Ah yes... the unpaid overtime. I worked one place where they had me in 18 hours a day, every single day, for 8 weeks. This was entirely caused by the main project manager, who was a complete twit and totally screwed everything up. She chewed me out one day for going home on time, even though I had gotten sick from being awake so long. The project was in a complete death spiral because she was making technical decisions that she was eminently unqualified to make.
For example, before hiring any programmers or technical people, she and a couple of other business analysts mapped out the data flow of the application without considering how the pieces involved talked to each other. Then they broke everything into chunks and dumped it on me and a couple of other guys. It turned out the flow couldn't possibly work and I was the lucky person who discovered it. Another time, she shot down our DBA's schema design, then a few months later we had to use it anyway because, of course, the DBA was right all along.
During this time, I couldn't watch "Office Space" without my blood pressure going through the roof.
I've noticed a number of problems with IT as a career choice. Back in '97, I graduated with a degree in computer science and started working like everyone else. I hopped from job to job for a number of years. The longest I stayed at one place was about a year and 4 months. After a while, I finally realized my problem. I absolutely hate working in IT. There are a number of reasons why. I'm not saying that these will apply to you or anyone else, but if you feel they do, it might be a good indication that IT is not the field for you.
1) I can't stand having to work on other people's stuff. I don't like being given assignments that I'm not interested in and having to complete them. I'm sure people with stronger "work ethics" can force themselves to muddle through, but I'm not going to do it. Worse, there are a lot of mundane administrative tasks (like timesheets, etc.) that have to be dealt with. If I'm working for myself and getting paid based on those things, it would be different, but it always just seems like a waste.
2) Having to constantly keep up with new technology got kind of old for me. I like low-level programming in C. I don't really care for web apps and such. I tend to find the various frameworks overly complicated for no apparent reason. Most places I've interviewed with want to see lots of solid job experience with particular technologies, which can be difficult if you weren't working somewhere that used it..NET is the newest example I can think of.
3) "IT" type programming isn't very interesting. I would rather work on low-level stuff, simulations, academic problems, etc. I don't really care a bit about data migration, or making loan payment GUIs, or whatever. There's relatively little problem solving to be done, which is the whole reason I liked programming in the first place. Instead you get handed some half-assed specs and spend all your time chasing people down to figure out what needs to be done, even though none of them really know or have the authority to decide. That's when the meetings begin.
4) Did I mention meetings? I hate meetings. I can't decide if conference calls are worse or not. On one hand, you can mute the phone and make faces, but on the other, it's frustrating to have to listen to people you can barely hear, deal with flaky connections, etc., and you still have to pay attention because someone will certainly end up asking you a question.
5) Outsourcing. Not just to foreign countries or migrant H1-B visa holders, but to any third-party contracting group. There are several problems with this. Many times, consulting companies (Accenture) will put people on a project who have never programmed before. They don't even have degrees in programming. The consulting company will use a project to train them. It's real fun explaining what recursion and stack overflows are to someone on a major project.
6) If you ARE a contractor though, you might be in luck. You're more likely to get to work with newer technology, so it's easier to stay ahead of the curve. From what I've seen, full-time employees tend to have to work on maintenance rather than new development.
Right now I'm transitioning out of IT as a career. I'm still working, but as a training consultant. It pays enough that I can finally risk going into business on my own. (A non-IT business at that!) The only way I'll ever feel motivated to put effort into a "job" is working for myself. I'll never give up computers and programming, and will pursue it as a hobby (and possibly as an academic career in the future) for the rest of my life.
But work in IT in the modern business world? No way.
A few years ago, I was working in a job when a very stressful project came around. In 8 weeks, I put on 20 pounds. I did not change my level of activity, or eat more than one meal a day. (I didn't have time for breakfast or lunch, but I rarely ate those meals anyway.) I was certainly not consuming well over 2100 calories in the single meal I was eating. The only difference? I was working almost 126 hours a week for those two months.
Stress has a very profound effect on what your body does with the calories it receives. Unfortunately, the changes end up being self-perpetuating. There are three big "problems": 1) lack of restful sleep, 2) depression, 3) lowered metabolism leading to weight gain. All of these problems cause the others, so no matter where it starts, you end up with the rest.
