Comment Re:I hope Yahoo loses. (Score 1) 93
Salts, which are mandatory for good password storage, torpedo your idea. Sorry. Passwords stored without salts are vulnerable to rainbow table attacks.
Comment Re:TRWTF (Score 2) 93
"It is always possible to recover a password."
This is not true. If a password has more entropy than the hash being used, there will be collisions that make it impossible to tell what the original password is.
This is a basic consequence of the fact that hash functions are irreversible and have fixed size. If you consider the space of all passwords of any length, there are infinitely many passwords (even if you limit passwords to those made of long strings of english words) that hash to a particular value.
For the vast majority of passwords in use, the entropy is lower than the entropy of the hash, so it's feasible to construct mappings of possible passwords to hashes and determine the most likely password that way. It is not *always* possible to recover a password, however.
Study Finds Alcohol, Not Marijuana, Is the Biggest Gateway Drug For Teens 459
An anonymous reader writes with news of a study out of the University of Florida which found that alcohol is the biggest "gateway" drug, the use of which increases the likelihood of other drug use. Quoting:
"In the sample of students, alcohol also represented the most commonly used substance, with 72.2 percent of students reporting alcohol consumption at some point in their lifetime. Comparatively, 45 percent of students reported using tobacco, and 43.3 percent cited marijuana use. In addition, the drug use documented found that substance use typically begins with the most socially acceptable drugs, such as alcohol and cigarettes, then proceeds to marijuana use and finally to other illegal, harder drugs. Moreover, the study showed that students who used alcohol exhibited a significantly greater likelihood — up to 16 times — of licit and illicit substance use."
Comment Re:Well...not so much (Score 1) 2416
Doesn't matter if you're not for it, you're getting subsidized anyway.
No health insurance company has an insurance class for vegans or paleo dieters who do 30+ minutes of cardio a day, because until there are cheap tech means of measuring compliance, implementing that would cause the insurers to hemorrhage profits due to cheaters claiming healthy habits, getting the discount, then having diabetes/etc when they eat sugar 24/7 and don't exercise.
The Ins companies tend to only screen for pathological conditions, so trying to be healthy has negligible immediate monetary benefit over being average or slightly below average.
I strongly believe that society needs to tackle the problem of convincing people to be healthy first, THEN move to a public healthcare system (for-profit insurers making money off of people's need/desire to be covered against catastrophic medical problems doesn't seem ethical to me).
Comment Re:Love Posner (Score 3, Funny) 63
Goes to credibility, your honor.
Red Hat Will Pay Microsoft To Get Past UEFI Restrictions 809
ToriaUru writes "Fedora is going to pay Microsoft to let them distribute a PC operating system. Microsoft is about to move from effectively owning the PC hardware platform to literally owning it. Once Windows 8 is released, hardware manufacturers will be forced to ship machines that refuse to run any software that is not explicitly approved by Microsoft — and that includes competing operating systems like Linux. Technically Fedora didn't have to go down this path. But, as this article explains, they are between a rock and a hard place: if they didn't pay Microsoft to let them onto the PC platform, they would have to explain to their potential users how to mess with firmware settings just to install the OS. How long before circumventing the secure boot mechanism is considered a DMCA violation and a felony?" Note that the author says this is likely, but that the entire plan is not yet "set in stone."
Milky Way's Black Hole Wasn't Always Such a Wimp 83
scibri writes "Sagittarius A*, the dormant supermassive black hole that lies at the center of our galaxy, was much more active not that long ago. Astronomers using the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have picked up some faint gamma-ray signals that suggest Sagittarius A* was emitting a pair of powerful gamma-ray jets like other galactic black holes as recently as 20,000 years ago (arXiv paper). If our black hole was more active in the past, it could explain why Sagittarius A* seems to be growing about 1,000 times too slowly for it to have reached its current mass of about four million solar masses since the Galaxy formed about 13.2 billion years ago."
Comment Re:So (Score 5, Insightful) 545
You think that cops should be allowed to detain you (you're placed under temporary arrest during a traffic stop) merely to give you helpful health and safety information?
Comment GITS (Score 1) 372
Ghost in the Shell manga. You can find scans of the whole thing.
Comment Re:Note to all governments (Score 1) 274
I thought all states technically require that.
However, it's unenforceable in most cases, so the only cases where someone usually pays it are:
a) They're a goodie-two-shoes.
b) They itemize the purchase when reporting to government. For instance, itemizing something to deduct it from taxes, without paying a use tax, could theoretically be noticed by the State.
Comment Really? (Score 2) 62
Is this testing for the absence of BEAST workarounds which are present in all current respectable ssl libraries? Or does it just look for sites using TLS 1.0/SSL3 with block mode ciphers?
Bionic Eye Patient Tests Planned For 2013 59
angry tapir writes "Australian researchers are getting ready to test a bionic eye on patients in 2013. The eye consists of 98 electrodes that stimulate nerve cells in the retina, which is a tissue lining the back of the eye that converts light into electrical impulses necessary for sight, and allow users to better differentiate between light and dark. With the bionic eye, images taken by a camera are processed in an external unit, such as a smartphone, then relayed to the implant's chip. This stimulates the retina by sending electric signals along the optic nerve into the brain where they are decoded as vision."
Comment Re:Why the anxiety? (Score 4, Informative) 807
Dear luddite, get off of the internet. Please. Win 2k is 1.5 years beyond its extended support end date. http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?c2=1131
While you're whining about apps and OS that can't run in 512MB ram, the rest of us have blazing fast desktops that never touch swap, because 16GB of ddr3 ram is something like $100-150 today. It costs more money to sit around whining than it does to get more ram than you know what to do with.
Profiles gone? I don't know what you're talking about. Start any modern firefox with the flags -no-remote to prevent opening another window of an existing firefox instance, and -profilemanager to open the profile management/selection window. I have all my shortcuts changed to start it that way by default.
My mobile has more ram than your computer.
US Military Working On 'Optionally-Manned' Bomber 278
An anonymous reader writes "Despite massive budget deficits, the U.S. military is working towards a stealthy and 'optionally-manned' bomber capable of carrying nuclear weapons. The craft is intended to replace the 1960s B-52, 1970s B-1 and 1990s B-2 bombers. The new aircraft is meant to be a big part of the U.S. 'pivot' to the Pacific. With China sporting anti-ship weapons that could sink U.S. carriers from a distance, a new bomber is now a top priority."
Comment Re:and where is exactly the problem? (Score 1) 915
To say that a right is "granted by our creator" is just a rhetorical trick to give legitimacy to a right that most people already agree with.
Let's take "free speech" as the right in question. The western religious zealots agree with it for the most part, but their religion prevents them from declaring arbitrary things to be of critical social importance. Everything true religious believers know and trust has to come from God. So you tell them their God is the source of this right, and all of a sudden they're on board.
Secular humanists or utilitarians or whatever you want to call them don't need that Creator BS, so they just ignore it and agree that free speech is a good idea.
