This is meant to kill off the weak password
on
Inkblot Passwords
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· Score: 1
Patrick speaks truth. The point of the original article is that inkblots may be an elegant solution to the "strong password" and "weak password" problems.
With the classical strong password consisting of long, completely random characters, you risk forgetting it and needing to leave sticky-notes reminders to yourself, or calling the admin (or a spoof admin calling you!) to reset the password.
With the classical weak password, you of course are a major security risk.
The inkblot scheme is a trade-off, like all security schemes, but it seems to me it's meant to kill off the weak password, and consequently the vast majority of attackers who are capable of weak-password attacks on your accounts. That's a good thing in my estimation.
Chris Nelson's immature reply to the WSP critique is par for the course for MozillaZine. Their articles over the past year have been a mix of (a) lame-brained advocacy a la Slashdot plus (b) knee-jerk propaganda for the bright and shining future of Mozilla against running dog MS-lackeys like jwz and WSP. Unbelievable.
I'm thinking Mozilla is in year 2 of a 5-year plan, much like Mao's Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s-60s. Everyone knows how that turned out for China.
Why do people insist that if you live in the midwest you had either better get out to do something cool, or just sit on your hands and hope for some news from the latest coastal craze?
They're thinking of the Marc Andreessen story.
Netscape would have never changed the face of the Internet if its programmers had decided to stay in Illinois. I don't live in Silicon Valley myself, but you must admit that if you're a techie and want to make a difference, you had better live there (or within a 2-hour flight!).
As antdude mentioned earlier, some versions of PKZip were indeed buggy, and some of these bugs lead to crashes or (being a DOS program) system lockups.
Here is the version history as I recall it.
v1.0 and v1.1 - Initial versions, stable, but didn't compress that much better than ARC.
Then nothing for a great while. BBS users were expecting PK to come up with a quantum leap, PKZIP version 2. They were waiting the way some people were waiting for DOOM version 1.
Flash forward to 1993.
v2.04c - truly dreadful, showstopping bugs. Mostly due to interactions with flaky extended/expanded memory access code. v2.04e - most of these bugs fixed. v2.04g - perfection!
The link is WinShoes. These are open-source Winsock plug-in components for Delphi
He's written about making the open source decision in this case study. His reasoning for open-sourcing was that developer components are a tough market to sell into, and that it was better to just release them open source and make money as a consultant/contractor based on his reputation as a coder. He hasn't regretted his choice.
someone is in charge of all those competition killing marketing maneuvers; who is it? Does the average employee even know that MS is trying to crush the very competition they are trying to outdo?
The average employee working on products? Sure they know. If you read the interviews with MS employees, such as during the trial, to a person they say they fear the competition and try to do their best to crush them.
I'm not sure what else they are supposed to say. "Nope, I don't want to humiliate Netscape/Sun/IBM, they're nice guys with families and friends who deserve to make a living"?
An analogy could be basic research vs applied research. The MS employee base is heavily on the applied side -- they are enthusiastic about innovations like ClearType, but only to the extent that it will be converted into a real product that sells in the millions - and grabs maximum market share.
In the article, Fallows noted that a lot of his ideas for improving MSWord as a writing tool were brushed off, because the product managers ran the numbers. The true writers who would use it wouldn't be worth the development effort!
I think the "scratch your itch" phenomenon that motivates Linux developers is alien to a commercial mass-market developer, of which MS is the biggest. As a commercial world, you have to prioritize and cut features, even if you personally think they're cool....
Slashdot Mirror
Patrick speaks truth. The point of the original article is that inkblots may be an elegant solution to the "strong password" and "weak password" problems.
With the classical strong password consisting of long, completely random characters, you risk forgetting it and needing to leave sticky-notes reminders to yourself, or calling the admin (or a spoof admin calling you!) to reset the password.
With the classical weak password, you of course are a major security risk.
The inkblot scheme is a trade-off, like all security schemes, but it seems to me it's meant to kill off the weak password, and consequently the vast majority of attackers who are capable of weak-password attacks on your accounts. That's a good thing in my estimation.
Chris Nelson's immature reply to the WSP critique is par for the course for MozillaZine. Their articles over the past year have been a mix of (a) lame-brained advocacy a la Slashdot plus (b) knee-jerk propaganda for the bright and shining future of Mozilla against running dog MS-lackeys like jwz and WSP. Unbelievable.
I'm thinking Mozilla is in year 2 of a 5-year plan, much like Mao's Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s-60s. Everyone knows how that turned out for China.
Why do people insist that if you live in the midwest you had either better get out to do something cool, or just sit on your hands and hope for some news from the latest coastal craze?
They're thinking of the Marc Andreessen story.
Netscape would have never changed the face of the Internet if its programmers had decided to stay in Illinois. I don't live in Silicon Valley myself, but you must admit that if you're a techie and want to make a difference, you had better live there (or within a 2-hour flight!).
As antdude mentioned earlier, some versions of PKZip were indeed buggy, and some of these bugs lead to crashes or (being a DOS program) system lockups.
Here is the version history as I recall it.
v1.0 and v1.1 - Initial versions, stable, but didn't compress that much better than ARC.
Then nothing for a great while. BBS users were expecting PK to come up with a quantum leap, PKZIP version 2. They were waiting the way some people were waiting for DOOM version 1.
Flash forward to 1993.
v2.04c - truly dreadful, showstopping bugs. Mostly due to interactions with flaky extended/expanded memory access code.
v2.04e - most of these bugs fixed.
v2.04g - perfection!
The link is WinShoes. These are open-source Winsock plug-in components for Delphi
He's written about making the open source decision in this case study. His reasoning for open-sourcing was that developer components are a tough market to sell into, and that it was better to just release them open source and make money as a consultant/contractor based on his reputation as a coder. He hasn't regretted his choice.
I hope this answers some of your questions!
someone is in charge of all those competition killing marketing maneuvers; who is it? Does the average employee even know that MS is trying to crush the very competition they are trying to outdo?
The average employee working on products? Sure they know. If you read the interviews with MS employees, such as during the trial, to a person they say they fear the competition and try to do their best to crush them.
I'm not sure what else they are supposed to say. "Nope, I don't want to humiliate Netscape/Sun/IBM, they're nice guys with families and friends who deserve to make a living"?
An analogy could be basic research vs applied research. The MS employee base is heavily on the applied side -- they are enthusiastic about innovations like ClearType, but only to the extent that it will be converted into a real product that sells in the millions - and grabs maximum market share.
In the article, Fallows noted that a lot of his ideas for improving MSWord as a writing tool were brushed off, because the product managers ran the numbers. The true writers who would use it wouldn't be worth the development effort!
I think the "scratch your itch" phenomenon that motivates Linux developers is alien to a commercial mass-market developer, of which MS is the biggest. As a commercial world, you have to prioritize and cut features, even if you personally think they're cool....
The paper version of the magazine died a while back, but shortly afterward it was reborn and re-cast as an online mag (BYTE.com).
O.J. Simpson starred as an astronaut. Its subject was a faked Mars mission, not a moon mission.