I think the laptop makers shouldn't have the security software depend upon this single metric.
But it would still be good to have a system whereby this is just one metric among many to help keep something secure.
Having more hurdles, even "easy to bypass" ones, helps increase the overall security, by making it just that much harder to get through. As long as it doesn't make it that much harder to use for the legitimate user (and thus make it more likely to not be used), it's good to have the option of using this.
Of course, if someone *really* wants to get your data, that will be difficult to prevent.
"One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them."
Hmm, I see some parallels with the RROD: -RROD has overriding control of console. -RROD causes console owner to contact maker. -RROD causes console owner to return console to maker. -RROD causes dark screens.
You've taken at least some of these quotes out of their proper context, when in fact they don't necessarily support your claim.
The fact is that the efficiency of mass transit depends greatly upon ridership. If people don't ride the train (like in San Jose), then the train is inefficient. But if people do ride the train, then the train can be much more efficient than the solo car.
When gas goes over $5/gallon again, people will ride the train.
I'm guessing that knapper_tech must live in a big city. The reason (in my uninformed opinion) that rails won't work for most of America is that there is too much space, things are too spread out, there are not enough "areas of concentration" to link together in any practical way, and that, in general, America is designed around the idea that everyone has a car. In addition, most places don't really seem to have much of a planning department; rather, development planning seems mostly left to (self-interested) developers, who generally care little for solving area-wide problems.
I think the solution to this problem (of reworking transportation away from inefficient personal cars) will have to be more forward-looking rather than coming from previous centuries. Perhaps cars may evolve into self-driven vehicles that can link themselves together into small "trains" (without rails, on mostly-normal roads).
Sure, it is difficult to think of a solution that isn't super-complex and therefore having lots of potential robustness issues. Engineering safeguards for all the potential kinks people can throw into a system is really difficult. But perhaps these problems may be more easily solved than trying to rework the whole country around a different transportation paradigm.
Than again, maybe I'm full of it. Perhaps "if you build it, they will come". Maybe rails will work in some areas if the existing transportation options are sucky enough (which may happen the next time gas prices spike).
Just some random thoughts from a flu-infected human.
Well, there is the command "repeat" (C-x z), but this tends to be less useful in emacs since you often want to repeat a sequence of commands rather than a single action.
For repeating the sequence, there's keyboard macros. Use c-x ( to start recording the sequence, type the sequence, the use c-x ) to finish recording. Use c-x e (or just F4) to call the macro.
You can edit the macro, save it, bind it to a key, and do all kinds of other stuff like that, too. Just type m-x apr (ret) macro (ret) to see the list of macro-related functions (click on any name for more details).
Using keyboard macros in combination with search can lead to some very powerful editing. You could write a turing machine using this mechanism. I've used macros to do some massive reformatting of files, such as reordering lines and fields within lines.
A useful trick for doing this is to: 1) Put the cursor at the destination. 2) Type a mark (a unique sequence of characters). 3) Search for the desired text. 4) Mark & cut the text. 5) Reverse search for the mark. 6) Paste the text. Edit as necessary. 7) Make sure the mark is in the right place for the next iteration.
Then I'll just type ctrl-u several times and ctrl-x e to execute the command many times over. It runs until the search fails (or stops because I didn't do enough repeats).
I imagine that you could get "low-level" access to the analog bits on the drive by just tapping into the analog data lines coming from the read/write heads (at the point where they attach to the circuit board on the outside).
This of course assumes that the A/D conversion happens on the outside circuit board, and not inside the sealed part of the drive.
Once you get such access, you could use a more sensitive A/D converter to try & make something from the data.
Like other posters have noted, though, data is encoded onto drives in a self-clocking manner that requires the absence of long series of 1's or 0's. So even though all 0's were written, the encoded bits are still a combination of 1's & 0's. Combined with the fact that drives use PRML (partial response, maximum likelihood), this makes data recovery VERY difficult, since even reading the data that was intended to be written is already quite difficult.
In an emergency, it's often good to have mobility. So rather than ditching the cordless phone, it's probably a good idea to make sure it can continue to work if the AC goes out.
But I agree that it's good to have a corded backup for when your batteries fail.
