Apparently, the CIO was disgruntled with his/her employee. It takes almost no work at all for some geeks to achieve personna non grata status. I remember working with a guy who bragged about dorking with sound levels on cable TV consoles so his wife could hear As The World Turns at full volume -- and nobody else in town could hear anything on other channels. My favorites, though, were the goons who routinely bypassed pcvs security to download code already checked out. Almost as much fun, the Jesus freaks who refuse to perform their job descriptions for heathens on the grounds that you're damned already and suffering is good for you. This is understandable, of course. Geeks with people skills work for world peace. To answer the question, though, I used to routinely memorandize my super with printed notes about the passwords I use or change -- then, when the inevitable burnout came, I simply forgot my passwords. They were hard to remember anyway. Revenge on the incompetent usually requires no effort at all -- not even malice. It's no wonder CIO's are paranoid. Still, if your two weeks of limbo aren't filled with subtle enticements to keep you on the job, you're probably weren't doing your job anyway.
Parse this: "...The four principles the United States issues on June 30, 2005, reinforce the continuing U.S. commitment..." As Truman Capote would say, "Issued! Isshoo-DUH! Why can't you make your past tenses match your obvious temporal syntax?" And what's with the superfluous comma? Unless standards have seriously fallen since 1975 (the last time I looked), this is not a State Department document. It might be a sloppy hand-typed amateur copy.
Sledge hammers are fine, but I think the usual hard drive incineration protocol involves a small pile of thermite and a magnesium fuse.
Alternatively, on modern, tiny hard drives with multi-Gb capacities, you could just use srm in default mode (Apple's OS X version of srm runs in DoD compliant mode, i.e., the uselessly impotent -m option, through the Finder's "Secure Empty Trash" interface). Default srm, however, has been compared to thermite on hard drives with not too much pick-and-put slop.
But regarding data recovery, yes, a sledge hammer applied judiciously to intricate small bones is likely to elicit a flood of data, most of it incoherent.
I think State of the Art regarding encryption is threefold: a) Done right, encryption cannot be cracked, period; b) Pipes leak at both ends, not in the middle, so proper decryption technique requires close observation of recipients; and c) Legislatures always respond favorably to Worst Case Scenarios.
Microsoft bashing is fun, especially when PR goons promulgate buzz instead of substance, as though everything that matters is virtual and buzz not only reshapes consensus reality in the realm of cash flow, but in the realm of actually getting things done. I roll my eyes too, but hey, you know, Microsoft has been getting things done for two decades. I'll cut 'em some slack with this one -- it's the same thing Steve Jobs did when he cut loose from legacy OS 9.
On the other hand, as this little flame-spat demonstrates, such a marvellous chronowhatsit will probably not survive the various unanticipated dooms we smegheads unleash on ourselves in the next 10,000 years, so the entire exercise seems remarkably quixotic. It seems to reside in Douglas Adams' Marvin the Depressed Robot category. That being the case, wasting YOUR time in the attempt to modify by nanokarms the future history of the species seems far more valuable than wasting MY time by reading an article whose future significance is obviously proscribed by human foible.
When the remnant of humankind on Mars reverts to Imperial Reign yearkeeping in Showa 1009, what will be the use of an obsolete "perpetual" calendar that doesn't know when Grom Vlagga Day is or what miblak Eta Carinae V is in?
Don't be naive. You'll have one client whose investment in you is smaller than it would be as a paid employee. You get no workman's comp, no health insurance, no dental plan, no 401k, no child college plan -- and you'll pay quarterly taxes, self-employment taxes and whatever fees you cough up to incorporate yourself. Are you an accountant? You'll need one. If market conditions change, your client (your former employer) will outsource your sorry chairwarming behind to Trinidad. As a "consultant", you'll have to wrangle your own consultees, and do you have time to sell yourself as well as generate and sell your billables? Unless you've got serious credentials at the Ph.D. from M.I.T. altocumulus stratum, you are living in The Happiest Land of All, i.e., Fantasyland. Face it. If your people skills were THAT good, you'd be in marketing, you'd be smiling, and you'd be C.E.O. of the company you just left.
