I guessed this when I first started using their service late last year. Your account "login" information is simply your real 10-digit phone number, and your "password" is just a 6-digit PIN. Everything you need to enter it is right there, on the numpad (with the exception of Tab). SMS spammers guess people's phone numbers and carriers to successfully send unwanted messages through e-mail; surely if they wanted to bad enough it wouldn't be too difficult to guess or do a brute-force attack on the six-digit string of digits protecting it.
Seriously, I was (and still am) shocked how such a poor system could be put into place in 2011/2012. They could at least set up two-factor authentication if they're going to have such a piss-poor username/password system, and require their primary authentication phone number to be another phone line so, you know... if the phone connected to the account is lost and/or stolen no one can get into your account before you do. And the secondary authenticator could optionally be the phone number of the account/phone in question to make personally logging into your account and checking your info easier--but as soon as the phone is labeled missing, it would be immediately be rendered useless for receiving any codes to log in. Virgin Mobile already nags you with text messages and e-mails constantly as your month of service comes to an end; sending an occasional text message with an account authentication code shouldn't hurt too badly.
Really though... the whole system needs rethought. At the very least, allow lowercase letters and more than six characters in the password. And while they're at it, why not allow capital letters and a few special characters? Of course, the problem then would be that when you call customer support, "verifying" that you're you wouldn't be as simple as asking "What's your phone number and your 6-digit account PIN?"
I just think it's funny that the guy who blogged about it had to write a script to brute-force his own account to "verify" that he was right, then finally call Sprint, and publicly write about it when they didn't do anything about it. Do you REALLY need to verify that a 6-digit PIN attached to a phone number is easily guessable? And as scummy as telecommunications companies are, does anyone really expect to get to someone who will actually forward the message over to someone else higher up who might potentially actually *do* something?
That's an... interesting prediction. Honestly, I think you might be onto something there. All I know is, Windows 8 ain't pretty. It's the next ME/Vista.
Well why the hell wouldn't it succeed? It was forced down new computer buyers' throats. The path of least resistance is to just say "fuck it" and live with what you've got, which undoubtedly is what happened with most people. Especially the vast majority of people who don't know Windows from the hole in their ass. Never mind the point that someone else mentioned, how Microsoft introduced "downgrade rights" to XP but still counted every single "Vista" computer sale as a sale for Vista, even if the purchaser "downgraded" to XP. It's all just a load of fucking bullshit.
Similarly, I have yet to hear a logical reason why Vista is better. Because in my opinion, Vista sucks--and Win7 managed to "fix" some of Vista's biggest pains in the ass, while bringing what are (again, in my opinion) some very welcome changes in the form of the new taskbar and Aero Peek/Shake/Snaps. And yes--dare I say it--even the ribbon in Microsoft Paint and WordPad. I'm not a fan and never really was a user of either Paint or WordPad, but I have to admit, I do like the ribbon interface and it can really work well with certain programs. It's nice in the office suite, but god damn it, leave it the hell out of my file manager... that is just one place the ribbon just doesn't belong.
I agree: I will never give up NoScript and Adblock Plus (or similar extensions). I think Do Not Track Plus and Ghostery have now made it to the point where I will no longer browse without them, either. DNT is a joke; its entire existence is a failure, because no one will ever be forced to abide by the user's wishes. Apache's move further cements the DNT header as a crock of shit. Still, I'll be sure that DNT is enabled at all times in all of the browsers that I use to get my point across; to leave me the fuck alone and get out of my god damn business. But I'll never get rid of my privacy extensions, and I'll never allow third-party cookies to be set.
So... who's going to patent this ~7,000-year-old technology? And better yet, what mummy's foot will be stepped on when it happens? Will the mummy come back to life and start going on a suing rampage like Apple?
I stopped letting my kids use my PC after I realized they could "break" it and prevent me from using it to earn a living. If you PC is used for anything other than recreation, I strongly recommend a dedicated PC.
You must run Windows. I've seen that OS practically "break" all on its own.
