Area12

YouTube keeps showing me ads for online casinos even though I have marked Gambling as a "don't show me this" category in my profile. There doesn't not appear to be any straight-forward way to report this to YouTube. Perhaps they find the complaints too inconvenient.

I'm old enough to remember that commercial. A true classic, that one.

I find Boing Boing ( https://boingboing.net/ ) is a good newsletter of weird stuff.

It would be very interesting to see that map for the rest of the world.

Psycho-Pass. Finish season one, which tells a complete story. There was a drop in quality in season two. Psycho-Pass is about two layers of futuristic police, "inspectors" with full citizen rights, and "enforcers" who are treated as "latent criminals". A brain scan from the end of a cop's weapon, which takes a second to complete, may determine your fate. The lead female character is initially very keen and eager to be an inspector, but soon questions the system and society. It's fast-paced and a great show.

I'm a doctor, not a bricklayer!

Convenient for me? No, I either stand there forever or leave with semi-wet hands. Paper towels work much faster and more effective, but the decision is made by facilities.

Seriously, check out Troy Hunt's Have I Been Pwned?

https://haveibeenpwned.com/PwnedWebsites

Does being clever with your money include a retirement fund that is considered absolutely vanilla in the country you are living in? Because the USA assumes that all financial services in the world provide exactly the same format of financial reporting that US services do. So retirement funds that are the foreign equivalent of an ordinary 401K have high compliance costs if you need to file with the USA.

I've had a quick look at the paper you reference, but my immediate question is ... this was written around 2009. If the costs and likelihood of getting hacked or phished have increased significantly, some of the conclusions of the paper may now be misleading, at least in detail. Has anyone done an update in the last year?

I still like the paper for one good reason ... it challenges IT people to ask the question: what risk am I mitigating with this rule on the users, and is it worth everyone's effort that will go into it? If yes, see if you can impose the rule. If no ... just be sure you didn't get the numbers wrong.

So much of The Psychology of Computer Programming is still relevant, and still worth reading. The title might put you off ... but this is really a great book that covers some practical topics regarding the human side of programming.

Free books are never 100% free ... because bookcases cost money and even if you pile books up on the floor, that is expensive real estate you now can't easily use for another purpose. Hoarders forget that the opportunity cost of storage drives most of their possessions into negative net worth. Source: I have hoarder tendencies.

Given that there will be people insisting that the main objective of the program was nuclear power, not weapons, a show like that would be risky. Does Netflix want their shows accused of glorifying murder? I'm aware that there is the argument, perhaps with evidence, that Israel was halting weapons research aimed at them, but Netflix may not want to take the risk that the debate goes against them.

True story. Years ago, I was driving with my wife, and I was wearing an oilskin rain hat. I felt a tickle, took the hat off and looked. Dropped the hat on the floor. My wife asked what startled me. I said "let me stop first". Parked the car. She was very worried by now. Said "weta in the hat". She ejected out of her car door like 2001: Space Odyssey airlock scene. Good times.

Does anybody remember when a default install of Oracle RDBMS also installed ask.com? It was at that point that I realised that a significant part of Oracle Corporation no longer cared about how disreputable they appeared. I can't even imagine that they got all that much money from ask.com, on the scale of their total revenue.

Is this now the most costly software error in history, measured in human lives lost?

Imagine if the UK Parliament or the EU decides that the best response is enact laws mandating a particular software testing approach, or mandates extensive regression testing on production systems after all changes?

I am not a crypto expert, but I thought that the idea was to produce a new more or less random salt for EACH password, store the salt with the hashed password, hashing using an expensive algorithm. Yes the hacker steals the salt with the hash, but now has to go to the trouble of brute forcing that ONE password with its UNIQUE (or almost unique) salt. In other words, the hacker can crack it, but the process is so expensive for ONE password that cracking an entire database of passwords is a nightmare. Of course, the hacker just focuses on the most privileged accounts I guess, but the idea is to make the hackers life as unpleasant as possible, and to catch the hacker while they are coming back in. Am I missing the point? I do see that if the hacker wants one password, they can do with effort even with unique salts.