It's nice to have another smudgepot in the fuds arsenal, isn't it? My money is still on smallpox, however. Or if that's mutated into mildness these days, on the Russian-strain tuberculosis bacterials. My none-too-subtle point, if you can call it that, is how does a campaign to reconstruct the worst plague in human history get funded, anyway? Basic research? Black ops? The next phase in reassurance, of course, is pointing out that reconstructing a DNA sequence is not the same as reconstructing DNA, which is kept under the strictest security anyway. I know I sleep soundly.
Hmmmm... Judging by some of the other posts here, that's probably incomprehensible. What do you put IN the dongle? Three or four megabytes of RANDOM data (as in Yarrow random, or even if you've got it TREWLY RANDUMB). Then the system works by generating a (*ahem*) password a la carte in several steps: Get the date, seed Mersenne Twister, read pseudorandom bytes from the dongle, reseed the much larger internal table of Mersenne Twister (you can use another instance, of course), store the date in your FS with the (encrypted) data blocks. The date is of course, just a salt -- but with that, AND THE DONGLE, you can access your own computer, the encryption scheme constantly changes with each passing second, the data is actually encoded using AES and your token 256-bit password. This has a fancy name, I don't remember it, though.
Including turnkey or "cookie" systems, such as the one GWB carries to identify himself to Launch Control. A simple flash memory card plugged into a USB port, etc. All it takes is the will to develop systems that DON'T use passwords. The minor stuff on the Internet is already managed by KeyChain on Mac OS X, and presumably similar stuff elsewhere. Passwords are sooooo passe, and dongle security is soooooo scalable, you have to assume passwords are still around because NSA wants you to use them.
Excellent! Thanks for this post. I've lost my meager mod points, or you'd get them all. As for the last point, I'd suggest that "complexity" is in the ear of the beholder. Anyone who has ever blundered through the social pitfalls of Japanese personal pronouns (which exist but aren't used in polite conversation) learns to appreciate the verbs of social direction (ageru, etc.) in direct proportion to personal embarassment, but Japanese kids pick these nuances up by osmosis. Unless you are referring (in the realm of IndoEuropean languages) to the "complexity" of Sanskrit, which is about as "natural" as Esperanto. Even a language as deceptively simple as Mandarin Chinese, which bears enough resemblance to English word order to support "pidgin" dialects, reveals a bewildering sophistication in its sentence particles -- which is why the "pidgin" not only sounds odd but gives English speakers a decidedly tonedeaf impression of fluent speech. It should also be pointed out that grammatical structures are nearly imperceptible to native speakers, who only notice them when foreigners Yoda-speak produce, so the emphasis on vocabulary is both uninteresting from the evo devo linguist's point of view and naive.
Almost as well as FeedDemon or NetNewsWire, depending on your platform. A few things skimped or just wrong, but mainly right and very much better than Firefox's headlines-only "Smart Bookmarks". In other words, Opera includes an email-style Description panel, and implements external urls (i.e., pictures, mainly podcasts I didn't check). That's nice. Otherwise, it's so darned foreign (like driving on the left side of the road), that I haven't taken the time to learn it yet. I've also got cookie-foot, which makes it hard to slog out of the Camino swamps to drier pastures. But I do like Opera. Just slowly.
Isn't the human ability to jump rightly or wrongly to obvious conclusions amazing? I mean, you can't PROGRAM illogic like that, but from an Evo Devo viewpoint, post hoc ergo propter hoc has obvious survival advantages and it would sure be useful if you could!
Rip a page out of a book, put it under plastic, backlight it with a dim glow you can't see in daylight, make the screen smaller than the page size and scroll, scroll, scroll...! No. A book sits in your lap. Anakin Skywalker's supersized Sony PSP in Star Wuzz Three is closer to ideal. The print has to be ON the surface, though, not under it. And it should feel like parchment. Ah ha! How about VIRTUAL books with direct eBrain implants applied at birth?
