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New Standard For Website Authentication Proposed: SQRL (Secure QR Login) Screenshot-sm 234

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the but-the-nsa-owns-your-phone dept.
fsagx writes "Steve Gibson has proposed a new standard method for website authentication. The SQRL system (pronounced 'squirrel') eliminates problems inherent in traditional login techniques. The website's login presents a QR code containing the URL of its authentication service, plus a nonce. The user's smartphone signs the login URL using a private key derived from its master secret and the URL's domain name. The Smartphone sends the matching public key to identify the user, and the signature to authenticate it. It may be used alongside of traditional username/password to ease adoption."
The Internet

The Greatest Keyboard Shortcut Ever 506

Posted by timothy from the wish-I'd-known-this-15-years-ago dept.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Ryan Vogt writes in the Mercury News that Shakespeare described death as 'the undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn no traveller returns.' Did you know there is a the miraculous way to resuscitate tabs sent to the 'undiscovere'd country,' a sort of Ctrl-Z for the entire Internet, that means 'no more called-out cusswords, no more wishing the back button had you covered when, aiming to click on a tab, you accidentally hit the little X on the tab's starboard.' For Macs: Command [plus] shift [plus] t reopens the last tab. For PCs: Ctrl [plus] Shift [plus] T. 'Try it right now. Close this tab and bring it back. I dare ya.' Melia Robinson's trick [described for Chrome] works in Firefox and Internet Explorer, too, so clumsy mousing won't send the the E*Trade tab you mistakenly closed all cued up to sell those 10,000 shares of stock or your long political post on your uncle's Facebook page on a one-way trip to the undiscovere'd country in those browsers, either." No guarantees on the stock trading.

Comment Re:Thanks GoPro, I'll check out the Sony (Score 2) 232

by ethan0 (#43240443) Attached to: GoPro Issues DMCA Takedown Over Negative Review

I think Sony is not an improvement in terms of supporting evil. It could be argued that their divisions have little to do with each other, and the evils of Sony Music (rootkits, etc.) or Sony Computer Entertainment (playstation, dropping promised linux support, exposing customers with disregard for security), or any other scandals shouldn't reflect on their cameras. But, I think similar mentality seems fairly consistent through their corporate culture. I've written Sony off entirely.

for a comparable alternative, I have a couple of Contour cameras I've been quite happy with.
Bug

You've Got 25 Years Until UNIX Time Overflows 492

Posted by timothy from the start-packing dept.
CowboyRobot writes "In 25 years, an odd thing will happen to some of the no doubt very large number of computing devices in our world: an old, well-known and well-understood bug will cause their calculation of time to fail. The problem springs from the use of a 32-bit signed integer to store a time value, as a number of seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on Thursday, 1 January 1970, a practice begun in early UNIX systems with the standard C library data structure time_t. On January 19, 2038, at 03:14:08 UTC that integer will overflow. It's not difficult to come up with cases where the problem could be real today. Imagine a mortgage amortization program projecting payments out into the future for a 30-year mortgage. Or imagine those phony programs politicians use to project government expenditures, or demographic software, and so on. It's too early for panic, but those of us in the early parts of their careers will be the ones who have to deal with the problem."
Input Devices

Star Trek Tech That Exists Today 207

Posted by Soulskill from the where-are-my-self-sealing-stembolts dept.
Esther Schindler writes "When Star Trek hit the air waves, talking computers were just a pipe dream. While teleportation remains elusive, several once-fictional technologies are changing the way people live and work. Here are some ways in which we're approaching the gizmos that Star Trek demonstrated. Speech recognition? Check. Holodeck? Sort of. Replicator? Workin' on it."

Comment Re:S.M.A.R.T. (Score 1) 297

by ethan0 (#39562477) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How Do You Test Storage Media?

SMART is good for telling you when your drives do have problems that need addressing. it's not so great for giving you assurance that your drives do not have problems - consider a positive smart result to be more of an "I don't know" than a "good". you should generally assume your drives can fail at any time. I don't think there's any way to reliably predict the sudden death of a drive.
Displays

iPad 3 Confirmed To Have 2048x1536 Screen Resolution 537

Posted by timothy from the small-package dept.
bonch writes "After months of reporting on photos of iPad 3 screen parts, MacRumors finally obtained one for themselves and examined it under a microscope, confirming that the new screens will have twice the linear resolution of the iPad 2, with a whopping 2048x1536 pixel density. Hints of the new display's resolution were found in iBooks 2, which contains hi-DPI versions of its artwork. The iPad 3 is rumored to be launching in early March."
Censorship

Google Begins Country-Specific Blog Censorship 250

Posted by samzenpus from the not-for-your-eyes dept.
bonch writes "Google will begin redirecting blogs to country-specific URLs. Blog visitors will be redirected to a URL specific to their location, with content subject to their country's censorship laws. A support post on Blogger explains the change: 'Over the coming weeks you might notice that the URL of a blog you're reading has been redirected to a country-code top level domain, or "ccTLD." For example, if you're in Australia and viewing [blogname].blogspot.com, you might be redirected to [blogname].blogspot.com.au. A ccTLD, when it appears, corresponds with the country of the reader's current location.'"

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