And I heard that they were contemplating a seed registration program, though I can't seem to track that down right now.
With the invisible hand of the big agribusiness (Monsanto and the like), it may very well be illegal to propagate your own plants and animals in the future (or at least not without paying the fees to register your stock with The Man). From what I hear, Monsanto is actually buying up independent seed cleaners and shutting them down, so that farmers are forced to buy from the only large seed cleaner left: Monsanto with their illegal-to-save seeds. While the jury is still out on the safety of GMO foods, there is a thriving demand for non-GMO and hierloom varieties, and Monsanto is trying very hard to eliminate the suppliers of such.
Indeed. For grins, I fired up my copy of Frink (very cool program, btw), and punched in the following:
10 dollars_1981 -> dollars
23.83
10 dollars_1972 -> dollars
51.81
Note that Frogger came out in 1981 and Pong in 1972, at least according to Wikipedia. For a perspective of what things cost in 1972, check out this link. Interesting to ponder.
I assume this means XFS under Linux? I administered some large SGI boxes for several years, using XFS. Sadly enough, the data center they were housed in would occasionally go tits-up and all power would go down. Never once did I have any of these machines get hung on a reboot for fsck reasons, nor was any data loss ever reported. Is there some reason the version under Linux would be so comparatively fragile?
Any pointers to your benchmarking methods? By "perceptible" did you mean "measurable"? Not that I doubt your claims -- I'm just curious how to accurately measure such a small performance degradation.
I had the pleasure of working with AIX, and I, too, loved working with JFS. It's a really nice file system.
I'm tracking RELENG_7_1 at the moment (7.1-PRERELEASE). I actually jumped from RELENG_7_0 when I saw a post on some list from pjd saying that the ZFS v13 stuff had been committed. Needless to say I was disappointed. Are the new ZFS updated in 7-STABLE, or would I need to track HEAD to test that stuff?
I was a bit disappointed by the results, being a FreeBSD fan myself. However, in my quick scan of the article, I didn't see any mention of how they configured the OS. If they truly used the stock 7.1-BETA2 install, that would mean that debugging mode is enabled in the kernel (and maybe the userland, I'm not 100% sure here). Unless I've misunderstood FreeBSD's release methods over the years, they don't disable the debugging until either the RC builds or maybe even the final release tag.
Still, FreeBSD came out on top on 3 of the tests -- not bad for a beta release. I can't wait for 7.1, as using 7.0 on my desktop since its release has been great. I just hope the fully-virtualized IP stack within jails made it into 7.1, as well as a slightly more stable ZFS.
Alnico "cow magnets" are loads of fun. Not nearly as strong as the rare-earth kind (less prone to pinch), but much more durable (not brittle) and they're fun as hell to mess around with. I acquired a pair of these while in grade school (traded a cool pencil box for them) and had a blast with them... until I stuck them on the underside of something and forgot where they were.
I, too, was less than impressed with the online offerings a few short months ago. However, they're really ramping up the content these days. I assume it's to feed those "watch instantly" TV-boxes they're pushing now. You can't sell a movie device without current content. That said, there are new shows and movies popping up every day in the watch instantly section, many from 2007 and 2008. One of my gripes is that they have many later seasons of current shows, but don't have earlier seasons. I was eager to check out Numbers, but they don't have the first season few seasons. WTF?!?
At any rate, I wish there was a way to rip the DRM out of those movies. I already download the movies on my FreeBSD box -- my connection is too slow to watch the high-quality movies on-demand, so I batch-download movies/shows overnight and watch the next day. I wish I didn't need to copy them over the the family Windows PC in order to watch them. Even then, I hate not being able to watch them if the internet connection flakes out and I can't contact the DRM/license servers (happens -- crappy rural DSL). It's not like I'd pirate the damned movies -- if I wanted to do that, I'd queue up the physical DVD and rip them, menus and all (which I do anyways to speed up getting DVDs back into the mail). The DRM, as usual, inhibits convenient playback by a paying customer. Lame.
