What's the point? The only difference would be the photographer.
The point? My version wouldn't be a crop of a nude woman that would belong to playboy. There would be nothing the least bit controversial about it, and it would have all the same technical merits in terms of suitability as a test case for an image processing alogorithm.
I don't see how continuing to use the image helps them, though.
What does what "you see" have to do with it? Frankly I agree with you about the image itself. I am not personally offended by it.
But surely you accept the empirical evidence that many other people do find even the idea of the use of a centerfold image lifted (even cropped) from Playboy to be inappropriate in an academic setting.
I see it. I even agree its inappropriate. Its certainly not something I'd knowingly do if I were selecting images to create a sample set of images for high school course.
your right. it meets a technical definition of censorship. I withdraw my objection based on it not being censorship.
However, even if I accept its "censorship", so what? There is nothing wrong whatsoever with not doing something that pops into your head because you realize other people would not appreciate it, would not understand, or would be offended by it.
There is nothing wrong with that. Yet you make out like its universally wrong. That's ridiculous.
Or are you really suggesting that a high school computer science teacher is showing good judgement if he goes through his porn collection, crops a bunch of the images of various porn actresses and provides those as his sample data set, with attribution. (Because not providing proper attribution is itself academic dishonesty.)
Does he have the right to do it? Sure. Because otherwise censorship right?
But does everyone else have a right to tell him he's an idiot, and refuse to do the assignment, and complain the administration that they feel the assignment is completely inappropriate, and demand he be replaced with a teacher who doesn't make decisions like this. Why yes, they can, because if they couldn't that would be censorship too. And around we go.
Some measure of reasonable self-censorship is part of normal social lubricant. Whether or not you personally feel the image is offensive you are aware that it controversial. If you select it knowingly you provoke controversy. If if you provoke controversy... then own the consequences.
While you have the right to offend. Other people have the right to be offended.
Thus it provides a useful test for face recognition and segmentation of natural images with or without color. The image was originally chosen by chance, but it's because of these qualities that it has been commonly used for so long.
Yes, its a suitable image. But its not uniquely suitable. Any of thousands of other images are equally suitable.
Hell, I could recreate the pose with a volunteer model (wife), 10 minutes, and trip to the thrift shop for.
In any event, you shouldn't take seriously any computer vision papers based on results from a single image.
One of the controversies when I was in high school centered around 'One flew over the cuckoo's nest'.
You read it in a class where the controversies raised are a central part of the education about american history and american literature.
and people more like yourself argued that it should be banned from the curriculum simply because it was controversial.
I respectfully disagree. I wouldn't ban it from the curriculum. Its perfectly appropriate for an American Lit curriculum.
However, if I were teaching calligraphy and wanted to give them practice exercises with n's and g's What possible reason is there to justify selecting "sand nigger" as their practice words? Yes, there are n's and g's... but innumerable other options are equally suitable to satisfy that objective, There is no reason to select an ethnic slur. Because its a calligraphy class... and we want to focus on calligraphy... brush strokes and technique. You want to focus on how to draw the letters, not get overly distracted by what the practice exercises actually say.
Every student in the class was involved during class discussion, unlike discussions about ancient "classics" like Shakespeare's works.
In a class where you want discussions about the book selecting a book that is both suitable for the course (american english lit) incites discussion makes sense.
In a CS image processing course you want discussion about rasterization, antialiasing, edge detection...not on the ethics of porn. Why would you select an image that originates with porn? Its not like there is a dearth of suitable photos to choose from.
My response to THAT issue was in the first part of my reply, to wit: that there is no particular reason to use that image, and that I'd select a different one.
If you've bought into this bullshit about sexuality being inherently profane, you're part of the problem
I haven't bought into this bullshit. I don't think the image is the least bit profane.
I have however bought into the unequivocal fact that the image draws controversy and discussion unrelated to teaching computer science.
If I were a teacher, and i wasn't interested in that discussion and controversy distracting the class, I'd pick a different image. Its not like there is any thing technical about that image that makes it especially useful as a test case.
It's disgusting that sexuality is so maligned that a completely innocuous image is considered inappropriate simply because it is cropped from another image which should not be considered offensive. People keep trying to show that pornography is harmful, and they keep failing to do so even when that is their agenda. Let it go!
Great points. A good topic for a philosophy course; but it's not computer science.
If the price of these gets low enough, it might make sense for everybody to install one, even without solar panels.
Peak pricing is based on peak demand. If someone buys a battery to try and get abitrage between peak and offpeak pricing they can.
However as soon as you try to scale it up and "everyone starts doing it" it doesn't work.
Each person that adds on lops a little slice of how much is needed at peak, and adds a little sloce to how much is needed off peak.
Think about that. As soon as enough people jump on the bandwagon the offpeak demand rises and the peak demand falls to equilibrium and the prices will equalize and there will be no more price arbitrage.
So, short term, yeah, it might makes sense - you might even break even or come out ahead depending on how things go. As backup power for your home, maybe it makes sense.
