...and passwords will be written on sticky notes pasted to the underside of keyboards. Also fecal samples, I guess, when they start to be required. That should make the office experience so much more pleasant...

I used "Correct Horse Battery Staple" as my credit union password and was hacked almost immediately. As was nearly every geek I know who works here. So clearly he's right.

Even with the best password, memorized or securely stored doesn't protect you against a password recovery process that's improperly engineered. Often an institution, even a BANK, will give you as a recovery password a choice from perhaps six possibilities, any of which can be divined from publicly available information or a little social engineering. Your password may be q4ot38yhewa;okl, but your password recovery phrase will be the street you lived on in high school or the name of your first dog. This is not secure.

And don't even get me STARTED about pin code security. When I set up my AmEx corporate card, the phone menu suggested strongly that I use digits that are easy to remember, like my mother's birthday. Ignoring the directions and entering a random code, I got rejected because my pin WASN'T A VALID DATE. I called tech support, told the tech monkey the error I was getting and he immediately said that I was to set it to my mother's birthday. I said I didn't want to use something that would so easily be discovered, and he seemed nonplussed. He had to consult with a supervisor. They eventually decided that I could use a random number, but I had to tell him the number over the phone so he could override the menu's requirements to use a valid date. This was AMEX!

Back to the lost password process, I give random strings as answers to the challenge questions, but I figure eventually banks won't let me use strings that aren't a valid dog's name or a listed street name in my home town.

I know why they do this -- it cuts down on service calls to require shlubs to use passwords that are easy for them to remember. But geeze... I foresee a time when we'll all be required to use the common name for an eating implement. Everyone will choose "spoon". The institution will be able to cut customer support back to one person in north-eastern Poland. Or perhaps they already have.

(I use Poland not to denigrate the Poles, but because a company I do business with was quite proud of the low low DL price they got for customer support hotline personnel in eastern Poland. To cover North American accounts. Because that makes sense. Really.)

and time for the penguin on top of your television set to explode.

Right, then. Must'a had lithium-ion batteries, innit?

> and of course the only way to stop nude selfies from leaking, is not to take them.

Um, no. That's one way, but not the only way.

As to the benefit vs risk argument, I guess it depends how much it means to you to have your selfies made public. If you're a kardashian, it's a *feature*. If you're Jennifer Lawrence, perhaps it's an embarrassment, (until she does her first full frontal in a film, and then those frames will be all over the internet) but if she really feels that strongly about it (a "sex crime"? Seriously?) then she should think about (a) take your nudies, but NOT WITH A PHONE, you dope! It's not like you've NEVER HEARD of a celeb's phone getting hacked. Look we know you're smart enough to read a script. You should be able to figure out that phones are not secure. (b) The security of "the cloud" is inversely proportional to the value of the data. That your nudies (which were fairly tame, by the way. And a little grainy. Consider moving out to the patio.) would be a prime target for hackers pretty much goes without saying.

What it comes down to, is this: You don't secure the crown jewels with a $3 novelty lock. Depending on cell phone security to keep nekkid photos of Jennifer Lawrence private is exactly the electronic equivalent of a $3 novelty lock securing the pr0n equivalent of the crown jewels. You don't blame the victim for the crime, but you can point out that the victim did not use security appropriate for the value of the object.

Compared to most of us, Lawrence is loaded. She could afford to have a pr0n assistant (I can already see people lining up for that job) who's sole purpose is to distribute her nudies to whomever she's dating, with appropriate NDAs signed, in a secure fashion.

To wit: Take the photos with a real digital camera, not a phone. Put the physical media in a patched-up, antivirus-protected PC, encrypt the photo, send it via a secure, non-well-known email provider, then destroy the original. Educate the recipient on the value of security and the pain he will experience if he lets it get out.

If that's too much to do, then either don't take nude selfies, or lower your privacy expectations. Don't run around with your pants down and complain that everyone is screwing you.

Yeah, that's true, but one assumes there will be uses eventually for which such an infrastructure will be appropriate. The next level is probably 4K media.

Depends on how many people are living there and what they're doing. The way to think of it is that the 1 GB connection is a great big ol' pipe that'll never be a choke point, no matter how many people are streaming Netflix or torrenting Fedora 20.

That said, my main workstation goes to a 1 GB switch attached to Cat 6 I had punched through the upstairs into the attic, threaded down the folding ladder frame, tacked across the garage ceiling to where the fiber modem is located in the far corner of the garage. So I have a direct full speed connection should I ever need it for anything. But for wifi, it's the cumulative throughput that's important.

> Depends. If you put the 4L of gas into your moped or prius or something lame like that, you can go about 70 yards before you are caught and beaten to death because you're an idiot.

This is officially my favorite Slashdot response of the year.

I thought it was two hubcaps full. Given the diameter of the hubcap and the deepest part of the curve (assume the curve is circular) compute the volume. How far can your supercharged Ford Falcon go on the fuel?

Socialize the bug. The bigger the audience, the better. I suspect that this is especially important with security issues. Argue that of the three legs of security, the bug violates "availability" if the users can't use the service. Also remind the vendor that even if you can't get out of the contract, you have to provide the service, so you will be forced to seek a different solution.

Back when Usenet was still a thang, I was the primary sysadmin for an SGI shop. Some version of SGI had upgraded NFS to some new version but had not updated lockd. File locking over NFS between Sun and SGI machines ceased to work. SGI engineering argued that there was no compelling new functionality in the new version of lockd, so they had not bothered to port it, and besides, "it works for us".

I complained bitterly about this in the appropriate Usenet groups, with analysis and examples. A few weeks later, I was contacted by our sales engineer with a patch, just for us, that fixed the problem. The very next OS release the patch became standard.

Point is, arguing the facts with the vendor did not get the problem fixed. Publicly rubbing the vendor's nose in it did.

> Fusion power designs aren't cheap enough to outperform systems that use fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas.

Well, that, and sustained fusion has not been achieved yet. That's kinda like saying "Pixie Dust will never replace coal because they cost too many Altairian Dollars per Ngogn", enthusiastically passing over the slight but persistent issue that pixies don't exist.

As a homeowner with several dogs and who relies on wood heat in the winter, having a truck is pretty much a necessity. But we also have a small car for commuting, because hey, why spend more on gas than you have to?

But I've long noticed that the disparity in gas mileage between the (unloaded) truck and the 4-banger to be much less than their ratings would indicate. Part are driving habits, of course. I tend to be very soft on the gas pedal of the truck, as it just gulps gas if you let it. And the tendency in the econodeathbox is what some people call "the digital pedal", which really has only two states -- idling/decelerating or trying-to-catch-up-with-traffic. All these things tend to have a leveling tendency, probably.

I spent my formative years in a DEC-dominated lab, so the office background sounds were the soft thok-thok-thok of VT100 keyboards rather than the clicky-clicky of the Model M. I did get a chance to use the M keyboard later, and agree it has the best tactile feel of any keyboard I've used before or sense.

As pointed out by others, the keyboard is a straight keyboard in days when most of us are using split keyboards, and the noise can be distracting. But when you spend most of your day as root, an audio indication that a key had been clicked, and the added force necessary to make it work, are actually positive things. Just my opinion.

Can't used Linkedin at all, then.

I see what happened. The thread had slipped into Comcast's business practices in general, not this particular case, but I think I could argue that in general, the practice of granting cable companies de facto monopolies in geographical markets naturally leads to abuses of which this particular case is an example. As someone else pointed out, Comcast no longer even tries to maintain an image, because really they don't have to.