"No shit!" to that, my friend. There's being "on the safe side" and there's "OMG, *how* fucking dumb are the consumers today?!?". As evidence, I present 3 labels (paraphrased, as I'm too lazy to actually go read them verbatim) on foodstuffs in my home at present: 1) "WARNING: Contains milk" on a pound of butter; 2) "0g Trans Fat" on a bag of brown sugar; and 3) "WARNING: Contains peanuts" on a jar of peanut butter.
Sad.
Re:Did Bill Gates pay Shuttleworth to create Ubunt
on
Linux 2.6.27 Out
·
· Score: 1
Wait a sec. There are as many online forums for Windows products as there are for OSS products, if not more due to the ubiquity of Windows. Are you saying that Windows is too difficult?
My position is that the powerful have more to lose from a breakdown of privacy than the "private" citizen has to fear.
Unfortunately, the evidence thus far seems to contradict what you hope for.
The problem is, those with power have (wait for it...) power. They can act with blatant disregard of the law, but they still have strong influence over those who write, enforce, and interpret the laws. At the very least, they an afford the high cover charge for what passes for justice these days. Sure, we're thrown the occasional bone for the sake of political theater, but that's really all it is.
The current veep weathered the incident of shooting his buddy in the face far better than your typical run-of-the-mill hunter would have. There was a SLC city councilman who, maybe 10 years ago, ditched his car while soused and he got off with a wink and a nod. You think anyone posting/reading Slashdot would have survived the same child porn incident Pete Townshend did with their lives intact?
A transparent society wouldn't level the field, but would make the imbalance of power even worse. Evidence we currently have for the misdeeds of powerful people hardly makes a dent as it is. What makes anyone think that giving *them* more ammunition against the rest of us would accomplish?
As of late, I've had to start relying on the family XP machine, using DVD Decryptor, in order to rip many of the DVDs I encounter. Vobcopy is nice and all, but it doesn't seem to handle
the DVDs that are intentionally damaged w/ bad sectors to thwart ripping. Are there any other tools out there that will actually do a proper rip of modern protected DVDs under Unix?
As someone who's owned family milk cows, I say you're being a tad harsh. Our cows were not only personable, but exhibited downright devious behavior. They learn quickly. They'll follow verbal commands. They recognize specific people and respond to their preferences to those people. Granted, they were both Jersey cows, which have a reputation for being a bit more clever than the average Holstein (and I would assume the typical Angus or Hereford that I see being run around my neck of the Utah open range).
Sure, cows are big clumsy animals, both by nature and due to breeding. But they're certainly not totally devoid of presence and thought, as you seem to imply. I didn't just labor near these animals, but I hand milked them daily. People who have hand-milked animals like cows and goats know there is a bond formed between them and the animal. They know full well that they could kill you in an instant, yet they recognize the give-and-take relationship they're part of.
As for the stairs... cows have little to no depth perception. That's why you can paint cattle guards across a road and it'll be as effective as a real cattle guard. They're not dumb, but self-serving. You of all people should know this. Bovines are known to be more sure-footed than horses, which are skittish creatures bordering on neurotic. They simply won't put their feet down where they're uncertain of the consequences (except when they're in a panic). That's why oxen are preferred as beasts of burden over horses, at least in countries where people aren't too proud to have cattle perform such work.
Still, I think that this idea is rather dumb. People who range cattle here in the West aren't making a killing as it is, and devices like these solve a problem that doesn't exist, in a very expensive way. Cheap radio beacons for tracking down cattle that have been ranging in the wooded mountains for the summer? Maybe. Probably not. But remote controlling cattle is something only a foolish marketing drone would come up with.
We don't get broadcast programming of any kind, opting for Netflix. No ads. Been this way for around 8 years now. Kids are 10 and 13. Come holiday season, the kids aren't pestering for us for anything. In fact, it infuriates my folks, who attempt to dutifully perform their role as grandparents by buying my kids too much crap, because when they ask what the kids want, I literally have no wish list for them.