Maybe once in a while the hidden hand of Adam Smith draws back a bloody stump, and the socialists -- in the name of altruism, justice, mercy and common sense -- win one. Right on! Community broadband forever! Just because it's possible to act like a dog in a manger, doesn't mean it's right to act like a dog in a manger.
You're missing the point. The guy is banging his brass balls together by jumping up and down. He knows a thing or two about htaccess (as don't we all?), and he's just flown a giant "Shoot me if you can!" cyberduck. My guess is, the paranoid bits will get massively inflamed before they get any better.
Actually, DNA evidence is pretty clear that Neanderthals contributed nothing to the modern human gene pool. Apparently, like all dinosaurs, they promulgated non-adaptive standards.
Ok, went to the party, snarfed the horse doover, launched the browser, registered it (no ads)... Unh. Heavy lifting. It's just different enough from MS IE, Safari, Firefox, Camino... even iCab... that it seems like going to another country. Fun for a slow day, I guess. I haven't deleted it yet.
The woods is chock full of lunatics who keep their personal visions of the veldt alive in rural Murka. Sometimes in the urbs, or even suburbs, not to mention municipally sanctioned zoological gardens which preserve the DNA, but not the survival skills, of endangered species. The idea of transplanting elephants onto turf God made for bison (yeah, yeah, I know... that's "intelligent design" for ya) is just species imperialism. If you ask me, somebody just wants to play safari with their 8 ga. shotguns.
Actually, there are any number of ways of jumping into the far distant future output of any PNG -- Mersenne Twister is especially amenable to this, since it can be initialized with a very large internal table -- then simply use 256-bit AES in counter mode. The result is "weak" encryption only in the sense that the universe may not actually expire through proton decay before a single such message is cracked. It is certainly comparable to OTP in real universes.
Judging by the fragmentary, disjointed, clueless, incoherent mish-mash that passes for in-depth Olympics coverage these days, it's almost impossible to acknowledge that the Games are happening anyway. If it weren't for the Internet, I'd never have bothered trying to follow the Sydney Olympics.
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Apparently, the CIO was disgruntled with his/her employee. It takes almost no work at all for some geeks to achieve personna non grata status. I remember working with a guy who bragged about dorking with sound levels on cable TV consoles so his wife could hear As The World Turns at full volume -- and nobody else in town could hear anything on other channels. My favorites, though, were the goons who routinely bypassed pcvs security to download code already checked out. Almost as much fun, the Jesus freaks who refuse to perform their job descriptions for heathens on the grounds that you're damned already and suffering is good for you. This is understandable, of course. Geeks with people skills work for world peace. To answer the question, though, I used to routinely memorandize my super with printed notes about the passwords I use or change -- then, when the inevitable burnout came, I simply forgot my passwords. They were hard to remember anyway. Revenge on the incompetent usually requires no effort at all -- not even malice. It's no wonder CIO's are paranoid. Still, if your two weeks of limbo aren't filled with subtle enticements to keep you on the job, you're probably weren't doing your job anyway.
Parse this: "...The four principles the United States issues on June 30, 2005, reinforce the continuing U.S. commitment..." As Truman Capote would say, "Issued! Isshoo-DUH! Why can't you make your past tenses match your obvious temporal syntax?" And what's with the superfluous comma? Unless standards have seriously fallen since 1975 (the last time I looked), this is not a State Department document. It might be a sloppy hand-typed amateur copy.
Rubber sheet frames of reference require a vantage point outside the experiment, sort of like string theory, I guess? Guess being the operant word.
Alternatively, on modern, tiny hard drives with multi-Gb capacities, you could just use srm in default mode (Apple's OS X version of srm runs in DoD compliant mode, i.e., the uselessly impotent -m option, through the Finder's "Secure Empty Trash" interface). Default srm, however, has been compared to thermite on hard drives with not too much pick-and-put slop.
But regarding data recovery, yes, a sledge hammer applied judiciously to intricate small bones is likely to elicit a flood of data, most of it incoherent.
I think State of the Art regarding encryption is threefold: a) Done right, encryption cannot be cracked, period; b) Pipes leak at both ends, not in the middle, so proper decryption technique requires close observation of recipients; and c) Legislatures always respond favorably to Worst Case Scenarios.