Don't miss the point here. Tesla doesn't require that you be a licensed air pilot before you buy the car. It doesn't matter what pilots know about autopilots, it's about what the general public believes when they hear "autopilot". I wouldn't be surprised if 50% of the world believes that an autopilot allows both pilots to leave the cockpit for five or ten minutes. So the word "autopilot" misleads them, even if a pilot would know the limitations.

The default setting, because 95% of the world will never change it. If Safari and Chrome and Android followed suit, the ripple effect would change a lot of things on the web. I'm not sure what the final result would be ... greedy people get to innovate too.

So does morality/ethics boil down to numbers/metrics? I'm not being sarcastic; I don't know the answer myself ... and I'm not entirely sure that I would want to "know".

Humans have gained great powers of number calculation, but I suspect that our greatest power and obsession has always been story-telling. We tell stories to each other and ourselves, and those stories form the basis of our ethics and morality.

Which is why I think utilitarianism always feels cold and unsatisfying; it doesn't play well as a story.

So ... why do they continue with tls_rsa? Is it required because of middleboxes lagging behind?

Oh boy did that list come out poorly, let me try again:

TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 (0xc02f) ECDH x25519 (eq. 3072 bits RSA)

TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 (0xc030) ECDH x25519 (eq. 3072 bits RSA)

TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256 (0xc027) ECDH x25519 (eq. 3072 bits RSA)

TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA384 (0xc028) ECDH x25519 (eq. 3072 bits RSA)

TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA (0xc013) ECDH x25519 (eq. 3072 bits RSA)

TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA (0xc014) ECDH x25519 (eq. 3072 bits RSA)

TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 (0x9c) WEAK

TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA (0x2f) WEAK

TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA (0x35) WEAK

I notice that ssllabs.com/ssltest lists the cipher suites uses at github engineering as:

TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 (0xc02f) ECDH x25519 (eq. 3072 bits RSA) TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 (0xc030) ECDH x25519 (eq. 3072 bits RSA) TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256 (0xc027) ECDH x25519 (eq. 3072 bits RSA) TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA384 (0xc028) ECDH x25519 (eq. 3072 bits RSA) TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA (0xc013) ECDH x25519 (eq. 3072 bits RSA) TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA (0xc014) ECDH x25519 (eq. 3072 bits RSA) TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 (0x9c) WEAK TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA (0x2f) WEAK TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA (0x35) WEAK

Why still support the TLS_RSA_* ciphers, given that they, unlike TLS 1.1, have a known vulnerability? Is it mainly because of middleboxes that can't handle ciphers that all modern up-to-date browsers can?

Investigation into calorie restriction isn't at all new. Roy Walford wrote five books about it, dating back to 1983.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Walford

This is fantastic, this new page works, thanks and have my upvote.

Good point, forgot that one even though I use it.

From an old IT guy, none of this is new ... Scott Adams (of Dilbert) noted it in 1998: http://dilbert.com/strip/1998-04-06

That was 18 years ago.

Particularly raw for Dilbert: "Squeal like a pig" is from the 1972 movie "Deliverance" and refers to a assault that was one of the most disturbing US mainstream movie scenes of the 1970s.

The only real improvement in all that time that I can think of: password managers. I almost said Single Sign On, but that comes with its own security issues.

Big pieces of meat, roasted. Yorkshire Pudding. British food has its moments.

Try putting money in a retirement fund in the country you live in. The bizarre requirements the IRS puts on reporting will see your compliance costs exceed the yearly growth of the fund. Sorry, but if your foreign investments include a retirement fund or a family trust, you may well be shafted.

I can't remember the details, and can't find it in google, but ... in my possibly faulty memory the FDR administration produced a similar report in the 1930s on the future of the USA. They missed five keys future game-changing events that unfolded not long after:

1. The rise of the superhighway and the importance of personal long-distance travel and trucking

2. The rise of cheap air travel and shipment

3. Nuclear weapons and energy, and the impact of nuclear weapons on geopolitics

And two others I can't remember. Probably at least one of those was WWII.

My point is that producing reports of even near-future trends is HARD. It is very likely multiple game-changing events will not be foreseen.