The broader result is that the kids have the ability to entertain themselves with minimal stuff for long periods of time -- they have quite active imaginations, and patience. Whether it's long car drives (no portable DVD players, thank-you-very-much) or sitting at the restaurant/store/office/etc. (no portable game consoles), they'll quietly hang out and not be pests like most of their peers. They talk, find amusement watching other misbehaving kids act like asshats, read a book/magazine, or actually converse with us. Never do we encounter a haggard parent of our kids' peers who doesn't go on and on about well-behaved our kids are. The reasons? No TV, and we are very willing to say "no" and stick with it.
Some years ago I overheard a parent talking to the checkout clerk at a local grocery store. She was going on about how tough times were, and how she could *only* afford $300 in Christmas spending per offspring that year and being despondent because her son wouldn't get the latest game console that year. I was saying to myself (in my head, of course), "WTF?!?" Excepting food, we don't spend $300 of both kids all damned *year* -- including clothing. When they *do* get gifts, it's something they genuinely desire, and they really appreciate the gift long after they get it.
No wonder most people my age are in financial trouble.
The problem with captchas is that there are only a few of them in comparison to the zillions of sites using them. So it's worth your while to crack the captchas that are found in, say, phpBB3 and its various 3rd party modules. Targeting these few systems will net you a large return in sites you can spam.
What if someone made a simple plug-in that allowed the site operator to put up a custom graphic of text, a text explanation of what to enter, then the input box. You can actually count on the bots being too smart for their own good. Put the answer to the captcha in plain view -- don't even obfuscate the text, but make it easy to ORC. Kinda like the "speak 'friend' and enter' riddle in LOTR. Put an image of nice, crisp sans serif font saying "This is a dummy captcha. Type FOO in the box below." The bot, at best (if it targets generic captchas) would enter all the text, whereas the human would only enter what it's told to enter.
This raises the bar from simple OCR brute force to something closer to AI. The text can be parsed out of the graphic, but the meaning would be hard for automation. In addition, a little bit of work by the admin for each site would amount to a huge amount for the spammers, since they'd essentially be faced with an almost unique problem for each site they want to tackle. Plus, if some bot targets your site (unlikely, for those of us running small traffic sites) and manages to start spamming, you simply change your custom graphic and text.
Sure, it won't help huge sites like Google and Yahoo, but it'll sure as hell help the little guy out. Decentralizing the exact method to generate the images would go a long way to increasing the workload on the bots/programmers.
Did you enable the optimized ATLAS libraries? Just curious. I installed R for a while, when I was trying to teach myself the basics of stats. This was under FreeBSD, and the ports configuration had an option for ATLAS libraries. Knowing it was overkill, I selected the option anyway (I worked for an HPC shop once, recognized ATLAS, so thought I may as well get the fastest possible install of R that I could), then regretted it after it became clear it was going to take 24+ hours for the ATLAS build to go through all of its trials.:) Still, all that work must amount to *something* (which must be why all those HPC scientists like ATLAS so much), so it may be worth a go if you haven't tried it already.
I see what you mean. With today's movies, it's always a gamble on whether you're throwing your money away seeing them. Take The Mummy 3 -- that's twenty bucks for the family of four and two hours of a Sunday afternoon I'll never recoup. I'd probably have lost more money that day and had more fun if I'd blown that coin in Wendover on the quarter slots.
Excellent idea! Good, paying customers *should* be forced to jump through extra hoops to get a quality gaming experience. If I wanted to piss away of my time fixing a problem that shouldn't exist to begin with, I'd just, you know, download the game -- crack and all -- to begin with.
I know of the original Gutmann paper, his follow-up debunking the "magical" 35-pass requirement, and then there was a dude who tried (unsuccessfully) to track Gutmann's original source material to see if any *real* data recovery had actually been done. This topic really interests me, and I've yet to find *any* evidence that data simply overwritten with zeros has *ever* been recovered (even partially) from modern hardware that even Gutmann himself feels is pretty immune to such techniques, given the density.