I predict 99% of the people who are going to reply below this line will have no idea what a 7-year-old is like.
Hey, I have first-hand experience--I WAS a 7-year-old at one time, you insensitive clod! I just... uh... can't remember what the hell it was like. Man, I'm getting old... I just remember I was heavily into video games and computers at a very young age. My uncle gave an Apple IIe to play around with and no one else in the house knew how to use it.
My estimate is closer to one or two percent. I say that because there will always be those dumbasses and advertising dickheads that just have to be different. But they're a minority; anyone in their right mind values their own privacy. I wonder if this Fielding asshole uses the DNT option himself.
I have used both Debian and Ubuntu as desktop operating systems. Ubuntu was better at a few things than Debian, but they were pretty close. Obviously Ubuntu had the most polish and fewer reasons to open up a terminal, but Debian is surprisingly good as a desktop. One major sore spot was trying to get the nVidia drivers installed; I got them installed fine in an older Debian release, but I have yet to do it in the current release (I just gave up).
This was all quite a while ago. Ubuntu is now a complete joke with Unity and all the bizarre changes they have made and are continuing to make. Debian is switching from GNOME to Xfce by default, with perfect timing because IMO GNOME 3 sucks (though that is not the reason the change was made). Meanwhile, I've been running CrunchBang, based on Debian, for a while now because I need all the memory I can got tired of swapping. SolusOS sounds good, but unfortunately even GNOME 2 is a bit too heavy for my situation (only 1GB memory, I typically have Firefox open with often 50 or more tabs, Geany open with several text files, between 1 and 3 file manager windows open, etc.).
Wrong [debian.org]. From the MANIFEST [debian.org]: "hd-media/boot.img.gz -- 1 gb image (compressed) for USB memory stick"
I think the far more common approaches to transferring Debian over to a USB thumb drive involves downloading a standard optical disc image (netinst, CD, DVD) and running it through a program such as isohybrid to process the image into a form that can be written directly to USB sticks, or using something like UNetBootin to copy its contents to a USB stick. In both of these cases, assuming you have a USB device with a capacity of at least a few gigabytes, it would make more sense to just write the DVD to it. Sure, Xfce will be selected by default--but given my experiences with GNOME 3, this is a major plus.
I should point out that I always download either the netinst CD or the DVD image and burn that to either a CD or DVD, obviously based on whichever image I choose, and I never write images to USB flash drives. I'm toyed around with the idea, but I always preferring the right tool for the right job. And in almost all cases, it's the trusty old CD-R or DVD-R. They're cheap, you can get a lot of them in a pack, they can double as coasters when you're done with them, and god damn it--I have a CD/DVD burner, so I'm gonna use it.
I prefer to use USB flash devices for what they're best at--full non-sequential read/write access on traditional file systems with potentially excellent cross-platform support (if you use a FAT file system). While they would work as an OS boot device, I find them inferior to CD-R/DVD-R in a few ways... including their rewritable nature. For example--after burning and finalizing a Linux, BSD, or general purpose boot disc, good luck accidentally burning over that disc and wiping what was on it. And have even more fun trying to find some virus or some other kind of malware that can replicate itself on your clean, read-only optical disc.
To me, the optical disc--both CD and DVD--is still a very important part of computers. I was glad to see the floppy disk finally die, but IMO the optical disc still has a lot of useful years ahead of it.
Defaults are important when it comes to new users.
So are you saying that if I download the USB image, it will default to Gnome? If not, then something has changed, hasn't it?
Now if they're new users to Debian as you suggested in the first part of your argument, then who's to say that they have previously used GNOME 2 in the current stable version of Debian? For that matter, who's to say that they actually came from Linux at all? They could be former Apple users just trying to keep an older machine up-to-date that Apple themselves refuse to provide continuing support, or a Windows user trying to bypass Metro for something a bit more familiar. Or maybe they're trying to escape Apple's ever-increasing sandbox model that they are beginning to slowly force upon their desktop users, which they are sneakily transferring from iOS to MacOS X. In this case, assuming we're talking about "new users" which you first started arguing about, then the switch in desktop environment to Xfce doesn't mean jack shit. Simple as that. Meanwhile, it's probably a blessing to all Debian users who can't stand GNOME 3--and I bet there's a hell of a lot of them.
