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Comment Salted your passwords (Score 2) 365

I gave up on trying to remember increasingly complex passwords and just remembered how to make them. Computers are great at doing complex math humans aren't. Humans can remember some things very easily (Correct Horse Battery Staple).

Then I only have to remember or write down 3 things: The 'password', the length and the mapping.

echo -n $password+$user+$website | sha256 | cut -c1-$length | [mapping]

Where mapping maps the hex codes to a-z, a-Z, a-Z0-9, a-Z0-9!-). (You can make up your own charset and just use mod(charset length)).

For example if my password was 'qwerty' I'd salt it such that my actual slashdot password would be:
echo -n qwerty+0100010001010011+slashdot.org | sha256 | cut -c1-20
050e48f9f39d4d481ec3

It's not that much harder to implement in Python for use on Windows. (I just have a simple GUI).

If you want to take it a step further just remember a pattern and then a start letter. qwerty, asdfgh and zxcvbn are the same 'password' in my brain. It's "Password 1, start q, a, or z'.

I have everything written down on how to generate the passwords in a lock box and my wife knows my 'password'. So if I die and everything is locked she could get into any website she wanted just by following the instructions.

All of our joint accounts do actually use our anniversary. Jan 1, 1980. 01Jan1980, etc are all going to generate different end passwords. You have to know both the date and the formatting, which she does.

Stop remembering passwords and start remembering how to get to your password.

Submission + - 3,500 unwitting attendees of OSCON need to be warned about Randi Harper

An anonymous reader writes: TL;DR: A large and prominent tech conference (3.5K attendees) run by O'Reilly Media and sponsored by major tech companies is presenting Randi as an "anti-harassment" activist. When evidence of her track record of abuse and harassment was brought to the attention of the conference organizers last month, they publicly dismissed those contacting them about her as "trolls".

WHY THIS MATTERS: This is by far the biggest venue Randi has ever appeared in and the deception that she and the conference organizers are engaged in is shameful. If enough of us post evidence of who Randi really is to the #OSCON tag, there's a very good chance that future conference organizers (and their sponsors) will think twice before embarrassing themselves by giving Randi a platform.

DETAILS:

Although #OSCON was notified of Randi's antics when news of her speaking engagement became public last month, they chose to ignore the evidence, instead of taking seriously their obligation to their attendee's well-being. Adding insult to injury, a statement by @joshsimmons dismissed those who had raised concerns as "trolls":

http://www.oscon.com/open-sour...

They followed this statement up with a fawning "interview" in their online magazine in which they didn't ask Randi a single question about her atrocious behavior:

http://opensource.com/life/15/...

The conference starts today (Wednesday) and runs until Friday. Detailed information including the list of sponsors, can be found at http://www.oscon.com./

Details about Randi's talk can be found here: http://www.oscon.com/open-sour....

Here are some links to some resources about Randi's misbehavior, such as Milo's just concluded series of articles, Ralph's followup, and Stephanie Greene's series from a few months ago. Please post links to other resources, such as blogs, articles, images, etc., which you think are worth posting to the #OSCON hashtag, in the comments.

http://www.breitbart.com/londo...

http://www.breitbart.com/big-j...

http://www.breitbart.com/big-h...

http://www.breitbart.com/big-j...

http://theralphretort.com/pill...

http://s2b20blog.mukyou.com/hi...

http://s2b20blog.mukyou.com/th...

http://s2b20blog.mukyou.com/th...

http://s2b20blog.mukyou.com/bl...

http://theralphretort.com/prol...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Kotak...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Kotak...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Kotak...

Most recent #OSCON tweets:

https://twitter.com/search?q=%...

Comment Re:So the good questions were ignored. (Score 4, Informative) 557

I wonder how many new Slashdot accounts were created from her Twitter whining and suddenly got mod points.

That or Dice decided to pull a Reddit and just hide them so they didn't appear "unfriendly to women in industry".

And right now I'd like to point out that Randi Lee Harper is speaking at OSCON this weekend.

TL;DR: A large and prominent tech conference (3.5K attendees) run by O'Reilly Media and sponsored by major tech companies is presenting Randi as an "anti-harassment" activist. When evidence of her track record of abuse and harassment was brought to the attention of the conference organizers last month, they publicly dismissed those contacting them about her as "trolls".

