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Comment Re:No surprises here (Score 1) 119

Sure they are. My school had AP classes, but not everyone in the class takes the test- those who didn't think they would pass skipped it and save the 70 bucks. In each one the teacher suggested to a few people not to take the test because they didn't think they had the understanding to pass. In at least 1 case they talked someone into taking the test when they were borderline (I think he passed).

As for financial incentive- read the article. Google was paying teachers directly. It was going to the teachers, administrators not involved. With financial incentives I can easily see the teachers telling more/all of those tweeners to take it and see if they pass.

Comment Re:Advertised on YouTube? (Score 4, Interesting) 97

The 'you can skip in 5 seconds' ads amaze me. Presumably the people using them know that they have 5 valuable seconds that everyone can see, yet they uniformly squander them. I've almost never seen an ad that tells me anything interesting in the first 5 seconds, which isn't that surprising, but it's really surprising to me that most don't even tell me what the product is. Several that I've seen use the first 4 seconds to fade from black, then get 1 second of something incomprehensible before I hit skip.

Comment Re:umm duh? (Score 1) 176

Please correct me if I'm wrong because I may not have imagined this system properly. I was thinking the idea was that you encrypt each file with a single unique key, and then to use a public-key encryption scheme to encrypt that key. You can then send the encrypted file and the encrypted key to another user, knowing that it will need that users private key to decrypt.

Every time you upload a file, you generate a random symmetric key. You encrypt the file with this key and the key with your public key. If you want to download the file, you get the file and the encrypted key and then you decrypt the key with your private key and then decrypt the file. When you create the account, you upload your public key.

When you want to share a file with everyone, with no access control, you download the encrypted key, decrypt it, and provide it to the server. The server can then decrypt the file.

When you want to share a file with a limited set of users, you download each of their public keys (which you can cache in the client) and the encrypted symmetric key, decrypt the key, and then encrypt it once for each user. They will then only be able to access it with their client.

I'm not sure who you're 'we' as in 'internet community' is. We do have standards and off-the-shelf libraries for everything required to implement this and others have done so in the past (one of my colleagues during her PhD did back around 2006, to give one example, others have implemented more complex and flexible schemes more recently). Note that this is the simple textbook scheme for doing this kind of system. It's been implemented before and doubtless will be again. If you check the research literature then you'll find more interesting schemes.

The only problem is if you want to be able to access it from the browser, without some kind of plugin (Google actually does compile OpenSSL with Emscripten to do ASN.1 parsing, but I wouldn't recommend using it for encryption).

IT

Ask Slashdot: What Would You Do With Half a Rack of Server Space? 208

New submitter Christian Gainsbrugh (3766717) writes I work at a company that is currently transitioning all our servers into the cloud. In the interim we have half a rack of server space in a great datacenter that will soon be sitting completely idle for the next few months until our lease runs out. Right now the space is occupied by around 8 HP g series servers, a watchguard xtm firewall, Cisco switch and some various other equipment. All in all there are probably around 20 or so physical XEON processors, and probably close to 10 tb of storage among all the machines. We have a dedicated 10 mbs connection that is burstable to 100mbs.

I'm curious what Slashdot readers would do if they were in a similar situation. Is there anything productive that could be done with these resources? Obviously something revenue generating is great, but even if there is something novel that could be done with these servers we would be interested in putting them to good use.

Comment Re:Typical (Score 2, Informative) 162

"Those who can't create, litigate" --- who does this remind you of over last 2-3 years? Funny to see Apple whine about plays outta their OWN playbook

A stupid post replying to an equally stupid post.

I thought Google was the patent troll, trying to get four billion dollars from Microsoft for h.264 related software patents and ending up having to pay Microsoft's bills. And there is Samsung threatened with a 13 billion Euro fine if they don't stop patent trolling in Europe.

In this case, Apple just has bought Beats, and has surely not done anything to infringe on Bose's patents. And from the description of these patents, they seem to be rather concrete and it should be not too difficult to find out if someone is infringing or not.

Comment Re:Horribly Inaccurate (Score 4, Insightful) 101

Trusted by whom? I don't think there's any requirement that the purchaser of the device trust the "trusted" data extractor. IIUC it could become trusted before the customer ever received the device, or anytime it's in for service.

Step 1: Plug iOS device into a Mac.
Step 2: Unlock iOS device.
Step 3: Click on YES when the iOS device asks if it should trust the computer.