The only way to stop is break the cycle. Stop bad eating habits (not just crappy food, but skipping meals), get exercise, force yourself to stick to a strict sleep schedule, and make sure to get some sunlight in there. And if a job ever tries to kill you with that kind of work schedule, quit before it hurts you!:) I just wish it were that easy... since one of the first effects is having all your motivation sapped from you, it's really hard to escape the cycle.
do whatever the hell a person would have to do to have too much iron in their blood
You just have to be slightly unlucky. One disease that causes this is called hemochromatosis, which is the most common single gene defect in the West. My dad has it, and it has caused him large number of problems, such as diabetes and cirhosis. It also causes heart problems, arthritis, and a host of other maladies.
Funnily, the treatment is regular bleeding. Unfortunately, it can't really repair the damage that has already been done.
I used to work on ATM software, so I can answer this from my own experiences.
ATMs don't actually track money at all. Everything you see is nothing more than an input screen that gets fed to another system. When you put in the amount you wish to withdraw, the ATM simply creates a message, posts it to the network, and waits for a reply. It doesn't even decide how to dispense the money. The main system knows how many money cartridges the ATM has and which denominations are in each one, then tells the ATM how many bills to deliver from each.
Anecdote 1: I was once responsible for tracking down a bug in some code and found the following construct:
// assume a bunch of vital code here
if (a < b)
return a; else
return b;
// assume some more vital code here
Naturally, the vital code after the if statement was never getting executed. But it sure needed to be.
Anecdote 2: Our code had a bug that caused only the ATM fee to be deducted from your account if you did the withdrawal from another bank's ATM. However, we still instructed the ATM to dispense the entire requested amount. (Note: I fixed that bug.) Combine this with one of our customers whose system was set up so that PINs were never validated from other bank's ATMs and you had an interesting situation. You could walk up to any other bank's ATM, put in the card, enter any PIN you wanted, and as long as the account had $1.50 in it, you could take out any amount you wanted.
I'm just glad neither of those was my fault. (More out of pride than any fear of reprisal. None of the developers was ever held responsible for their crappy code. I was just a maintenance programmer, so it was my fault if it didn't get fixed!)
I got the green/red combo pointer for Christmas last year. The green laser is amazing. It's so bright you can see the lightbeam in the dark. Very useful for pointing out stars. It also makes you feel sort of like you're wielding a lightsaber.
Imagine when they go from algorithm patents to look-and-feel copyrights!
"Dear Mr. Smith,
We regret to inform you physical appearance violates our copyright on olive-skinned (skincolor index: 984adb3e), dark-haired (haircolor index: 12231ec3), males (gender index: 1).
Fortunately, you are able to lease the rights from us at a monthly rate. Please contact our office to discuss payment arrangements at your earliest convenience.
Cinergy Corp. CEO James E. Rogers, who at 11 one evening was reading email from employees at home while nursing a vodka...
After drinking for a solid hour, he started sending pathetic messages to former employees about how sorry he is they couldn't stay together and how he hopes they aren't bitter and if so then too bad because, hey, *HE'S* the one who dumped *THEM* and if they can't handle that then f*ck off, but maybe he can get together with them some weekend for a little "fun" sometime.
He then passed out at the keyboard in a puddle of drool.
I wonder how much of that data is necessary for the card to work. Perhaps you could get a magstripe writer, scan the card, and re-write only what needs to be there to get the door to open.
Sidenote: Fun with cards -- Use a reader/writer to exchange the data on different cards. (E.g., swap your gas station card with a retail store card. It's kind of like paying for fast food with $2 bills.)
For those interested in the link between spelling and pronunciation, Mark Rosenfelder, the maintainer of the sci.lang FAQ has a great article on his homepage:
1. Comment each function
- Function name
- what it does
- parameters
parameter name - what is is for and any restrictions on it (i.e., must not be null)
- return value (all possible return values)
The idea is that you can remember the phrase and a particular method of generating the password. So, if you forget the password, you just write the phrase and follow an algorithm for obtaining the password from it.
The resulting password is far more secure than dictionary-based passwords, and it is far easier to remember a sentence along with a series of predefined steps than it is to memorize a string of random characters.
Normally I wouldn't reply to an AC, but I wouldn't want your completely misguided interpretation to infect anyone else, so I feel obligated to respond.
