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Comment Great to give to kids with an interest (Score 1) 210

in electronics. When I was a teenage geek, a ham up the street gifted me with a number of things including a marvelous "boat anchor" surplus shortwave set. And lent me a number of other things like a working scope. It was a great learning experience. If something wasn't working or couldn't be made to work, I salvaged components from it. My parents had no idea I was debugging 400 volt tube circuits. Somehow I survived.

Comment Anybody who sends a password in plaintext (Score 1) 250

in response to a reset request is not hashing passwords and would fail a security audit (but I have certainly seen sites like this). There is no reason for the remote site you are logging into to ever store your password, vs. storing a hash (a strong hash, repeated multiple times to make brute force reverse hashing difficult).

Comment Probably broke his employment contract (Score 1) 457

Almost all employees (contract or regular) usually have to sign a non-disclosure agreement, among other things. So he broke that for sure. Re export of the RSA token - if it contains encryption software he probably should have gotten export paperwork done for it, but he's not likely to be prosecuted for that.

Comment Re:I used it. Once. (Score 1) 263

I've used it more than once, but not often enough that I don't have to go back and learn parts of over the next time I use it.

It just isn't very intuitive. The regex support can do awesome things, but just I can't seem to keep enough of it in my head to be productive. Or if I do, it leaks out when I'm off coding in some other language :-).

Comment Re:All this misinformation re GPL makes me sad... (Score 1) 371

All this stuff about "is the software author pure enough" makes me sad. That is why I like the BSD (and similar) non copyleft licenses. Remember, 99% of software users are not programmers and wouldn't use the source code if they had it. Heck, most *programmers* even don't use the source code of the FOSS they consume. The GPL is catering to the tiny percentage of software users who are RMS or like RMS.

Comment One of the main problems is with expectations (Score 1) 602

People with Asperger's just don't conform to the expectations most people have, and unless you have some background and understanding, it is just baffling, and they tend to get slotted into categories people already have, like "rude" or "difficult," when really something else is going on. My personal experience (family member) is that you keep saying to yourself or the other person "Why can't you ..?" where ? is something that fits expectations, and finally you realize the answer is that "because you have a non-typical brain wiring." Once you get that it becomes easier because you understand that this probably isn't fixable, and you're going to have to alter your expectations. But most people don't get to that level of understanding of Asperger's.

Comment Re:use encryption (Score 2) 325

Also, we don't know just how crackable off the shelf encryption is. More than you'd think, probably. The NSA is not going to tell you just how good they are at reading encrypted material but they employ some of the best cryptographers on the planet, so their capabilities are not to be underestimated.

Comment Re:What company (Score 1) 451

I think the issue is, as the submitter said, they don't control from where the end user downloads the product. They could get it from anywhere and those 3rd-party sites don't put up any kind of disclaimer. Maybe you can put it in bold letters in the installer, but many users don't read their EULA anyway, and you can't rely on the download site.

Comment Re:Why is this surprising? (Score 2) 569

I'm sure that they have good security technology and procedures.
But you are only as strong as your weakest link. And any large and complex system has bugs and vulnerabilities, whether you are talking about off the shelf software such as Linux & Apache, or custom software. And even if the endpoint software is bulletproof, the network may not be. So they shouldn't brag about being uncrackable. They probably aren't.

Comment Re:Too many options! (Score 1) 196

Word is so complex, most users don't even touch most of its features. And making the UI customizable, as a way of dealing with complexity, does not improve matters - it just confuses users even more. That said, it could be (and has been) worse: if you used it in the 80s, when it was a poor competitor to WordPerfect, you are glad you don't have *that* to deal with anymore.

Comment Re:Terminology (Score 1) 333

In my experience developer and software engineer are synonymous. Some organizations will call a person creating or modifying software a Developer and some will call him/her an Engineer. Architect tends to imply you are spending most of your time designing systems or reviewing others' designs, although higher-level software engineers do quite a bit of that too.

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