WHY THIS MATTERS: This is by far the biggest venue Randi has ever appeared in and the deception that she and the conference organizers are engaged in is shameful. If enough of us post evidence of who Randi really is to the #OSCON tag, there's a very good chance that future conference organizers (and their sponsors) will think twice before embarrassing themselves by giving Randi a platform.

DETAILS:

Although #OSCON was notified of Randi's antics when news of her speaking engagement became public last month, they chose to ignore the evidence, instead of taking seriously their obligation to their attendee's well-being. Adding insult to injury, a statement by @joshsimmons dismissed those who had raised concerns as "trolls":

http://www.oscon.com/open-sour...

They followed this statement up with a fawning "interview" in their online magazine in which they didn't ask Randi a single question about her atrocious behavior:

http://opensource.com/life/15/...

The conference starts today (Wednesday) and runs until Friday. Detailed information including the list of sponsors, can be found at http://www.oscon.com./

Details about Randi's talk can be found here: http://www.oscon.com/open-sour....

Here are some links to some resources about Randi's misbehavior, such as Milo's just concluded series of articles, Ralph's followup, and Stephanie Greene's series from a few months ago. Please post links to other resources, such as blogs, articles, images, etc., which you think are worth posting to the #OSCON hashtag, in the comments.

http://www.breitbart.com/londo...

http://www.breitbart.com/big-j...

http://www.breitbart.com/big-h...

http://www.breitbart.com/big-j...

http://theralphretort.com/pill...

http://s2b20blog.mukyou.com/hi...

http://s2b20blog.mukyou.com/th...

http://s2b20blog.mukyou.com/th...

http://s2b20blog.mukyou.com/bl...

http://theralphretort.com/prol...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Kotak...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Kotak...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Kotak...

Most recent #OSCON tweets:

https://twitter.com/search?q=%...

Comment It needs to be a trade (Score 2, Insightful) 305

What used to happen is that something was academic, then it became a trade, then it became ubiquitous.

With computers being relatively new everyone still thinks you need a 4+ year education to do some of the stuff when it would be better of as a skilled trade. Not everyone is built for college/university. There are a lot of qualified intelligent individuals that, at the age of 13-14 should have gone into an apprenticeship program for the local IT workers 1010010101.

As technology progresses people dive deeper and deeper into various fields stuff shifts down the educational chain. First it's highly academic R&D and only a few PhDs know about it. Then it moves into the area where a masters degree is sufficient, then BS, then Trade, then it becomes unskilled labor.

The problem with STEM the last ~40 years is people are still convinced that you HAVE to go to college for some of these things and it's no true, we need to have people start specializing around 13-14 like we have always done. It's how Germany operates its educational model. There needs to be a good apprenticeship programs setup.

60 years ago no one had a camera, now kids are walking around taking photos. Everything bumps but CS and IT, for some reason, have refused to do that. You see it all the time on Slashdot "Well back in my day you had to take 4 classes on structures before you were allowed near..." and that's not the case any more. There are children building mobile apps. Sure they aren't always great but the point is that the younger you expose kids to this stuff the more ubiquitous it becomes for humanity. Pushing students that are 'interested in computers' towards an IT trade path at 14 would allow them to then learn enough by time they graduated highschool to then specialize in some realm of IT.

It's already going that way in Engineering. Mechanical Engineering is going to undergo a Mitosis in the next decade because there just isn't enough room for everything in the curriculum. Freshmen level Engineering courses need to be moved down to 16 year olds and then let them decide if they'd rather study fluid dynamics engineering or thermodynamics engineering. There is enough material in both realms to warrant a full degree in both. And if there is cross over there is always double/twin majors like Mechatronics is now (Between ME/EE).

Split CS and IT into 10 different majors each. Teach basic CS stuff to 15-16 year olds and those that are more hands on will just go into it as a trade, those that want to learn more can go to college.

Comment Re:Can someone answer me this? (Score 1) 164

> The reason it exploded wasn't because it was a superior discussion system- nerds made better ones at the dawn of the net, and they are still here.

They did make some incremental improvements. I love Markdown now. I stopped writing HTML ages ago for my own blog. Reddit is much easier to use in terms of adding formatting to text.

Coming back to Slashdot I realized how tedious doing full mark up was just to add some emphasis or a URL. I also like that with RES you can view images inline. I wish that there was a script to automatically show the first paragraph of a wiki article if you hovered over a complex term.