Hey, wouldn't that be a Googolchrome? Or a Googlechrome?
Well, it won't take long at Google's and Mozilla's rate of excessive-to-the-point-of-pointless version bumping to get to such a version, so I guess we'll find out soon...
It's exactly that sort of arrogance that has caused gnome 3 to be dropped from distros(even Debian is replacing it as default).
You are right except for the Debian part. Debian is actually switching to Xfce because they want the complete desktop to fit on one CD. In other words, they want it to be possible to install Debian along with a fully-functional desktop environment by downloading only one CD-ROM image. To be fair though, in the announcement, they do acknowledge that many people just don't like GNOME 3, but the official, simple reason is that GNOME 3 is just too damn big and bloated. I would not be surprised if at least a few people said "I agree" while keeping their true reason--that GNOME 3 sucks--to themselves.
Once a dumbass idiot, always a dumbass idiot--whether there's a cell phone to add to the distraction or not. Sounds plausible to me. I never did think a cell phone was needed to crash a car, only a driver's own stupidity and/or inability to keep from getting distracted. The cell phone just gives all the morons bonus points, possibility increasing the risk of crashing any time it's out and being used.
I have a computer from ~2001 that I just recently decided to give up on. It came with Windows ME, which I didn't like from the start. Pentium 4 1.7GHz, 256MB RD-RAM. Not exactly weak for the time, and certainly no shitty Celeron (I would never get one--I have experience with someone else's). Windows ME fucking sucked... I can't put it any nicer than that. It was absolute shit. Heavy, bloated, unstable as hell... it literally ran laps around Windows 98SE and even Windows 95 in terms of bloat and the increased instability associated with it. I honestly wished the damn machine would have just come with Windows 98SE. It was just bad. Once XP came out, ME was nuked from orbit and I never looked back. I tend to forget about the OS until other people bring it up, usually remembering Win95 OSR2, Win98 and Win98SE when I think of "classic" Windows.
To be fair, Windows XP had quite a few problems of its own, especially at the beginning--but its stability was miles ahead of ME. It had just about as much extra bloat as ME, but even with the bloat it was much more stable. Like ME, it required hours of tweaking, installing programs, and configuring the programs after a new install, but once it was done it was much better. Unfortunately, every service pack bloated the OS and slowed it down further, but... well, that's Microsoft for you, take what is supposed to be a simple update to an OS, not a whole new release, and bloat it up more. I recall quite a few blue screens of death in XP (mostly related to actual driver problems, most memorable and persistent being one that started occurring with my network card driver when downloading torrents after installing one of the first service packs, and it wasn't corrected until the next SP) and other problems typical of Windows, but it was nothing like ME. ME would choke to death and cough up a blue screen every damn time one of its added bloat features farted--and with all the junk added, it happened all the time.
Seriously, did anyone out there really expect this *not* to happen?
A company follows up a product that works as expected with one that's totally different and in many ways inferior as a successor. Who would've guessed?
Yes. A few (but not all) of the Prince of Persia games were good. Then again, the couple that weren't good sucked dick. But... that's about it. I don't recall any other games they made that I liked, though there might have been one or two. And if they were so great themselves, I wouldn't have a hard time trying to remember them.
I can't be the only one who comprehended the title as some monster planet that somehow devoured a star and immediately said, "WTF? It has to be the other way around." And sure enough, it is meant to be the other way around.
Slashdot Mirror
Now I'm just waiting for a nuclear war. Anyone with me?
While I'm waiting, I think I'll go get a six-pack of craft beer.
