It's GBP - for Pound Sterling. Admittedly not as intuitive as one would first think (Great Britain Pounds? No).

Don't forget, Microsoft has also invested in Facebook.

In embedded devices like these, there is no reason to use a root password. The devices should be locked down completely with a process to update them with signed firmware.

If they need some form of remote access, they should at the very least use SSH PKI.

The summary suggests otherwise: "I'll also still have access to the internet at my office"

Example: http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?ll=-36.79191,174.771398&spn=0.001697,0.003484&sll=51.629526,-0.175223&sspn=0.021045,0.055747&t=h&z=19

See the two roundabouts? They each have pedestrian islands on each side road.

The roads themselves aren't high volume, but rather than having to come to a complete stop at each intersection and look, or install traffic lights and wait until the cycle goes green, you can basically drive straight through and only check a single direction as you go. You don't need to check for oncoming traffic, nor do you need to check for traffic turning into your path, as it's a single flow. It greatly reduces the number of potential points cars can crash into each other.

Pedestrian either have pedestrian crossings or pedestrian islands provided along each ingress/egress road. With ped crossings obviously cars give way to peds immediately, and there is no distraction because at that point you are still on a normal road. With the islands, the pedestrian moving into the middle first when it's safe, then onto the next side. Pedestrians don't walk onto the roundabout itself.

Roundabouts are used in low and medium volume traffic situations, where it is quite easy to find a safe gap to walk across a road. It does mean a bit more walking for someone trying to walk 'straight' through the roundabout, as you'll have to deviate slightly down a side road then walk back up again. But as mentioned, since there isn't normally much traffic, you don't normally need to walk far. It's normally quicker than waiting for a traffic light.

What Qantas has here is closer to the difference between self-checkouts in supermarkets - designed to handle only small loads - and the regular supermarket operator who can handle all volumes of goods. Yes, your floating point operation will work, sir, as long as you use the correct registers.

You are of course correct, they have had fatal crashes in the past. But none with jet engines. I.e. nothing in the modern era. I'd prefer we had a rolling scale approach that reflects the average working life of modern planes, e.g. in the last 20 years has the airline had a fatal crash?

Does anyone have a link to the actual legislation? So we can read and see for ourselves what the law states.

Easy to stop

- Don't allow zip files with passwords (or any other compression format)
- Inspect individual files in compressed archives for checksum matches (i.e. lolcat.jpg not matched, but game.exe is, so is README.txt, etc...) and if enough of the individual files match known checksums, flag it for human inspection.
- Check all files to identify what filetype they are - jpg/zip/gz/tar/etc... if the file type is not known, disallow it. Yes I'm sure someone will invent a zip file format with a JPG header.

- Perhaps for 'identity verified' customers (users who you have confirmed their phone/address somehow, e.g. TXT postal letter activation code) you lift the restrictions on no encrypted files, and also allow files of unknown type.

- Video and Audio are harder to detect than other lossless filetypes, as the user can modify it easily to change its checksum without destroying the content. There are some algorithms that fingerprints aren't affected by such changes but they're typically a lot more specific to the given filetype and I imagine quite intensive to run compared to a typical SHA/MD5 checksum.

*whoosh* That was his point.

Let's have a larger number for dedicated silent calls. 999 111 999. A lot harder to accidentally put in. Publicity of it will make sure people who *need* silent calls will use it (and those who don't are Darwins). All calls to 999 111 999 would be followed up, and pranksters would be severely fined / jailed on the first offense.

More than likely it would be fine. I guess I was commenting more on your question of brute force attacks being relevant in the days where you get X tries then the account is locked. If you choose even a moderately sane password (i.e. no sequential numbers, no keyboard sequences, no common words) then you'll be a lot safer than most people.

But attackers these days are more interested in *any* account, not a specific account. So brute force hacking has shifted from brute force passwords to brute force usernames. Imagine trying tonnes of common usernames (johnsmith@gmail.com) against the top 3 most common passwords. You're bound to strike gold soon enough. Attackers will most likely have access to large email databases of legitimate addresses to use in their attempts. Sites allowing / encouraging / requiring you to use your email as your username these days only make such attackers easier.

One thing to think about - If you try brute force a username, yes, you probably will lock out that account for a period of time. But what if you try the same password against random usernames. There is over 200,000 users with the password 123456. All you need to do is guess the username for one. Most websites don't detect and block against this sort of attack.

One thing some companies do, is require X of Y characteristics. i.e. Your password must be at least 8 characters long, and contain at least 3 out of the following 4: {lowercase letter, uppercase letter, number, special character}.

So your keyspace is far larger than: Must have a lowercase, uppercase, digit and special character. I think it's a nice compromise - but of course as this report shows, a hacker would still probably target [a-z0-9]{8}.

What would be interesting if the change password form predetermined the password requirements for this particular password, and these requirements are randomised each time the user wants to change the password. E.g. one time it may require a password of at least 8 characters, the next time it might require it to be 10 characters. One time it may require digits, another time it may require special characters. So an attacker in this case couldn't rely on a large populus having simple passwords of the bare minimum length as the system forces some variances in those minimums. Sure, it'll probably piss off users even more... (And I'm the first to admit I'd be pissed off by such an approach too).