Re: salting

"weak passwords are still vulnerable to brute force etc"

I do a similar thing to disguise passwords as you (my method involves ROT-PRNG on the password characters along with a 20-character string interlaced with them) but there is one more thing I do to reduce the chance of brute-forcing, and it's something that used to be done a lot in days of yore but of late seems to have been forgotten.

That is, limit failed login attempts. My method is 3 strikes and the account is locked, and the owner sent an email advising them of the hack attempt, with a link for them to click on to reactivate the account. (The link doesn't log them in though, they still need to enter username and password to do that.) So attempting to log in on one of my customers' accounts means you need to get it right within 3 tries or fail completely. It's easy to do, and compensates a lot for peoples' tendency to use weak passwords.

Finally, my system logs the IP addresses of repeated login attempts after an account is locked, and notifies me of the ISP owning that address so I can advise them of the hack attempts if necessary.

Re: meh

"Which ones, specifically?"

Well, if you live in Adelaide, you get to enjoy hours-long power outages in summer because AGL and Origin can't be bothered upgrading or maintaining outdated, *privately owned* infrastructure;

Water being shut off in our area for two days because a *privately owned* water main burst and it took the company that long to fix it;

*Privately owned* buses and trains running late or not at all because of cost-cutting measures (and the strikes they cause).

You laissez-faire capitalists and your "everything should be privatised" mentality have brought this world to the brink of ruin. Public infrastructure should be publicly owned. Without it, civilisation would not exist. Surely the organisations that maintain these very foundations of civilisation should have some accountability to that civilisation, instead of just a few wealthy shareholders?

You forgot

The spurns that patient merit of th' unworthy takes - check (going by the comments in this forum anyway!)

But whether Assange might his quietus make with a bare bodkin remains to be seen...

Re: It gets harder to SEO sites...

Good. I hope Google end up making it fucking impossible. Then maybe search results will return relevant sites instead of those whose owners paid crooks like you to fiddle search results to get them to the top.

@david wilson

Since when is being "illegal" a reason not to stand up for one's rights by itself? What happens when ANY form of protest becomes "illegal"? Would you support the police against protesters merely because protesting is "illegal"?

Advocacy of blind obedience to the law is the hallmark of a zealot, a broken slave, or an idiot.

...still smells as bad

And if they did, what, exactly could Amnesty International do about it?

...so you can't shut the console down...

Ever hear about a simple technique frequently referred to as "pulling the plug out of the wall socket"? Or are PS3s secretly armed with lasers that'll zap your hand off the moment you reach for the plug?

@selective culpability

Gee, dat's raht Billy-Joe Bahb, dem damn' stinkin' pinko commie scum soash-ee-al-ists are gahddamn' ever'whur!

Exactly what I thought

when I read the article. I can understand Rik's (and by extension El Reg's) professional concern about any biased-review system, but the thought occurred to me as I read the last paragraph that maybe Apple patenting this idea was, for a change, not a bad thing.

If Apple patent the idea of writing biased reviews wouldn't that discourage anyone else from doing so in relation to everything other than Apple products? Meaning that reviews of other products would have to be less biased and those of Apple products known to be made of pure bullshit?

Maybe Apple have shot themselves in the foot here. Which is most definitely a GOOD thing!

It's not you

This is going too far, because not only can people who don't have facebook accounts be tagged, but the stalking potential is huge. Consider the following:

1. Take a picture of some stranger in public. Upload it to facebook and wait for it to identify the person. Even if they don't have a facebook account. A stalker's wet dream come true...

2. Because of (1) people will now be even more paranoid about photographers in public places. It won't be just the police harassing you, now it'll be the public as well.

3. What a gift for the purveyors of the police state our "democracies" have become. An all-in-one-place, warrant-accessible database of face-recognition biometrics of more than 500 million people. How long before the thugs of the ruling elite have unfettered access to this?

Yes, this is absolutely fucking terrifying. I'm reminded of a line from the movie Freejack: "If he even walks past a vidphone now, we've got him." It's coming.