The critical part is Step 2, which you can only perform if you know how to unlock the device. In other words, if you know the passcode. But if you know the passcode, then you can do _anything_ with the phone. That's what the passcode is there for.

So basically, this security "expert" found a way for a thief to enter my home through the backdoor, as long as the thief has the keys for my front door.

Comment Re:umm duh? (Score 1) 176

then you may as well just give the server the AES key and ask it to decrypt the file

But in that model, if "the server" has the key, wouldn't Dropbox have the key? I thought that was the whole thing people were freaking out about.

No, you'd have the key. If you wanted to share the file publicly, then there's no point in keeping it encrypted, so you'd provide the server with the key and it would decrypt, saving you the cost of downloading and reencrypting.

I understand what you (and the AC) are saying about storing an encrypted key on the server, and then re-encrypting the key for each new user you'd want to share with. That's a clever arrangement and I admit that I hadn't thought of it, but it still seems like it has the potential to create more complexity than most people want to deal with. It still means you need to manage various encryption keys, and we (Internet culture) seem intent on not developing a coherent system for managing encryption keys.

The client just needs one key, the RSA (or equivalent) public key. You'd need to copy this between devices, but it's relatively small (under 1KB). It's small enough to fit in a version 40 QR code quite easily, so you could set up mobile devices by displaying the QR code on your laptop screen and point the mobile device's camera at it, if you don't have any sensible way of transferring files between devices. The client then has to download the file and the associated key, decrypt the key with the locally-stored key, and then decrypt the file, but that's not something that's exposed to the user.

Comment Re:call them (Score 1) 354

I don't have kids, but when I was one my parents were spending most weekends taking us somewhere to do something. Watching movies was not on the agenda, at least not at home (maybe the occasional trip tot he movie theater). Why would you waste prime family time on movies? You do those on the weekdays because there's fewer entertainment options and most of them are closed by the time you get home from work.

Comment Re:One trillion becquerels (Score 1) 190

So....is that bad?

One becquerel = 27 pico curie.

One trillion becquerel = 27 curie.

Sounds a lot less frightening now.

However, one curie is an awful lot of radiation. You wouldn't go near that. On the other hand, becquerel and curie are measures of "radiation per hour", so "1 trillion becquerel released" doesn't make sense.

Comment Re:umm duh? (Score 1) 176

The anonymous poster pointed out a simpler mechanism, which is used in practice on file stores that want to be encrypted on the server. This technique also has a number of advantages. Using a symmetric cypher is generally faster than an asymmetric one and using a different key for each file is just good practice anyway as it limits the damage that certain kinds of trojan can do. If you're sharing with everyone, then you may as well just give the server the AES key and ask it to decrypt the file. If you're sharing with just a few people, then sending them a (fixed-size) key for each file is not too much overhead.

Comment Re:Astronomy, and general poor night-time results. (Score 1) 550

The thing that's really put me off the surgery is the improvement in contact lens technology over the last 10 years. My sight is sufficiently bad in one eye that I'd have to have an implanted contact lens, although the other could be fixed by burning the cornea. The contact lenses that I have now; however, are so thin that I don't notice that I'm wearing them most of the time and can be worn overnight. I put them in at the start of a month and then change them a month later. There's a slightly increased risk of eye infection, but they come with six monthly checkups to prevent this. I was wearing the previous generation of lenses (which were noticeably thicker) for about 10 years without serious issue, but with slight irritation around the eyelids caused by the thickness of the lens (and my eyes sometimes getting very dry, because it took a long time for the lens to dry out, so I'd forget to blink sometimes). With the newer ones, it's basically as if I had fully working eyes and if my prescription changes then I can put in different lenses next month.

Comment Re:Best Wishes ! (Score 3, Interesting) 322

They've been pursuing the dream of one windows to rule them all since the days when

No, not really. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

When you decide it's time to "unify" a single product, clearly you've made a serious, long-running mistake.

Having a dozen different versions of a single product is just a short-term way to milk a few more dimes out of your customers, and has a pretty severe long-term cost. It's most lucritive in software though, because it doesn't cost a penny more to manufacture the $300 version than the $100 version once you're finished with development. If it were a car for example, that leather interior is going to cost more to produce. But those "better bits" are free to produce. So it's creme, pure profit.

And eventually the customers get pissed. Which is OK if your'e not in it for the long haul. Which unfortunately is what Windows is. Bad match.

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