If you use the sentence-based password system you can write down the generator sentences and still be a good deal safer than writing down your passwords directly.
But given the ridiculous number of passwords you have to deal with, I certainly couldn't blame you for writing them down somewhere!
How exactly are they defining "streaming audio"? Cuseeme was developed back in '93. I would consider that streaming media, and it's 12 years old.
I still remember playing with cuseeme in the computer lab at school. The connection was painfully slow, but it was really cool to see the humble origins of this technology.
10 billion won't take long to crack, though. Someone could easily pre-generate the hashed password list so they're just doing a bunch of string comparisons later. Also, PCs are pretty cheap, and it would be trivial for someone to cluster 10 or so machines together to parallelize the cracking process.
Anyway, with a random combination of letters and numbers (including shifted values), you can get over 139 billion combinations with just 6 characters, and over 722 trillion with 8 characters. 10 characters gives you nearly 4 quintillion combinations! Seeing as how the number of English dictionary words is only in the hundreds of thousands, a dictionary-based attack would be effectively useless here.
If you want to make your password selection process a tad more secure without giving up the ease of remembering it, you'd be better off coming up with a 6 to 8 word sentence and select some particular letter from each word (e.g., the first letter). Then change a couple of characters to numbers or symbols, or further manipulate it in some pre-defined fashion (like reversing the order of the letters, using ROT13, changing capitalization, et cetera). You can write the sentence down without it looking like a password, or even translate it into another language.
Generative sentence: "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" Selected letters: "C n e p u p" Transform: "P u p 3 n C" Password: "Pup3nC!" Reminder: "This is not a pipe"
Note: This is not actually my password, either.
With your original method, a dictionary attack (with a little brute force for the word combinations) has almost a 100% chance of discovering your password. With a purely random password of a length of 8 characters, the chance of a dictionary attack working drops to about 0.000000062 percent.
Injecting signals into the brain amounts to controlling it, though. If those signals come from a body part with which the brain is already familiar, great. If not, the brain can learn to process the "foreign" signals as best it can.
Certain situations already cause similar behavior. When a person becomes blind, the part of the brain devoted to visual processing starts taking input from other parts (especially the hands, since they are absolutely loaded with touch receptors). The situation is not identitical to getting feedback from prosthetic limbs, but it does show that parts of the brain can take unfamiliar inputs and figure out what to do with them.
We could just be debating the semantics of the word "control" here. I imagine many people see it as forcing the brain to take a particular action. Although this is probably possible, it also probably isn't desirable. For instance, it would be monumentally difficult to inject a probe into a person's brain and trigger it to get them to raise their hand. This is because it takes a massive amount of motor coordination to get the hand to raise smoothly and subsequently remain in the air, and the probe would produce an unnatural, Frankenstein-like motion.
Instead of trying to force the arm up, it's easier just to ask someone to raise their arm. You are controlling their brain by activating their auditory processing cortex, which leads to them interpreting and understanding your request, then firing off systems in the motor cortex that get routed through the cerebellum to lift their arm and hold it there. More effective than a probe, and easier, too!:)
We do have RoboRats. Note that the rats are not "forced" in a certain direction, but actually trained to respond to mild electrical stimulus to the "whisker processing" center of their brains that is enforced by stimulating their pleasure centers. Even remotely controlling a rat, it's far easier to provide minimal feedback and let the brain do the bulk of the processing.
Your finger already controls your thoughts. Just touching the tip of it starts off a flurry of activity in your parietal lobes.
In fact, controlling robotic limbs will be much easier once the communication goes both ways. Most of what you think your brain "knows" about your body was learned entirely from peripheral nervous system feedback.
P.S. The minute the UN controls the Internet is the minute I start a new network of unregulated computer systems on all the dark fiber.
Why wait?
I am curious about how such a thing would work, actually. Where do the endpoints of dark fiber terminate? Wouldn't the switching be controlled by the telecoms anyway? I'll admit it would be fun to run a "pirate" (as in "underground", not "warez") network right under the packet sniffers of the Powers That Be, but it could probably be shut down in a matter of minutes.
