the meaning of sales figures.
Apple may be technically still in the minority, but at the end of every week, Apple's inventory has been entirely sold out.
That's a funny statement. The one part of the sentence has nothing to do with the other.
Only because your browser munges it.
What I would've loved is to set up a temporary Gmail password that was only valid for 1 week (in addition to my normal one) and use that while traveling.
Two-step authentication is a good option. It wouldn't do exactly what you want, because you'd need to keep using it after you got back (Internet cafe sniffers and the like would get your main password), but if you just turn it on and leave it on, it would keep you safe. On the computers you use regularly you can click the "remember verification" checkbox when you use it, so you'll only get prompted once per month for a one-time password, so in practice you don't have to do the second step very often -- except when using random machines while traveling.
For OTPs, there are multiple choices. The most convenient is a smartphone OTP app. If you don't have a smartphone, you can also have Google send you OTPs when you need them via SMS. For those times when you don't have service (e.g. international travel), carry a piece of paper in your wallet with a list of one-time passwords, crossing them off as you use them. If you get low on backup OTPs, use one to log in and then get some more.
Don't forget to thank a veteran.
Note: No I'm not criticizing the US military, or veterans. I'm a veteran. My point is that military forces do not provide "freedom", that must come from internal political and judicial processes, which must in turn arise from the desires and actions of the citizenry at large. Military forces just make it possible for us to do whatever we're going to do free of external coercion. What we choose to do, though, can go either way.
Sorry for the semi-OT post. It just struck a chord, in light of the recent holiday and the flurry of "thank a veteran" messages it always spawns.
Stories of wartime included the 30somethings diving into cover at every event. People 10-15 years younger mocked them.
But... 30-somethings are young'uns.
... the more likely it is that you actually have an identity worth stealing.
And the more likely it is that you'll have a wealth of background to draw on when coming up with obscure-but-memorable (to you) bits of information you can combine and tweak to make a good password. I definitely notice this when comparing passwords my wife chooses with passwords my kids choose. She uses bits of old but important dates, parts of names of people she knew decades ago, etc. and comes up with some pretty good ones. I can mostly recognize where she got the pieces but doubt I'd ever be able to guess her password if she didn't tell it to me.
My kids, on the other hand, tend to pick simple names of favorite entertainment characters. Even when I try to get them to pick something more complex, they just don't seem to have much else to draw on. When I pointed out not long ago that one son's choice of his favorite pokemon's name as a password wasn't very hard to guess, he proceeded to pick a another pokemon with a longer name. When I talked him through the idea of picking several and using pieces of their names, the result was still not very good.
Perhaps all of this is just a result of not caring as much, but I think there's more to it.
(BTW, some are undoubtedly wondering why I force my family to give me their passwords. I don't. In fact I harp at them all regularly about how they shouldn't ever tell me their password. They roll their eyes and just blurt it out when I ask them to type it so that I can fix something on their account. I also find out their password when they forget their old password and I have to reset it for them. I used to change it to "changeme", but then I found out that just meant that my kids, at least, always had "changeme" as their password. So they actually have better security if I make them come up with something and tell it to me so I can set it. It also gives me a chance to make them think about whether or not they can remember the new password so I don't end up having to reset it again tomorrow.)
in hopes that people wouldn't see that and decide not to try to use it
Er, s/wouldn't/would/
Hiding your SSID isn't a security feature.
Very true.
My brother-in-law has an equally... er... effective strategy. He set his SSID to "broken" in hopes that people wouldn't see that and decide not to try to use it. He also has WPA2 with a reasonable password, though.
If your SSID is non-broadcast, and your laptop is set to automatically connect to it, your laptop does that by continually broadcasting your SSID whenever it's not connected. So you're actually broadcasting your SSID to more people and places than if you set your router to broadcast it. Luckily, the SSID really has no security value.
You do know that IP != DNS, and that most of those parked domains don't consume an IP address, right?
Changing their address to google.google is a bit redundant.
But mapping http://google/ to their search engine would make a lot of sense.
I'm guessing from your spelling choices that you're in the UK?
Based on your comment and various others, it appears to me that Google Maps data in the US is very good, which has led to relatively little interest in OSM, which has led to OSM data not being so great. In some other industrialized countries the reverse has been true. Since Google isn't very good, there's greater interest in OSM, which leads to OSM data being very good.
Does that agree with your experience?
Actually, Google does generate a lot of its own map data. Google buys whatever data they can, but in many areas have paid to create it themselves where the available data wasn't of sufficiently high quality. For city areas, where Google wants to provide complete coverage of 3D building models, Google bought Sketchup and then incented people to create models in various ways, including just paying them. Now Google is shifting to automated means of generating 3D models from other data (I'm not sure how much I can say here, so I'm being vague) and so has sold Sketchup to Trimble. I wouldn't be surprised if the same automated techniques are increasingly used to generate more 2D data as well.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, in fact in the same office as the Sketchup guys were. I've sat in on tech talks given by some of the people working on map data, and the above constitutes the information I'm sure I can share without violating confidentiality. I suspect that much of what I'm holding back is public knowledge, but I have to err on the side of caution.)
