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User: CastrTroy

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  1. Re:less than a minute? on Researchers Crack iOS Mobile Hotspot Passwords In Less Than a Minute · · Score: 1

    Sure you're right, both should be done, but it's still a little unsettling how often password files are retrieved from large sites. Whenever I see a security bulletin stating "Password file compromised, but it was salted and hashed" I think people are missing the whole problem. If they were able to obtain the password file, what other information were they able to make away with?

  2. Re:Scaremongering on 21 Financial Sites Found To Store Sensitive Data In Browser Disk Cache · · Score: 1

    Perhaps people can't afford not to have their own computer if they risk having their personal information taken when using the library computers. Of course, it's worth noting that libraries, at least the one's I've been to, actually do a pretty good job of wiping the data between sessions. At the very least, if your library doesn't do this, they should have Chrome/Firefox installed so that you can browse in Incognito/Private mode.

  3. Re:less than a minute? on Researchers Crack iOS Mobile Hotspot Passwords In Less Than a Minute · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And rainbow tables are also only good if the attacker has access to your password file. If untrusted people have access to your password file, you already have some problems. The only case where the attacker should have access to the password file would be if they had physical access to the machine, in which case you'd better trust them to some degree anyway. However, what frequently ends up happening, is that remote systems are hacked into and password files are downloaded, and analyzed using a rainbow table. Sure the salting of passwords would have helped a little in this situation, but the glaring problem is that they hacker should have never been able to obtain the password file in the first place.

  4. Re:fuck me slashdot cant display unicode on Lobster, a New Game Programming Language, Now Available As Open Source · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is one of my favourite things about .Net. All strings are unicode (utf-16) by default. You don't have to do any fancy trickery to get the language to interpret your string as UTF, and all the functions (assuming no bugs) work properly for international characters. In most other languages, you have to remember to precede the string with some character to signify that it's unicode, and the strange things start happening when you mix unicode and non-unicode strings, and have the functions don't work properly with unicode strings to begin with. Same thing goes with base-10 decimal numbers. It's a native type. You don't have to import some library and a= b.add(c) every time you want to add a couple numbers (gets really messy with more complex math).

  5. Re:Fee to use? on With an Eye Toward Disaster, NYC Debuts Solar Charging Stations · · Score: 1

    Are they waterproof? How does the USB port stand up to the elements? Because I could seriously see this being a problem next time there's a hurricane. It seems like they wouldn't work specifically when you needed them. Flying debris could easily break a solar panel. Also, 25 charging stations in a city of 10 million people seems like it would do little good. It takes over an hour to charge many phones from a wall socket. I could see quite a queue forming if everybody wanted to charge their phones at the same time.

  6. Re:Ease of use on Shapeshifting: Proposal For a New Periodic Table of the Elements · · Score: 2

    Different periodic tables might be better for different uses. Maybe one would be good for PhD's while others would be good for high school students who don't really intend on studying chemistry after high school or their bachelor's degree. Maybe a different periodic table would suit organic chemistry better. I doubt there's one periodic table that works best for all of chemistry, just as there isn't one programming language or IDE that works best for all types of programming.

  7. Re:The solution to cable on TiVo Series 5 Coming This Fall · · Score: 1

    Only if you live in the US. In Canada, you get almost nothing over the air. If you live really close to a major city on the US border, like Windsor (next to Detroit) you can get some decent channels, but for the most part, there's very little to be had OTA in Canada. When the government mandated the switch-over, most of the broadcast stations just cut the signal instead of switching over, Almost everybody subscribes to cable in Canada anyway. Although many are starting to get rid of their subscriptions for a mix of Netflix/Hulu/US VPN and various torrent sites.

  8. Re:Don't Do The Dig ... on Canadian Couple Charged $5k For Finding 400-Year-Old Skeleton · · Score: 1

    The big question is, would the pirate gold belong to the people when it's on their property? If so, the the skeleton would also be their property. So after they paid the archaeologist, they should then have the right to sell anything he finds to the archaeologist or any museum who wants to buy the artifacts. Some initial Googling suggest that any treasure you find on your land is yours unless the original owner is found, which in the case of a 400 year old skeleton, the would be no owner, and even if you did argue that people could be "owned' the owner would be long dead. So, while they may be out $5000 to pay an archaeologist, they may even be able to make some money, or at least not lose so much from selling the found artifacts.