Microsoft bashing is fun, especially when PR goons promulgate buzz instead of substance, as though everything that matters is virtual and buzz not only reshapes consensus reality in the realm of cash flow, but in the realm of actually getting things done. I roll my eyes too, but hey, you know, Microsoft has been getting things done for two decades. I'll cut 'em some slack with this one -- it's the same thing Steve Jobs did when he cut loose from legacy OS 9.
On the other hand, as this little flame-spat demonstrates, such a marvellous chronowhatsit will probably not survive the various unanticipated dooms we smegheads unleash on ourselves in the next 10,000 years, so the entire exercise seems remarkably quixotic. It seems to reside in Douglas Adams' Marvin the Depressed Robot category. That being the case, wasting YOUR time in the attempt to modify by nanokarms the future history of the species seems far more valuable than wasting MY time by reading an article whose future significance is obviously proscribed by human foible.
My point was that time is political, not that geeks are insufficiently aware of their peculiar subject matters. Oh, wait...
When the remnant of humankind on Mars reverts to Imperial Reign yearkeeping in Showa 1009, what will be the use of an obsolete "perpetual" calendar that doesn't know when Grom Vlagga Day is or what miblak Eta Carinae V is in?
Don't be naive. You'll have one client whose investment in you is smaller than it would be as a paid employee. You get no workman's comp, no health insurance, no dental plan, no 401k, no child college plan -- and you'll pay quarterly taxes, self-employment taxes and whatever fees you cough up to incorporate yourself. Are you an accountant? You'll need one. If market conditions change, your client (your former employer) will outsource your sorry chairwarming behind to Trinidad. As a "consultant", you'll have to wrangle your own consultees, and do you have time to sell yourself as well as generate and sell your billables? Unless you've got serious credentials at the Ph.D. from M.I.T. altocumulus stratum, you are living in The Happiest Land of All, i.e., Fantasyland. Face it. If your people skills were THAT good, you'd be in marketing, you'd be smiling, and you'd be C.E.O. of the company you just left.
It's nice to have another smudgepot in the fuds arsenal, isn't it? My money is still on smallpox, however. Or if that's mutated into mildness these days, on the Russian-strain tuberculosis bacterials. My none-too-subtle point, if you can call it that, is how does a campaign to reconstruct the worst plague in human history get funded, anyway? Basic research? Black ops? The next phase in reassurance, of course, is pointing out that reconstructing a DNA sequence is not the same as reconstructing DNA, which is kept under the strictest security anyway. I know I sleep soundly.
Hmmmm... Judging by some of the other posts here, that's probably incomprehensible. What do you put IN the dongle? Three or four megabytes of RANDOM data (as in Yarrow random, or even if you've got it TREWLY RANDUMB). Then the system works by generating a (*ahem*) password a la carte in several steps: Get the date, seed Mersenne Twister, read pseudorandom bytes from the dongle, reseed the much larger internal table of Mersenne Twister (you can use another instance, of course), store the date in your FS with the (encrypted) data blocks. The date is of course, just a salt -- but with that, AND THE DONGLE, you can access your own computer, the encryption scheme constantly changes with each passing second, the data is actually encoded using AES and your token 256-bit password. This has a fancy name, I don't remember it, though.
Including turnkey or "cookie" systems, such as the one GWB carries to identify himself to Launch Control. A simple flash memory card plugged into a USB port, etc. All it takes is the will to develop systems that DON'T use passwords. The minor stuff on the Internet is already managed by KeyChain on Mac OS X, and presumably similar stuff elsewhere. Passwords are sooooo passe, and dongle security is soooooo scalable, you have to assume passwords are still around because NSA wants you to use them.
Plucky comic relief? So much for the Three Laws of Robotics!