Perhaps one of us has missed the point. The article says that Google had started out with good daycare that people could afford. Then they changed that to the very best daycare that money could buy, at prices that only the very rich could afford. The good daycare was no longer an option, but probably most people still wanted that option.
When a company stops considering what the common employee wants and only considers what the richest executives want, then you might also wonder how long they will remain in touch with what their common customer wants.
Don't we have this now? The standard plug (in the US) has 2 flat blades and an optional round pin. The standard socket has matching rectangular and round holes. I see them everywhere, usually in pairs! Talk about convenience!
Well, I have rented apartments many times, but I have to admit I don't follow my own advice either. I've usually just solved problems myself without asking for help or permission.
I this case, it may be advisable to not say "I'd like to put an antenna on the roof," but rather to show a small example antenna and say you want to find an inconspicuous place to mount it high up. The reason is that when you say "antenna", most people think of something big (your typical VHF antenna), whereas a UHF antenna is actually quite small by comparison.
Or, like another poster said, just go ahead and do it yourself, but be very neat and inconspicuous about it. If it looks done professionally, perhaps it will go unnoticed.
At Tenn. Tech. Univ., many years ago, our on-campus computer club had use of a top-floor classroom. We went up to the roof and nailed up a small VHF antenna for our own use. It actually stayed there for a couple years until the whole building was re-roofed. Only too bad that there was nothing to watch at the time.
Talk to the apartment management. They may either have something already set up (antenna on the roof already), or else they might actually be willing to help you solve your problem if you can do it in a way that benefits the building as a whole. Perhaps other tenants may want good reception as well, and they can help make your case.
Never just assume that management will always get in your way. You'll make a lot of barriers for yourself that way.
You are missing the point a little bit. The locks in question are not ordinary locks. They are very expensive, high-security locks, like you might find in a secure government installation. The keys are not cut in an ordinary way; the ridges have different angles on them in order to turn the pins to the left or right as they are raised to the correct height. The company in question is saying that this kind of bypass is not possible. And guess what? It is.
It just goes to show: you should never completely trust a security system that has only been "designed" to be secure. You should only trust it after lots of intelligent hackers have failed to crack it over time.
It looks like they scheduled it in stages (city to city) over 9 days. I'm sure that they had all teams complete the stage each day before starting the next stage. They probably gave themselves plenty of time to deal with cars that broke down and what not.
I'd guess if Nintendo came out with a mind-reading accessory, people would still whine "Why didn't this come with the Wii at launch?"
More than likely, the new add-on incorporates gyroscopes. A gyroscope is an order of magnitude more complex than an accelerometer. This means that they are expensive and hard to make. It is probably not easy to find anyone who can make you a million of them every month now, and it was likely impossible to source these a couple of years ago.
If Nintendo had waited for this to mature before launching the Wii, then the Wii would maybe be ready for launch this coming November.
I was just thinking the exact same thing. The crackers are pouring lots of effort into solving hard problems. Why not pose problems that need to be solved instead of useless ones?
Okay New Yorkers, it's time to talk to your governor, your state senators, and your congressmen and let them know what you want, or don't want.
Did you ask to be taxed more? No? Well, your politicians seem to be confused. Please set them straight.
Remember, they are supposed to represent you. It's not as if the government should do whatever it wants to do and you have no say in the situation. It's only that way when you keep quiet.
Actually, white text on a blue background is a very good combination to use.
If you think about it a bit, it makes sense. Your eyes are very sensitive to green & red, so you can imagine yellow (green+red) on a black background is a good combination, as others indeed note.
Your eyes are not as sensitive to blue, so it doesn't hurt to add blue to both the background and the text, resulting in white (R+G+B) text on a blue background. Your eyes are still picking up on the same green+red vs. no green+red contrast. And in fact, the blue background actually helps drown out screen reflections (vs. a black background).
Slashdot Mirror
I think the laptop makers shouldn't have the security software depend upon this single metric.
But it would still be good to have a system whereby this is just one metric among many to help keep something secure.
Having more hurdles, even "easy to bypass" ones, helps increase the overall security, by making it just that much harder to get through. As long as it doesn't make it that much harder to use for the legitimate user (and thus make it more likely to not be used), it's good to have the option of using this.
Of course, if someone *really* wants to get your data, that will be difficult to prevent.
"One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them."