But long term though, I speculate the power company will simply deploy its own industrial scale batteries for a fraction of the price per kwh stored than will be available to me at home and use that to smooth things out at their end. And then peak pricing and off peak pricing will move to equillibrium.
Good solve!:) Strictly speaking, it would have been O18.9Neon as I was truncating rather than rounding atomic weights.
But no way in hell I'd have an automatic pattern generator rigged to try that.
That was my thought too. And even that algorithm was relatively simple; requiring the user memorize just a couple simple rules and either know the periodic table; or have ready access to one (which is trivial) in the event he needs to "regenerate" a forgotten password.
I -used- to use techniques in the same general category as this for password generation... but after a few breaches and other forced password change situations it became irritating because I could no longer use the password the 'system' generated with some sites. I switched to using a password manager with random passwords on most sites.
I still use a 'system' for some sites I use regularly and/or have to enter the p/w manually instead of being able to use copy/paste.
I memorize a simple password for each and then some apply some ciphers and transformations to it. So losing one to a phish isn't a threat to the rest, and I can change it easily since it isn't based soley on the domain name.
But it's only suitable for a smallish number of sites; since I still have to remember a basic password.
And honestly, at this stage I feel the so-called security questions (that anyone who knows you can answer) with email or SMS recovery mechanisms are the weakest link. As these are both fairly easy to intercept; especially if you know the target.
Your criticism amounts to "If it doesn't completely solve the problem for everybody its no good." and that is false.
Yes some will switch to various simple password patterns t.password for twitter... f.password for facebook... or maybe fb.password... etc. That's still an improvement. Even simple patters require some effort to break.
Some fraction will use a harder patterns that aren't immediately obvious. That's an improvement. Lets say my password is "stupidgdog" for google. Maybe your automated phishing tools will try stupidfdog on facebook... but maybe not.
Some fraction will use a slightly harder pattern.
Lets say I use stupidgHdog as my google password. My new pattern is still simple. its "stupid" + "first name of domain" + "next letter in alphabet capitalized" + "dog"
With just one sample, are you really sure your automated phishing tools going to figure out that facebook is: stupidfGdog ? And twitter its stupidtUdog?
And that's still pretty lazy as passwords go.
Some smal fraction will take the hint and use much harder patterns. That will take several fished passwords for the user and probably some human eyes to figure out. This is an improvement.
Lets say my google password is: C69.7Germanium what's my facebook password?
Here... I give you twitter on this pattern too: N47.8Vanadium. With 2 samples passwords you've got enough of a pattern to try and brute force it... letter + 3 digits + element... 26* 1000 * 118... 2.6 million passwords to try.
Very doable if its a targeted search on a particular user... but your probably not going to spend the time looking at each fished password and then write a script to do that specific search... for just one random user. Probably.
And some fraction of people will switch to using a password safe or something, and thats an improvement too.
The intersection of the set of people that care about security enough to install this extension, yet don't care enough to use unique passwords, is probably rather small
Fair enough. Still...
"Password Alert is also available to Google for Work customers, including Google Apps and Drive for Work. Your administrator can install Password Alert for everyone in the domains they manage, and receive alerts when Password Alert detects a possible problem."
The intersection of administrators who might think its a good idea with end users that use the same password on other sites might be large enough to be at least a little bit fun.
Yes, making this work for all password protected sites, rather than Google-only, would be nice. That would not only stop many phishing attempts, but would also discourage cross-site password reuse.
Yeah, if it were integrated with something like password safe or password gorilla or keypass etc.
Or I suppose it could be tied into the A/V products which already have anti-phishing extensions -- McAfee for example, already has a password safe and antiphishing... seems almost a no-brainer for them to integrate them in this way. The password safe component could dump a list of hashes and domain names and if you try entering a password that matches the hash throw up an alert. And then maybe flag the page for A/V's phishing lists so if a page is generating alerts like crazy visitors it can be blacklisted -- preventing other users from even reaching the domain/phishing page.
Put on the popcorn and wait for the fireworks show that arises when people who use the same password they use for google on other sites.
Still its an interesting idea, that might be usable in a general purpose extension that maintains hashes and URLs and then hashes every input box and compares it to the databse / urls -- and if it finds a hash match but the URL is wrong throw up an alert.
Way more useful than a google only one that only works in chrome and only when you are signed in.
But the three-letter agencies can't do that 200 times a day, so they want a cheap, simple solution that labels the common people as criminals without rights.
This is needlessly cynical. I don't dispute the TLAs love mass surveillance. But there is a legitimate concern where law enforcement can justify and obtain a legal warrant for someone's electronic records/communications but not have any way to actually legally act on the warrant.
Ie... if they have your encrypted laptop AND a warrant they ARE allowed to break into it, but they can't. This is a legitimate issue.
"Rubber hose decryption" is not legal, nor should it ever be.
In a sense, encrypted data is like the contents of one's mind more than its like other property; in that there is currently no legal way to ensure they can get at it.
