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Comment Ability to upgrade is... (Score 1) 183

Mandatory for desktops, even all in ones... even a NUC. Gotta be able to upgrade it. Laptops I'm a little more flexible. I look at the machine I need today/tomorrow but not next week and price it. Then check the next step up for storage and RAM and I take 1/2 that difference and that is the premium I'm willing to pay for the ability to upgrade. If the all in one laptop is cheap enough, upgrade is not necessary as I can just buy a new one in about three years.
Privacy

Cryptographers Break Commonly Used RC4 Cipher 90

Posted by timothy from the do-it-one-nanotimes dept.
Sparrowvsrevolution writes "At the Fast Software Encryption conference in Singapore earlier this week, University of Illinois at Chicago Professor Dan Bernstein presented a method for breaking TLS and SSL web encryption when it's combined with the popular stream cipher RC4 invented by Ron Rivest in 1987. Bernstein demonstrated that when the same message is encrypted enough times--about a billion--comparing the ciphertext can allow the message to be deciphered. While that sounds impractical, Bernstein argued it can be achieved with a compromised website, a malicious ad or a hijacked router." RC4 may be long in the tooth, but it remains very widely used.

Comment MSDOS 3.11 and a Flash drive (Score 1) 402

by farnsaw (#42188393) Attached to: The Trouble With Bringing Your Business Laptop To China
Just partition the HD, install MSDOS 3.11 and set it as the default boot. Make your 2nd partition nothing but randomized noise. Setup camera and prepare to send to AFV... Then carry an encrypted Flash drive and let it boot your OS of choice. Don't ever let the flash drive out of your sight. Be sure to scrub your laptop prior to reusing it once you are back home, or just throw it out.
Data Storage

Ask Slashdot: Protecting Data From a Carrington Event? 386

Posted by timothy from the managed-to-save-the-kids-and-the-games dept.
kactusotp writes "I run a small indie game company, and since source code is kind of our lifeblood, I'm pretty paranoid about backups. Every system has a local copy, servers run from a RAID 5 NAS, we have complete offsite backups, backup to keyrings/mobile phones, and cloud backups in other countries as well. With all the talk about solar flares and other such near-extinction events lately, I've been wondering: is it actually possible to store or protect data in such a way that if such an event occurred, data survives and is recoverable in a useful form? Optical and magnetic media would probably be rendered useless by a large enough solar flare, and storing source code/graphics in paper format would be impractical to recover, so Slashdot, short of building a Faraday cage 100 km below the surface of the Moon, how could you protect data to survive a modern day Carrington event?"

Comment Unlimited can be abused, make it large (Score 1) 314

by farnsaw (#40711017) Attached to: Fair price for an unlimited wireless data plan?
The problem with truly unlimited data is that people will abuse it and cause problems for the cell if not a larger portion of the network. If instead they would do a large quantity of data cheap, larger than almost anyone would use, that would work well and protect the networks. Right now they offer ~1-5 Gb of data and what they need to offer is an order of magnitude above that so you can do things like stream movies, tethering other devices (laptops, tablets, etc) without worrying about hitting your limit. The price range should be $10-20 for 50-100 GB and then a fixed rate per GB above that. Discourage massive abusers.

Comment SPAM WARE alert! (Score 5, Informative) 71

The Windows installer will also try to install the crawler toolbar. Supposedly it lets you uncheck the boxes but they are checked by default. This is BAD behavior in my opinion. If they want to recommend it and leave them unchecked to start with (i.e. you must opt IN not OUT) that is acceptable.
Displays

Has the 3-D Hype Bubble Finally Popped? 261

Posted by Soulskill from the let's-hope-so dept.
An anonymous reader writes "An article at Time speculates that the recent hype surrounding 3-D display technology has finally peaked and begun to subside. As evidence, they point to comments from Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, who does not seem particularly enthusiastic about it, and concedes it won't be a major selling point if the company continues to have 3-D enabled products in the future. He said, 'So, now we've created the 3DS and 3DS XL and also have some games out there that are really using that 3D effect that we can see, from my point of view, that it's an important element. But as human beings are this kind of surprise effect wears off quickly, and just [having] this 3D stereoscopic effect isn't going to keep people excited.' Revenue from 3-D films is also dropping, and while 3-D television sales are rising, only 14 percent of potential buyers think 3-D is a 'must have' feature."

Comment Driving mode (Score 1) 257

by farnsaw (#40283659) Attached to: No Tech Panacea For Tech-Distracted Driving
They need to incorporate a "Driving Mode" that will auto respond to the person texting / calling / emailing / etc and say the user they are attempting to contact is driving, please leave a message. Then, automatically enter driving mode if detected (via GPS or any other method really) that the person is in a vehicle traveling > 10 mph or so. Make it so you can manually turn off driving mode if you are a passenger. Same tech could be used for flight mode, enter flight mode if detected you are traveling > 100 MPH and / or more than 500 feet above the ground, allow manual override for special circumstances. Note: This is proof of prior art in case anyone tries to patent this.

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