Hmm, I see some parallels with the RROD:
-RROD has overriding control of console.
-RROD causes console owner to contact maker.
-RROD causes console owner to return console to maker.
-RROD causes dark screens.
Maybe MS is on to something here...
You've taken at least some of these quotes out of their proper context, when in fact they don't necessarily support your claim.
The fact is that the efficiency of mass transit depends greatly upon ridership. If people don't ride the train (like in San Jose), then the train is inefficient. But if people do ride the train, then the train can be much more efficient than the solo car.
When gas goes over $5/gallon again, people will ride the train.
I'm guessing that knapper_tech must live in a big city. The reason (in my uninformed opinion) that rails won't work for most of America is that there is too much space, things are too spread out, there are not enough "areas of concentration" to link together in any practical way, and that, in general, America is designed around the idea that everyone has a car. In addition, most places don't really seem to have much of a planning department; rather, development planning seems mostly left to (self-interested) developers, who generally care little for solving area-wide problems.
I think the solution to this problem (of reworking transportation away from inefficient personal cars) will have to be more forward-looking rather than coming from previous centuries. Perhaps cars may evolve into self-driven vehicles that can link themselves together into small "trains" (without rails, on mostly-normal roads).
Sure, it is difficult to think of a solution that isn't super-complex and therefore having lots of potential robustness issues. Engineering safeguards for all the potential kinks people can throw into a system is really difficult. But perhaps these problems may be more easily solved than trying to rework the whole country around a different transportation paradigm.
Than again, maybe I'm full of it. Perhaps "if you build it, they will come". Maybe rails will work in some areas if the existing transportation options are sucky enough (which may happen the next time gas prices spike).
Just some random thoughts from a flu-infected human.
My company offers a small "discount" on the health plan for non-smokers (yes, it's really a tax for smokers).
I thought this story would be about a company using dogs to sniff out people who said they are non-smokers but still smoke.
Well, there is the command "repeat" (C-x z), but this tends to be less useful in emacs since you often want to repeat a sequence of commands rather than a single action.
For repeating the sequence, there's keyboard macros. Use c-x ( to start recording the sequence, type the sequence, the use c-x ) to finish recording. Use c-x e (or just F4) to call the macro.
You can edit the macro, save it, bind it to a key, and do all kinds of other stuff like that, too. Just type m-x apr (ret) macro (ret) to see the list of macro-related functions (click on any name for more details).
Using keyboard macros in combination with search can lead to some very powerful editing. You could write a turing machine using this mechanism. I've used macros to do some massive reformatting of files, such as reordering lines and fields within lines.
A useful trick for doing this is to:
1) Put the cursor at the destination.
2) Type a mark (a unique sequence of characters).
3) Search for the desired text.
4) Mark & cut the text.
5) Reverse search for the mark.
6) Paste the text. Edit as necessary.
7) Make sure the mark is in the right place for the next iteration.
Then I'll just type ctrl-u several times and ctrl-x e to execute the command many times over. It runs until the search fails (or stops because I didn't do enough repeats).
I imagine that you could get "low-level" access to the analog bits on the drive by just tapping into the analog data lines coming from the read/write heads (at the point where they attach to the circuit board on the outside).
This of course assumes that the A/D conversion happens on the outside circuit board, and not inside the sealed part of the drive.
Once you get such access, you could use a more sensitive A/D converter to try & make something from the data.
Like other posters have noted, though, data is encoded onto drives in a self-clocking manner that requires the absence of long series of 1's or 0's. So even though all 0's were written, the encoded bits are still a combination of 1's & 0's. Combined with the fact that drives use PRML (partial response, maximum likelihood), this makes data recovery VERY difficult, since even reading the data that was intended to be written is already quite difficult.
Soon? Like 8 years ago soon, if not more?
In an emergency, it's often good to have mobility. So rather than ditching the cordless phone, it's probably a good idea to make sure it can continue to work if the AC goes out.
But I agree that it's good to have a corded backup for when your batteries fail.
Perhaps one of us has missed the point. The article says that Google had started out with good daycare that people could afford. Then they changed that to the very best daycare that money could buy, at prices that only the very rich could afford. The good daycare was no longer an option, but probably most people still wanted that option.
When a company stops considering what the common employee wants and only considers what the richest executives want, then you might also wonder how long they will remain in touch with what their common customer wants.