Their desire for a backdoor is pretty reasonable, in a way, but the problem is what they are asking for is a key which is far too much. There is no good solution here.
a) Giving them the power to demand the key is fine, but what if they demand the key of someone who genuinely doesn't have it? Is he guilty and imprisoned for not having something? That's bullshit.
b) Giving them a back door so they can just come and go as they please is giving them far too much power and ripe for abuse.
c) Not giving them a back door and requiring they break has the issue that properly encryption can't currently be broken.
The sanest and only reasonable choice is 'c', but it is not really a solution to the legitimate problem... its just the only one that doesn't trample on the innocent.
You're not really removing a car from the road if the people you're transporting can't drive.
I'd like to point out that the traffic problem in cities is not caused by all the cars that are full of people.
there has to be more than one licensed driver in the vehicle in order to use the carpool lane.
But then we'll all bitch about that married couple that work near each other and get to use the carpool lane, and would carpool even there were no HOV lanes... so they aren't removing any cars from the road.
Don't most single men want a woman that will have sex with them without a whole lot effort
Sure. But just with them though.
There's no allure to the woman who also slept with their best friend, and the mailman, and the neighbor, and the guy at 7-11, that weirdo on the bus...
You just wait until Win 10 launches and practically insists on MSN and THE CLOUD, Xbox for media integration, your mic as a default on device with cortana and sparton, ten tentacles hooked into your nuts and brains for every web service that defaults to bing,
Ok, yes, that's a problem. But its also not a problem.
I accept Microsoft might develop all that crap. I accept Microsoft might turn all that crap on, or make the default rout. Note I don't necessarily LIKE it.
I also know it all going to be something I can turn off because: enterprise and government.
Those customers aren't going to put up with xbox integration, or MSN cloud signin, or always on microphones, or desktop search talking to bing. Or any of that crap... so I know that not only will I be able to turn it all off, but that it will be pretty easy too. No hacking, probably even GUI tools for it, with preset policy's I can just flip, save, and apply to any computer I buy, easily.
So while I know Microsoft might WANT 'my brainz' I also know they'll ensure they fully support not giving them 'my brainz' in a way that Google never will.
Sure google has apps for enterprise but its a bastard stepchild that is peanuts compared to their search and advertising division.
Microsoft will provide for what the enterprise wants. So when I read about horrible Microsoft feature X... I ask myself "would an enterprise put up with that?" and if the answer is no, I don't worry about it. And so far that's never let me down.
I do worry about Windows as a subsription service. -- Enterprises by and large are already on one. And I figure the 4k drm garbage will be real... enterprises by and large won't give a shit whether the pc's will play hollywood 4k movies or not.
But requiring an MSN account to sign into windows? Yeah I'm not worried about that. Requiring xbox integration? Nope. Not worried. Requiring always on Mic? Nope.
"lololololol" right back at you. What's the domain called? Maybe you thought I meant the itunes application? If so your retort is understandable, but you still misunderstood.
I could use only third party apps and no Apple services
How do you get third party apps without using Apple services (for example without using itunes.apple.com) smart ass?
Apple watch is vastly less reliant on Apple than Android Wear is on Google.
If only there was some way of getting apps for it without relying on apple, that might actually be true. But there is not, so its not.
Android wear might completely dependent on google than I thought; I really don't know. I speculate that if you can run it cyanogenmod you don't need google services to use it... but perhaps not. It doesn't really matter... I'm not advocating an android wear anyway.
Without Google Now it's a paperweight.
Without Apple so is your apple watch. Because without itunes (itunes the service not itunes the app), there are no 3rd party apps for it.
How do you KNOW that? There are plenty of times when I may want to take a call if it's important.
How do you KNOW that? How do you know its important until you answer it?
And if you don't know, but expect it might be important, then you'll need to check. Checking your phone to see who is calling is just as obnoxious as checking your watch. Moreso probably because after checking your watch, you have even less time to answer it so your panic answer dance will be that much more urgent.
I do that too but it's not AS EASY. Again it's the layering you are missing here.
Its pretty easy. Certainly not difficult enough nor something that occurs frequently enough for being able to do it from my watch to to even register as a "layer" of value.
.That relies heavily on services from a single manufacturer, and it fairly useless without.
As I said, it works with cyanogenmod meaning the "single manufacturer" is less critical to its continued operation or functionality. Google could vanish off the face of the earth tomorrow and android would live on.
Android Wear is every bit as pigeon-holed, in fact moreso...[...]
False.
there are already far more Apple Watch apps to gain non-Apple functionality.
Lol. Seeing as they are inextricably tied to itunes and ios, calling it non-apple functionality means what exactly?
The pebble has non-apple functionality, you can toss your iphone in a ditch buy and android and keep using your pebble.
Android wear at least works with android not-tied-to-google (cyanogenmod) and may work with other OSes such as sailfish etc.
For those that run down phones in less than a day they may not have to do a mid-day charge any longer. That's actually quite a huge win.
I'm extremely doubtful.
You are ignoring the tiering of notifications possible with this arrangement.
Sort of, but better tiering of notifications really should just be part of the phone OS. iOS in particular is terrible at letting you filter notifications -- android is better but only because you have more 3rd party app options, but the OS is severely lacking.
