So a private, for-profit company named "Coverity" has released a report that shows that their "Coverity Scan" software finds the fewest vaguely-defined "defects" in a programming language whose community has added the "Coverity platform" product to their development process?
I was about to say "excellent marketing" by writing a fluff piece for free Slashdot traffic, but it's really not even excellent marketing.
They also got the widely used wxWidgets toolkit to change their name from wxWindows. It was apparently amicable, but I MS requests are generally like the godfather's "offers".
I should also add: why not just have a service to delete the image automatically from facebook after N days? Encryption is absolutely not needed here and achieves nothing.
This can be debunked quite easily: once an image is decrypted, it is forever decrypted. Alternatively, all I have to do is comment on your post of the image with the key I just downloaded for it while it was still valid. Even more alternatively, I could set up a counter-service to this that stores retrieved keys permanently and hands them out publicly. Unless the service is refreshing the image data every single day with a new key, in which case: (a) they will run out of bandwidth and CPU in a week, (b) they will hit facebook's limits very very soon, and (c) I still have copies of yesterday's encrypted data and yesterday's key.
Oh yes, and your friends will not be able to see your pictures unless they download a plugin ("huh...what's that??"), and possibly use a specific browser ("huh? why?").
So yeah, pretty stupid overall. This is another sad attempt at a form of DRM.
So using an MS or MS-compatible (thanks to years of aggressive marketing by MS) stack is less expensive in terms of training time than inserting a piece of open-source software into that stack and trying to make everything work? Interesting...next up, replacing my car's wheels with motorcycle wheels makes it take longer for me to get to places. Perhaps I should just get the entire motorcycle instead?
Sure, why not?
However, Thiel better be right about selecting people correctly for the program. Otherwise, you've "stopped out" for a couple of years, got a failed.com startup to your credit, and might have trouble getting back into or adjusting to university.
I dislike the analogy between "large social networking sites walling off your data" and net neutrality infringement/censorship/monitoring. Walled gardens are a perfectly acceptable consequence of a FREE web; net neutrality infringement is the opposite. Would you complain if your
and spaceflight bragging rights for years afterward
Hopefully, this won't turn out to be true. Brag in the short term, you bourgeois pig, but I'm still among the idealistic holdouts, with thousands of dollars in my hand waiting in line to sign up, who believe in Virgin Galactic and economies of scale.
I never got the leet speak in spam thing. Sure, it might get past the filter, but who can read it? Are they trying to sell drugs to script kiddies?
I don't know about you, but I can't stop trying to figure out what word they're trying to represent with the symbols. For example, I know the second word in your subject means viagra, but what is "H3rb41"? Oh..."herbal". It's naturally (perhaps unknowingly) targeted towards geeks and puzzle-solvers, which perhaps isn't the worst market to target available-without-human-contact penis drugs towards.
and you're an idiot if you post anything there expecting to be anonymous.
Why? If I really wanted to post something anonymously, I would set up a network of proxy SSH severs paid for with prepaid debit cards (purchased using cash), change the wireless MAC on a throwaway secondhand laptop (purchased using cash off Craigslist), walk down to the local Starbucks, access my proxy setup through Tor, and then be reasonably confident that I would be able to do anything anonymously. Of course, I would only post plain text files.
So I don't really understand why you would be an idiot for expecting anonymity if you went to the pains of taking care of it.
... that cameras are not allowed in many/most court rooms.
It's not ironic because there is an expectation of privacy in a courtroom. Hypothetical: I accuse you of being a pedophile, procure tons of evidence against you, which I display in court. Sure, the case gets thrown out (maybe I face charges myself, but I'm reckless that way), but someone videotapes the proceedings, edits out the juicy bits and puts it up on youtube without context. Pretty sure your life's ruined.
If my fate's being determined, that's between me, the lawyers, the defendant/plaintiff, and the judge/jury.
...allow me to plug my own banal "checkin" service, based on things "most people do"...
FourGoHookupPlaces: for telling your friends when and who you procreate with! BONUS: use your iphone's built-in accelerometer to compute your "performance", and try to best your friends! Become the virtual "mayor" of PEOPLE! Make lovemaking an ONLINE social game!
Last I heard, American soldiers were supposed to be fighting to preserve a way of life, a way which includes freedom of expression.
Except this has absolutely nothing to do with freedom, but rather good taste and a little sensitivity towards their target market (unless they're planning on selling this game in Afghanistan).
It just sounds like the classic hill climbing algorithm to me.
That's because it's very similar -- with a massive stochastic component. It might be effective at routing, but I image leaving "pheromone traces" over network routes to indicate quality (latency, bandwidth, whatever) is something that will make sure security researchers have jobs for a long, long time.
