Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Protests were Illegal. (Score 1) 142

And I am a native Dutch speaker, and while (West) Flemish has its own ISO language code, they're really Dutch dialects and they are much more intelligible to me (and most Dutch) than West Frisian. West Frisian, now that is a language in its own right, even though it's spoken in Friesland, a Dutch province.

Comment Re:Not happening. (Score 1) 116

That's great, in theory. In reality it will just lead people to create very easy to remember passwords, since people are good at routine and not at things that change constantly. Those easy passwords, in turn, are much more easily cracked. How would you mitigate that risk, increasing the password change frequency?

I've worked with highly sensitive systems (*ahem* the Ogone payment system for one) that use silly policies like these, and yet are horribly unsafe. At one time when I tried to login with an expired password I got an error message saying that the password was not "completely" valid and that I should understand that the password is case-sensitive! Well, that message implies that they can do a case-insensitive check, which means they don't even hash passwords.

In my experience these policies just shift the responsibility for proper security to the end-user. Even though, in theory, it may act as a complementary security measure, in practice that's counterproductive for 99% of users. Also it is more often than not used as the only security measure (apart from the basic $input == $password).

Comment Re:"conspiracy theory" is loaded language (Score 1) 395

To make matters worse we often see obnoxious theories introduced to confuse issues and maintain a status quot.

That's called muddying the waters and I frequently point that out to people I consider naive as well as people who exaggerate, IE the tinfoil hatters.

There are plenty of conspiracies and often the only conspiracy theory is the one where the conspirators are made out to be the victims.

Comment Re: my daughter (Score 1) 280

I am in fact a WhatsApp user, but I use it reluctantly. It has a history of security issues and in the end it's just a hack on top of XMPP standards. No to mention it is very centralized in nature.

Most of the others I mentioned use standards like XMPP and SIP, which means that you aren't tied to a single vendor or ISP. A jabber.org account can communicate perfectly with a jabme.org account, you just need an XMPP client and set your account. Granted, this sounds like a lot of work for the majority of lazy users, which is why I suggested Kontalk as an alternative. Which does use XMPP without ugly hacks on top of it, and yet uses the same concepts as WhatsApp.

Slashdot Top Deals

It has just been discovered that research causes cancer in rats.

Working...