Don't we have this now? The standard plug (in the US) has 2 flat blades and an optional round pin. The standard socket has matching rectangular and round holes. I see them everywhere, usually in pairs! Talk about convenience!
"Tomb Raider: Legend" already incorporated it as part of the game's story.
Well, I have rented apartments many times, but I have to admit I don't follow my own advice either. I've usually just solved problems myself without asking for help or permission.
I this case, it may be advisable to not say "I'd like to put an antenna on the roof," but rather to show a small example antenna and say you want to find an inconspicuous place to mount it high up. The reason is that when you say "antenna", most people think of something big (your typical VHF antenna), whereas a UHF antenna is actually quite small by comparison.
Or, like another poster said, just go ahead and do it yourself, but be very neat and inconspicuous about it. If it looks done professionally, perhaps it will go unnoticed.
At Tenn. Tech. Univ., many years ago, our on-campus computer club had use of a top-floor classroom. We went up to the roof and nailed up a small VHF antenna for our own use. It actually stayed there for a couple years until the whole building was re-roofed. Only too bad that there was nothing to watch at the time.
Talk to the apartment management. They may either have something already set up (antenna on the roof already), or else they might actually be willing to help you solve your problem if you can do it in a way that benefits the building as a whole. Perhaps other tenants may want good reception as well, and they can help make your case.
Never just assume that management will always get in your way. You'll make a lot of barriers for yourself that way.
They just need to genetically modify the produce to grow its own RFID tags!
You are missing the point a little bit. The locks in question are not ordinary locks. They are very expensive, high-security locks, like you might find in a secure government installation. The keys are not cut in an ordinary way; the ridges have different angles on them in order to turn the pins to the left or right as they are raised to the correct height. The company in question is saying that this kind of bypass is not possible. And guess what? It is.
It just goes to show: you should never completely trust a security system that has only been "designed" to be secure. You should only trust it after lots of intelligent hackers have failed to crack it over time.
Sorry, but this race is not like Lemans.
It looks like they scheduled it in stages (city to city) over 9 days. I'm sure that they had all teams complete the stage each day before starting the next stage. They probably gave themselves plenty of time to deal with cars that broke down and what not.
AKA, use it as a light sharpener:
http://www.cockeyed.com/incredible/solardish/dish01.shtml
I'd guess if Nintendo came out with a mind-reading accessory, people would still whine "Why didn't this come with the Wii at launch?"
More than likely, the new add-on incorporates gyroscopes. A gyroscope is an order of magnitude more complex than an accelerometer. This means that they are expensive and hard to make. It is probably not easy to find anyone who can make you a million of them every month now, and it was likely impossible to source these a couple of years ago.
If Nintendo had waited for this to mature before launching the Wii, then the Wii would maybe be ready for launch this coming November.
No, what we need isn't more efficient cars.
What we need are cities designed around mass transit, or better yet, a pedestrian lifestyle.
Think outside the box.
In the future, cars may serve the same role that horses do now.
The actual circuity is fine up to about 300 degrees or so (solder temperature).
More likely, you just didn't wait for them to dry long enough. Perhaps take them out and try again if it's been a while.
I was just thinking the exact same thing. The crackers are pouring lots of effort into solving hard problems. Why not pose problems that need to be solved instead of useless ones?
If people make enough noise such that the politicians wonder about having a job after the next election, then they will pay attention.
Okay New Yorkers, it's time to talk to your governor, your state senators, and your congressmen and let them know what you want, or don't want.
Did you ask to be taxed more? No? Well, your politicians seem to be confused. Please set them straight.
Remember, they are supposed to represent you. It's not as if the government should do whatever it wants to do and you have no say in the situation. It's only that way when you keep quiet.
Actually, white text on a blue background is a very good combination to use.
If you think about it a bit, it makes sense. Your eyes are very sensitive to green & red, so you can imagine yellow (green+red) on a black background is a good combination, as others indeed note.
Your eyes are not as sensitive to blue, so it doesn't hurt to add blue to both the background and the text, resulting in white (R+G+B) text on a blue background. Your eyes are still picking up on the same green+red vs. no green+red contrast. And in fact, the blue background actually helps drown out screen reflections (vs. a black background).