And where Reddit does work is in smaller groups. There's a threshold for a subreddit where everything just goes to shit. My wife loves hanging out on /r/babybumps, /r/parenting & /r/clothdiapering because it's a place where she can sit and chat with other women about parenting. There's no reason for full slashdot moderation there. Reddit's 'everyone votes' system works just fine. But that's because there isn't a "/r/disposablediapers" subreddit that comes in to brigade what they say, argue endlessly, etc.

I'll restate the same thing I've been stating for a few months: I want a new *protocol*, not a new site. A RFC that outlines comment moderation, story submission, etc. I want a C/C++ stack that I can deploy on my own server to roll my own Slashdot or Reddit. NNTP was good for its time but had its flaws (moderation). I want a stand alone app (then again I still use Thunderbird over a webmail) for discussion. I want it to be decentralized

Reddit's system is awful by design, because their goal isn't to make for conversation, it's to make for clicks and fights and play off that end of the emotional spectrum.

Reddit figured out fanning flame wars was more profitable. Twitter too.

When Brianna Wu tried to get her echo chamber to ask her the questions she wanted to answer in her Interview it didn't work.

Most people here have been isolated from "GamerGate" attributing it to "Reddit/Twitter Drama" but it's now been spilling over to Slashdot (because it's profitable for Dice) and even to the FreeBSD project (Because of Randi Harper). However people have found out that it's also profitable to be a professional victim which is why you're seeing it everywhere now, they need a bigger audience to fund their patreons

- https://www.patreon.com/freebs...
- https://www.patreon.com/user?u...

I wish Grace Hopper was still alive to tell this new group to STFU and GBTW.

Comment Re:Subject (Score 1) 212

What is stupid is deducing that the solution involves creating new incentives for young women to go into computer science.

All you need to do is ask a 8-12 year old girl what she wants to do and figure out how to get software to help her do that. "Programming" is just a means to an end to let lazy us lazy people take over the world. Find something, anything, repetitive and boring and figure out how to automate it. That's what software does for me. Software, for me and thousands of others, isn't the end game it's a tool to allow me to be lazy. If a 10 year old girl is tired of having to do _________ on the computer teach her how Python (or Perl) can do that for her. That's how you get girls into programming.

I personally use Python to mail out daily photos of my son. I've automated my Facebook picture posting. I really want to get a Ramp/Soak arduino built so that I can use it to bake the perfect cake. If that is what girls are interested in, then help them get there. If they have other interests foster their interests with STEM / code.

All of these "STEM STEM STEM" "CS CS CS" initiatives fail to do the most basic question of "What would you like to do". Why has no one just asked 8-12 year old girls what they want and then trying to figure out where programming fits into it. Not the other way around.

If girls aren't interested in gaming, why pink wash a Barbie game? Why throw money at getting them into programming for Windows Core if that's what they're not interested in at 12, 15, 18 or 20?

Comment Re:Here's a bold idea... (Score 2) 212

As a stay at home father I'm getting sick of the 77% number. It's bull shit and here's why....

A year ago I quit my job. I had been in industry for all of ~9 years. That means by this year I would have been in industry for 10 years. If I had been paid the exact same amount of money the entire time I would immediately be at making 90% of income as my peers. But start to weight my starting salary vs bonuses and raises and that number slips.

Additionally I'm 1 year removed from what has happened in industry. I've a 1 year gap on my resume (thankfully filled with GitHub commits). I've 1 year that I haven't been networking.

By this time next year that will be 2 years. Then 3. There are 3-4 women I went to university with that did the same thing. I was just in a position where my wife's job earned us more income and I wanted to stay at home and take care of the homefront, contribute to OSS, and raise our son.

This is a situation that everyone that becomes a parent and it's statistically the woman that makes the decision to stay home. Especially when you consider that STEM majors usually marry other STEM majors (at least all my friends did).

If you want to get women into industry you need to take an approach like IBM is doing: http://www.tonikal.com/ibm-hel... I showed that article to my wife and she said she would be pissed if she had to pump and dump for an entire week.

The internet and technology is another way to address this gap. You need to do exactly the opposite thing that Yahoo and Reddit did and let people work at home. There are still other Engineers that I went to school with that will be doing a finite element analysis on their laptop while breast feeding. For 90% of my job there was absolutely no reason to be at the office. Apple has launched their "Home Advisor" program where they're starting to insource all their call centers. Everyone I know of that talks to an Apple tech says they love it. Meanwhile I have to argue with someone in India any time I contact Comcast. (And not that there is a problem with someone in India, but there was a language barrier especially between "reccomends" and "requires" a professional install when getting my Cable Card)

My company before I left started doing the same with their IT support staff. You would call someone sitting at their home, and a lot of times they were women married to our engineers. They gave them a VOIP box, a head set and they sat at home and fielded IT questions.

