*shrug*

In my hypothetical offline-validator scenario, it doesn't have to scale because it's not running at transaction time. Go ahead and reset the password, generate a bunch of new fake hashes and store the index of the "real" one in the same log that will be picked up for validation later on. With asymmetric encryption, the log could be stolen outright and be of no use at all to an attacker.

That said, I'd probably lean towards an online validator just so I could stick attackers in a honeypot and keep them from messing with my users. Though, as someone else pointed out here, by far the most likely use for the stolen passwords is not on my site, but to use them to log into bank accounts.

Some responses (informed by the actual paper):

The second DB doesn't have any of the the password hashes, it just knows which one is correct. It's a single table of (userid, hashid) where hashid is just some small integer.

The idea seems to be that the second system can be a smaller, less complicated single-function server, easier to harden and could be running a different OS/Webserver/DB stack. You could (by sacrificing real-time validation) even have the second system entirely firewalled off and unreachable to an attacker, just polling the login servers to validate the sessions at some small interval.

If the second system goes down, one approach would be to just accept any of the passwords until it comes back up. Then check the logs of what happened while it was offline and act accordingly (invalidate sessions, raise alarms, whatever).

Overall, I like the idea tremendously. It seems like it's not quite all there yet, but we're probably going to start implementing some variant of it immediately.

What the heck, I'll bite. iPad-style tablets are probably the most important advance in general-purpose computing hardware since IBM launched their PC. I don't mean that as hyperbole, either. iOS and Android have made modestly powerful computers easy to understand and use by regular people. They are the present and future of consumer computing. Desktop and laptop PCs are and have always been a professional product, overcomplicated and poorly suited to the "workflow" of regular life, and they are rightfully being abandoned by everyone that doesn't actually need what they offer: A ridiculously powerful workstation with a bunch of overlapping windows, a disc burner, huge local hard drives and/or the latest graphics hardware.

If anything, I think the "home desktop computer" is going to quickly become a weird niche product.

I'm not sure firing her was an over-reaction. Her employer is trying to be a five-nines service provider. Her poor judgement got their services DDoS'd off the net for 5 hours today. Sounds like a pretty good case for firing to me.

Incidentally, I'm working with a customer of that company right now, and their downtime caused us a bunch of extra work. But I'm not bitter. Not at all.

It's quite possible to change the email address associated with an Apple account, and dissociate the old address, as long as you can log into it. Just takes a few clicks and a couple of "click this link" emails.

Not necessarily; a 4-letter password can be brute-forced in a fraction of a second with most services, or in a couple of hours even with those that introduce delays after login failure, but to get the 26-letter password from your monitor they have to breach physical security at your company. That's usually not too hard ("Hi, someone said a toilet on the third floor is leaking?"), but it does have to be targeted.

For the rest, I agree with you. The policies you mention seem ill-conceived and poorly implemented.

Having also worked on (and lead) large game and non-game projects, I must respectfully completely disagree with you. The compiler might be able to boil someInstance.SetThing( someInstance.GetThing()*2 ) down to a couple of lines of assembly, but my eyeballs can parse someInstance.thing *= 2 much, much faster and (more to the point) more accurately. I think your potential for weird bugs just increases with the complexity of your syntax (and it's no trickier to catch one in a debugger than the other).

Management won't say "no". They'll say, "That sounds good. Do it, but don't change the date for our next release." And everyone will hate the new guy forever.

I don't think that would help. If I understand the theory correctly, it's that high atmospheric CO2 is affecting our climate by trapping more energy in the system, and localized weather events (such as a heat wave in Australia or a less-than-usually-cold snap in Antarctica) are expected to reflect that change in an average, aggregate sort of way.

Of course, it's just a theory, and one that has a number of dubious advantages:

• * it's easy to model with our (comparitively) crude systems.
• * it appeals to our inner guilt over raping the planet.
• * it's extremely difficult to disprove (see crude systems above).

On the other hand, lots of really smart people seem to agree that it beats out a hotter sun, too much pavement, some other natural or manmade aerosol, God's wrath, "natural" climate change, whatever that might be, and angry space bunnies as a cause for the planet changing its average temperature.

Smart-ass. Parentheses are a type of bracket.

I did. Immediately. My professional use of paint and page layout programs is now limited enough that CS2 does everything I need and most of what I want, and there's no way I could justify the outlay for CS6 or their cloud service. Heck, I used PS CS2 for pro photography work for a couple of years. It might be seven-year-old software, but it's still miles better than anything else you can get for less than a few hundred bucks even today.

Why? CPU time is dirt cheap if you can concentrate your task. The bandwidth (a much scarcer resource) is already being spent, and better decisions will just tend to reduce your costs there. To me this smacks of laziness, not efficiency.

No, but you are required to be in actual possession of at least a binary copy before you gain any rights under the GPL. If you can't find someone that will just give you a copy out of the goodness of their hearts, you might well have to pay for it.

That got modded flamebait? Really??? Hey moderators: WHOOSH!

Wow. It's rare that you can actually see sarcasm dipping from a comment.