This is a night and day difference with respect to reverse engineering...
No, it isn't. They had to go further out of their way to dance around that issue in order to make a legal clone.
...and the fact that IBM didn't want a compatible BIOS to be produced does not change this.
It changes this part:
Compaq et al were able to create clones because the IBM PC was an open platform.
...the fact is those working on a compatible BIOS had the IBM source code with comments to work from
... they clean-room reverse engineered it.
That is pretty open and greatly facilitated the creation of a compatible BIOS.
The fact remains that IBM published the source code to the embedded firmware, that is by definition open.
You can nitpick individual details all you like, but at the end of the day Compaq created the clone of the BIOS despite IBM, not with support from them.
Clean room design (also known as the Chinese wall technique) is the method of copying a design by reverse engineering and then recreating it without infringing any of the copyrights and trade secrets associated with the original design. Clean room design is useful as a defense against copyright and trade secret infringement because it relies on independent invention.
IBM published the source code to their BIOS. That is pretty open and greatly facilitated the creation of a compatible BIOS.
Heh. No. Compaq reverse-engineered their BIOS. Here's some more reading material.
Perhaps corporations can get cyanogen out of the dorm and mom's basement and get it some serious usage.
Or Google could release an OS that doesn't require vendors' permission to install... like Microsoft does. Hah.
From the same link:
The success of the IBM computer led other companies to develop IBM Compatibles, which in turn led to branding like diskettes being advertised as "IBM format". An IBM PC clone could be built with off-the-shelf parts, but the BIOS required some reverse-engineering. Companies like Compaq, Phoenix Software Associates, American Megatrends, Award, and others achieved fully functional versions of the BIOS, allowing companies like DELL, Gateway and HP to manufacture PCs that worked like IBM's product. The IBM PC became the industry standard.
Using off-the-shelf parts is not the same as being open.
So, this guy published the the fact that he was going to do this on his blog and in email before he did it. Here's the quote from "Thehill.com":
On the webpage thedemocracyclub.org, he wrote: ''My flight is not a secret. Before I took off, I sent an Email to info@barackobama.com. The letter is intended to persuade the guardians of the Capitol that I am not a threat and that shooting me down will be a bigger headache than letting me deliver these letters to Congress.''
Tell me again, what our incredible spying and surveillance program is supposed to be doing? Because, I'm pretty sure this is the definition of "intelligence failure" in all senses of the phrase.
Then another site I used got hacked. And at that point I decided I was better off using a password manager and using different passwords for each site.
Yeah, that sucks.
I use a password manager as well, mostly because I'm lazy typing. It gives me the added benefit that if one of the sites gets hacked, I can check the PW manager to see where else I use the same PW.
You can use different passwords, if you like. I don't do it because it would mean that when I find myself without my PW manager, I'd be fucked. And it happens quite often that I do.
The problem there is that all it takes is one crap site and an attacker can check all of your "reset answers" (pet's name / mom's name / etc) to see if they can be used for an attack.
These bullshit "security questions" are actually the weakest link. I don't use them. If the site enforces it, I fill them with noise.
Think about what the minimum information an attacker would need to access your bank account (either login or social engineering) and then look at how many sites have that information.
Depends on your bank. Mine doesn't let me log in with username or password or any such crap. Also, every bank worth its money these days will use 2-factor authentication, or send a TAN by SMS or something like that. More and more banks will also send you SMS to inform you about every transaction made, so you can stop any abuse immediately.
Banks are among the few who actually take security seriously. They're not perfect, not by far, but they are still among the only commercial entities to use one-time-passwords (those TAN lists) and were among the very first to use 2-factor authentication.
So, to answer your question: What do you need to access my bank account? Nothing you would find on any of the forums, games sites or even my Amazon or iTunes account.
Changing passwords doesn't make them magically more secure.
What do you hope to accomplish? If you have a good reason to change, change. If you don't, you change for prophylaxis, to stop someone who may have been using your account for something. But if you didn't even notice, what's the damage? And if he's a pro, he's also changed the password reset email address, at least on sites that don't send a notice to the old address.
You're doing a lot of effort for - what? If you can't answer that question, don't do it.
You're right on that. If you have an account on some random forum, you should treat the password you use there as if it has already been compromised.
Sorry that I thought that's so obvious it doesn't need to be mentioned.
Because 9 orders of magnitude applied down towards zero would give you 3.
But the population of the US is closer to the zero point than the naive complexity estimate. To give a proper comparison of "we are wrong by relatively this much", you have to scale the offset correspondingly.
No, it wouldn't help.
The problem is techies thinking in techie terms. What would help is get a normal user into the room and give him an actual voice in the matter, when the policy is decided. You know, not John from the call center, but Frank the philosophy doctor who's now head of product management.
Religious institutions own business and property. They don't have to pay taxes on any of this, which means that while *my* business and property taxes go up, they're free to continue on their merry way, polluting the airwaves with drivel, owning prime real estate forever without fear of confiscation by the authorities due to unpaid taxes, and so on. Nice deal, that.
If a religious organizations want to start a fan club with a big building, it's their business, but let them pay their share for the surrounding infrastructure (i.e. roads, law enforcement, flood control, sewage, etc.).
The point of password complexity requirements has nothing to do with security. It's about the check box some auditor or lawyer needs to check. People assume it leads to security, but only because they see it in a vacuum.
That's consultant bullshit. The legal requirements are nowhere near this specific. It's only consultants that turn them into this nightmare of nonsense. I've worked in IT Compliance (SOX) for years. As long as you can describe why your password policy is good, it doesn't matter what it actually is. The problem is too many people don't invest the time to think a bit and simply take a so-called "best practice" and apply it. In way too many cases without reading to the end and realizing that this "best practice" was published in 1998 and may be a little outdated.
Still waiting for an article (actually, the posts so far also seem devoid) about pass-acronyms. "mhallifwwas" will pwn any brute force, any attack table (well, not any more) and it's a fscking nursery rhyme.
You can wait a long time, because there are too few computer scientists on the intersection of poetry, linguistic analysis and computer security to make that happen. You would need a good estimate of likely sentences used for input and that requires skills far outside the computing sphere.
A statistical analysis will likely reduce the set of probably letter combinations somewhat, but probably not by more than one or two orders of magnitude. An analysis of word-beginning distribution of letters will gain you more. Taking all that into account, my best gut feeling is that you'll end up somewhere in the area of 10^10 in complexity for an 8-character output. Better than passwords (which I've repeatedly estimated at around 10^7) but still not so great and probably much less than you'd expect.
Also, taking into account psychology and the fact that a fairly small set of phrases is much more popular than all the others combined, and that many users will choose a popular phrase instead of a personal one, you would also end up with the "password"-as-my-password problem in that a lot of accounts would have phrases from a list of maybe 1000 popular ones.
Understanding is always the understanding of a smaller problem in relation to a bigger problem. -- P.D. Ouspensky
