You and the author of the article both seem to be missing one important aspect of password hashing. You're never supposed to apply a particular hashing algorithm directly to a password. Instead the user's password should be combined with some salt(random data) and then hashed. The resulting hash can still be brute forced, but any resulting hashes can't be used as collisions for other stored hashes as they require a different known salt to be used. In other words, while it took the author 49 minutes he only had to compute 6^n number of hashes where n is the number of possible characters per position (lowercase, uppercase, numeric?). If each hashed password had a different known salt appended, he would have had to compute 14 * 6^n number of hashes. This is an order of magnitude larger than the original time. Of course, this only applies if the salt is known. If the salt is unknown during the brute-force it's practically impossible to discover the original password.

Sadly it seems a lot of people still think $10,000 is a briefcase full of cash. Lets break it down shall we.. Assuming they used standard US bills we get the following:

1. $10,000 = $100 x 100 bills = 1 stack of 100, $100 bills
2. $10,000 = $50 x 200 bills = 2 stacks of 100, $50 bills
3. $10,000 = $20 x 500 bills = 5 stacks of 100, $20 bills
4. $10,000 = $10 x 1000 bills = 10 stacks of 100, $10 bills
5. $10,000 = $5 x 2000 bills = 20 stacks of 100, $5 bills
6. $10,000 = $1 x 10000 bills = 100 stacks of 100, $1 bills

At 0:14 when they open the case you can clearly see several stacks marked as $100, some as $50, and some as $5. If the briefcase truly has $10,000 in it, the stacks marked with $100 bills must be filled with something other than $100 bills as a single stack would equal the amount the briefcase was said to hold. Given the variety of bills in the case, it appears they went to a lot of trouble to convince us that they gave away $10,000 USD. The reality is they probably didn't, and that the entire thing was just as staged as the briefcase full of cash.

I completely agree. Remove the word "lawful" from all sections and I'll be much more supportive of their efforts. If all content and application communications were protected under the First Amendment then word "lawful' would only serve to restrict that right in the future by designating specific things as "unlawful". The last thing we need is government overview of what applications or content are considered "lawful".

I thought gasoline taxes already accounted for this sort of thing. That is the more you drive your car the more tax you pay in taxes. If you're one of those idiots that must drive an 8mpg SUV then you undoubtedly pay more in taxes than someone who drives a midsized or compact car. Is this fair? I think so.

TFA is referring not to de-facto ubiquitous coverage by multiple independent access points, but by a single, centrally run mesh of access points owned and operated (at least partially) by the municipal government.

At least in the USA, this has largely been quashed by the telcos in the courts, claiming that such networks are unfair competition to their price gouging mobile data plans.

The problem is that you need jailbroken iphone...

This may be true for the moment, but now that someone is actually capitalizing on jailbroken iphones, Apple's attempts to completely restrict people from installing what they want on their devices could be construed as anti-competitive behavior by a judge. That is, if they were to secure all flaws in the phone's operating system via an update and not provide people with the availability to install software from a competing vendor, Apple could face some serious fines for effectively trying to eliminate the competition.

If this ever winds up in court, Apple might try to argue that jailbroken iphones are against the DMCA. The competing store however might argue that it was done for "compatibility" purposes, which last I recall was allowed under current copyright laws. In the end if something like this does ever happen, it'll definitely be a case worth paying attention to.

PBS had a great 1 hour segment on this not too long ago. Their segment covered the rapid decline in albatrosses due to offspring being fed the plastic from the pacific. I haven't been able to find the complete coverage of the segment I saw on my local PBS station, but I have managed to locate part of it here titled: World's Oceans Face Problem of Plastic Pollution

Landesk is one such solution.. Unless of course you need something to monitor software installed on non-Windows machines...

Maybe you should play with Transmorphers instead.

For all those interested, Scientific American has the story.

Anyone worth their salt knows nothing is stored in the cable modem.

Something tells me he hasn't heard of the mysterious black smoke.

While I agree that web based email clients may be the way of the future, it will be a long time before messaging services provided by sites like MySpace or Facebook replace traditional email services. The main problem with these services is their inability to relay messages to users of different sites.

From a technical POV, the move to web based email services could actually be considered a good thing since it abstracts the underlying system from the user. That is to say, users need not know how it works or how to make it work, only that it does what they expect it to do. If web based email were to completely replace desktop email clients, we would be free to modify and correct the shortfalls of the current system without having to conform to protocols imposed by existing desktop based email clients.

Sure, install Bind/Named or any other free DNS server and do the look-ups yourself. Having your own DNS server dramatically improves look-up times. It also prevents the unfortunate situation where you're unable to resolve any sites simply because your ISP's DNS servers have failed.