Umm, the court ordered them to decide which requests to remove, based on the vague criteria mentioned in the summary. And they're legally obligated to get it right, too.

Did you miss the big hullabaloo shortly after this went into effect, when Google was accused of removing stuff that didn't meet the criteria defined by the court? The allegation was that Google was intentionally doing exactly what you said they should -- in violation of the order -- and removing everything requested, in an attempt to show how ludicrous the law was. (In actual fact it turned out that it was an error on the part of the reporter who wrote the story, that in fact Google had evaluated the situation correctly and acted correctly, but hadn't been able to fully explain the decision because the explanation would have violated privacy rights of people mentioned on the page in question.)

I think you're confusing the US with China, the latter of which did increase its defense budget by 12% (and has for about the last 12 years), and is on track to exceed US defense spending by 2020-2025.

er, can those come with semi-disposable google voice phone numbers too? That said, I haven't had the need to dispose of any of them yet... I only see 2-3 mails going into the SPAM folder per day (though some of them are false positives).

One of my coworkers does use GV for dating sites, though, so it's easier for him to disappear if one of his hookups doesn't work out or turns out to be crazy.

Thanks. Cripes, would it have been so hard to define it in TFS?

Because he won't let them. He selects the team. That's why you get the snark and arrogance from the other side: the secrecy and vagueness are strongly indicative of a hoax. Not proof, but it would be so very easy to disprove the hoax, and he's conspicuously not allowing that.

That's correct, and I'd really like to see somebody actually test Munroe's theory. I don't think that "correct horse battery staple" is any more memorable than any other password with an equivalent entropy. It's easy to remember that one because it's that-ONE. If you have a different password at each of hundreds of sites, it seems to me you won't do any better at remember which combination goes with this site. There will be hundreds of words running around in your head.

The visual might help you keep the set of 4 of them together, but will you really be able to remember which ones you used when you established that password months or even years ago? Perhaps if you modify the technique to incorporate the site that the password goes to...

It seems like something that should be testable. Are CHBS-based passwords any more memorable than any other technique? They are more brute-force resistant than shorter passwords, but if web sites are allowing brute-force attacks then something is deeply wrong to start with. That's what this article is about: CHBS generates great passwords but it may not be solving the right problem.

I find the whole notion of "secret questions" baffling. It's generally stuff that can be looked up. That reduces the security on the account, with the bonus that it has a chance of locking me out if I can't remember precisely the capitalization or punctuation I used, or which of my pets was my favorite.

Er, you made my password less secure, Mr. Insightful... it was: L15b,lb+s.Lin|_|,lriapo\/ . Just keep going through the poem until you have as few or as many entropy bytes as you need/like, and/or spell out as much of each word in each verse as you want (though the less it looks like something you'd read the better). But thanks for leading everyone down a tangent anyways ;-)

3.995 million of them are currently collecting dust in the desk drawers of neckbeards.

Leaving 5,000 of them doing something interesting and useful - and probably something that couldn't be done affordably with a brain that cost $800 or more.

If the computer costs just chump change, who CARES if most of them end up gathering dust? The cost of that is trivial, which the benefit of those that DO get used is substantial.

It's like pencil sharpeners (back before cheap automatic pencils): They spend almost all of their time idle. But they're so cheap that it makes more financial sense to have one in every office than to have one for the company and a department scheduling its time-sharing.

(That analogy was acutally used, to get executives to rent a clue, during the transition from central timesharing systems to ubiquitus desktop machines. When a computer costs several million and needs a clean room and dedicated hierarchy, it makes sense to have one and spend a lot of effort rationing it out. When one costs a thousand bucks it's far cheaper to put them on every desk and leave most of them horribly under-utilized. Such a price drop creates a qualitative change to resource allocation strategies.)

I'm using BeagleBone Black. Not wedded to it - it was just handy. Any of several others would have worked, but this was available and had the right stuff available, too.

$55, half a gig of RAM, four gig of flash filesystem (plus a socket for adding more).

Runs Linux (and several other OSes with ARM support.). Comes stock with Agngstrom but I installed a port of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and an upgrade to the corresponding kernel version. (The stock Ubuntu port to BBB uses an older kernel, but there's another project that ports later kernels as drop-in replacements.)

The kind of capabilities you are looking for are out there.

Holy crap, I can hardly believe this topic. Who in their right mind would want FM opinion on anything? This is really puzzling to me.

There's a saying that applies: Know your enemy.

I doubt anyone will be fooled into thinking his arguments are unbiased, or correct, and adopt the mindset he's pushing. (If nothing else, there will be PLENTY of warnings from posters in the discussions. B-) ) So this is a chance to do a little research: Find out what arguments are being brought into court and congressional cloakrooms by those opposed to innovation and competition from outside of established corporate monoliths, so we can get ready with counter arguments.

As an independent software developer, how can I avoid getting dragged into a patent lawsuit? How can I leverage my rights to ensure others aren't exploiting my patents?

You can't.

A patent is just a license to sue.

It licenses others to sue you if they think you might be infringing their stuff (or they can get you to pay them to go away even if you aren't). It licenses you to sue others who are infringing your patents. That's all it is.

If you want protection for your creations, you have to be ready to put on the armor and walk into the arena to defend them.

The summary quotes the article's own summary, but the headline and intro cause it to be misleading.

The article doesn't claim that "correct horse battery staple" is wrong, as in a bad way to choose a high-entropy password. It is a good way to choose a high-entropy password. The article argues (quite accurately) instead that users should not be choosing passwords at all because they will choose weak ones, even if you give them a fairly good heuristic (like the one from XKCD), or try to help them estimate the strength of their passwords, etc. Instead it suggests that we really should try to get rid of passwords entirely, and where that isn't possible we should encourage people to use truly random, non-memorable passwords and put them in password managers, essentially reducing all of their passwords to one: the password that opens their password manager.

This. Yes, merely changing the word "password" to "passphrase" already gets people to use better options.

And for all of the silly ways to come up with half-decent passphrases that are both easy to remember and hard to attack with both dictionary and brute-force attacks, I like the nursery rhyme / song lyric approach. So think of some poetry you like, and assemble your passphrase from bits and pieces of it like so:

"Love is beautiful, like birds that sing.
Love is not ugly, like rats in a puddle of vomit." - John S. Hall
=> Lib,lbts.Linu,lriapov

Bam, a half-decent passphrase that's easy to remember. Maybe you'd even 133+ify it a bit to add as many "special" characters and numbers as you need:
L15b,lb+s.Lin|_|,lriapo\/

And the best part, is when you need to rotate passphrases every 90 days or so, you can just go on to the next verse. Also, it helps put you in a good mood when you start at work, depending on how much you like your choice in poetry.

Of course, the hardest part is not to start singing as you log in.