I guessed this when I first started using their service late last year. Your account "login" information is simply your real 10-digit phone number, and your "password" is just a 6-digit PIN. Everything you need to enter it is right there, on the numpad (with the exception of Tab). SMS spammers guess people's phone numbers and carriers to successfully send unwanted messages through e-mail; surely if they wanted to bad enough it wouldn't be too difficult to guess or do a brute-force attack on the six-digit string of digits protecting it.
Seriously, I was (and still am) shocked how such a poor system could be put into place in 2011/2012. They could at least set up two-factor authentication if they're going to have such a piss-poor username/password system, and require their primary authentication phone number to be another phone line so, you know... if the phone connected to the account is lost and/or stolen no one can get into your account before you do. And the secondary authenticator could optionally be the phone number of the account/phone in question to make personally logging into your account and checking your info easier--but as soon as the phone is labeled missing, it would be immediately be rendered useless for receiving any codes to log in. Virgin Mobile already nags you with text messages and e-mails constantly as your month of service comes to an end; sending an occasional text message with an account authentication code shouldn't hurt too badly.
Really though... the whole system needs rethought. At the very least, allow lowercase letters and more than six characters in the password. And while they're at it, why not allow capital letters and a few special characters? Of course, the problem then would be that when you call customer support, "verifying" that you're you wouldn't be as simple as asking "What's your phone number and your 6-digit account PIN?"
I just think it's funny that the guy who blogged about it had to write a script to brute-force his own account to "verify" that he was right, then finally call Sprint, and publicly write about it when they didn't do anything about it. Do you REALLY need to verify that a 6-digit PIN attached to a phone number is easily guessable? And as scummy as telecommunications companies are, does anyone really expect to get to someone who will actually forward the message over to someone else higher up who might potentially actually *do* something?
That's an... interesting prediction. Honestly, I think you might be onto something there. All I know is, Windows 8 ain't pretty. It's the next ME/Vista.
Well why the hell wouldn't it succeed? It was forced down new computer buyers' throats. The path of least resistance is to just say "fuck it" and live with what you've got, which undoubtedly is what happened with most people. Especially the vast majority of people who don't know Windows from the hole in their ass. Never mind the point that someone else mentioned, how Microsoft introduced "downgrade rights" to XP but still counted every single "Vista" computer sale as a sale for Vista, even if the purchaser "downgraded" to XP. It's all just a load of fucking bullshit.
Similarly, I have yet to hear a logical reason why Vista is better. Because in my opinion, Vista sucks--and Win7 managed to "fix" some of Vista's biggest pains in the ass, while bringing what are (again, in my opinion) some very welcome changes in the form of the new taskbar and Aero Peek/Shake/Snaps. And yes--dare I say it--even the ribbon in Microsoft Paint and WordPad. I'm not a fan and never really was a user of either Paint or WordPad, but I have to admit, I do like the ribbon interface and it can really work well with certain programs. It's nice in the office suite, but god damn it, leave it the hell out of my file manager... that is just one place the ribbon just doesn't belong.
I agree: I will never give up NoScript and Adblock Plus (or similar extensions). I think Do Not Track Plus and Ghostery have now made it to the point where I will no longer browse without them, either. DNT is a joke; its entire existence is a failure, because no one will ever be forced to abide by the user's wishes. Apache's move further cements the DNT header as a crock of shit. Still, I'll be sure that DNT is enabled at all times in all of the browsers that I use to get my point across; to leave me the fuck alone and get out of my god damn business. But I'll never get rid of my privacy extensions, and I'll never allow third-party cookies to be set.
So... who's going to patent this ~7,000-year-old technology? And better yet, what mummy's foot will be stepped on when it happens? Will the mummy come back to life and start going on a suing rampage like Apple?
I stopped letting my kids use my PC after I realized they could "break" it and prevent me from using it to earn a living. If you PC is used for anything other than recreation, I strongly recommend a dedicated PC.
You must run Windows. I've seen that OS practically "break" all on its own.
I predict 99% of the people who are going to reply below this line will have no idea what a 7-year-old is like.