As illustrated in the old humorous "Physics Warning Lables" piece:
Advisory: There is an Extremely Small but Nonzero Chance That, Through a Process Known as 'Tunneling,'
This Product May Spontaneously Disappear from Its Present Location and Reappear at Any Random Place in the
Universe, Including Your Neighbors Domicile. The Manufacturer Will Not Be Responsible for Any Damages or
Inconvenience That May Result."
Likewise, it's *theoretically* possible that such low-level magnetic scanning voodoo could recover overwritten data, but real-world evidence thus far has been nil. As others have pointed out, if such equipment sensitivity were feasible, then that technology would have been used to increase HD data density. In addition, if such techniques were truly feasible, any company that could do it would have enormous fame and financial success.
It's a shame that this particular "challenge" was so piss-poorly implemented. Maybe James Randi should put up some cash for such data recovery, as it pretty much can be filed under the "paranormal" category.:)
This is somehow cutting edge enough to warrant a paper?
Please!
Hell, I've been using something similar. What I do is have a text file w/ all my internet accounts that require a unique password -- you know, like online banking, online retailers, etc. I've even started doing this for less critical places (like here). What I do is make an md5 hash of a reasonably unique and one-time data source: "ps waux | md5". Then I store than in my list of passwords, then cut-n-paste when needed. Some sites need the resulting hash string pared down to fit.
Sure, it's not as *obscured* as hashing some random file for the password each time, but such a list of passwords is much easier to store and keep around intact, upload to an email account for using anywhere (in encrypted form, of course -- yay! for FireGPG), and for using an actual password manager.
I guess this may be good for the average computer user, as they tend to use bad passwords to begin with. It may actually help the general case, even in spite of the inevitable loss or changes of the source media files.
But really, does this need a presentation at USENIX? I think we all know the answer to that.
There have been a number of presentations lately that have been silenced by private companies before a conference, either by injunction or under the table (I'm thinking of Apple here). How long before we see conference talks being titled as clearly as most software patents? "Some Group Discusses Some Weakness In Some Company's Software" Tuesday at Defcon. If this gets out of hand, I wouldn't be too surprised if we start seeing some subtle obfuscation of what the true nature of some talks are about.
In case you're too young to remember or never heard of it, KoH was an encrypting virus of sorts. I recall playing with in in college in the early 90s. Was a pretty cool concept.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't laugh, my friend.
The USDA is already trying to force a livestock registry and ID program on private individuals: http://animalid.aphis.usda.gov/nais/
And I heard that they were contemplating a seed registration program, though I can't seem to track that down right now.
With the invisible hand of the big agribusiness (Monsanto and the like), it may very well be illegal to propagate your own plants and animals in the future (or at least not without paying the fees to register your stock with The Man). From what I hear, Monsanto is actually buying up independent seed cleaners and shutting them down, so that farmers are forced to buy from the only large seed cleaner left: Monsanto with their illegal-to-save seeds. While the jury is still out on the safety of GMO foods, there is a thriving demand for non-GMO and hierloom varieties, and Monsanto is trying very hard to eliminate the suppliers of such.
Scary world.
10 dollars_1981 -> dollars
23.83
10 dollars_1972 -> dollars
51.81
Note that Frogger came out in 1981 and Pong in 1972, at least according to Wikipedia. For a perspective of what things cost in 1972, check out this link. Interesting to ponder.
I assume this means XFS under Linux? I administered some large SGI boxes for several years, using XFS. Sadly enough, the data center they were housed in would occasionally go tits-up and all power would go down. Never once did I have any of these machines get hung on a reboot for fsck reasons, nor was any data loss ever reported. Is there some reason the version under Linux would be so comparatively fragile?
Any pointers to your benchmarking methods? By "perceptible" did you mean "measurable"? Not that I doubt your claims -- I'm just curious how to accurately measure such a small performance degradation.
