Lost my low ID nick - Slashdot User

Comment: Re:His Password Comment (Score 1) 147

by Lost my low ID nick on Wednesday December 05 2007, @01:55PM (#21587369) Attached to: Freakonomics Q&A With Bruce Schneier

But here's the idea. Let the browser perform the one-way hashing. You enter your password, the browser hashes it, and the hashed value is sent to the site.

It's called "Digest Auth" and has been in browsers for quite some time now. In fact, even non browser http-using tools like wget or subversion or basically and file manager using WebDAV support it. I know of no web server that doesn't support it, too.

It's not supported in html forms, though, and as everybody has to have nifty login forms instead of http auth, which is so web 1.0, we all fall back to plain text passwords, even here on slashdot, a geek site. :-(. I once saw a site that encrypted the password with RSA in JavaScript before sending it, the first security enhancing use of JS I saw to that day. They had a little sleep call in there, too, to make it feel more secure to the user ("Ugh, encrypting... please wait... oh, this is hard work... ugh...")

Microsoft launches open source site-> 0

Submitted by

prostoalex

on Thursday July 26 2007, @02:02PM

prostoalex writes "Microsoft launched a site dedicated to collaboration between Microsoft and open source community. The site helps developers, IT administrators, and IT buyers find out what Microsoft's product offerings are, and read articles about open source such as "Open Source Provider Sees Sales Doubling After Moving Solutions to the Windows Platform.""
Link to Original Source

Humans beat computer in man-machine poker match-> 0

Submitted by

dj_tla

on Thursday July 26 2007, @01:16PM

dj_tla writes "The Edmonton Journal is reporting that humans have won the man-machine poker competition held at the AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) conference in Vancouver. The match was between Polaris, a poker-playing bot from the University of Alberta's GAMES research group and poker-playing humans Phil Laak and Ali Eslami from Los Angeles. From the article:

Phil Laak and Ali Eslami, two poker players from Los Angeles ranked as the world's best, prevailed against a program named Polaris by just 570 points in the fourth and final game. [...] The previous three games over two days resulted in one draw and one win each for humans and the machine.
The University of Alberta's coverage can be found here."
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"Cat Scanning" death-> 0

Submitted by

BWJones

on Thursday July 26 2007, @12:15PM

BWJones writes "An article in the New England Journal of Medicine that describes a cat in Providence, Rhode Island that appears to be able to detect when a patient in a nursing home is about to die. BBC link here. CBS link here. The cat following cues or small molecular signals goes into the room of a dying patient, curls up next to them and begins to purr in the hours before the patient dies. Cats may be better detectors of metabolomic status than we give them credit for."
Link to Original Source

German court rejects claim against P2P user-> 1

Submitted by

doppelfish

on Thursday July 26 2007, @12:08PM

doppelfish writes "A german court (AG Offenburg) has rejected the desire of the public prosecution office to learn the identity of users from the IPs of computers that were allegedly sharing copyrighted material. A german lawyer firm had filed complaints against the users in the hope of learning the identity of the users so that they could file civil charges against them. The court decided that the ISPs could not be queried for the identities of the users under restriction of commensurability. The court argued that the desire of the public prosecuters ran "against the laws of logic" since the lawyer firm could not prove significant damage besides a single download that they had initiated themselves. The court also denied the complaint about lost sales, arguing that demand would increase artificially when goods, i. e. music files, were availlable for free, leading to an increased number of downloads by people who otherwise wouldn't have bought the music. To back up this decision, the court cited a 2004 Harvard study which shows that the damage to the music industry by P2P sharing networks tends towards zero. The court also denied the charge of intentional sharing, arguing that five common P2P clients "insist" on uploading data without their users knowledge. The court also recognized the strategy of private law firms to file "up to 10'000 criminal complaints" with the only intent of learning the identity of the users for the purpose of filing "exagerated claims against those users". A public prosecutor who asked for his name to be withheld said that public prosecutor offices will strive to obtain more court verdicts in this spirit to relieve their offices from the mass of criminal charges which keep them from prosecuting much more important crimes."
Link to Original Source

Canadian Supreme Court Allows Parallel Imports 0

Submitted by on Thursday July 26 2007, @11:33AM

An anonymous reader writes "The Canadian Supreme Court has ruled that copyright law cannot be used to block parallel imports. The case involved chocolate bars, yet the same principles would apply to video games, DVDs, and other products. The court continued its focus on copyright balance, emphasizing the limited nature of copyright, stating that "care must be taken to ensure that copyright protection is not allowed to extend beyond the legitimate interests of a copyright holder.""