"He is a good German..."

I believe the guy, at least partially. Probably a lot of NSA drones are honest, decent people that knew very little about all the dirty shit that the agency is pulling. In an organization that size you can't keep secrets very long unless you can compartmentalize information. There are probably a lot of low level people who work for the NSA because they believe in protecting America.

Of course that makes the small group(s) of filthy fuckers that are in the know and driving this stuff all that more guilty, for doing illegal shit in the first place, and then conspiring to cover it up. If I ran the DOJ, I would fire off a massive witch hunt to convict everyone in charge at the NSA with treason. Hang the lot of them, they have done more to damage US internal and external interests than Snowden could ever manage.

What then would prevent my ex-wife from posting the sex tape via a public computer terminal and reporting it to the FBI's "revenge porn" task force? Nothing....and it would be my word against hers and her ass on every computer screen in the country so there goes 5-10 years of my freedom.

Nothing except perhaps, the fact its against the law. IANAL, but I think that is covered by:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...

...And if she were caught falsely reporting a federal crime, she would be the one doing 5-10 years. (Lying to the feds is a really bad idea, unless you like orange jumpsuits.)

....Or rather than all these paranoid theories, perhaps he is just a decent guy who thinks revenge porn is just a shitty thing that should be made illegal. People who do this sort of thing are ass wipes and prosecuting them will, to some small degree, make society better.

I am finding these stories very entertaining...

Oh, the stories aren't that great, chuckleworth at best, but certainly not actually funny. The entertainment factor is all the people who are absolutely losing their shit over these stories. You would think that someone just deleted the last known copy of 'Star Wars' for all the nerd rage that is going on.

Slashdot Editors, please tell me that the real April fool's joke is poking the /. trolls with a stick. Because if was your goal, you just won at the Internet....

Can I have a robot that kills dogs that come into my yard to take a dump?

Yeah, but wasn't there a push to arm pilots awhile back? You know, to fight off the terrorists that were in the process of breaking down the cockpit door.....

This is an interesting approach, but I see one flaw: If this sort of technique be comes common, wouldn't an attacker just need to know what word list you 'rolled' your password on and then can just brute force all the password combinations from that list?

Example, pretend that you had to pick a password for a new website that only allows all uppercase English characters, with no numbers or symbols allowed (just to keep the math simple). A normal ten character password gives an attacker 26^10 possibilities to try.

Your lets say that your diceware generated password picks 6 words from a list of 1000 words, and each word is 4 characters in length. If you skip white space, conventional wisdom would say that your password is 26^24 possibilities to guess via brute force.

But because this has become a common trend in password generation, or because the attacker is the NSA and have been watching what you read, they know you used this list. They don't bother to try all the combinations, just all the combinations of the words on this list. This gives them only 1000^4 possibilities to try. As it happens (yeah, my example is rigged), this is exactly 1 trillion possibilities, which if they were guessing at the rate suggested in TFA, would take them exactly one second to break via brute force.

Essentially, you are replacing individual characters with words to make a long password easier to recall. There is no reason why an attacker cannot do the same thing, mapping one 'alphabet' of symbols onto another.

Now, some people might point out that there are some things you can do to mix things up a bit and force an attacker to have to dig deeper, but my point is that this might actually make it much simpler for a smart/informed attacker to brute force a password.

Many people are suggesting using string builder, as a easy fix...If you think about this problem, that doesn't solve it as you approach infinite operations, it just pushes the cost crossover point way out (possibly beyond the limits of existing hardware, so it might be practically moot). Since they are doing silly comparisons like this, I would suggest just writing a linked list to store each byte as a counter example that will provide more of an apples to apples comparison. Adding an element to an linked list will have a fixed cost, just like appending a byte to disk will, so after infinite operations, you could demonstrate that memory operations are always going to be faster performing similar tasks when the IO time of memory is faster than disk IO.

I just scanned the paper, because their claim seem to be idiotic. It looks like they are appending a single byte on the end of a string in memory and on disk. For the memory operation, this will result in a string copy since strings are immutable, vs. doing a one byte file append onto the disk. The former is increasingly expensive and the latter is a fixed cost, so after infinite operations, the disk cost becomes far less than the memory operation. If this is indeed their claim, and I am not missing something, then they should be collectively slapped for wasting our time by writing this paper. If this is really your use case, write some proper data structures to manage your data in a sane fashion.

So yes, if you do stupid things, you can make bad engineering decisions look like good ones.

There's a big difference between uranium and a working hydrogen bomb. The US won't use nukes unless someone else detonates one first.

That isn't how it worked out for Hiroshima.....For all our talk about how we are morally 'better' because we are a 'democracy', remember we are the only country that has use a nuclear weapon on an enemy.

Also, this author probably doesn't have a security clearance, so pretty much all the sources of info he is going to have access to is going to be by definition declassified. Unless he was getting some of the engineers who work our current batch of nuclear weapons drunk and taking notes, it seems pretty unlikely that he has any privileged info. You can learn quite a bit about nuclear and thermonuclear devices if you know which physics papers to read. The physics for hydrogen bombs and stars are the same thing.

Don't be naive, and ascribe personal ethics to the behaviors of state actors. States' behavior is driven by the lowest common ethical denominator of it's collective leadership. For any sufficiently large state, this will trend towards 0.

1) When people are arrested, their friends, family, and neighbors routinely say "I can't believe he did that. He seemed like such a nice guy."

To be fair, when have you seen a news report where a friend or neighbor said, 'Yeah, he was a dangerous nut job that should have been locked up years ago. it's a shame that the SWAT team didn't just kill him and save the state the trial cost'.

Swatting is an activity that the 'Internet' seems to think that it can get away with, because it is a novelty. Once Law enforcement accidentally kills a couple of young children by accident in a bumbled raid, you will get a couple of outraged senators who will make this a federal offense punishable with ten to twenty. The law is slow but it always catches up with society changes.

That was one of the reasons why Descent 1 was such a breakthrough; Even Doom 2 still required synchronized clients so if you had one of your 4 maximum players on a slow machine, the whole game would slow down. Descent allowed 16 players and they communicated in an non-synchronized fashion. A player on a bad connection did nothing to other players' performance.
I played the game for hundreds of hours, I never experienced motion sickness. Only one data point, sure, but people I have encountered that have this problem have it with all 3d shooters.

It wouldn't work...most neo nazis would agree with his racist agenda. But you are correct, he pretty well outlined all the fucked up plans that he carried out in the 30s and 40s back when he was in jail in the 20s. Its hard to see how anyone didn't see what was coming.

Censorship in general, never works very well, and often fans the flames. Just let them post whatever they want. Also, if I was a cia/nsa type, I would want all the extremist groups posting freely and publicly thinking they were safe, so I could intercept all communication going to and from their servers....

No that isn't correct. When Einstein proposes a change to the observed laws of physics, there is an absolute truth to test it against. (Reality). The whim of the scientist is irrelevant, if it cannot be successfully tested it doesn't get added to the 'laws' of physics.Y can explain something any fashion you want to, but it has to pass the test.