Forgot your password?

typodupeerror

Comment: Re:Thanks for all the Fish Wrapper (Score 1) 1521

by vrmlguy (#37217374) Attached to: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

And I lurked long enough to get a low six digit id. Also, didn't get my first choice of a username, and my second choice was either inspired or lame, the jury's still out. I try to visit every day, but when I miss a day I feel compelled to go back and read the days I've missed (thanks, OCD!)

Comment: Re:URL for MP3 recording (Score 3, Informative) 105

by vrmlguy (#36676324) Attached to: Scientists Play World's Oldest Commercial Recording

Comment: Re:How Original (Score 2) 171

by vrmlguy (#36547642) Attached to: Fonolo Lets You Bypass Company Phone Menus

Mod parent up! I downloaded the Lucyphone app on my iPhone, and it's a life saver. Like Fonolo, Lucyphone is free; I suspect they make money by providing some service to the companies you call. As someone one said, if you aren't the person paying for something, then you're the thing someone else *is* paying for.

One minor quibble: Lucyphone needs you to navigate the phone tree, but once you get the message asking you to wait for the next available operator, you just hit the button and go about your normal business. There's only been a couple of times that the rep hung up on Lucy before I could get on the line, and you can be sure I let the company know about it.

Comment: Re:Ha Ha, mine goes to 11 (Score 1) 615

by vrmlguy (#36345326) Attached to: Cheap GPUs Rendering Strong Passwords Useless

Go further to 7 characters (fh0GH5h), and the CPU would grind along for 4 days, versus a frankly worrying 17 minutes 30 seconds for the GPU."

OK, so go to 15 characters. Using a password generator I can go as far as I like. Using some sort of password bank program, I can store passwords / phrases of any complexity and use copy and paste, thus having only one strong password to remember.
So, what am I missing? (And lets keep it on topic, folks).

I've been generating 14 alpha+num+special characters with Last Pass, only to discover that some sites restrict you to 12 or fewer chacters and/or forbid special characters. And recent attacks (like Sony and Gawker) have involved the hackers obtaining user's password hashes, which are generally kept where the web server can see them to authenticate you.

Comment: Re:Short Answer (Score 5, Interesting) 730

by vrmlguy (#36151604) Attached to: Can Computers Be Used To Optimize the US Tax Code?

Slightly longer answer:

Maybe

Would politicians accept the solution without re-bloating it first? No

Actually, the original idea will never get off the ground, because most of those 10,000 pages deal with things like "companies employing less than 100 people and which are located in a depressed neighborhood and which have names ending in a vowel get to deduct the cost of the president's jet." Things like that are added to give one particular company a break, but they never mention the company's name, just a set of circumstances that describe only that company. The company knows who they are, but we are unlikely to figure it out since each of the intersecting sets is rather large. Unless that company is part of one of the clades, that particular clause will have zip effect and it will be proposed for deletion, leading to that company and all the others in the same situation to object to the entire process.

Comment: Re:Without PSN (Score 1) 386

by vrmlguy (#36111508) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How Should Sony Compensate PSN Users?

I don't know any game that requires PSN for single player or split screen co-op mode.

Multiplayer modes would need PSN obviously. There's no way that it can be done otherwise...

  • Portal 2? Yes, there's an online component, but there's also a single player mode, and right now you can't get *any* mode to work while PSN is down.
  • Xenogears on my PSP.
  • Just about everything from Capcom (which uses a PSN-dependent DRM scheme).

Comment: Re:One key to rule them all... (Score 1) 268

by vrmlguy (#36040042) Attached to: LastPass Password Service Hacked

No, because if you encrypt your own material you hold the keys. If you let someone else do it, they hold the keys. And who knows how good they are at keeping them safe.

You always know how good you are (or, how bad you are) at keeping your own keys safe.

Keepass(x), gpg encrypted file backup with the gpg keys backed up on a CD in a bank safety deposit box. (and if you're daring, a copy of the key on a usb jump drive you keep on your person at all times)

Don't forget the copy you keep in your head and enter whenever you need to access the safe; you're vulnerable at that point to a key logger. :)

With LastPass, you encrypt your own material, LastPass never holds the keys. LastPass works exactly the same as KeePass: there's a binary blob that is kept on an Internet-accessible server, and you download the blob and decrypt it locally. All they have is an encrypted version of your key, just like in your Linux/Mac/Windows desktop system. Yeah, maybe they could have used different keys for their web site and the blob, but I don't see how that would increase security all that much. With either service, an attacker has to get your blob (by hacking the LastPass server or your computer's cache, or by finding the KeePass blob on your computer or in a Dropbox or similar cloud-based server), then they have to brute force the key. If your key is easy to figure out using a dictionary, then you're hosed no matter which service you use.

This is similar to the Gawker attack, except with Gawker the encrypted passwords were made public, along with the subset that were brute forced. I checked for my email address and it only showed up in the first list, not the second. Of course, my passwords for everywhere use the "at least one letter, number and special character" rule, they are generally fairly long (pre-Gawker, 8 characters, post-Gawker, 14), and I don't use leet-speak to determine the non-alpha characters (leet-speak increases the effort needed to brute-force by only a small factor).

Comment: Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn (Score 3, Insightful) 487

by vrmlguy (#35979768) Attached to: Department of Justice: FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

>>>I'm sure that these people are reassured by your arguments.

Last I heard they were freed, and all charges dropped, since sharing nude photos of your own body (which you own) is not a crime.

The prosecutors didn't think that when they charged these kids with the production and possession of CP. And if sharing nude photos of your own body is not a crime, why are states now amending their laws to make sexting a misdemeanor instead of the felony that so many prosecutors were willing to treat it as.

Necessity has no law. -- St. Augustine

Working...