  9. Re:typical, spoiled child attitude. on Canadian Couple Charged $5k For Finding 400-Year-Old Skeleton · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Maybe some insurance company would be willing to offer insurance to cover the costs of an archaeological survey should one be needed. Since it seems to be a rare yet costly problem, it would seem to be along the lines of exactly the kind of thing somebody would buy insurance for. Same as car, house, or medical insurance, one should be able purchase insurance in the event that some ancient remains are found, and cause the project to the held up

  10. Re:Economies of scale on Microsoft Reputation Manager's Guide To Xbox One · · Score: 1

    If you're poor, you really shouldn't be spending $500 on a console plus $60 on games.

  11. Re:Damage control on Microsoft Reputation Manager's Guide To Xbox One · · Score: 3, Insightful

    But the Ouya is in a weird space, somewhere outside the standard Android ecosystem. It doesn't come with the Google Play store, and any games in their store must come with some kind of free version. Personally, I think pushing free on people is what's making a lot of bad games. Most of the games that I really like on my Android are not games that had any free version whatsoever. There's a few good free games I've tried. Most of the in between stuff, the games that start out free and then try to get you to give them money by paying to level up faster or even just paying to remove annoying advertisements are terrible, and seem to be interested in making money than in making the game enjoyable to play.

  12. Re:Wi-Fi toothpick on Wi-Fi Light Bulbs Shipping Soon · · Score: 2

    It really depends on a lot of factors. My lights are usually only on at night. In my neck of the woods, they charge less for power in the evening and nights. 6.7 cents per KWh. For 50,000 hours, a 60 watt bulb would cost $200. A 9 watt LED $30. So over the life time of the bulb, I would save $170. But then we subtract out the cost of the bulb. Let's assume it's only $30. So that's $140 saved over 50,000 hours of operation. Assuming I use it for 4 hours a night, that would be 34 years. I really don't trust that the light will still be working in 34 years. Something will break. I would be surprised if it lasted 5 years. So over 34 years, I'd have to replaced it 7 times. At a cost of $30 a bulb, that would cost me $210. Which is more than the amount the electricity costs me. I've left out the cost of the incandescent bulbs, but they cost almost nothing and I've had them last a couple years, sometimes longer than the CFL bulbs. I've still got a few in my house that I've been meaning to replace with CFLs since I moved into my house 3 years ago, but they haven't gone out yet. And those bulbs get turned on and off a couple times a day.

  13. Re:Wi-Fi toothpick on Wi-Fi Light Bulbs Shipping Soon · · Score: 2

    This is what I don't like about current LED designs. They really should come in a multipart design. There's no reason I should have to replace the AD/DC converter every time a few LEDs decide to break. Putting everything in a single form factor is convenient, but makes things much more expensive to fix when a single component fails. Since LEDs don't need to be in a vaccuum like incandescent filaments, and don't need harmful chemicals like CFL bulbs, they should be easily user servicable, allowing individual LEDs to be replaced, or allowing the working LEDs to be connected to a new DC converter (or whatever it's called) should that part die. If you want a computer controlled light, that part should be a separate pieced that connects to the rest of the bulb.

  14. Re:What? on Volvo's Electric Roads Concept Points To Battery-Free EV Future · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If we're going to go through the trouble of laying down electric rails on the highway, why not just put down actual rails so we don't have to steer the cars either. have a system where the car can attach/detach from the rails so that it can move between traditional roads and roads with rails. Basically it would work like those electric slot car racers, except you'd want to engineer it so it the car wouldn't fly off the track in a corner. The car would then just retract the mechanism that fits inside the slot when it wants to go on traditional roads. You could have an electric car that has it's own batteries for short trips, but gets power from the roads when going on longer trips.

  15. Re:No iPad app on Microsoft Office Finally Gets iOS App · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I don't get this. When I buy a copy of MS Office at Best Buy, they get a little cut, and so does the supplier that Best Buy purchases from. I'm not sure what the usual split is between Microsoft, the supplier and the retailer, but I'm sure it's not that far off from 30%. I don't see why it should work any different if I set up a software store that only sells licenses and not disks.

  16. Re:It's incredible to me on Bill Regulating 3D Printed Guns Announced In NYC · · Score: 1

    I really don't see how TOR protects anyone. If NSA sets up a bunch of TOR nodes, then they can read the data that passes over the TOR network. If they are the first node you connect to, it could just pretend the data was sent between other nodes, when really they were just listening in on your messages while sending them straight to the receiver. Or it could just pass the message between "friendly" nodes to ensure that it could always read the messages, and know the route you took. Sure it protects the end web site from knowing your location, and it might stop a government from listening in on your connection, provided they aren't running any nodes themselves.