If it comes down to it, why not start an encrypted network over packet radio or something? Hell, we can go to TCP (Tin Can Protocol) over Stringnet if necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah yes... the unpaid overtime. I worked one place where they had me in 18 hours a day, every single day, for 8 weeks. This was entirely caused by the main project manager, who was a complete twit and totally screwed everything up. She chewed me out one day for going home on time, even though I had gotten sick from being awake so long. The project was in a complete death spiral because she was making technical decisions that she was eminently unqualified to make.
For example, before hiring any programmers or technical people, she and a couple of other business analysts mapped out the data flow of the application without considering how the pieces involved talked to each other. Then they broke everything into chunks and dumped it on me and a couple of other guys. It turned out the flow couldn't possibly work and I was the lucky person who discovered it. Another time, she shot down our DBA's schema design, then a few months later we had to use it anyway because, of course, the DBA was right all along.
During this time, I couldn't watch "Office Space" without my blood pressure going through the roof.
How's the IT seminar business going?
I've noticed a number of problems with IT as a career choice. Back in '97, I graduated with a degree in computer science and started working like everyone else. I hopped from job to job for a number of years. The longest I stayed at one place was about a year and 4 months. After a while, I finally realized my problem. I absolutely hate working in IT. There are a number of reasons why. I'm not saying that these will apply to you or anyone else, but if you feel they do, it might be a good indication that IT is not the field for you.
.NET is the newest example I can think of.
1) I can't stand having to work on other people's stuff. I don't like being given assignments that I'm not interested in and having to complete them. I'm sure people with stronger "work ethics" can force themselves to muddle through, but I'm not going to do it. Worse, there are a lot of mundane administrative tasks (like timesheets, etc.) that have to be dealt with. If I'm working for myself and getting paid based on those things, it would be different, but it always just seems like a waste.
2) Having to constantly keep up with new technology got kind of old for me. I like low-level programming in C. I don't really care for web apps and such. I tend to find the various frameworks overly complicated for no apparent reason. Most places I've interviewed with want to see lots of solid job experience with particular technologies, which can be difficult if you weren't working somewhere that used it.
3) "IT" type programming isn't very interesting. I would rather work on low-level stuff, simulations, academic problems, etc. I don't really care a bit about data migration, or making loan payment GUIs, or whatever. There's relatively little problem solving to be done, which is the whole reason I liked programming in the first place. Instead you get handed some half-assed specs and spend all your time chasing people down to figure out what needs to be done, even though none of them really know or have the authority to decide. That's when the meetings begin.
4) Did I mention meetings? I hate meetings. I can't decide if conference calls are worse or not. On one hand, you can mute the phone and make faces, but on the other, it's frustrating to have to listen to people you can barely hear, deal with flaky connections, etc., and you still have to pay attention because someone will certainly end up asking you a question.
5) Outsourcing. Not just to foreign countries or migrant H1-B visa holders, but to any third-party contracting group. There are several problems with this. Many times, consulting companies (Accenture) will put people on a project who have never programmed before. They don't even have degrees in programming. The consulting company will use a project to train them. It's real fun explaining what recursion and stack overflows are to someone on a major project.
6) If you ARE a contractor though, you might be in luck. You're more likely to get to work with newer technology, so it's easier to stay ahead of the curve. From what I've seen, full-time employees tend to have to work on maintenance rather than new development.
Right now I'm transitioning out of IT as a career. I'm still working, but as a training consultant. It pays enough that I can finally risk going into business on my own. (A non-IT business at that!) The only way I'll ever feel motivated to put effort into a "job" is working for myself. I'll never give up computers and programming, and will pursue it as a hobby (and possibly as an academic career in the future) for the rest of my life.
But work in IT in the modern business world? No way.
Just to provide a first hand account here...
:) I just wish it were that easy... since one of the first effects is having all your motivation sapped from you, it's really hard to escape the cycle.
A few years ago, I was working in a job when a very stressful project came around. In 8 weeks, I put on 20 pounds. I did not change my level of activity, or eat more than one meal a day. (I didn't have time for breakfast or lunch, but I rarely ate those meals anyway.) I was certainly not consuming well over 2100 calories in the single meal I was eating. The only difference? I was working almost 126 hours a week for those two months.