I think if our phones were better at tiering notifications, that would moot a lot of the point of a smartwatch doing it.
I guess you don't mind people wondering why you find the insides of your pants so suddenly interesting.
Meh, when my phone rings in my pocket and I know I don't want to answer it without even looking, I can easily click the side button to ignore it, through my pocket. I can't imagine spending literally hundreds of dollars to avoid this scenario.
So then you must equally hate Android Wear.
Not quite equally. Android is a single platform but not a single manufacturer, and android is a lot more open, rumor has it works with cyanogenmod for example, which might mean it could work with other phones firefoxos,sailfish, ubuntuphone, etc...
I also ordered a Pebble Time, so I'll see...
I'm not sold on the smartwatch concept, but if I were, this is the sort of product I'd be interested in.
Christ, this is so obnoxious. Look, just because you don't have a use for this watch, it doesn't mean NOBODY does.
Christ, I literally suggested my own possible use for this watch.
But it's also jewellery. People wear that stuff for lots of reasons.
I mentioned that too in my post.
Do you understand how insanely dumb it is to buy a mechanical watch except as jewellery? They're not terribly accurate timekeeping devices
Accurate timekeeping for a handheld watch? If its within 2-3 minutes of being right, its good enough for what nearly everyone wears a wrist watch for.
You finish by saying that it's about the lock-in, but that's a ridiculous complaint. You think someone buying the first-gen Apple watch is the kind of person that is normally so capricious about their tech decisions?
And yet it's my complaint. As for people buying it, I think they are idiots.
What you don't like is that Apple made it and that other people like it.
Hmmm. I gave this some real thought, and no. That's not the issue. I think its a genuiely stupid product. There is an apple angle to it though... I think if anybody else had made it but Apple everyone else would agree that its a stupid product. For example if HP had made a smartwatch that only worked with Apple iphones nobody would give a shit about it. (And rightly so.) If HP had released a $10,000 version that was gold plated and only worked with the iphone it we'd be speculating what drugs their management was taking.
Remember the tablet that only works paired to a blackberry? It was a joke. This product is no different.
Buying an apple smartwatch is like buying a trailer for your car... one that can't be towed by any other car.
I think we can all safely assume by now that when Apple makes something there are a bunch of people that don't like it, so let's all pretend that you've said your piece and not use up the space from now on, hmm?
Apple has some decent products. (steadily fewer of them lately though.) But this watch is up there with the RIM playbook for stupid... except it might be successful because: Apple
But god forbid any one criticize anything apple does? Lets keep this space clear so we can just post praise and declare how badly we want one?
It extends the battery life of your phone because you are not powering it on as often.
In exchange for wearing a 2nd device you need to charge every day or so. Not much of a win.
It allows you to filter notifications more than the phone does, so you can know quicker if you should pay attention to an alert.
Thereby saving you time only if you can ignore most notifications, or actually wasting more time as you first check your watch, then pull out your phone every time instead of just pulling out your phone.
It allows you to silence a call without even reaching into your pocket doing the Vibration Reaction Dance.
Lol. true, but how much is that worth, right?
It's like a fitness band you wear all the time but without the single minded pointlessness.
But retains the pointlessness of wearing a fitness band.
And yes, it also tells the time without having to reach into a pocket...
Functionality handled better by a non-smart watch. (which runs for months, even years on a single battery...) and which can cost next to nothing, or be as arbitrarily expensive as you like. Which can be a cheap throwaway you could lose, or a family heirloom worn by your grandparents....
Or you can buy one that will be obsolete within a year or two.
If you aren't clear what it can do for you,
Separate money from wallets? Bring smiles to Apple fanbois faces? Usher in a new wave of corporate privacy invasion?
But there are many small uses which aggregate to form a model, different for each person, of how a smart watch can be useful to them.
True enough. And I'm honest enough with myself to think I'd like to be able to read texts and view alerts while mountain biking without having to stop and pull my phone out of my backpack. Then again, between the gloves and full body armor I'm wearing I'm not sure a smart watch would really be comfortable or all that usable.
Honestly my main complaint with the apple watch is the lock in to apple. I don't want a device that only works with a iphone. What if an owner doesn't want a new iphone next year because company Z has the better product. Now he has to abandon his smart watch too?
THAT is the main source of my derision for the device. If you want a smart watch fine, but have the sense to buy one that works with any phone.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the point? The only difference would be the photographer.
The point? My version wouldn't be a crop of a nude woman that would belong to playboy. There would be nothing the least bit controversial about it, and it would have all the same technical merits in terms of suitability as a test case for an image processing alogorithm.
I don't see how continuing to use the image helps them, though.
What does what "you see" have to do with it? Frankly I agree with you about the image itself. I am not personally offended by it.
But surely you accept the empirical evidence that many other people do find even the idea of the use of a centerfold image lifted (even cropped) from Playboy to be inappropriate in an academic setting.
