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Submission + - Black hat and a badge (cnn.com)

Submitted by rot26
rot26 writes: Two federal agents involved with the investigation of the silk road kept some bitcoin for themselves

Comment Re:everyone who passed a math class knows (Score 1) 159

by rot26 (#49353597) Attached to: Many Password Strength Meters Are Downright Weak, Researchers Say
My reply in the other thread was more detailed, nuanced, explicit, and reasoned. I just couldn't do that twice in one day, it's exhausting. (I did say "lists" in my response.)

When I googled "diceware", and read what was on their site, I didn't really see any mention of the extra lengths you would have to go to to make the method actually secure. It's not a bad idea, it just has some caveats.

Comment Re:everyone who passed a math class knows (Score 1) 159

by rot26 (#49349417) Attached to: Many Password Strength Meters Are Downright Weak, Researchers Say
Unless the diceware lists are not known to the attackers, how is this any better than any collection of 6 bit numbers? And if you're counting on the attackers not knowing about this method, you've degenerated into security by obscurity. What am I missing? And why did some wanker delete essentially this same response from another thread?

Comment Most Importantly: MAKE SURE BAD GUYS DON'T KNOW (Score 1) 2

by rot26 (#49349103) Attached to: Passphrases You Can Memorize That Even The NSA Can't Guess
Am I missing something here? How does this make the password/phrase any more secure than 5 (ect) 6 bit digits? It depends on the hackers not knowing about the diceware lists, which devolves simply into security by obscurity. Now if the list were different for each person who downloaded it, that would help SOMEWHAT, but this would still by no means be secure.

Somebody point out what I am missing, please.

Submission + - Passphrases You Can Memorize That Even The NSA Can't Guess 2

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Micah Lee writes at The Intercept that coming up with a good passphrase by just thinking of one is incredibly hard, and if your adversary really is capable of one trillion guesses per second, you’ll probably do a bad job of it. It turns out humans are a species of patterns, and they are incapable of doing anything in a truly random fashion. But there is a method for generating passphrases that are both impossible for even the most powerful attackers to guess, yet very possible for humans to memorize. First, grab a copy of the Diceware word list, which contains 7,776 English words — 37 pages for those of you printing at home. You’ll notice that next to each word is a five-digit number, with each digit being between 1 and 6. Now grab some six-sided dice (yes, actual real physical dice), and roll them several times, writing down the numbers that you get. You’ll need a total of five dice rolls to come up with each word in your passphrase. Using Diceware, you end up with passphrases that look like “cap liz donna demon self”, “bang vivo thread duct knob train”, and “brig alert rope welsh foss rang orb”. If you want a stronger passphrase you can use more words; if a weaker passphrase is ok for your purpose you can use less words. If you choose two words for your passphrase, there are 60,466,176 different potential passphrases. A five-word passphrase would be cracked in just under six months and a six-word passphrase would take 3,505 years, on average, at a trillion guesses a second.

After you’ve generated your passphrase, the next step is to commit it to memory.You should write your new passphrase down on a piece of paper and carry it with you for as long as you need. Each time you need to type it, try typing it from memory first, but look at the paper if you need to. Assuming you type it a couple times a day, it shouldn’t take more than two or three days before you no longer need the paper, at which point you should destroy it. "Simple, random passphrases, in other words, are just as good at protecting the next whistleblowing spy as they are at securing your laptop," concludes Lee. "It’s a shame that we live in a world where ordinary citizens need that level of protection, but as long as we do, the Diceware system makes it possible to get CIA-level protection without going through black ops training"

Comment Re:Godaddy are thieving wankers dot com (Score 1) 70

by rot26 (#49305971) Attached to: GoDaddy Accounts Vulnerable To Social Engineering (and Photoshop)
No, no coincidence. This has happened to me multiple time, though not with godaddy because I've never been tempted to use them. It's such a simple, obvious bit of asshattery that many registrars do this, although (excuse my lack of definitive information) I don't believe they actually register the domain name, there is some additional asshattery that allows them to tie the name up for a short period without actually having to pay money for it... which means that after a few days (???) it will become available again. Of course, everything I just said could be wrong.

but I don't think so

Submission + - Flash Crashes Every Day for Me

Submitted by BrendaEM
BrendaEM writes: The Flash plugin for Firefox crashes more than every other program I use. How much longer must we harbor this plugin?

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