It occurred to me this evening (after a particularly wine-laced meal) that one of the powerful contributions of the de-coherence of cafeteria style spirituality is the way it inoculates on against having one's religious beliefs manipulated for political agendas by others ( Read more... )

On Friday we had a major server meltdown at work (source code repository), only to discover that the reigning sys admin had gone on vacation without communicating the latest password change, since they were still in the middle thereof. Travel to the co-location of the server and a hard reset were needed to get the developer team unsnagged ( Read more... )

After yet another round of being locked out from a banking website that has some weird user ID that is neither my account ID, my SSN or anything else that I can find on my banking statement, I have a proposal to the banking industry (and expect my more security savvy folks to reject it ( Read more... )

I've now wasted about two weeks trying to get _MWife_'s laptop back into working shape after she somehow got AntiVirus 2009 on it. It looks like enough got corrupted that I will have to reinstall the damn thing (Anti malware would not even install anymore ( Read more... )

Today I learned what a Rainbow Table is.

PS: It trades memory for time.

iGoogle has a nice gadget that is a password generator. One master password plus a task specific seed spits out a cryptographically decent password of numbers and characters (the common denominator across most websites ( Read more... )

You might not want to use your cellphone to read email. On the other hand, you gotta admire these guys. Programmers tasked to develop a piece of code that runs without any user intervention on arbitrary phones would probably walk off to sepukku while they were still ahead; the hacker community instead rises to the challenge.

As discussed in this previous post, I had been wondering whether there was a technical term for the situation when someone mistakes the elaborate mode of contriving a secret for the security of that secret.

After some posts, matherd and I spent some time this morning getting our insights squared and lined up. bfraser, who unfortunately is reduced to cyber- ( Read more... )