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Comment Re:Before somebody asks . . . (Score 1) 84

by bakuun (#41888323) Attached to: A Piezoelectric Pacemaker That Is Powered By Your Heartbeat

No, that's not the reason. A UPS has to be able to replace the full power provided by the main when in use. A pacemaker only needs to provide a small trigger signal, which is much smaller than the output of the heart itself.

"... which is much smaller than the output of the heart itself."

Kind of like a UPS and an electric power plant then, yes?

Comment The Logica hacking ... (Score 5, Informative) 95

by bakuun (#41348337) Attached to: Pirate Bay Co-Founder Detained In Sweden
... isn't just a matter of hacking a random IT firm as the summary may lead one to believe. The firm in question was a contractor for the government, and was handling a number of important census databases, including personal details about people with "protected identity" (people that live under threat of violence, and the like). Through the hacking, this data was released.

Considering that he was already wanted for his involvement in the pirate bay, the hacking was an incredibly stupid thing to do.

Comment Wrong audience for the question (Score 4, Insightful) 340

by bakuun (#41326837) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Tech For a Sailing Ship?
While I'm sure there are some here that are into sailing, this question should really be placed at a sailing forum instead. There are plenty of those - I'd suggest that you become a member there, and ask the question there instead. It also seems to me that a round-the-world trip may be a bit ambitious if you don't even know about the gear (or have tested the boat) yet. Something more limited may be suitable initially.

Comment Re:Spying? Really? (Score 2) 162

by bakuun (#41304051) Attached to: <em>Arma III</em> Developers Arrested In Greece For 'Spying'

So if I was there as a tourist, would I get arrested?

Or is somehow putting your island into a video game now sedition or something?

TFA is pretty slim, but I'm having a hard time imagine what law was broken.

TFA is not thin at all. It states that the men were caught with photographs of military installations. I would wager that most countries have laws against photographic military bases, and I'm not surprised that Greece do. This was just a really stupid thing to do.

Comment Re:So are they talking about (Score 1) 65

by bakuun (#41128401) Attached to: Gartner Says Application Development Is a $9 Billion Industry
It must be "apps", as in software for mobile devices. Last year, Microsoft alone had revenue of $ 74 billion. Granted, they do hardware and the like as well, but the 9 billion figure is still ridiculous if were to refer to all software development. Because of this, it is unfortunate that the summary says "software application development", whereas the articles only mentions "application development".

Comment Re:Completely broken. (Score 1) 287

Ok, so there is a one-in-three chance of guessing the correct sequence, yes? Even if the whole operation would be quadrupled, as you said (choose the correct sequence, then again another three times), you will still have a 1-in-81 chance of guessing (3^4). This is by no means enough.

You mention allowing no more than three of four attempts, but this won't really work well either. You can't reliably do it by IP - it is easy for malicious users to jump between IPs (using e.g. botnets or different proxy servers), and if you do it by user account (e.g. ignoring IP, allowing only x number of attempts for the username before locking it down) you will have created the best possible scenario for denial-of-service attacks. Anybody would be able to lock anybody else's account trivially.

I agree that research is a good thing and that sequence-based login is kind of interesting, but the flaws really need to be covered as well. That is critical in any scientific field. As it is now, this method is completely unusable.

Comment Completely broken. (Score 3, Insightful) 287

A few readers have commented that the system will need to know your unhashed password. This is clearly bad, but there are even worse flaws.

A 30-character password sounds awfully strong (60^30 combinations if upper/lower-case chars and numbers are used). However, from the article: "Authentication requires that you play a round of the game — but this time, your 30-letter sequence is interspersed with other random 30-letter sequences". This means that the number of characters is irrelevant, really. What matters is the number of "30-letter sequences", and since you need to play them all, they will need to be limited. How many? 10 would probably too many to play, but will still only be the equivalent of a single-digit password. This system will be trivial to crack with brute-force guesses.

Even worse, repeated "login attempts" will reveal which sequence is the correct one - simply check which sequence repeats between tries.

Comment Re:Not so fast...YET (Score 5, Insightful) 135

by bakuun (#40351263) Attached to: SPDY Not As Speedy As Hyped?

You're not going to see the potential of SPDY before we have environments (browsers, CPU and your internet speed) that can take full advantage of it. Only in the most recent version of Firefox did we see SPDY support.

SPDY does not depend at all on CPUs or your "internet speed". It does depend on the browser (with both Firefox and Chrome supprting SPDY now) and, critically, the server. That last is also why the article author did not see much of a speedup - most content providers don't support SPDY yet. Going to non-SPDY servers and believing that it will evaluate SPDY for you is absolutely ridiculous.

Comment Re:Zero Because: (Score 1) 280

by bakuun (#40140449) Attached to: % of my digital storage that is solid-state:

I chose to interpret "storage" as "not temporary". All my long term storage is on ZFS arrays that do use ssd's for caching. Cameras and phones have sd cards but I don't count them. Camera cards are used until its backed up. Androids memory was copied from the backups for use, deleted once I don't care about it anymore. My OS is on an SSD, but its not used for storage, its used for running my OS. Dedicated game drive is also SSD, not used for storage, used for running games. Only place I store data is a ZFS array, if it isn't ZFS, its only temporary.

That sounds like a nice setup. I'm curious, though - while efficient, are you at all concerned about the life span of your SSD cache drives? Having a limited number of write cycles, I would have imagined that using them for a cache layer would cause them to fail quite quickly.

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