Hey, I have first-hand experience--I WAS a 7-year-old at one time, you insensitive clod! I just... uh... can't remember what the hell it was like. Man, I'm getting old... I just remember I was heavily into video games and computers at a very young age. My uncle gave an Apple IIe to play around with and no one else in the house knew how to use it.
My estimate is closer to one or two percent. I say that because there will always be those dumbasses and advertising dickheads that just have to be different. But they're a minority; anyone in their right mind values their own privacy. I wonder if this Fielding asshole uses the DNT option himself.
Some verifiable facts, examples and explanations, or you're full of shit.
I have used both Debian and Ubuntu as desktop operating systems. Ubuntu was better at a few things than Debian, but they were pretty close. Obviously Ubuntu had the most polish and fewer reasons to open up a terminal, but Debian is surprisingly good as a desktop. One major sore spot was trying to get the nVidia drivers installed; I got them installed fine in an older Debian release, but I have yet to do it in the current release (I just gave up).
This was all quite a while ago. Ubuntu is now a complete joke with Unity and all the bizarre changes they have made and are continuing to make. Debian is switching from GNOME to Xfce by default, with perfect timing because IMO GNOME 3 sucks (though that is not the reason the change was made). Meanwhile, I've been running CrunchBang, based on Debian, for a while now because I need all the memory I can got tired of swapping. SolusOS sounds good, but unfortunately even GNOME 2 is a bit too heavy for my situation (only 1GB memory, I typically have Firefox open with often 50 or more tabs, Geany open with several text files, between 1 and 3 file manager windows open, etc.).
Wrong [debian.org]. From the MANIFEST [debian.org]: "hd-media/boot.img.gz -- 1 gb image (compressed) for USB memory stick"
I think the far more common approaches to transferring Debian over to a USB thumb drive involves downloading a standard optical disc image (netinst, CD, DVD) and running it through a program such as isohybrid to process the image into a form that can be written directly to USB sticks, or using something like UNetBootin to copy its contents to a USB stick. In both of these cases, assuming you have a USB device with a capacity of at least a few gigabytes, it would make more sense to just write the DVD to it. Sure, Xfce will be selected by default--but given my experiences with GNOME 3, this is a major plus.
I should point out that I always download either the netinst CD or the DVD image and burn that to either a CD or DVD, obviously based on whichever image I choose, and I never write images to USB flash drives. I'm toyed around with the idea, but I always preferring the right tool for the right job. And in almost all cases, it's the trusty old CD-R or DVD-R. They're cheap, you can get a lot of them in a pack, they can double as coasters when you're done with them, and god damn it--I have a CD/DVD burner, so I'm gonna use it.
I prefer to use USB flash devices for what they're best at--full non-sequential read/write access on traditional file systems with potentially excellent cross-platform support (if you use a FAT file system). While they would work as an OS boot device, I find them inferior to CD-R/DVD-R in a few ways... including their rewritable nature. For example--after burning and finalizing a Linux, BSD, or general purpose boot disc, good luck accidentally burning over that disc and wiping what was on it. And have even more fun trying to find some virus or some other kind of malware that can replicate itself on your clean, read-only optical disc.
To me, the optical disc--both CD and DVD--is still a very important part of computers. I was glad to see the floppy disk finally die, but IMO the optical disc still has a lot of useful years ahead of it.
Defaults are important when it comes to new users.
So are you saying that if I download the USB image, it will default to Gnome? If not, then something has changed, hasn't it?
Now if they're new users to Debian as you suggested in the first part of your argument, then who's to say that they have previously used GNOME 2 in the current stable version of Debian? For that matter, who's to say that they actually came from Linux at all? They could be former Apple users just trying to keep an older machine up-to-date that Apple themselves refuse to provide continuing support, or a Windows user trying to bypass Metro for something a bit more familiar. Or maybe they're trying to escape Apple's ever-increasing sandbox model that they are beginning to slowly force upon their desktop users, which they are sneakily transferring from iOS to MacOS X. In this case, assuming we're talking about "new users" which you first started arguing about, then the switch in desktop environment to Xfce doesn't mean jack shit. Simple as that. Meanwhile, it's probably a blessing to all Debian users who can't stand GNOME 3--and I bet there's a hell of a lot of them.