Stress has a very profound effect on what your body does with the calories it receives. Unfortunately, the changes end up being self-perpetuating. There are three big "problems": 1) lack of restful sleep, 2) depression, 3) lowered metabolism leading to weight gain. All of these problems cause the others, so no matter where it starts, you end up with the rest.
The only way to stop is break the cycle. Stop bad eating habits (not just crappy food, but skipping meals), get exercise, force yourself to stick to a strict sleep schedule, and make sure to get some sunlight in there. And if a job ever tries to kill you with that kind of work schedule, quit before it hurts you!
do whatever the hell a person would have to do to have too much iron in their blood
You just have to be slightly unlucky. One disease that causes this is called hemochromatosis, which is the most common single gene defect in the West. My dad has it, and it has caused him large number of problems, such as diabetes and cirhosis. It also causes heart problems, arthritis, and a host of other maladies.
Funnily, the treatment is regular bleeding. Unfortunately, it can't really repair the damage that has already been done.
ATMs don't actually track money at all. Everything you see is nothing more than an input screen that gets fed to another system. When you put in the amount you wish to withdraw, the ATM simply creates a message, posts it to the network, and waits for a reply. It doesn't even decide how to dispense the money. The main system knows how many money cartridges the ATM has and which denominations are in each one, then tells the ATM how many bills to deliver from each.
Anecdote 1: I was once responsible for tracking down a bug in some code and found the following construct:Naturally, the vital code after the if statement was never getting executed. But it sure needed to be.
Anecdote 2: Our code had a bug that caused only the ATM fee to be deducted from your account if you did the withdrawal from another bank's ATM. However, we still instructed the ATM to dispense the entire requested amount. (Note: I fixed that bug.) Combine this with one of our customers whose system was set up so that PINs were never validated from other bank's ATMs and you had an interesting situation. You could walk up to any other bank's ATM, put in the card, enter any PIN you wanted, and as long as the account had $1.50 in it, you could take out any amount you wanted.
I'm just glad neither of those was my fault. (More out of pride than any fear of reprisal. None of the developers was ever held responsible for their crappy code. I was just a maintenance programmer, so it was my fault if it didn't get fixed!)
I got the green/red combo pointer for Christmas last year. The green laser is amazing. It's so bright you can see the lightbeam in the dark. Very useful for pointing out stars. It also makes you feel sort of like you're wielding a lightsaber.
ThinkGeek sells them right here...
Imagine when they go from algorithm patents to look-and-feel copyrights!
"Dear Mr. Smith,
We regret to inform you physical appearance violates our copyright on olive-skinned (skincolor index: 984adb3e), dark-haired (haircolor index: 12231ec3), males (gender index: 1).
Fortunately, you are able to lease the rights from us at a monthly rate. Please contact our office to discuss payment arrangements at your earliest convenience.
Thank you,
Big BioCorp"
After drinking for a solid hour, he started sending pathetic messages to former employees about how sorry he is they couldn't stay together and how he hopes they aren't bitter and if so then too bad because, hey, *HE'S* the one who dumped *THEM* and if they can't handle that then f*ck off, but maybe he can get together with them some weekend for a little "fun" sometime.
He then passed out at the keyboard in a puddle of drool.
RFID enabled devices like that don't have power. They receive all the energy they need via induction from the scanning device.
I wonder how much of that data is necessary for the card to work. Perhaps you could get a magstripe writer, scan the card, and re-write only what needs to be there to get the door to open.
Sidenote:
Fun with cards -- Use a reader/writer to exchange the data on different cards. (E.g., swap your gas station card with a retail store card. It's kind of like paying for fast food with $2 bills.)
For those interested in the link between spelling and pronunciation, Mark Rosenfelder, the maintainer of the sci.lang FAQ has a great article on his homepage:
Hou tu pranownse Inglish
You might also be interested in:
Writing English Chinese-style
How about Technocrat?
- Function name
- what it does
- parameters
parameter name - what is is for and any restrictions on it (i.e., must not be null)
- return value (all possible return values)
* Function: p-inc
* Purpose: adds one to a positive integer
* Input: x, the integer to be incremented.