I see it. I even agree its inappropriate. Its certainly not something I'd knowingly do if I were selecting images to create a sample set of images for high school course.
/shrug
your right. it meets a technical definition of censorship. I withdraw my objection based on it not being censorship.
However, even if I accept its "censorship", so what? There is nothing wrong whatsoever with not doing something that pops into your head because you realize other people would not appreciate it, would not understand, or would be offended by it.
There is nothing wrong with that. Yet you make out like its universally wrong. That's ridiculous.
Or are you really suggesting that a high school computer science teacher is showing good judgement if he goes through his porn collection, crops a bunch of the images of various porn actresses and provides those as his sample data set, with attribution. (Because not providing proper attribution is itself academic dishonesty.)
Does he have the right to do it? Sure. Because otherwise censorship right?
But does everyone else have a right to tell him he's an idiot, and refuse to do the assignment, and complain the administration that they feel the assignment is completely inappropriate, and demand he be replaced with a teacher who doesn't make decisions like this. Why yes, they can, because if they couldn't that would be censorship too. And around we go.
Some measure of reasonable self-censorship is part of normal social lubricant. Whether or not you personally feel the image is offensive you are aware that it controversial. If you select it knowingly you provoke controversy. If if you provoke controversy... then own the consequences.
While you have the right to offend. Other people have the right to be offended.
It's not censorship.
Actually, there are several - complex background, including a mirror, widely varying colors and textures (e.g. the hat feather),
http://www.ringwoodbiology.co....
or take your pick...crop to hearts content...
http://www.bigstockphoto.com/s...
http://www.bigstockphoto.com/s...
Thus it provides a useful test for face recognition and segmentation of natural images with or without color. The image was originally chosen by chance, but it's because of these qualities that it has been commonly used for so long.
Yes, its a suitable image. But its not uniquely suitable. Any of thousands of other images are equally suitable.
Hell, I could recreate the pose with a volunteer model (wife), 10 minutes, and trip to the thrift shop for.
In any event, you shouldn't take seriously any computer vision papers based on results from a single image.
Of course.
One of the controversies when I was in high school centered around 'One flew over the cuckoo's nest'.
You read it in a class where the controversies raised are a central part of the education about american history and american literature.
and people more like yourself argued that it should be banned from the curriculum simply because it was controversial.
I respectfully disagree. I wouldn't ban it from the curriculum. Its perfectly appropriate for an American Lit curriculum.
However, if I were teaching calligraphy and wanted to give them practice exercises with n's and g's What possible reason is there to justify selecting "sand nigger" as their practice words? Yes, there are n's and g's ... but innumerable other options are equally suitable to satisfy that objective, There is no reason to select an ethnic slur. Because its a calligraphy class... and we want to focus on calligraphy... brush strokes and technique. You want to focus on how to draw the letters, not get overly distracted by what the practice exercises actually say.
Every student in the class was involved during class discussion, unlike discussions about ancient "classics" like Shakespeare's works.
In a class where you want discussions about the book selecting a book that is both suitable for the course (american english lit) incites discussion makes sense.
In a CS image processing course you want discussion about rasterization, antialiasing, edge detection...not on the ethics of porn. Why would you select an image that originates with porn? Its not like there is a dearth of suitable photos to choose from.
My response to THAT issue was in the first part of my reply, to wit: that there is no particular reason to use that image, and that I'd select a different one.
If you've bought into this bullshit about sexuality being inherently profane, you're part of the problem
I haven't bought into this bullshit. I don't think the image is the least bit profane.
I have however bought into the unequivocal fact that the image draws controversy and discussion unrelated to teaching computer science.
If I were a teacher, and i wasn't interested in that discussion and controversy distracting the class, I'd pick a different image. Its not like there is any thing technical about that image that makes it especially useful as a test case.
It's disgusting that sexuality is so maligned that a completely innocuous image is considered inappropriate simply because it is cropped from another image which should not be considered offensive. People keep trying to show that pornography is harmful, and they keep failing to do so even when that is their agenda. Let it go!
Great points. A good topic for a philosophy course; but it's not computer science.
You've got it upside dowm. I run systemd on emacs.
If the price of these gets low enough, it might make sense for everybody to install one, even without solar panels.
Peak pricing is based on peak demand. If someone buys a battery to try and get abitrage between peak and offpeak pricing they can.
However as soon as you try to scale it up and "everyone starts doing it" it doesn't work.
Each person that adds on lops a little slice of how much is needed at peak, and adds a little sloce to how much is needed off peak.
Think about that. As soon as enough people jump on the bandwagon the offpeak demand rises and the peak demand falls to equilibrium and the prices will equalize and there will be no more price arbitrage.
So, short term, yeah, it might makes sense - you might even break even or come out ahead depending on how things go. As backup power for your home, maybe it makes sense.
But long term though, I speculate the power company will simply deploy its own industrial scale batteries for a fraction of the price per kwh stored than will be available to me at home and use that to smooth things out at their end. And then peak pricing and off peak pricing will move to equillibrium.
Bad guys have to set the evil bit; the software checks whether or not it's set. Really people, we've thought this through.