So, now, if I get all the people I want to call on Facebook and get them to use this app, then we can call each other be buying the $10-15/mo unlimited data plan and buying 0 min/mo. Heck, it's a lot cheaper.
Which is precisely why you can't buy a plan that has no voice and only data. The ultra-cheap $15 data plan is in addition to the clusterf**k that is your monthly base price, plus the tons of fees added. Sure, you can get a broadband card, but try sticking one of those things in your shiny new iphone. Every phone operator, pretty much the world over, is a thieving a-hole.
I thought people used Facebook because they did NOT want to talk in person, but rather receive information in an asynchronous way. Same reason why some people prefer chat/SMS/IM over phone calls. Neat gimmick though.
He's more of an operating systems/networking kind of guy. This just seems like fluff research to keep the department chair happy while he actually does his teaching and "real" research. Academia has this tendency to prioritize quality over quantity, and I think this provides an example of the pressures even good profs feel from the top re: publishing.
That's a very generous assessment. Obviously, I don't know the guy, but another possible hypothesis is that he's made the oft-repeated mistake of an expert outside his own field, who thinks he's also good enough to be an expert in another field. Academia is chock full of this -- having a good publishing record in one field tends to inflate one's ego, and can frequently lead to moronic research in even a closely related field.
I'm thinking of you, "obesity spreads through a social network" guy, who is actually a political scientist.
Passphrases are not harder to brute force. In general if you have 26 random characters its hard to brute force.
Passphrases encourage the use of numbers, capitalization, longer passwords, and punctuation. If the common password is all lowercase letters and maybe digits, your looking at a search space of (26+10)^k for a password of length k. If you throw in the 30 or so punctuation marks, and capitalization, the search space is (26+26+30)^k for the same length of password.
Given that so many people use lowercase+digits passwords, I'd be inclined to think that anyone brute-forcing a bunch of passwords would stick to the (26+10)^k search space, and therefore leave yours uncrackable. If they're just going after yours though, all bets are off, but then you should probably be using some uber-fancy authentication scheme anyway.
That's an even worse solution. Do you really think end users are going to be willing to type a 200 letter phrase in instead? We use passwords for a reason- its as much as most people are willing to type before becoming annoyed.
You, sir, have outdone yourself, even for slashdot standards. A passphrase is NOT "a phrase as a password", but rather a phrase as a mnemonic for your password.
Slashdot Mirror
So a private, for-profit company named "Coverity" has released a report that shows that their "Coverity Scan" software finds the fewest vaguely-defined "defects" in a programming language whose community has added the "Coverity platform" product to their development process? I was about to say "excellent marketing" by writing a fluff piece for free Slashdot traffic, but it's really not even excellent marketing.
Isn't this the same as every Jedi building their own lightsabre?
Only if you live inside Star Wars
Sadly, conferences do not contribute a diddly squat percentage of the US annual GDP, so your point is rather short-sighted.
yup, this is a UIC project. This is the grad student who won the Image of Research prize: http://compbio.cs.uic.edu/~mayank/
They also got the widely used wxWidgets toolkit to change their name from wxWindows. It was apparently amicable, but I MS requests are generally like the godfather's "offers".
I should also add: why not just have a service to delete the image automatically from facebook after N days? Encryption is absolutely not needed here and achieves nothing.
Oh yes, and your friends will not be able to see your pictures unless they download a plugin ("huh...what's that??"), and possibly use a specific browser ("huh? why?").
So yeah, pretty stupid overall. This is another sad attempt at a form of DRM.
So using an MS or MS-compatible (thanks to years of aggressive marketing by MS) stack is less expensive in terms of training time than inserting a piece of open-source software into that stack and trying to make everything work? Interesting...next up, replacing my car's wheels with motorcycle wheels makes it take longer for me to get to places. Perhaps I should just get the entire motorcycle instead?
In Soviet Russia, Putin Linux you.
Sure, why not? However, Thiel better be right about selecting people correctly for the program. Otherwise, you've "stopped out" for a couple of years, got a failed .com startup to your credit, and might have trouble getting back into or adjusting to university.
I dislike the analogy between "large social networking sites walling off your data" and net neutrality infringement/censorship/monitoring. Walled gardens are a perfectly acceptable consequence of a FREE web; net neutrality infringement is the opposite. Would you complain if your
and spaceflight bragging rights for years afterward
Hopefully, this won't turn out to be true. Brag in the short term, you bourgeois pig, but I'm still among the idealistic holdouts, with thousands of dollars in my hand waiting in line to sign up, who believe in Virgin Galactic and economies of scale.
I never got the leet speak in spam thing. Sure, it might get past the filter, but who can read it? Are they trying to sell drugs to script kiddies?