* Possible return values: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 325, 326, 327, 328, 329, 330, 331, 332, 333, 334, 335, 336, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341, 342, 343, 344, 345, 346, 347, 348, 349, 350, 351, 352, 353, 354, 355, 356, 357, 358, 359, 360, 361, 362, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369, 370, 371, 372, 373, 374, 375, 376, 377, 378, 379, 380, 381, 382, 383, 384, 385, 386, 387, 388, 389, 390, 391, 392, 393, 394, 395, 396, 397, 398, 399, 400, 401, 402, 403, 404, 405, 406, 407, 408, 409, 410, 411, 412, 413, 414, 415, 416, 417, 418, 419, 420, 421, 422, 423, 424, 425, 426, 427, 428, 429, 430, 431, 432, 433, 434, 435, 436, 437, 438, 439, 440, 441, 442, 443, 444, 445, 446, 447, 448, 449, 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, 455, 456, 457, 458, 459, 460, 461, 462, 463, 464, 465, 466, 467, 468, 469, 470, 471, 472, 473, 474, 475, 476, 477, 478, 479, 480, 481, 482, 483, 484, 485, 486, 487, 488, 489, 490, 491, 492, 493, 494, 495, 496, 497, 498, 499, 500, 501, 502, 503, 504, 505, 506, 507, 508, 509, 510, 511, 512, 513, 514, 515, 516, 517, 518, 519, 520, 521, 522, 523, 524, 525, 526, 527, 528, 529, 530, 531, 532, 533, 534, 535, 536, 537, 538, 539, 540, 541, 542, 543, 544, 545, 546, 547, 548, 549, 550, 551, 552, 553, 554, 555, 556, 557, 558, 559, 560, 561, 562, 563, 564, 565, 566, 567, 568, 569, 570, 571, 572, 573, 574, 575, 576, 577, 578, 579, 580, 581, 582, 583, 584, 585, 586, 587, 588, 589, 590, 591, 592, 593, 594, 595, 596, 597, 598, 599, 600, 601, 602, 603, 604, 605, 606, 607, 608, 609, 610, 611, 612, 613, 614, 615, 616, 617, 618, 619, 620, 621, 622, 623, 624, 625, 626, 627, 628, 629, 630, 631, 632, 633, 634, 635, 636, 637, 638, 639, 640, 641, 642, 643, 644, 645, 646, 647, 648, 649, 650, 651, 652, 653, 654, 655, 656, 657, 658, 659, 660, 661, 662, 663, 664, 665, 666, 667, 668, 669, 670, 671, 672, 673, 674, 675, 676, 677, 678, 679, 680, 681, 682, 683, 684, 685, 686, 687, 688, 689, 690, 691, 692, 693, 694, 695, 696, 697, 698, 699, 700, 701, 702, 703, 704, 705, 706, 707, 708, 709, 710, 711, 712, 713, 714, 715, 716, 717, 718, 719, 720, 721, 722, 723, 724, 725, 726, 727, 728, 729, 730, 731, 732, 733, 734, 735, 736, 737, 738, 739, 740, 741, 742, 743, 744, 745, 746, 747, 748, 749, 750, 751, 752,
The idea is that you can remember the phrase and a particular method of generating the password. So, if you forget the password, you just write the phrase and follow an algorithm for obtaining the password from it.
The resulting password is far more secure than dictionary-based passwords, and it is far easier to remember a sentence along with a series of predefined steps than it is to memorize a string of random characters.
Normally I wouldn't reply to an AC, but I wouldn't want your completely misguided interpretation to infect anyone else, so I feel obligated to respond.
If you use the sentence-based password system you can write down the generator sentences and still be a good deal safer than writing down your passwords directly.
But given the ridiculous number of passwords you have to deal with, I certainly couldn't blame you for writing them down somewhere!
How exactly are they defining "streaming audio"? Cuseeme was developed back in '93. I would consider that streaming media, and it's 12 years old.
I still remember playing with cuseeme in the computer lab at school. The connection was painfully slow, but it was really cool to see the humble origins of this technology.
10 billion won't take long to crack, though. Someone could easily pre-generate the hashed password list so they're just doing a bunch of string comparisons later. Also, PCs are pretty cheap, and it would be trivial for someone to cluster 10 or so machines together to parallelize the cracking process.