I had the pleasure of working with AIX, and I, too, loved working with JFS. It's a really nice file system.
I'm tracking RELENG_7_1 at the moment (7.1-PRERELEASE). I actually jumped from RELENG_7_0 when I saw a post on some list from pjd saying that the ZFS v13 stuff had been committed. Needless to say I was disappointed. Are the new ZFS updated in 7-STABLE, or would I need to track HEAD to test that stuff?
I was a bit disappointed by the results, being a FreeBSD fan myself. However, in my quick scan of the article, I didn't see any mention of how they configured the OS. If they truly used the stock 7.1-BETA2 install, that would mean that debugging mode is enabled in the kernel (and maybe the userland, I'm not 100% sure here). Unless I've misunderstood FreeBSD's release methods over the years, they don't disable the debugging until either the RC builds or maybe even the final release tag.
Still, FreeBSD came out on top on 3 of the tests -- not bad for a beta release. I can't wait for 7.1, as using 7.0 on my desktop since its release has been great. I just hope the fully-virtualized IP stack within jails made it into 7.1, as well as a slightly more stable ZFS.
Alnico "cow magnets" are loads of fun. Not nearly as strong as the rare-earth kind (less prone to pinch), but much more durable (not brittle) and they're fun as hell to mess around with. I acquired a pair of these while in grade school (traded a cool pencil box for them) and had a blast with them... until I stuck them on the underside of something and forgot where they were.
I, too, was less than impressed with the online offerings a few short months ago. However, they're really ramping up the content these days. I assume it's to feed those "watch instantly" TV-boxes they're pushing now. You can't sell a movie device without current content. That said, there are new shows and movies popping up every day in the watch instantly section, many from 2007 and 2008. One of my gripes is that they have many later seasons of current shows, but don't have earlier seasons. I was eager to check out Numbers, but they don't have the first season few seasons. WTF?!?
At any rate, I wish there was a way to rip the DRM out of those movies. I already download the movies on my FreeBSD box -- my connection is too slow to watch the high-quality movies on-demand, so I batch-download movies/shows overnight and watch the next day. I wish I didn't need to copy them over the the family Windows PC in order to watch them. Even then, I hate not being able to watch them if the internet connection flakes out and I can't contact the DRM/license servers (happens -- crappy rural DSL). It's not like I'd pirate the damned movies -- if I wanted to do that, I'd queue up the physical DVD and rip them, menus and all (which I do anyways to speed up getting DVDs back into the mail). The DRM, as usual, inhibits convenient playback by a paying customer. Lame.
You mean there's more than corn in Indiana?!?
Sad.
Wait a sec. There are as many online forums for Windows products as there are for OSS products, if not more due to the ubiquity of Windows. Are you saying that Windows is too difficult?
Unfortunately, the evidence thus far seems to contradict what you hope for.
The problem is, those with power have (wait for it...) power. They can act with blatant disregard of the law, but they still have strong influence over those who write, enforce, and interpret the laws. At the very least, they an afford the high cover charge for what passes for justice these days. Sure, we're thrown the occasional bone for the sake of political theater, but that's really all it is.
The current veep weathered the incident of shooting his buddy in the face far better than your typical run-of-the-mill hunter would have. There was a SLC city councilman who, maybe 10 years ago, ditched his car while soused and he got off with a wink and a nod. You think anyone posting/reading Slashdot would have survived the same child porn incident Pete Townshend did with their lives intact?
A transparent society wouldn't level the field, but would make the imbalance of power even worse. Evidence we currently have for the misdeeds of powerful people hardly makes a dent as it is. What makes anyone think that giving *them* more ammunition against the rest of us would accomplish?
As of late, I've had to start relying on the family XP machine, using DVD Decryptor, in order to rip many of the DVDs I encounter. Vobcopy is nice and all, but it doesn't seem to handle the DVDs that are intentionally damaged w/ bad sectors to thwart ripping. Are there any other tools out there that will actually do a proper rip of modern protected DVDs under Unix?