O19.0Neon
Good solve! :) Strictly speaking, it would have been O18.9Neon as I was truncating rather than rounding atomic weights.
But no way in hell I'd have an automatic pattern generator rigged to try that.
That was my thought too. And even that algorithm was relatively simple; requiring the user memorize just a couple simple rules and either know the periodic table; or have ready access to one (which is trivial) in the event he needs to "regenerate" a forgotten password.
I -used- to use techniques in the same general category as this for password generation... but after a few breaches and other forced password change situations it became irritating because I could no longer use the password the 'system' generated with some sites. I switched to using a password manager with random passwords on most sites.
I still use a 'system' for some sites I use regularly and/or have to enter the p/w manually instead of being able to use copy/paste.
I memorize a simple password for each and then some apply some ciphers and transformations to it. So losing one to a phish isn't a threat to the rest, and I can change it easily since it isn't based soley on the domain name.
But it's only suitable for a smallish number of sites; since I still have to remember a basic password.
And honestly, at this stage I feel the so-called security questions (that anyone who knows you can answer) with email or SMS recovery mechanisms are the weakest link. As these are both fairly easy to intercept; especially if you know the target.
Your criticism amounts to "If it doesn't completely solve the problem for everybody its no good." and that is false.
Yes some will switch to various simple password patterns t.password for twitter... f.password for facebook... or maybe fb.password... etc. That's still an improvement. Even simple patters require some effort to break.
Some fraction will use a harder patterns that aren't immediately obvious. That's an improvement. Lets say my password is "stupidgdog" for google. Maybe your automated phishing tools will try stupidfdog on facebook... but maybe not.
Some fraction will use a slightly harder pattern.
Lets say I use stupidgHdog as my google password. My new pattern is still simple. its "stupid" + "first name of domain" + "next letter in alphabet capitalized" + "dog"
With just one sample, are you really sure your automated phishing tools going to figure out that facebook is: stupidfGdog ? And twitter its stupidtUdog?
And that's still pretty lazy as passwords go.
Some smal fraction will take the hint and use much harder patterns. That will take several fished passwords for the user and probably some human eyes to figure out. This is an improvement.
Lets say my google password is: C69.7Germanium what's my facebook password?
Here... I give you twitter on this pattern too: N47.8Vanadium.
With 2 samples passwords you've got enough of a pattern to try and brute force it... letter + 3 digits + element... 26* 1000 * 118... 2.6 million passwords to try.
Very doable if its a targeted search on a particular user... but your probably not going to spend the time looking at each fished password and then write a script to do that specific search... for just one random user. Probably.
And some fraction of people will switch to using a password safe or something, and thats an improvement too.
The intersection of the set of people that care about security enough to install this extension, yet don't care enough to use unique passwords, is probably rather small
Fair enough. Still...
"Password Alert is also available to Google for Work customers, including Google Apps and Drive for Work. Your administrator can install Password Alert for everyone in the domains they manage, and receive alerts when Password Alert detects a possible problem."
The intersection of administrators who might think its a good idea with end users that use the same password on other sites might be large enough to be at least a little bit fun.
Yes, making this work for all password protected sites, rather than Google-only, would be nice. That would not only stop many phishing attempts, but would also discourage cross-site password reuse.
Yeah, if it were integrated with something like password safe or password gorilla or keypass etc.
Or I suppose it could be tied into the A/V products which already have anti-phishing extensions -- McAfee for example, already has a password safe and antiphishing ... seems almost a no-brainer for them to integrate them in this way. The password safe component could dump a list of hashes and domain names and if you try entering a password that matches the hash throw up an alert. And then maybe flag the page for A/V's phishing lists so if a page is generating alerts like crazy visitors it can be blacklisted -- preventing other users from even reaching the domain/phishing page.
Put on the popcorn and wait for the fireworks show that arises when people who use the same password they use for google on other sites.
Still its an interesting idea, that might be usable in a general purpose extension that maintains hashes and URLs and then hashes every input box and compares it to the databse / urls -- and if it finds a hash match but the URL is wrong throw up an alert.
Way more useful than a google only one that only works in chrome and only when you are signed in.
No good reason for Grandma to use Chrome anyway, or anyone else for that matter.
But the three-letter agencies can't do that 200 times a day, so they want a cheap, simple solution that labels the common people as criminals without rights.
This is needlessly cynical. I don't dispute the TLAs love mass surveillance. But there is a legitimate concern where law enforcement can justify and obtain a legal warrant for someone's electronic records/communications but not have any way to actually legally act on the warrant.
Ie... if they have your encrypted laptop AND a warrant they ARE allowed to break into it, but they can't. This is a legitimate issue.
"Rubber hose decryption" is not legal, nor should it ever be.
In a sense, encrypted data is like the contents of one's mind more than its like other property; in that there is currently no legal way to ensure they can get at it.
