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Comment Re:It could be worse (Score 1) 247

by darenw (#48562155) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Convincing My Company To Stop Using Passwords?

Cutting out so many patterns - what does that leave? How many bits entropy less?

What if such a policy is in place but randomly allows some exceptions? Then a cracker won't know if such patterns should be tried or not. Allow the patterns with the same probability that they'd have for truly random sequences. It'd be pointless, but in a way that would impress non-technical executives.

For long enough passwords and PINs, it's likely that less than half of all possible sequences could be considered patterns of any kind. So, only one bit lost at most. But on a touchtone telephone pad, there aren't that many ways to go after one button, and a lot of sequences might arguably look like patterns. Overzealous pattern prevention including geometric patterns on the keypad and numbers with meaning or patterns to the digits, along with dainty short passwords might be a problem. How can this be quantified? Is there a real problem?

Submission + - Fraud Bots Cost Advertisers $6 Billion

Submitted by Rambo Tribble
Rambo Tribble writes: A new report claims that almost a quarter of the "clicks" registered by digital advertisements are, in fact, from robots created by cyber crime networks to siphon off advertising dollars. The scale and sophistication of the attacks which were discovered caught the investigators by surprise. As one said, "What no one was anticipating is that the bots are extremely effective of looking like a high value consumer."

Submission + - 'Moneyball' Approach Reduces Crime in New York City

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The NYT reports that NY County District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.’s most significant initiative has been to transform, through the use of data, the way district attorneys fight crime. “The question I had when I came in was, Do we sit on our hands waiting for crime to tick up, or can we do something to drive crime lower?” says Vance. “I wanted to develop what I call intelligence-driven prosecution.” When Vance became DA in 2009, it was glaringly evident that assistant D.A.s fielding the 105,000-plus cases a year in Manhattan seldom had enough information to make nuanced decisions about bail, charges, pleas or sentences. They were narrowly focused on the facts of cases in front of them, not on the people committing the crimes. They couldn’t quickly sort minor delinquents from irredeemably bad apples. They didn’t know what havoc defendants might be wreaking in other boroughs.

Vance divided Manhattan’s 22 police precincts into five areas and assigned a senior assistant D.A. and an analyst to map the crime in each area. CSU staff members met with patrol officers, detectives and Police Department field intelligence officers and asked police commanders to submit a list of each precinct’s 25 worst offenders — so-called crime drivers, whose “incapacitation by the criminal-justice system would have a positive impact on the community’s safety.” Seeded with these initial cases, the CSU built a searchable database that now includes more than 9,000 chronic offenders (PDF), virtually all of whom have criminal records. A large percentage are recidivists who have been repeatedly convicted of grand larceny, one of the top index crimes in Manhattan, but the list also includes active gang members, people whom the D.A. considers “uncooperative witnesses,” and a fluctuating number of violent “priority targets,” which currently stands at 81. “These are people we want to know about if they are arrested,” says Kerry Chicon. “We are constantly adding, deleting, editing and updating the intelligence in the Arrest Alert System. If someone gets out of a gang, or goes to prison for a long time, or moves out of the city or the state, or ages out of being a focus for us, or dies, we edit the system accordingly — we do that all the time.”

“It’s the ‘Moneyball’ approach to crime,” says Chauncey Parker. “The tool is data; the benefit, public safety and justice — whom are we going to put in jail? If you have 10 guys dealing drugs, which one do you focus on? The assistant district attorneys know the rap sheets, they have the police statements like before, but now they know if you lift the left sleeve you’ll find a gang tattoo and if you look you’ll see a scar where the defendant was once shot in the ankle. Some of the defendants are often surprised we know so much about them.”

Submission + - SKA space telescope to offer neighbours cheap broadband (htxt.co.za)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Square Kilometer Array is a giant space telescope currently being built in the middle of the Karoo in South Africa, which when complete will be 50 times more sensitive than any existing Earth-based telescope. The problem is that it's so sensitive, the thousands of antennas need to be protected from terrestrial radio interference. Given that cell masts and technologies like TB white spaces are the only way people living in the remote areas near SKA are going to be able to get affordable net access, this is a bit of a problem.
In order that its neighbours aren't completely cut-off, SKA is offering them subsidised satellite broadband instead. Which is nice.

Submission + - France Wants To Get Rid Of Diesel Fuel

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: France wants to gradually phase out the use of diesel fuel for private passenger transport and will put in place a system to identify the most polluting vehicles, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on Friday. Next year, the government will launch a car identification system that will rank vehicles by the amount of pollution they emit, Valls said in a speech. This will make it possible for local authorities to limit city access for the dirtiest cars. "In France, we have long favoured the diesel engine. This was a mistake, and we will progressively undo that, intelligently and pragmatically," Valls said. About 80 percent of French motorists drive diesel-powered cars. Valls said taxation would have to orient citizens towards more ecological choices, notably the 2015 state budget measures to reduce the tax advantage of diesel fuel versus gas.

