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!

I wasn't talking about privacy, but rather security in terms of the routing algorithm being gamed for malicious reasons.

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).

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Mark Newman! PNAS! The list goes on...generally seem to be people from field X trying to stuff from field Y (where Y is often ML/statistics/algorithms, and X != math or CS).

I agree with parent, and have you considered that developers whose code quality is affected by seating arrangements relative to other developers might not be...um, the best developers? Otherwise, I'd say you might be overthinking the issue.

Oh please, I think Sony put an end to the delusion that only grandmas and morons are susceptible to phishing or malware. Allow me to give you an example which most people here won't be able to do detect instantaneously: zero-day exploit in Flash + rootkit + trojan. I run a tight ship like the next nerd, but my AV software still flags trojans that somehow make it onto my system from time to time, and those are only the ones that it CAN detect.

And yes, there are zealots who will undoubtedly say things like "Flash is for suckers" or "what do you expect with Windows?", but these people should consider the fact that (a) not everyone lives in caves, and (b) some people just have more important things to worry about, like losing their homes.

Look, we as nerds must STOP treating "data mining" like an epithet, or at least a scarlet letter on one's resume. The term has been abused by the popular media in connection with the NSA's wiretapping, but people tend to overlook the fact that "data mining" is just a bunch of algorithms to find statistical patterns in different kinds of data. When it's referred to as "exploratory data analysis", no one seems to mind. When it's referred to as simply "applied statistics", no one seems to mind. Read the statement by ACM's data mining special interest group, SIGKDD.

That said, I completely agree with you -- of course Facebook is interested in mining the social graph and f***ing it for all its worth. They're a for-profit company whose only asset is detailed information about people and their interactions. Why is anyone shocked that they don't want to make the world a better place, and would rather become very rich instead off their only asset. For a capitalist country, a lot of nerds in the US seem to have rose-colored glasses on.