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Comment OK, great, but not at the expense of users (Score 1) 265

The entire concept of security by obscurity acts as a justification for keeping secrets. It often sweeps up information whose release will help users much more than it will help attackers. Once it becomes a sanctioned tool of security, instead of an objective of the security, those who set up and maintain the security lean on obscurity like a crutch.

I realize my argument is an appeal to the slippery slope, but I see it everywhere in society. People, organizations, and governments can get into frames of mind wherein they lose focus of the overall goal of information security and just start obscuring everything, which makes their interactions with others difficult and sometimes hostile.

In fairness, the article itself says as much:

Typing and proling are frowned
on in security. Leaving aside the question whether gathering
information about the attacker, and obscuring the system,
might be useful for security or not, these practices remain
questionable socially. The false positives arising from such
methods cause a lot of trouble, and tend to just drive the
attackers deeper into hiding.
On the other hand, typing and proling are technically
and conceptually unavoidable in gaming, and remain re-
spectable research topics of game theory. Some games can-
not be played without typing and proling the opponents.
Poker and the bidding phase of bridge are all about trying
to guess your opponents’ secrets by analyzing their behav-
iors. Players do all they can to avoid being analyzed, and
many prod their opponents to sample their behaviors. Some
games cannot be won by mere uniform distributions, with-
out analyzing opponents’ biases.
Both game theory and immune system teach us that we
cannot avoid proling the enemy. But both the social ex-
perience and immune system teach us that we must set the
thresholds high to avoid the false positives that the prol-
ing methods are so prone to. Misidentifying the enemy leads
to auto-immune disorders, which can be equally pernicious
socially, as they are to our health.

But inevitably, this kind of caveat is thoroughly ignored by most people. They will only hear something like "Security by Obscurity Now Considered Useful", and a whole new set of administrative roadblocks will be thrown up in the name of security, when in fact it's helping very little, if any; furthermore, those who try to circumvent the new measures to do something they consider to be within the permitted use of the network may be considered security risks (or even malicious entities outright) and will be dealt with as such, when nothing of the sort was intended.

Comment They are paying now for deferred maintenance. (Score 1) 495

If you think they are going too slow, you have a very different perspective from my own.

Mozilla didn't understand how people were using their browser, and as such, most of them dismissed the fact that their memory usage problems went deeper than mere leaks.

If they don't get those fixes out the door now, they're screwed for sure. Firefox 7 helps---I know, because I've been using it since just before it hit beta---but 8 should be even better than 7 about long-term memory usage.

Comment Re:DRM (Score 1) 206

triple AAA

lol

But seriously, that's bullshit, and you know it.

Dinosaurs who make so-called "AAA titles" don't make Linux games because it costs too much money, one way or another. Management at such places don't want to spend money if they aren't guaranteed a return, which only says how much the bottom line drives everything they do anyway, and good riddance.

Larger companies not yet swallowed by conglomerates have senior devs who may consider Linux and just might have the clout to pull it off, but they can't afford (time, money, energy: take your pick(s)) to pull it off. It's hard to hit a target which moves so differently from commercial software. Heaven forbid trying to get something upstream—a policy which has merits, just not to commercial game creators.

Does "AAA"/"triple-A" even mean anything? I want someone to come along and start saying that they're a quad-A developer working on quad-A games.

Comment "FOX" and "new Cosmos" made me do a double-take. (Score 1) 206

However, "Neil deGrasse Tyson" made me do a spit-take.

I actually only learned about Cosmos when the Science Channel showed it with many re-done graphics, but also with enough cuts that I like the DVD version from the 1990s. I would show that version as-is, or I would splice in some of the updated visuals from the Science Channel airings, except that I would re-do the updates that were already appended to most episodes on the DVD version.

And yes, as (I think) someone above said, Brian Cox has a much more Sagan-like delivery than Tyson. Cox's new program feels like Cosmos, though I don't know enough about him to know whether he would dare to make the kind of strong claims Sagan did without being overly confrontational.

Comment Re:Oh god. (Score 1) 169

I never thought I'd have to read about My Little Pony here. Today is a sad day for me.

And Slashdot just became 20% cooler.

Sadly, ponies cannot effect a miracle and do better than that.

But oh sweet Celestia, I might spend more time here again if Taco brought back OMG PONIES theme but updated it for FiM. Sure, it might drive away the last vestiges of what made /. great; but, I mean, how much worse can the noise in the articles, headlines, and comments get? (Don't answer that.)

Also, the thought of Big Macintosh doing advanced mathematics makes me happy.

Comment Re:SMS ... (Score 1) 456

No, I'm of the same mind.

I still use a Nokia 3120 (I think that's what it is) and have no data plan, so first-class SMS support is Twitter's killer feature for me. Until there is a smart phone and data plan out there which meet my needs and price, I will keep this arrangement as long as possible.

Comment Define "pass". (Score 1) 741

What's a passing grade in this case? 60% Yes, I could get 60% on this test. I studied Latin for 6.5 years and still have many books I read on the subject. I have done basic Ancient Greek informally, so I'd do sorta OK on that. The history is, in some cases, subjective, but I remember enough of that. Math is straightforward.

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