They see me trollin'...

...they hatin'

Yes, KRudd was a complete tosser

His party, under him, were the ones that pushed the Great Firewall of Australia, remember? Time doesn't heal those wounds - the man was, is and always will be, a fuckwit.

@Kubla Cant

Wouldn't that mean that the singular of agenda would be agendum, "Thing to be done"?

I must apologise

on behalf of the 5 ignorant fuckwads who downvoted your post, but you can take consolation in knowing that it'll be their children who get to live in the world of Soylent Green they are implicitly supporting. Population is a very real problem and needs to be dealt with fast.

Seagate vs WD

I have an interesting situation with these two HDD manufacturers. Like you, I'm a WD man. I've bought 4 Seagate drives in the past and ALL 4 have failed within 6 months, so now I won't touch them with a pole. I've owned a dozen or more WD drives, and not one has ever failed or gone faulty on me.

Yet a friend of mine has bought three WD drives in the last few years and they've all died on him in the first year - and he's never had any problems with Seagate drives. As you might expect, he's a Seagate man.

I find it strange that we should have such radically different experiences with these manufacturers' drives, but it does lend credence to each fans' support of their favourite brand!

Had a look at HitMan Pro

and I can't say I'm impressed. Program starts up, fetches an automatic update, and exits without doing anything. Pretty bloody useless if you ask me.

Actually

If NASA did announce the discovery of some alien civilisation, the same conspiracy theorists who have been claiming NASA has been concealing evidence of alien life for 50 years, will now start saying that NASA is faking the discovery of aliens to further the aims of the New World Order.

One has to wonder at the mentality of such people.

It's called sexcrime

and a gentleman by the name of Goerge Orwell explained it about 60 years ago. In a nutshell, the idea is to lock down some primal human instinct (sex is the most common) because it deliberately builds up rage and fanaticism in the populace. By social engineering, this fanaticism can then be channeled into hatred of the enemy, love of Big Brother (the government), or whatever else is needed to maintain power for the elite. The guiding principle being that:

"Obedience is not enough. Power is inflicting pain and humiliation otherwise you cannot be sure. Power is tearing human minds apart and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Power is not a means, it is an end... In our world, there will be only triumph and self-abasement. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty to the Party. There will be no love, except love of Big Brother. All competing pleasures, we will destroy."

Or

being arrested for the heinous crime of taking photographs in a public place.

Me too

Ta sadi ghan, chak ta tan korinad anghan korinyanya, son ghalad la ji tikya shalayneth lianyan la ansharanya. Law taeli la tunai anlani anke ahyanadi faw korinya chak'kailan.

Translation:

"So have I, but I haven't published my language, preferring to restrict its use to a few friends. Thus we can talk to each other without police spying on us."

(The word order isn't necessarily one-for-one; the grammatical structure and syntax are very different to English. There are also several semantic nuances in my language above that would take several paragraphs to convey in English, but I'm not going into that here!)

Brother-in-law-in-law

Is that your sister's husband's brother or your brother's wife's sister's husband?

You should know by now

that "lack of criminal intent" is only a valid defence when it's a police officer, politician or corporate bigwig in the dock. It isn't available to the plebs like you and me.

AC is pretty pointless

since the message content pretty much gives you away, amanfromMars...

Wouldn't help

The reason you want to get off this rock is the same as mine - it's not the planet, it's the human shitbags living on it, that you want to get away from, right? Unfortunately, going to the moon won't solve your problem - because there will be humans of all kinds accompanying you there, and so all the shit will be there too.

What we really want when we say "stop the world, I want to get off" is to be able to get on a colony ship outward bound to another Earthlike planet, to be populated only with such humans as agree with our views on life. In my case, that would be a ship with no religious believers, no feminists, no control freaks, no do-gooders/soccer moms, and nobody with an IQ less than 110, among other traits. I could probably scour the whole Earth and its 7 billion humans for suitable colonists and find maybe 100 or so fit to go with me. I'll assume you're one of them! ;)