  17. Re:you joke, but... on Crowd-Funded Radio Beacon Will Message Aliens · · Score: 1

    Except that the star they are pointing it at is 18 light years away. So at best it will be 36 years before they'll be able to send get a signal back to us. That's assuming they detect the signal right away, and have the capability to send another message back to us. The planet that receives the signal may have intelligent life, but they may be a little behind us in terms of scientific knowledge. We've only had radio for less that 150 years, but humans have been around for 195,000 years, and the earth is 4.5 billion years old. That's a pretty small percentage of human history that radio has existed, even smaller if you're looking at the age of the planet. Who's to say we won't move past radio at some point, or that the radio spectrum won't be so polluted that we won't be able to detect such a weak signal from a far off star.

  18. Re:Genius judge on Federal Judge Says Interns Should Be Paid · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I never understood how companies got away with this kind of stuff in the USA. I'm from Canada, and I've never heard of an unpaid intership happening here. If it does, I don't know why anybody would go for it. In university, we had a Co-op programme which required us to alternate between semesters of school and work. Took a little longer to finish your degree (but only a little bit more, we were either working or in school year round, and work only started after second year). After we graduated, we had 16 months of paid work experience. They didn't pay us as much as regular employees, but it wasn't minimum wage work either. And the co-op coordinators at the school ensured we were doing real work and not just fetching coffee and making photo copies.

  19. Re:Post them on twitter on UK ISPs Secretly Start Blocking Torrent Site Proxies · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It seems like this would pretty easy. You can fit magnet links inside a QR code, and there's a million other ways you could encode the link into an image, perhaps even encrypting the link with a simple cipher to stop bots from autoblocking them.

  20. Re:mostly some small private planes left on FAA Wants All Aircraft Flying On Unleaded Fuel By 2018 · · Score: 1

    The big questions are, how many miles are these planes flying, and how much actual fuel are they using. Sure there's a lot of planes out there that use this kind of fuel, but how often do they get used? Are they mostly pleasure type aircraft that maybe fly a few hours a week? Does it really create a huge problem in the environment? Only stating the number of aircraft is useless if the planes are never flown, or only account for a miniscule amount of pollution generated from air travel.

  21. Re:dumb on Sharing HBO Go Accounts Could Result In Prison · · Score: 1

    Netflix already states you can only have 6 devices registered to an account, and only have 2 streams running simultaneously. So as long as you don't go over their limits (and their system should be set up such that you can't go outside the limits) then they should have nothing to complain about. If I only have 1 TV, and always watch Netflix on that, shouldn't I be able to let my brother use my account as well. Unless someone is hacking into the service to get free movies, there is no "theft of service" because they already limit the number of devices and simultaneous streams they can use.

  22. Re:Did anyone need reminding? on Majority of Americans Say NSA Phone Tracking Is OK To Fight Terrorism · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The question is also flawed because we don't know if this really "helps fight terrorism". Do they need to tap everyone's phones and internet? Or could they do just as well targeting a few specific people who might actually be involved in terrorism? Does this kind of activity actually create more terrorism by giving people, both the stereotypical Muslim enemy they want us to believe they are guarding us against, and the homegrown terrorist such as people like McVeigh who feel a need to lash out against the government/wall street/mega corporations. The question makes the assumption that this kind of surveillance makes catching terrorists before they commit their acts, and also assumes that terrorism is actually a big problem, where most likely neither of the two are correct.

  23. Re:Yes. on The Turbo Entabulator: A 3D-printed Mechanical Computer · · Score: 1

    And by those standards, this project is even less impressive. I don't know if the creators of MineCraft ever intended for people to be able to create computers inside the game, but my guess would be no. A 3D printer on the other hand is designed to make custom mechanical parts. Building a mechanical computer using a 3D printer doesn't really required much of a leap from one step to the next. Take an existing design, and print out the parts. However, in a game like MineCraft, It would be quite a feat even figuring out what had to be done based on the limited number of blocks available, and you really couldn't even be sure it was possible until after you completed the design.

  24. Re:people asking why bother on The Turbo Entabulator: A 3D-printed Mechanical Computer · · Score: 1

    But this doesn't really seem particularly hard, just time consuming. People build mechanical computers all the time. Using a 3D printer to make the parts is a very obvious way of doing it. While I respect the person who built it just to further their own learning and to have a little fun, I would have to say that it doesn't really impress me, and isn't really that newsworthy.

  25. Re:Encrypted blob on Hacker Releases 1.7TB Treasure Trove of Gaming Info · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And it seems odd that there would be so much data. Source code doesn't take that much space, and neither do development kits. Perhaps he's including game assets like textures and cut scenes from the games, but I don't really see much point in including that, since it would mostly be easy to extract from the actual game files themselves.