Excellent! Thanks for this post. I've lost my meager mod points, or you'd get them all. As for the last point, I'd suggest that "complexity" is in the ear of the beholder. Anyone who has ever blundered through the social pitfalls of Japanese personal pronouns (which exist but aren't used in polite conversation) learns to appreciate the verbs of social direction (ageru, etc.) in direct proportion to personal embarassment, but Japanese kids pick these nuances up by osmosis. Unless you are referring (in the realm of IndoEuropean languages) to the "complexity" of Sanskrit, which is about as "natural" as Esperanto. Even a language as deceptively simple as Mandarin Chinese, which bears enough resemblance to English word order to support "pidgin" dialects, reveals a bewildering sophistication in its sentence particles -- which is why the "pidgin" not only sounds odd but gives English speakers a decidedly tonedeaf impression of fluent speech. It should also be pointed out that grammatical structures are nearly imperceptible to native speakers, who only notice them when foreigners Yoda-speak produce, so the emphasis on vocabulary is both uninteresting from the evo devo linguist's point of view and naive.
Almost as well as FeedDemon or NetNewsWire, depending on your platform. A few things skimped or just wrong, but mainly right and very much better than Firefox's headlines-only "Smart Bookmarks". In other words, Opera includes an email-style Description panel, and implements external urls (i.e., pictures, mainly podcasts I didn't check). That's nice. Otherwise, it's so darned foreign (like driving on the left side of the road), that I haven't taken the time to learn it yet. I've also got cookie-foot, which makes it hard to slog out of the Camino swamps to drier pastures. But I do like Opera. Just slowly.
Isn't the human ability to jump rightly or wrongly to obvious conclusions amazing? I mean, you can't PROGRAM illogic like that, but from an Evo Devo viewpoint, post hoc ergo propter hoc has obvious survival advantages and it would sure be useful if you could!
Rip a page out of a book, put it under plastic, backlight it with a dim glow you can't see in daylight, make the screen smaller than the page size and scroll, scroll, scroll...! No. A book sits in your lap. Anakin Skywalker's supersized Sony PSP in Star Wuzz Three is closer to ideal. The print has to be ON the surface, though, not under it. And it should feel like parchment. Ah ha! How about VIRTUAL books with direct eBrain implants applied at birth?
Maybe once in a while the hidden hand of Adam Smith draws back a bloody stump, and the socialists -- in the name of altruism, justice, mercy and common sense -- win one. Right on! Community broadband forever! Just because it's possible to act like a dog in a manger, doesn't mean it's right to act like a dog in a manger.
You're missing the point. The guy is banging his brass balls together by jumping up and down. He knows a thing or two about htaccess (as don't we all?), and he's just flown a giant "Shoot me if you can!" cyberduck. My guess is, the paranoid bits will get massively inflamed before they get any better.
Actually, DNA evidence is pretty clear that Neanderthals contributed nothing to the modern human gene pool. Apparently, like all dinosaurs, they promulgated non-adaptive standards.
Ok, went to the party, snarfed the horse doover, launched the browser, registered it (no ads)... Unh. Heavy lifting. It's just different enough from MS IE, Safari, Firefox, Camino... even iCab ... that it seems like going to another country. Fun for a slow day, I guess. I haven't deleted it yet.
You mean the spammers talk to himself?
The woods is chock full of lunatics who keep their personal visions of the veldt alive in rural Murka. Sometimes in the urbs, or even suburbs, not to mention municipally sanctioned zoological gardens which preserve the DNA, but not the survival skills, of endangered species. The idea of transplanting elephants onto turf God made for bison (yeah, yeah, I know... that's "intelligent design" for ya) is just species imperialism. If you ask me, somebody just wants to play safari with their 8 ga. shotguns.
Actually, there are any number of ways of jumping into the far distant future output of any PNG -- Mersenne Twister is especially amenable to this, since it can be initialized with a very large internal table -- then simply use 256-bit AES in counter mode. The result is "weak" encryption only in the sense that the universe may not actually expire through proton decay before a single such message is cracked. It is certainly comparable to OTP in real universes.
Judging by the fragmentary, disjointed, clueless, incoherent mish-mash that passes for in-depth Olympics coverage these days, it's almost impossible to acknowledge that the Games are happening anyway. If it weren't for the Internet, I'd never have bothered trying to follow the Sydney Olympics.