Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment We already had this discussion in 2004 (Score 1) 513

In fact, we had it right here on Slashdot the day Gmail was announced. We panicked about Google reading our email. Then, if you follow to the bottom of that thread you will see the same conclusion we reached here today. No one is reading your email. An algorithm is parsing it the same way all spam filters do.

That was 2004. We probably moved on after that, but about 4 years later Steve Ballmer himself started to use this misunderstanding to generate fear, uncertainty and doubt. A year after that, Google was sued over it.

The people behind this new campaign at Microsoft either don't remember all of this, or they're smart enough to see that it's been long enough to sound like a new issue. Let's not treat it as one. This issue should not be news to anyone reading this site. The only news here is that Microsoft is trying to use this misunderstanding again, ie. that a person is reading your mail, not an algorithm.

Comment Re:Brilliant idea (Score 5, Informative) 480

I use a password manager to solve this problem. It stores all (or a large set of) my passwords in an encrypted database. I have one very strong password that lets me access the database. The passwords it stores are all strong (sometimes hard to remember) passwords that I do not have to store in my head.

I still have all of my eggs in one basket, but that basket is sealed in a solid iron box.

Comment This Seems Like a Moot Point to Me (Score 1) 94

As much as I like how the game of Football plays, I will forever see it as one of the brain injury sports.

The Boston University School of Medicine studied 35 brains of former pro Football players. They found evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in 34 of them. The disease can lead to sufferers experiencing memory loss, dementia and depression.

It's fun to watch and play, but I can't support a sport that knowingly puts hundreds of thousands of kids through that. I don't know how much of this they knew when they published it, but the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic about Headbrick was frighteningly accurate.

To make it safe, they would have to turn it into what we currently call “flag” or “touch” Football. It would be a different sport.

Comment Re:The Insourcing Boom (Score 1) 266

I think so too. The article from theatlantic also mentioned protecting proprietary technology.

The addition of high-tech components to everyday items makes production more complicated, and that means U.S. production is more attractive, not just because manufacturers now have more proprietary technology to protect, but because American workers are more skilled, on average, than their Chinese counterparts.

Aside from handing over patents, I've read that it is routine for Chinese factories to secretly sell authentic brand products to counterfeiters. It's hard to compete with counterfeiters when they're selling the real thing at a discount.

Comment The Insourcing Boom (Score 2) 266

This sounds like another case of The Insourcing Boom. Companies are finally seeing at the total cost of outsourcing. Cook mentioned that Apple already has to make some parts in the US and pay to ship them out to the manufacturing plants overseas, and that's only one of the common costs.

The interview doesn't go into a lot of details on Apple's move to US manufacturing, but a big part of the outsourcing cost is what you lose when you separate your product development from the manufacturing process. This comment from Tim Cook speaks to that:

In addition, we have hundreds of people that reside in China in the plants on a full-time basis that are helping with manufacturing and working on manufacturing process and so forth. The truth is we couldn’t innovate at the speed we do if we viewed manufacturing as this disconnected thing. It’s integrated. So it’s a part of our process.

I'm guessing this move to insource is not philanthropic, it's a smart business decision in the long run, just like General Electric's.

Comment Re:oblig xkcd (Score 1) 454

It says that XKCD passwords (at least 18 lower case characters) would take insane amounts of time to crack, but it doesn't give numbers for a rainbow table attack; that's where an attacker makes all combinations of 1 to 4 words from a list of common ones and tries those first. They would also try word separators like spaces, underscores, dashes and even odd symbols. Those don't add much to the total search space though.

A rainbow table attack would reduce XKCD passwords to about 2048^4 (most use 4 words from a list of 2048 common ones). That's a search space of 1.76×10^13. That would take about 54 centuries of online cracking, 30 minutes of offline cracking and 1.5 seconds of offline mega-cluster hacking. That's not so good.

If you stick a single symbol character into the middle of one of your words (@, #, %, &, etc.), the rainbow attack fails and the search space goes back up to 2.66 x 10^35, or 8.45 hundred billion centuries to crack offline with a mega-cluster. Effectively uncrackable.

Even three words with a random symbol would take 1.18 thousand centuries offline with a mega-cluster. I think I'll go with that from now on.

Comment Re:Anything Else? (Score 1) 213

The Palladium RPG aims more for realism and combat simulation. It can get tedious, but it's pretty flexible in the amount of detail you can enforce.

They also have a lot of books that apply their system to completely different settings like modern day and sci-fi. Heroes Unlimited and Ninjas and Superspies work pretty well together.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Ninety percent of baseball is half mental." -- Yogi Berra

Working...