Not along a route, but you can cache any number of 10 mile-side squares (up to storage limits -- and most phones have a lot of storage).
and for a maximum of 30 days, at which point anything you've cached silently expires and deletes itself (well, maps deletes it.)
Interesting. I discovered this feature less than 30 days ago, so I haven't seen that yet.
That's still retarded. It's like when you turn off the stereo it burns all your CDs.
Is there no way to permanently (at least until you make a positive decision to remove it) store the data locally?
Not along a route, but you can cache any number of 10 mile-side squares (up to storage limits -- and most phones have a lot of storage). Go into Settings, then Labs, then enable the pre-cache feature. Then long-tap on the centerpoint of the area you want to pre-cache. Tap the bubble that pops up, and then tap "pre-cache" at the bottom of the dialog. It'll take a minute to download that square, but then you'll have cached map data (map only; no satellite, etc.)
I live in an island which is 5km wide and 40km long. Cities and everything else is organized across the 40*1 km range. So the whole cache thing is useless for me.
Why is that? You cache two 10-mile (24 km) squares and you have your whole island cached. Plus a great deal of water, but ignore that.
I think he was including more than just mobile. The clue is that he contrasted Google's offering against "iOS and Mac". So the total market under consideration includes not just phones and tablets but also laptops and desktops. And, clearly, a solution that is available on essentially all platforms (including iOS and OSX) has an advantage over one that's tied to iOS and OSX. Of course, that presumes that Apple won't make their mapping solution available on non-Apple platforms. I don't know if they will or won't, but it's an implicit assumption which should be called out.
Any government that holds secret wars is extremely corrupt. That taxpayer pays for tinkering that almost always causes more trouble, giving the secret agencies more work and more demands on the taxpayers.
Yeah, damned the government for keeping the actual date and location of D-Day as a state secret </stupid>
Operational security in a declared war is completely different from a secret war.
I know there are all sorts of craziness for bills, but wouldn't something like a Git repository be ideal? that way, you can have the hash of the exact version of the bill your voting on, so the people know stuff wasn't 'slipped in' before it becomes law. Oh, wait, that is probably a 'feature'
I really need to get some time to work on it some more, but that was exactly the idea I had a few years ago when I set up github repositories to track the US Code and Utah Code.
Of course, the only data I had easy access to was the codified law, some time after it was passed and went into effect, so my repos only track changes at that point. But, yes, what would be perfect is a distributed version control system that tracks the changes. Each legislator, each committee, each house would have its own fork, as would special interest groups, etc., even individual citizens with ideas about how to improve the law. Everyone could hack on their copies, push and pull changes, etc., all tracked by version history, and with official versions merging changes at point of adoption.
Imagine being able to run "annotate" on the law to find out where each bit of it came from! Of course, true sources would still often be obscured.
My next step, BTW (should I ever get time to hack on it), is to build a web UI that allows easy navigation of the code. I need to switch to pulling the XML version of the US Code from Cornell, then create some XSLT filters to hide some of the extraneous stuff and convert the links into a functional form and some stylesheets to present the code nicely, and finally create a web interface that allows the changes to be navigated and summarized.
You don't even really need the GPG signatures. If someone edits a law for propaganda purposes, the original version should always be there for reference.
+1.
If there were a concern about partisans being able to break in and alter the version being distributed, that would be legitimate -- but GPG signatures would address it. Outside of that... it has always been possible for people to create fake versions of documents and try to pass them off as the real thing, and yet this doesn't appear to have been an issue for pending legislation in the past.
No.... I'm suggesting that the algorithm presented above, which only ever displays the single highest scoring design, is biased against designs that haven't yet had a chance to be viewed by anybody, and thus have not had an opportunity to get a positive response, when people are already showing some favor towards others.
What you're missing is the implied assumption that all of the options will fail most of the time, and that all options are initialized with maximum scores. The goal is to find the design that best motivates the user to take some action (e.g. click a link), and the assumption is that most of the time the user will not take that action. By starting all of the choices at a high value, they will all gradually converge downward to their true effectiveness rate, at which point the most effective will be chosen nearly all of the time. During the convergence process, the "leader" may change, but if the current leader isn't the true best, as it gets driven towards it's true rate, it will eventually dip under one of the others.
If, by chance, a more effective option has a really bad run early on and gets pushed below the true effectiveness rate of another option, it would never recover -- which is why the author includes an occasional randomly-selected choice. If there is a large difference between the effectiveness of the options this is really unlikely to happen, but in the rare event it happens the randomization will eventually fix it. The author also covers a method of handling the case where the audience preferences drift over time, by including the ability to "forget" old input via simple exponential decay.
The only really bad thing about this approach is that it assumes you don't have a lot of repeat visitors. If you do, they'll be annoyed by seeing different versions, apparently at random (from their perspective).
It's ok, look around, most of the people you work with are pricks, your boss is....so are the people at the gym, in the super-market, and everywhere. So am I, and so are you, most likely. Fact is, most people are pricks. So what?
Right, because it's a boolean attribute. Frequency and degree aren't relevant.
Without that we'd be an Islamic state by now
Do you seriously believe that? There is absolutely no way the terrorists ever had even the remotest hope of overthrowing our government. Your statement is one of the most ludicrous I've ever read on this whole topic -- and mountains of idiocy have been spouted.