Comment Re:Tech time lines (Score 1) 179
My rule of thumb is: come up with an estimate, double it, add 1, and move to the next highest unit of measure, e.g. 1 hour -> 3 days, 1 day -> 3 weeks.
Comment In New York City (Score 5, Informative) 281
My office has "strongly advised" everyone to work from home, and the subway and buses have been shut down since 7pm Sunday evening. Right now (8:30am Monday) we've got some small wind gusts and scattered rain.
Comment Re:Wait, what? (Score 1) 240
Whoa, not so fast... there may be a way around that, see
http://www.acsa-admin.org/2005/abstracts/47.html
Comment Re:How many are 'bots? (Score 1) 383
But did you notice that gmail addresses are significantly more expensive?
Comment Make sure it's okay to fail (Score 1) 239
Try to make it a place where it's okay to fail, and fail early. I don't mean encourage people to be idiots, I mean make sure it's okay to try, work hard, make a legitimate mistake, and everybody moves on without repercussions and hopefully there's some lessons learned.
Comment Cutting the cable is like open source software (Score 1) 479
There's always something to watch, but it might not be exactly what you're looking for.
I've got a mix of over-the-air, a Roku serving YouTube, and Netflix streaming, and the non-plus version of Hulu on my laptop. It's not bad, I'm entertained, but the selection isn't all that great and about half of the time I say "Oh, I think I'd like to watch $X" but I have to settle for $Y. I don't watch a whole lot of television to begin with, so it's not that big of a deal for me.
If you are a serious TV watcher (I'm not) and don't want to torrent (I don't), I would recommend at a minimum Hulu or Hulu Plus (I've never used the 'Plus' version), Netflix streaming and DVD service.
Comment Where are you? (Score 1) 367
I'm in NYC, I'm and according to speedtest.net, I've got 2.7 Mb/s down, 0.7 Mb/s up.
My choices are Verizon DSL (which I have, and it's been rock-solid for the past 2 years) and Comcast (bleah), or else dial up. The irony is I live 10 minutes walk away from a major peering point.
Comment Re:We should pin the USPTO (Score 1) 150
"It's worse somewhere else" doesn't excuse "It's bad here"
Comment Re:Encrypt it then (Score 1) 241
Actually, you can do a bit better than that; see Homomorphic Encryption, but I think it's still mostly in the proof of-concept phase
Submission + - China calls US culprit in global 'Internet war' (cbsnews.com) 1
sticky.pirate writes: From the article:
The Chinese military accused the U.S. on Friday of launching a global "Internet war" to bring down Arab and other governments, redirecting the spotlight away from allegations of major online attacks on Western targets originating in China.
The Chinese military accused the U.S. on Friday of launching a global "Internet war" to bring down Arab and other governments, redirecting the spotlight away from allegations of major online attacks on Western targets originating in China.
Comment Re:I tried Tor.... (Score 1) 132
I saw a presentation by Jacob Appelbaum, where he addressed these kinds of speed concerns. He said (I hope I'm getting the quote right from memory) "we can make it faster, but you have to ask yourself: how fast do you want to die?"
Comment Re:How do you know when it's decrypted? (Score 1) 186
And encrypting multiple time with the same key will, for any reasonably secure crypto system*, not increase security. I understand that from a theoretical point of view, but from a practical point of view -- how would you break an encrypted file if it is doubly encrypted, even if you knew both algorithms involved. How do you solve the problem of recognizing if you'd actually decrypted with the first key, so that you can start working with the second key?? Haven't you increased the key-space to an exponent of itself (in practical terms), and therefore created something vastly more secure?
Multiply encrypting will only increase your security if there isn't some other key that you could have used that yields the same results. For example, if we use "E(M,K)" means "Encrypt message M with key K" then encrypting twice would be E(E(M,K1),K2). The problem is, if there is some OTHER key K3 such that E(M,K3) = E(E(M,K1),K2), then you really haven't added any security by doing that.
Obligatory disclaimer: everything I know about cryptography I learned from reading Bruce Schneier's books, and they're all in storage at the moment
Comment Re:Wow (Score 1) 182
SSL was released in 1996
Banks prefer a conservative approach, using tried and tested 18th century steam punk hardware.
No kidding. One of the many projects I have worked on over the years is some of the infrastructure for Continuously Linked Settlement, which automates a huge chunk of foreign currency exchange. Not too long after the "Go-Live" date, I needed to exchange a sizable chunk of money between Euros and dollars that required me to go in-person to my bank.
I was really looking forward to participating in the modern 21st century economy, and seeing the high-tech whiz-bang front end the bank had wrapped around our back-end... and I was very disappointed when the whole transaction boiled down to the bank guy filling out a form and putting it in stack of other forms.
Comment Re:But (Score 1) 366
Why is that? What does "sophistication" have to do with the underlying crime? You either did something illegal, with an actual victim or you did not. How good you are at doing it should have nothing to do with your punishment.
I don't think this is about punishment; this is about being "tough on crime", which is always good for getting votes.
Comment Re:Well... (Score 1) 308
Any politician who gets behind this will not get re-elected. When less than 10% of the population supports something, it is political suicide to try and hitch your wagon to it.
I think you're over-estimating the attention span of most voters. When re-election time comes around, the message won't be "I supported a measure that only 10% of you were in favor of and my opponent was against it", it will be "I'm tough on internet crime and my opponent supports open access to child pornography". Most people will probably not remember the issues in detail, but will definitely hear the election-time rhetoric.