Comment Re:Can someone answer me this? (Score 1) 164

Reddit is a social site first and then a news and information site second. To leave moderation in the hands of a few select people takes most of the social aspects away from people.

They're trying to be both. I would much prefer my Slashdot news over Reddit. Reddit, by virtue of being truly demographic (with an authoritarian police) will have multiple articles posted in multiple places. I liked that I had one central site to discuss the latest Tech article and that the comments within were voted mostly on their own merit and not by who made them or bandwagoning.

Comment Re:Can someone answer me this? (Score 1) 164

That's why I think there needs to be a moderation RFC with everything we've learned about moderation of internet discussion over the last 40 years.

When discussing some social things everyone should get to moderate. However when discussing science, math, technology.

I also think there should be some sort of statistical regression like Slashdot had with meta moderation.

Voat just looks like a rehash of Reddit with some incremental improvements but not things I would like to see.

Comment Re:Can someone answer me this? (Score 5, Insightful) 164

That can be mitigated with 2 things:

Reddit needs an "Anonymous Coward" account so that people don't have to create throwaways for every single thing they don't want to post under their main account.

Reddit needs to limit moderation rights. The problem with Reddit is everyone gets a vote. With Slashdot mod points are distributed based on Karma. (And it actually meant something), you can also not vote and comment in the same thread.

Anonymous cowards always start at +0. Registered accounts always start at +1. But just because you register a dozen Slashdot accounts doesn't mean you get to moderate what other people get to say on a new thread.

Comment Re:Can someone answer me this? (Score 5, Insightful) 164

The thing with Reddit is there is just a +/- system. There is no taxonomy in why you moderate someone + or -.Everyone also gets an equal vote, which for some types of discussion, is best.

With Slashdot points are randomly distributed and you can't both moderate and comment, which is appropriate for other types of discussion.. In that way Slashdot got a lot of things right.

The problem neither site is a one size fits all solution for moderation. For actual tech discussion I want Slashdot's moderation. For pictures of Cats I want Reddit's.

Slashdot's moderation and "Anonymous Coward" account also prevented bandwagoning on the Brianna Wu Interview despite her trying to get her twitter followers to do exactly that. They didn't have the same power that they did on Reddit or Twitter so they really didn't affect the conversation.

Usenet just needed a good moderation system built on top of it.

Personally I wouldn't be opposed to 3 separate types of 'moderation' that can be enabled/disabled.

- No moderation. 4Chan, Usenet

- Everyone gets to moderation Reddit

- Not everyone gets to moderate. Slashdot. Mod points are handed out at random.

Each have their advantages or disadvantages. The "inline sharing" is something that should be done client side anyway. After using reddit for a few years and coming back to Slashdot I realize how much more I like markdown for just doing forum posts. Not that I have a problem with HTML but it takes a bit longer to type out the same content. Add a web front end and call it a day.

The best part is if you made it a RFC people could run their own usenet circles. I would love to get a slashdot replacement going outside of corporate control. If you host nodes in a few countries it would be hard to take down. (It's how Usenet was designed).

I'm ready to jump ship from Reddit and Slashdot to somewhere else and would prefer if that somewhere else was a protocol rather than a specific site.

It's kind of come to a head now that there is nothing really left for people to just discuss stuff. Slashdot sold out to Dice. Fark and Reddit sold out to SJWs and "mainstream". Voat is just reimplementing Reddit, but poorly (IMHO).

Why isn't 'moderation' in a RFC yet? It's something that could probably be nailed out by now as we've tried multiple different methods.

I personally prefer Slashdot's style of moderation for most things. (Where its limited to -2 to +5, and you have taxonomy built in). But for some things I prefer Reddit's where everyone gets a vote. Let people write their own implementations of the RFC and let anyone incorporate it into their website. Slashdot and Reddit are open source in the same way that OpenSSL was. Technically open source but such a pain in the ass to get running & modify for most people it wasn't worth it (and we see how that turned out).

The nice thing about it being an RFC is that most of this stuff can be implemented client side. I can write my own app to discuss things. NNTP just needed distributed moderation like Slashdot.

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