Wait--please don't tell me the moron actually believes this shit.
Hey, wouldn't that be a Googolchrome? Or a Googlechrome?
Well, it won't take long at Google's and Mozilla's rate of excessive-to-the-point-of-pointless version bumping to get to such a version, so I guess we'll find out soon...
It's exactly that sort of arrogance that has caused gnome 3 to be dropped from distros(even Debian is replacing it as default).
You are right except for the Debian part. Debian is actually switching to Xfce because they want the complete desktop to fit on one CD. In other words, they want it to be possible to install Debian along with a fully-functional desktop environment by downloading only one CD-ROM image. To be fair though, in the announcement, they do acknowledge that many people just don't like GNOME 3, but the official, simple reason is that GNOME 3 is just too damn big and bloated. I would not be surprised if at least a few people said "I agree" while keeping their true reason--that GNOME 3 sucks--to themselves.
Once a dumbass idiot, always a dumbass idiot--whether there's a cell phone to add to the distraction or not. Sounds plausible to me. I never did think a cell phone was needed to crash a car, only a driver's own stupidity and/or inability to keep from getting distracted. The cell phone just gives all the morons bonus points, possibility increasing the risk of crashing any time it's out and being used.
I have a computer from ~2001 that I just recently decided to give up on. It came with Windows ME, which I didn't like from the start. Pentium 4 1.7GHz, 256MB RD-RAM. Not exactly weak for the time, and certainly no shitty Celeron (I would never get one--I have experience with someone else's). Windows ME fucking sucked... I can't put it any nicer than that. It was absolute shit. Heavy, bloated, unstable as hell... it literally ran laps around Windows 98SE and even Windows 95 in terms of bloat and the increased instability associated with it. I honestly wished the damn machine would have just come with Windows 98SE. It was just bad. Once XP came out, ME was nuked from orbit and I never looked back. I tend to forget about the OS until other people bring it up, usually remembering Win95 OSR2, Win98 and Win98SE when I think of "classic" Windows.
To be fair, Windows XP had quite a few problems of its own, especially at the beginning--but its stability was miles ahead of ME. It had just about as much extra bloat as ME, but even with the bloat it was much more stable. Like ME, it required hours of tweaking, installing programs, and configuring the programs after a new install, but once it was done it was much better. Unfortunately, every service pack bloated the OS and slowed it down further, but... well, that's Microsoft for you, take what is supposed to be a simple update to an OS, not a whole new release, and bloat it up more. I recall quite a few blue screens of death in XP (mostly related to actual driver problems, most memorable and persistent being one that started occurring with my network card driver when downloading torrents after installing one of the first service packs, and it wasn't corrected until the next SP) and other problems typical of Windows, but it was nothing like ME. ME would choke to death and cough up a blue screen every damn time one of its added bloat features farted--and with all the junk added, it happened all the time.
Seriously, did anyone out there really expect this *not* to happen?
A company follows up a product that works as expected with one that's totally different and in many ways inferior as a successor. Who would've guessed?
Yes. A few (but not all) of the Prince of Persia games were good. Then again, the couple that weren't good sucked dick. But... that's about it. I don't recall any other games they made that I liked, though there might have been one or two. And if they were so great themselves, I wouldn't have a hard time trying to remember them.
I can't be the only one who comprehended the title as some monster planet that somehow devoured a star and immediately said, "WTF? It has to be the other way around." And sure enough, it is meant to be the other way around.
They must be as valuable as yesterday's diarrhea then.
I would prefer to see the worthless government organization completely dissolved. Firing the whole group just to hire more lunatics wouldn't do shit.
If you were a straight chick who wanted to get pregnant, then yes--the balls most definitely do matter.