Their desire for a backdoor is pretty reasonable, in a way, but the problem is what they are asking for is a key which is far too much. There is no good solution here.
a) Giving them the power to demand the key is fine, but what if they demand the key of someone who genuinely doesn't have it? Is he guilty and imprisoned for not having something? That's bullshit.
b) Giving them a back door so they can just come and go as they please is giving them far too much power and ripe for abuse.
c) Not giving them a back door and requiring they break has the issue that properly encryption can't currently be broken.
The sanest and only reasonable choice is 'c', but it is not really a solution to the legitimate problem... its just the only one that doesn't trample on the innocent.
No the car analogy isn't valid, because the police do have access to everyone's cars and homes. They get a warrant. They bring a crowbar. Done.
That's the issue with encryption, they can get a warrant giving them the legal right to get in. But there is no crowbar.
I'm not in favor of this, but we do need to understand it is a somewhat unique situation. Strongly encrypted data is not like other property.
You're not really removing a car from the road if the people you're transporting can't drive.
I'd like to point out that the traffic problem in cities is not caused by all the cars that are full of people.
there has to be more than one licensed driver in the vehicle in order to use the carpool lane.
But then we'll all bitch about that married couple that work near each other and get to use the carpool lane, and would carpool even there were no HOV lanes... so they aren't removing any cars from the road.
Don't most single men want a woman that will have sex with them without a whole lot effort
Sure. But just with them though.
There's no allure to the woman who also slept with their best friend, and the mailman, and the neighbor, and the guy at 7-11, that weirdo on the bus...
You just wait until Win 10 launches and practically insists on MSN and THE CLOUD, Xbox for media integration, your mic as a default on device with cortana and sparton, ten tentacles hooked into your nuts and brains for every web service that defaults to bing,
Ok, yes, that's a problem. But its also not a problem.
I accept Microsoft might develop all that crap.
I accept Microsoft might turn all that crap on, or make the default rout. Note I don't necessarily LIKE it.
I also know it all going to be something I can turn off because: enterprise and government.
Those customers aren't going to put up with xbox integration, or MSN cloud signin, or always on microphones, or desktop search talking to bing. Or any of that crap... so I know that not only will I be able to turn it all off, but that it will be pretty easy too. No hacking, probably even GUI tools for it, with preset policy's I can just flip, save, and apply to any computer I buy, easily.
So while I know Microsoft might WANT 'my brainz' I also know they'll ensure they fully support not giving them 'my brainz' in a way that Google never will.
Sure google has apps for enterprise but its a bastard stepchild that is peanuts compared to their search and advertising division.
Microsoft will provide for what the enterprise wants. So when I read about horrible Microsoft feature X... I ask myself "would an enterprise put up with that?" and if the answer is no, I don't worry about it. And so far that's never let me down.
I do worry about Windows as a subsription service. -- Enterprises by and large are already on one. And I figure the 4k drm garbage will be real... enterprises by and large won't give a shit whether the pc's will play hollywood 4k movies or not.
But requiring an MSN account to sign into windows? Yeah I'm not worried about that. Requiring xbox integration? Nope. Not worried. Requiring always on Mic? Nope.
It's called CallerID.
And I don't need to look at my phone to know whether someone important is calling, because that's what distinctive ring/vibration is for.
Since you didn't say why, True wins.
I said why in the parent post, and in the post I made before that too.
loolololol since it's not tied to iTunes in any way, invalid.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/ap...
"lololololol" right back at you. What's the domain called? Maybe you thought I meant the itunes application? If so your retort is understandable, but you still misunderstood.
I could use only third party apps and no Apple services
How do you get third party apps without using Apple services (for example without using itunes.apple.com) smart ass?
Apple watch is vastly less reliant on Apple than Android Wear is on Google.
If only there was some way of getting apps for it without relying on apple, that might actually be true. But there is not, so its not.
Android wear might completely dependent on google than I thought; I really don't know. I speculate that if you can run it cyanogenmod you don't need google services to use it... but perhaps not. It doesn't really matter... I'm not advocating an android wear anyway.
Without Google Now it's a paperweight.
Without Apple so is your apple watch. Because without itunes (itunes the service not itunes the app), there are no 3rd party apps for it.
How do you KNOW that? There are plenty of times when I may want to take a call if it's important.
How do you KNOW that? How do you know its important until you answer it?
And if you don't know, but expect it might be important, then you'll need to check. Checking your phone to see who is calling is just as obnoxious as checking your watch. Moreso probably because after checking your watch, you have even less time to answer it so your panic answer dance will be that much more urgent.
I do that too but it's not AS EASY. Again it's the layering you are missing here.
Its pretty easy. Certainly not difficult enough nor something that occurs frequently enough for being able to do it from my watch to to even register as a "layer" of value.
.That relies heavily on services from a single manufacturer, and it fairly useless without.
As I said, it works with cyanogenmod meaning the "single manufacturer" is less critical to its continued operation or functionality. Google could vanish off the face of the earth tomorrow and android would live on.
Android Wear is every bit as pigeon-holed, in fact moreso ...[...]
False.
there are already far more Apple Watch apps to gain non-Apple functionality.