Sure, cows are big clumsy animals, both by nature and due to breeding. But they're certainly not totally devoid of presence and thought, as you seem to imply. I didn't just labor near these animals, but I hand milked them daily. People who have hand-milked animals like cows and goats know there is a bond formed between them and the animal. They know full well that they could kill you in an instant, yet they recognize the give-and-take relationship they're part of.
As for the stairs... cows have little to no depth perception. That's why you can paint cattle guards across a road and it'll be as effective as a real cattle guard. They're not dumb, but self-serving. You of all people should know this. Bovines are known to be more sure-footed than horses, which are skittish creatures bordering on neurotic. They simply won't put their feet down where they're uncertain of the consequences (except when they're in a panic). That's why oxen are preferred as beasts of burden over horses, at least in countries where people aren't too proud to have cattle perform such work.
Still, I think that this idea is rather dumb. People who range cattle here in the West aren't making a killing as it is, and devices like these solve a problem that doesn't exist, in a very expensive way. Cheap radio beacons for tracking down cattle that have been ranging in the wooded mountains for the summer? Maybe. Probably not. But remote controlling cattle is something only a foolish marketing drone would come up with.
We don't get broadcast programming of any kind, opting for Netflix. No ads. Been this way for around 8 years now. Kids are 10 and 13. Come holiday season, the kids aren't pestering for us for anything. In fact, it infuriates my folks, who attempt to dutifully perform their role as grandparents by buying my kids too much crap, because when they ask what the kids want, I literally have no wish list for them.
The broader result is that the kids have the ability to entertain themselves with minimal stuff for long periods of time -- they have quite active imaginations, and patience. Whether it's long car drives (no portable DVD players, thank-you-very-much) or sitting at the restaurant/store/office/etc. (no portable game consoles), they'll quietly hang out and not be pests like most of their peers. They talk, find amusement watching other misbehaving kids act like asshats, read a book/magazine, or actually converse with us. Never do we encounter a haggard parent of our kids' peers who doesn't go on and on about well-behaved our kids are. The reasons? No TV, and we are very willing to say "no" and stick with it.
Some years ago I overheard a parent talking to the checkout clerk at a local grocery store. She was going on about how tough times were, and how she could *only* afford $300 in Christmas spending per offspring that year and being despondent because her son wouldn't get the latest game console that year. I was saying to myself (in my head, of course), "WTF?!?" Excepting food, we don't spend $300 of both kids all damned *year* -- including clothing. When they *do* get gifts, it's something they genuinely desire, and they really appreciate the gift long after they get it.
No wonder most people my age are in financial trouble.
What if someone made a simple plug-in that allowed the site operator to put up a custom graphic of text, a text explanation of what to enter, then the input box. You can actually count on the bots being too smart for their own good. Put the answer to the captcha in plain view -- don't even obfuscate the text, but make it easy to ORC. Kinda like the "speak 'friend' and enter' riddle in LOTR. Put an image of nice, crisp sans serif font saying "This is a dummy captcha. Type FOO in the box below." The bot, at best (if it targets generic captchas) would enter all the text, whereas the human would only enter what it's told to enter.
This raises the bar from simple OCR brute force to something closer to AI. The text can be parsed out of the graphic, but the meaning would be hard for automation. In addition, a little bit of work by the admin for each site would amount to a huge amount for the spammers, since they'd essentially be faced with an almost unique problem for each site they want to tackle. Plus, if some bot targets your site (unlikely, for those of us running small traffic sites) and manages to start spamming, you simply change your custom graphic and text.
Sure, it won't help huge sites like Google and Yahoo, but it'll sure as hell help the little guy out. Decentralizing the exact method to generate the images would go a long way to increasing the workload on the bots/programmers.