I don't know about you, but I can't stop trying to figure out what word they're trying to represent with the symbols. For example, I know the second word in your subject means viagra, but what is "H3rb41"? Oh..."herbal". It's naturally (perhaps unknowingly) targeted towards geeks and puzzle-solvers, which perhaps isn't the worst market to target available-without-human-contact penis drugs towards.
and you're an idiot if you post anything there expecting to be anonymous.
Why? If I really wanted to post something anonymously, I would set up a network of proxy SSH severs paid for with prepaid debit cards (purchased using cash), change the wireless MAC on a throwaway secondhand laptop (purchased using cash off Craigslist), walk down to the local Starbucks, access my proxy setup through Tor, and then be reasonably confident that I would be able to do anything anonymously. Of course, I would only post plain text files.
So I don't really understand why you would be an idiot for expecting anonymity if you went to the pains of taking care of it.
... that cameras are not allowed in many/most court rooms.
It's not ironic because there is an expectation of privacy in a courtroom. Hypothetical: I accuse you of being a pedophile, procure tons of evidence against you, which I display in court. Sure, the case gets thrown out (maybe I face charges myself, but I'm reckless that way), but someone videotapes the proceedings, edits out the juicy bits and puts it up on youtube without context. Pretty sure your life's ruined.
If my fate's being determined, that's between me, the lawyers, the defendant/plaintiff, and the judge/jury.
It's programming.
FourGoHookupPlaces: for telling your friends when and who you procreate with! BONUS: use your iphone's built-in accelerometer to compute your "performance", and try to best your friends! Become the virtual "mayor" of PEOPLE! Make lovemaking an ONLINE social game!
Hopefully a decent spec would also be sensitive to privacy concerns and would simply have an "off" bit as well.
I wasn't talking about privacy, but rather security in terms of the routing algorithm being gamed for malicious reasons.
Last I heard, American soldiers were supposed to be fighting to preserve a way of life, a way which includes freedom of expression.
Except this has absolutely nothing to do with freedom, but rather good taste and a little sensitivity towards their target market (unless they're planning on selling this game in Afghanistan).
It just sounds like the classic hill climbing algorithm to me.
That's because it's very similar -- with a massive stochastic component. It might be effective at routing, but I image leaving "pheromone traces" over network routes to indicate quality (latency, bandwidth, whatever) is something that will make sure security researchers have jobs for a long, long time.
So, now, if I get all the people I want to call on Facebook and get them to use this app, then we can call each other be buying the $10-15/mo unlimited data plan and buying 0 min/mo. Heck, it's a lot cheaper.
Which is precisely why you can't buy a plan that has no voice and only data. The ultra-cheap $15 data plan is in addition to the clusterf**k that is your monthly base price, plus the tons of fees added. Sure, you can get a broadband card, but try sticking one of those things in your shiny new iphone. Every phone operator, pretty much the world over, is a thieving a-hole.
Vonage awesome! Facebook - not so!
I thought people used Facebook because they did NOT want to talk in person, but rather receive information in an asynchronous way. Same reason why some people prefer chat/SMS/IM over phone calls. Neat gimmick though.
He's more of an operating systems/networking kind of guy. This just seems like fluff research to keep the department chair happy while he actually does his teaching and "real" research. Academia has this tendency to prioritize quality over quantity, and I think this provides an example of the pressures even good profs feel from the top re: publishing.
That's a very generous assessment. Obviously, I don't know the guy, but another possible hypothesis is that he's made the oft-repeated mistake of an expert outside his own field, who thinks he's also good enough to be an expert in another field. Academia is chock full of this -- having a good publishing record in one field tends to inflate one's ego, and can frequently lead to moronic research in even a closely related field.
I'm thinking of you, "obesity spreads through a social network" guy, who is actually a political scientist.
Passphrases are not harder to brute force. In general if you have 26 random characters its hard to brute force.
Passphrases encourage the use of numbers, capitalization, longer passwords, and punctuation. If the common password is all lowercase letters and maybe digits, your looking at a search space of (26+10)^k for a password of length k. If you throw in the 30 or so punctuation marks, and capitalization, the search space is (26+26+30)^k for the same length of password.
Given that so many people use lowercase+digits passwords, I'd be inclined to think that anyone brute-forcing a bunch of passwords would stick to the (26+10)^k search space, and therefore leave yours uncrackable. If they're just going after yours though, all bets are off, but then you should probably be using some uber-fancy authentication scheme anyway.
That's an even worse solution. Do you really think end users are going to be willing to type a 200 letter phrase in instead? We use passwords for a reason- its as much as most people are willing to type before becoming annoyed.
You, sir, have outdone yourself, even for slashdot standards. A passphrase is NOT "a phrase as a password", but rather a phrase as a mnemonic for your password.
Example:
Passphrase: 100 quick clicked commentors barely read Slashdot each day!
Password: 100qccbrSed!
I'll leave it to you to figure the magic out.