Submission + - Another community gets split by systemd: Devuan is "forking" Debian (devuan.org)

Submitted by jaromil
jaromil writes: The so called "Veteran Unix Admin" collective announces that the "fork" of Debian will proceed as a result of the recent systemd debacle. The reasons put forward are not just technical, included is a letter of endorsement by Debian Developer Roger Leigh mentioning that "people rely on Debian for their jobs and businesses, their research and their hobbies. It's not a playground for such radical experimentation."
The fork is called "Devuan", pronounced "DevOne". A website is up on https://devuan.org/ with more information.

Submission + - Facebook Can't Cite Evidence to Support Claims of U.S. Tech Worker Shortage

Submitted by sycodon
sycodon writes: Facebook, which has spent millions trying to get massive amnesty legislation that would include huge increases in the number of guest-worker permits that would lower the wages of tech workers, cannot cite any definitive evidence pointing to a shortage of American high-tech workers.

I know..."Breitbart!". Well here it is from a left leaning source... The Atlantic

Submission + - 'Sophisticated' Android malware hits phones .. (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Hundreds of thousands of Android phones have been infected with malware that uses handsets to send spam and buy event tickets in bulk ..

NotCompatible is being spread via spam and websites seeded with booby-trapped downloads, he said and urged Android users to be wary of any app that required a security update to be installed before it was run ...

Submission + - Researchers Find The Tech Worker Shortage Doesn't Really Exist (businessweek.com)

Submitted by Beeftopia
Beeftopia writes: From the article: "For a real-life example of an actual worker shortage, Salzman points to the case of petroleum engineers, where the supply of workers has failed to keep up with the growth in oil exploration. The result, says Salzman, was just what economists would have predicted: Employers started offering more money, more people started becoming petroleum engineers, and the shortage was solved. In contrast, Salzman concluded in a paper released last year by the liberal Economic Policy Institute, real IT wages are about the same as they were in 1999. Further, he and his co-authors found, only half of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) college graduates each year get hired into STEM jobs. “We don’t dispute the fact at all that Facebook (FB) and Microsoft (MSFT) would like to have more, cheaper workers,” says Salzman’s co-author Daniel Kuehn, now a research associate at the Urban Institute. “But that doesn’t constitute a shortage.”

Submission + - "Advanced Life Support" Ambulances May Lead To More Deaths

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Jason Kane reports at PBS that emergency treatments delivered in ambulances that offer “Advanced Life Support” for cardiac arrest may be linked to more death, comas and brain damage than those providing “Basic Life Support.” "They’re taking a lot of time in the field to perform interventions that don’t seem to be as effective in that environment,” says Prachi Sanghavi. “Of course, these are treatments we know are good in the emergency room, but they’ve been pushed into the field without really being tested and the field is a much different environment.” The study suggests that high-tech equipment and sophisticated treatment techniques may distract from what’s most important during cardiac arrest — transporting a critically ill patient to the hospital quickly.

Basic Life Support (BLS) ambulances stick to simpler techniques, like chest compressions, basic defibrillation and hand-pumped ventilation bags to assist with breathing with more emphasis placed on getting the patient to the hospital as soon as possible. Survival rates for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest patients are extremely low regardless of the ambulance type with roughly 90 percent of the 380,000 patients who experience cardiac arrest outside of a hospital each year not surviving to hospital discharge. But researchers found that 90 days after hospitalization, patients treated in BLS ambulances were 50 percent more likely to survive than their counterparts treated with ALS. Not everyone is convinced of the conclusions. “They’ve done as much as they possibly can with the existing data but I’m not sure that I’m convinced they have solved all of the selection biases,” says Judith R. Lave. “I would say that it should be taken as more of an indication that there may be some very significant problems here.”

Submission + - Both NY and LA Times write that Silicon Valley can't find enough talent. 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The New York Times has featured Zenefits in an article about the need for more H1-B visas, because they can't find enough qualified U.S. workers to fill their active positions, even after President Obama's recent Executive Actions. The Los Angeles Times has done similarly. Why are so many jobs, primarily in Silicon Valley it seems, going unfilled in 2014?

Submission + - Robots Put To Work On E-Waste (unsw.edu.au)

Submitted by aesoteric
aesoteric writes: Australian researchers have programmed industrial robots to tackle the vast array of e-waste thrown out every year. The research shows robots can learn and memorise how various electronic products — such as LCD screens — are designed, enabling those products to be disassembled for recycling faster and faster. The end goal is less than five minutes to dismantle a product.

Submission + - women (and to a lesser degree men) with multiple children are most productive (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by jehan60188
jehan60188 writes: from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

"That’s the conclusion of a recent study from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which found that over the course of a 30-year career, mothers outperformed women without children at almost every stage of the game. In fact, mothers with at least two kids were the most productive of all. ...
They decided to analyze the amount of research published by more than 10,000 academic economists as a proxy for performance. A job in the ivory tower of academia requires higher education by definition, and their work is easily searched, recorded and ranked.

It's important to point out that the authors are examining a very narrow group of women with privileged circumstances. Parenthood was likely planned for many them, with benefits such as maternity leave and paid sick time. They can also better afford to pay for resources like reliable childcare that allow them to work longer. Low-income or low-skilled mothers often face a very different working environment."

full paper: http://research.stlouisfed.org...

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