Anyway, with a random combination of letters and numbers (including shifted values), you can get over 139 billion combinations with just 6 characters, and over 722 trillion with 8 characters. 10 characters gives you nearly 4 quintillion combinations! Seeing as how the number of English dictionary words is only in the hundreds of thousands, a dictionary-based attack would be effectively useless here.
If you want to make your password selection process a tad more secure without giving up the ease of remembering it, you'd be better off coming up with a 6 to 8 word sentence and select some particular letter from each word (e.g., the first letter). Then change a couple of characters to numbers or symbols, or further manipulate it in some pre-defined fashion (like reversing the order of the letters, using ROT13, changing capitalization, et cetera). You can write the sentence down without it looking like a password, or even translate it into another language.
Generative sentence: "Ceci n'est pas une pipe"
Selected letters: "C n e p u p"
Transform: "P u p 3 n C"
Password: "Pup3nC!"
Reminder: "This is not a pipe"
Note: This is not actually my password, either.
With your original method, a dictionary attack (with a little brute force for the word combinations) has almost a 100% chance of discovering your password. With a purely random password of a length of 8 characters, the chance of a dictionary attack working drops to about 0.000000062 percent.
I wonder why he didn't spend time on Eric S. Raymond's luxury yacht? (I suspect because it's actually pronounced Throat Warbler Mangrove.)
I'm about to release a P2P application based on my new hashing algorithm. The algorithm itself is deceptively simple:
1) Look at the first bit of the file.
2) If that bit is a one, record a one, otherwise record a zero.
3) Repeat until you reach the end of the file.
I'm willing to bet the company can't come up with a way to get collisions out of that one!
It's a cliff-hanger; you'll have to wait until tomorrow to read about what made Wikipedia start to work.
Wait until tomorrow? That's how long it will be before I'm done reading the summary anyway!
Injecting signals into the brain amounts to controlling it, though. If those signals come from a body part with which the brain is already familiar, great. If not, the brain can learn to process the "foreign" signals as best it can.
:)
Certain situations already cause similar behavior. When a person becomes blind, the part of the brain devoted to visual processing starts taking input from other parts (especially the hands, since they are absolutely loaded with touch receptors). The situation is not identitical to getting feedback from prosthetic limbs, but it does show that parts of the brain can take unfamiliar inputs and figure out what to do with them.
We could just be debating the semantics of the word "control" here. I imagine many people see it as forcing the brain to take a particular action. Although this is probably possible, it also probably isn't desirable. For instance, it would be monumentally difficult to inject a probe into a person's brain and trigger it to get them to raise their hand. This is because it takes a massive amount of motor coordination to get the hand to raise smoothly and subsequently remain in the air, and the probe would produce an unnatural, Frankenstein-like motion.
Instead of trying to force the arm up, it's easier just to ask someone to raise their arm. You are controlling their brain by activating their auditory processing cortex, which leads to them interpreting and understanding your request, then firing off systems in the motor cortex that get routed through the cerebellum to lift their arm and hold it there. More effective than a probe, and easier, too!
We do have RoboRats. Note that the rats are not "forced" in a certain direction, but actually trained to respond to mild electrical stimulus to the "whisker processing" center of their brains that is enforced by stimulating their pleasure centers. Even remotely controlling a rat, it's far easier to provide minimal feedback and let the brain do the bulk of the processing.
Your finger already controls your thoughts. Just touching the tip of it starts off a flurry of activity in your parietal lobes.
In fact, controlling robotic limbs will be much easier once the communication goes both ways. Most of what you think your brain "knows" about your body was learned entirely from peripheral nervous system feedback.
P.S. The minute the UN controls the Internet is the minute I start a new network of unregulated computer systems on all the dark fiber.
Why wait?
I am curious about how such a thing would work, actually. Where do the endpoints of dark fiber terminate? Wouldn't the switching be controlled by the telecoms anyway? I'll admit it would be fun to run a "pirate" (as in "underground", not "warez") network right under the packet sniffers of the Powers That Be, but it could probably be shut down in a matter of minutes.
If it comes down to it, why not start an encrypted network over packet radio or something? Hell, we can go to TCP (Tin Can Protocol) over Stringnet if necessary.
Yes, there are.
The GP post is probably talking about specific type of eye movement called saccades, which are used to keep the fovea centered on objects of interest.