True, but as I said I was generous in my assumptions anyway. In reality the alphabet is larger, Apple must have a minimum password length of at least 8, and I really doubt that you can do 100 tries per second. I therefore am very sceptical that even with a dictionary attack you can get very far, at least not without choosing a specific dictionary for your victim. And if you do that it is no longer a brute-force attack.

As I wrote in an earlier discussion, I know very few websites that impose a limit on the number of login attempts, so it is not reasonable to suddenly declare this an epic fail of Apple. It is good they plugged the hole (although they could just block you for an hour after three failed login attempts), but guessable passwords must have contributed to this.

Oh, and does /. impose such a limit?

In cryptography, a brute-force attack means that you don't know anything about the password, but just try all the billions of possibilities. Assuming that a password character can only be a-z, A-Z, 0-9, and 10 other characters, and assuming that a password has exactly 6 characters, you would have to try on average (72^6)/2=69657034752 passwords. Assuming you can do 100 tries per second, that would still take more than 8062 days, or more than 22 years on average. Note that I'm being very generous in my assumptions here.

In other words, unless there was another weakness, a brute-force attack was impractical, even without any limit on the number of attempts.

What probably happened was that the passwords were indeed weak. If you know your victim has a dog called 'fido', you can try if she used that name in her password, and in my example you only have to guess two more characters. That only takes seconds or minutes. The attackers may call this brute force, but that's misleading.

Nobody forces you to listen to only the most recent one-hit wonders. There is now more than 50 years of good-quality recordings of popular music to choose from, and then there are the vast worlds of latin-american music, world music, and classical music. And with services like Spotify they are more accessible than ever.

I admit that seeing good visual art in person is a bit more difficult, especially in some cultural wastelands, but things are no worse than in earlier decades, and there are more good reproductions available online than ever before. Just one good example: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/....

Art has always been like that: 90% of the output is garbage, 9% is pretty good, and perhaps 1% is beyond that. Don't obsess about that 99%, in a few years it will be forgotten. Enjoy the 1%.

Your sweeping evaluation of the entire field of social sciences is of course not at all subjective, so you can back this up with rigorous peer-reviewed research. Citations please?

As far as I know, the only website that I use that enforces such a limit is my bank, and even there I think it is heavy-handed. They could just block you for an hour after three failed attempts, or make the time exponential, or something.

Logging in to FMi will be a relatively slow process anyway. A full brute-force attempt is extremely unlikely to succeed, so scripting only makes sense if the attacker knows at least some of the password. That is, if you want to try if one of 'fido1' to 'fido9999' is the right password, you may succeed. Beyond that the search will quickly require too much time.

It is good they plugged the hole, but I hardly consider this an epic failure. Sometimes I think people are just searching for things to grumble at, and the big players, be they Apple, Google, Microsoft, or whatever, are held to impossibly strict standards.

True, the non-islamic people who recently committed genocide were not thumping a holy book, but rather a history book. I'm not sure this is progress, though.

Actively fighting? Probably. That's usual in war. Supporting the fight against the goons? A vast percentage. Like Joe Average, Ahmed Average just wants a quiet life, and only gets into heated disputes about the merits of the local football teams. And narrow-minded Koran thumpers are just as bad for such a quiet life as narrow-minded Bible thumpers.

Funny how you left out `tiny' before `percentage' here. You don't really belief that this percentage is large, do you?

That's why wise people have said that emacs is a nice operating system, but they should write a decent editor for it.

I don't know about everything, but perhaps the Wikimedia Foundation simply would like to have a larger pool of contributors? There are often pragmatic reasons to worry about a gender gap.

Agreed, as soon as they can do submicron technology. By the way, for some strange reason I feel like I've been sleeping a decade.

Examples please?

Is it really? Now suppose that instead of that clever new valve the OP was talking about I invent a whole new concept of fuel injection that also saves 5% of fuel. And I have an implementation, but as software in a standard electronic fuel controller. Do I deserve a patent? If not, why is it fair that the OP gets rewarded for his mechanical invention, and I am not for my software invention?

Do you really believe that a culture/tribe/village/group can develop such stupid rituals to deal with the dead and diseased and survive to this day? Do you really think that `primitive' people don't know anything about quarantaine or other measures against infectious diseases? Do you really think that a group of people that has just seen some of their own die in a horrible way will quietly slink off to meditate on their sins rather than seek (quite possibly rough) justice for this? But you're not one of the RFSP, right?

It is quite possible that this attack was stupid, but clearly we're not getting all of the story here.

Hmm, this smells like a talking point from a lobbying group.

In any case, it is irrelevant. It is a rare opportunity for a before/after comparative study of the effect of this level of radiation. Why not take it?