Lol. Seeing as they are inextricably tied to itunes and ios, calling it non-apple functionality means what exactly?
The pebble has non-apple functionality, you can toss your iphone in a ditch buy and android and keep using your pebble.
Android wear at least works with android not-tied-to-google (cyanogenmod) and may work with other OSes such as sailfish etc.
The apple watch? Not so much.
For those that run down phones in less than a day they may not have to do a mid-day charge any longer. That's actually quite a huge win.
I'm extremely doubtful.
You are ignoring the tiering of notifications possible with this arrangement.
Sort of, but better tiering of notifications really should just be part of the phone OS. iOS in particular is terrible at letting you filter notifications -- android is better but only because you have more 3rd party app options, but the OS is severely lacking.
I think if our phones were better at tiering notifications, that would moot a lot of the point of a smartwatch doing it.
I guess you don't mind people wondering why you find the insides of your pants so suddenly interesting.
Meh, when my phone rings in my pocket and I know I don't want to answer it without even looking, I can easily click the side button to ignore it, through my pocket. I can't imagine spending literally hundreds of dollars to avoid this scenario.
So then you must equally hate Android Wear.
Not quite equally. Android is a single platform but not a single manufacturer, and android is a lot more open, rumor has it works with cyanogenmod for example, which might mean it could work with other phones firefoxos,sailfish, ubuntuphone, etc...
I also ordered a Pebble Time, so I'll see...
I'm not sold on the smartwatch concept, but if I were, this is the sort of product I'd be interested in.
Christ, this is so obnoxious. Look, just because you don't have a use for this watch, it doesn't mean NOBODY does.
Christ, I literally suggested my own possible use for this watch.
But it's also jewellery. People wear that stuff for lots of reasons.
I mentioned that too in my post.
Do you understand how insanely dumb it is to buy a mechanical watch except as jewellery? They're not terribly accurate timekeeping devices
Accurate timekeeping for a handheld watch? If its within 2-3 minutes of being right, its good enough for what nearly everyone wears a wrist watch for.
You finish by saying that it's about the lock-in, but that's a ridiculous complaint. You think someone buying the first-gen Apple watch is the kind of person that is normally so capricious about their tech decisions?
And yet it's my complaint. As for people buying it, I think they are idiots.
What you don't like is that Apple made it and that other people like it.
Hmmm. I gave this some real thought, and no. That's not the issue. I think its a genuiely stupid product. There is an apple angle to it though... I think if anybody else had made it but Apple everyone else would agree that its a stupid product. For example if HP had made a smartwatch that only worked with Apple iphones nobody would give a shit about it. (And rightly so.) If HP had released a $10,000 version that was gold plated and only worked with the iphone it we'd be speculating what drugs their management was taking.
Remember the tablet that only works paired to a blackberry? It was a joke. This product is no different.
Buying an apple smartwatch is like buying a trailer for your car... one that can't be towed by any other car.
I think we can all safely assume by now that when Apple makes something there are a bunch of people that don't like it, so let's all pretend that you've said your piece and not use up the space from now on, hmm?
Apple has some decent products. (steadily fewer of them lately though.) But this watch is up there with the RIM playbook for stupid... except it might be successful because: Apple
But god forbid any one criticize anything apple does? Lets keep this space clear so we can just post praise and declare how badly we want one?
It extends the battery life of your phone because you are not powering it on as often.
In exchange for wearing a 2nd device you need to charge every day or so. Not much of a win.
It allows you to filter notifications more than the phone does, so you can know quicker if you should pay attention to an alert.
Thereby saving you time only if you can ignore most notifications, or actually wasting more time as you first check your watch, then pull out your phone every time instead of just pulling out your phone.
It allows you to silence a call without even reaching into your pocket doing the Vibration Reaction Dance.
Lol. true, but how much is that worth, right?
It's like a fitness band you wear all the time but without the single minded pointlessness.
But retains the pointlessness of wearing a fitness band.
And yes, it also tells the time without having to reach into a pocket...
Functionality handled better by a non-smart watch. (which runs for months, even years on a single battery...) and which can cost next to nothing, or be as arbitrarily expensive as you like. Which can be a cheap throwaway you could lose, or a family heirloom worn by your grandparents ....
Or you can buy one that will be obsolete within a year or two.
If you aren't clear what it can do for you,
Separate money from wallets? Bring smiles to Apple fanbois faces? Usher in a new wave of corporate privacy invasion?
But there are many small uses which aggregate to form a model, different for each person, of how a smart watch can be useful to them.
True enough. And I'm honest enough with myself to think I'd like to be able to read texts and view alerts while mountain biking without having to stop and pull my phone out of my backpack. Then again, between the gloves and full body armor I'm wearing I'm not sure a smart watch would really be comfortable or all that usable.
Honestly my main complaint with the apple watch is the lock in to apple. I don't want a device that only works with a iphone. What if an owner doesn't want a new iphone next year because company Z has the better product. Now he has to abandon his smart watch too?
THAT is the main source of my derision for the device. If you want a smart watch fine, but have the sense to buy one that works with any phone.