Did you enable the optimized ATLAS libraries? Just curious. I installed R for a while, when I was trying to teach myself the basics of stats. This was under FreeBSD, and the ports configuration had an option for ATLAS libraries. Knowing it was overkill, I selected the option anyway (I worked for an HPC shop once, recognized ATLAS, so thought I may as well get the fastest possible install of R that I could), then regretted it after it became clear it was going to take 24+ hours for the ATLAS build to go through all of its trials. :) Still, all that work must amount to *something* (which must be why all those HPC scientists like ATLAS so much), so it may be worth a go if you haven't tried it already.
I see what you mean. With today's movies, it's always a gamble on whether you're throwing your money away seeing them. Take The Mummy 3 -- that's twenty bucks for the family of four and two hours of a Sunday afternoon I'll never recoup. I'd probably have lost more money that day and had more fun if I'd blown that coin in Wendover on the quarter slots.
So nice to see another Plastic reader here on Slashdot.
Did you take out the pews to make room for the garbage?
Excellent idea! Good, paying customers *should* be forced to jump through extra hoops to get a quality gaming experience. If I wanted to piss away of my time fixing a problem that shouldn't exist to begin with, I'd just, you know, download the game -- crack and all -- to begin with.
Is qemu not good enough?
I know of the original Gutmann paper, his follow-up debunking the "magical" 35-pass requirement, and then there was a dude who tried (unsuccessfully) to track Gutmann's original source material to see if any *real* data recovery had actually been done. This topic really interests me, and I've yet to find *any* evidence that data simply overwritten with zeros has *ever* been recovered (even partially) from modern hardware that even Gutmann himself feels is pretty immune to such techniques, given the density.
As illustrated in the old humorous "Physics Warning Lables" piece:
Advisory: There is an Extremely Small but Nonzero Chance That, Through a Process Known as 'Tunneling,' This Product May Spontaneously Disappear from Its Present Location and Reappear at Any Random Place in the Universe, Including Your Neighbors Domicile. The Manufacturer Will Not Be Responsible for Any Damages or Inconvenience That May Result."
Likewise, it's *theoretically* possible that such low-level magnetic scanning voodoo could recover overwritten data, but real-world evidence thus far has been nil. As others have pointed out, if such equipment sensitivity were feasible, then that technology would have been used to increase HD data density. In addition, if such techniques were truly feasible, any company that could do it would have enormous fame and financial success.
It's a shame that this particular "challenge" was so piss-poorly implemented. Maybe James Randi should put up some cash for such data recovery, as it pretty much can be filed under the "paranormal" category. :)
Please!
Hell, I've been using something similar. What I do is have a text file w/ all my internet accounts that require a unique password -- you know, like online banking, online retailers, etc. I've even started doing this for less critical places (like here). What I do is make an md5 hash of a reasonably unique and one-time data source: "ps waux | md5". Then I store than in my list of passwords, then cut-n-paste when needed. Some sites need the resulting hash string pared down to fit.
Sure, it's not as *obscured* as hashing some random file for the password each time, but such a list of passwords is much easier to store and keep around intact, upload to an email account for using anywhere (in encrypted form, of course -- yay! for FireGPG), and for using an actual password manager.
I guess this may be good for the average computer user, as they tend to use bad passwords to begin with. It may actually help the general case, even in spite of the inevitable loss or changes of the source media files.
But really, does this need a presentation at USENIX? I think we all know the answer to that.
Say it with me...
Please!
*nod* This forum pleases me.
(P.S. -- My theme song: "You're the First, the Last, My Everything".)
There have been a number of presentations lately that have been silenced by private companies before a conference, either by injunction or under the table (I'm thinking of Apple here). How long before we see conference talks being titled as clearly as most software patents? "Some Group Discusses Some Weakness In Some Company's Software" Tuesday at Defcon. If this gets out of hand, I wouldn't be too surprised if we start seeing some subtle obfuscation of what the true nature of some talks are about.
In case you're too young to remember or never heard of it, KoH was an encrypting virus of sorts. I recall playing with in in college in the early 90s. Was a pretty cool concept.