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Comment passwords inherently suck (Score 1) 209

Many people (not necessarily us super-smart slashdotters, but in the media and in general) appear to be taking the wrong lesson from this. This data breech shows that it doesn't really matter how good your password is if the list is not stored securely.

In this case, they were encoded with the flawed and ancient "crypt" method, which allowed the weakest passwords to be brute-forced very quickly. But there's plenty of CPU power out there, and rest assured that any stronger passwords wouldn't stand up to further scrutiny, no matter how many squiggly characters are included.

Because of this, people using weak passwords that they didn't use elsewhere ("lifehack" is a prime example) are certainly better off than someone who had a "strong" password used on multiple sites.

Comment Re:This seems easy to fix on the Google side (Score 1) 63

Why should people like myself, who have a legitimate reason for services on different ports, be punished because others lack the skills to properly secure their networks? Are you suggesting that I should have to proxy all of my services through apache even when their is no benefit to doing so? This isn't a problem that will be fixed from the top down I'm afraid.

You're misunderstanding. Alternate ports shouldn't be inherently penalized. They just shouldn't get a pagerank bump by being on the same hostname as something else. If your content is legit, there really shouldn't be any worry.

Comment "Undercover agent"? Puh-leeeese. (Score 2) 179

The article says "... Tony Rosario, was an undercover agent with the Entertainment Software Association ...". I'm gonna call O RLY on that one.

Even though not surprising that the entertainment industry lives in such a fantasy world, private corporate organizations do not get undercover agents. This was some random guy playing at cloak and dagger cops under the label of "private investigator".

Comment Re:Doomed to failure by license conflict (Score 2, Interesting) 235

Um, just who do you think is writing BTRFS? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs I know its fashionable to knock Oracle every chance you get... but Look at the line:

As I understand it, Chris Mason brought his btrfs work with him when he started at Oracle, or at least the ideas for it. A kernel hacker of his caliber probably started the job with an agreement of exactly how that was going to go.

Oracle is a big organization; it's not surprising they act in apparently contradictory ways. They've done a reasonable amount of good open source work and made community contributions. But I stand by the statement that it's impossible to make a good prediction as to what Oracle is going to do with anything that comes from the Sun acquisition -- but you certainly don't need to take my word for it that most of the behavior so far seems to be aimed at short-term monetization rather than long-term community growth.

Comment Re:Doomed to failure by license conflict (Score 1) 235

It differs from the Nvidia driver because the Nvidia module until recently was needed to make very common PC hardware work at all, and even with the new free software Nouveau drivers, still needed for game-level performance. ZFS has neat features, but you don't need it in order to have storage on Linux.

There's clearly a niche market for out-of-tree ZFS modules, or else this wouldn't have gotten funding. But if you're not already committed, it adds significant overhead. As someone who was dependent on OpenAFS for years for legacy reasons, I strongly caution people that the overhead is unlikely to be worth it.

Comment Doomed to failure by license conflict (Score 4, Interesting) 235

OpenAFS, which still today provides features unavailable in any other production-ready network filesystem, is a nightmare to use in the real world because of its lack of integration with the mainline kernel. It's licensed under the "IPL", which like the CDDL is free-software/open source but not GPL compatible.

ZFS is very cool, but this approach is doomed to fail. It's much better to devote resources to getting our native filesystems up to speed -- or, ha, into convincing Oracle to relicense.

Personally, I was pretty sure Sun was going to go with relicensing under the GPLv3, which gives strong patent protection and would have put them in the hilarious position of being more-FSF free software than Linux. But with Oracle trying to squeeze the monetary blood from every last shred of good that came from Sun, who knows what's gonna happen.

Comment Re:Lungs (Score 2, Informative) 177

The bacteria they made in the lab likes the acidity of concrete. What about the mutant bacteria that the bacteria in the crack makes?

It won't survive because it's still in the very alkaline concrete environment? Or as Morbo might put it: EVOLUTION DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY.

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