bennysaurus

Agreed with the way it could be done better though they didn't actually have the private key on the system. They really badly implemented their crypto so they might as well have though.

No worries.

Yep you're spot-on in this case, and as you say the software signing keys hasn't been compromised, though they aren't needed in service mode.

There are definitely ways the dongle keys could have been better protected (and I'm sure a few people are having some very serious talks about why they weren't), but have to give Sony kudos for having a system last 3 years without being compromised, and even now it's only easily broken at ring 2; the gameOS level of the system.

Apologies if this is overly simplified, not sure of your level of expertise (can give you the more complex one too if you want more information!). The dongle in this case is a USB diagnostic tool used by Sony employees and technicians to put a PS3 into service mode.

Essentially it's plugged in and the PS3 started up. The PS3 communicates with the dongle and swaps a set of 'secure' keys to authenticate that the dongle is a legitimate, then runs some code to give you access to all sorts of options you normally wouldn't be able to see/use.

What these guys have done is found the master key found in all PS3s that allows it to authenticate any/all service dongles. Using this information one can generate their own service ID and ultimately create their own dongle.

Basically this was possible to do because the protection mechanisms in place to protect the key relied on the rest of the system not being broken. Once the system was hacked it was simply a matter of time before this was decoded as well.

Just checked the source -- farting around with it a bit to try and raise the timeout period among other things.

Nope it's a lot simpler than that as said above. Basically the x axis is generation, y axis is distance. The black line is the max and the green line is the average.

Source code puts parts of it to Jan 2007, but looks like this particular version is Dec 2008. Nice bit of code for 16K

Sweet, so my account is worth about a whole $1 in tweets

JS speed has improved so much recently due to optimisations like JIT (Just In Time compiling). There will be an upper limit eventually but we haven't hit it yet.

It's damn fast but still a high-level interpreted language - time is taken for a program in the browser to compile it on the fly and run.

It wont hit the speed of well written C code, but most things don't need that speed anyway.

The only reason this is the case is Google threatened to de-list them unless they showed the actual content the page was being cached for. They didn't tell anyone they shifted it down the bottom though, and the only way you can see that content is by using a search engine as a referring URL.

Not all SEO is evil but that one is a bit naughty.

Edit: spelling is awesome

I'm not so sure about that - you have a community that is very tech-oriented and actually volunteering to view ads knowing it is doing the community a benefit. Such people are more likely to pay attention to what is being advertised as well as they're conscious the advertisements are there by choice.

Marketing done carefully on such sites can lead to a much more effective turnover if it identifies with the group it's targeting. A few good examples are the beef jerky company and the Reddit soap rescue done about 12 months ago. Forgotten both their names but can do a search if need be :-)

Lots of ways to interpret it, but stripping back the story, it's showing a technique to sharpen your skills and looking at a problem in different ways.

As you say there are definitely better ways to test the actual wrapper class in a real life situation, but showing the test suites one by one gives the reader a chance to see how the narrator approaches the problem and various situations are word-wrap class would face.

If you were set your own 'katas' and reproduce similar code from scratch or a framework, I can see it helping some people look at various problems in different ways and look objectively at how they solve them. Every person has their own methods all the same.

A kata is a series of movements in a number of martial arts (also called 'forms' and a million other names depending on the style and origin). You practice the same movements over and over focusing on technique, balance and your state of mind.

As referenced in in the story there are often a number of different types to choose from depending on what you are trying to achieve (relaxation, a specific move/technique, different fight situations). They also generally get harder and more refined as you go up belts/levels.

Never heard of it before in the coding world though, might take it up, definitely looks useful!

The author doesn't touch on it much, but part of the added complexity is each person thinks differently too.

“Create a window with a table view, and then when someone clicks a button, add an entry to the table view”

If you asked a room of 30 people to draw you a picture of exactly what that sentence means, you will get 30 different results. Building on your comment, I'm not sure the actual act of programming would be hard if you had to take only 1 person's viewpoint into account and work off that.

The confusing thing is the people implementing the decisions seem to know very little about the way the web works. The filter itself is being brought under the premise of filtering out child porn and 'undesirable and illegal content', however minutes from a meeting earlier this year detailed that only around 30% of the filtered list dealt with this sort of material. There has been no explanation as to what the other 70% deals with; that part is what concerns me.

Hi Jason, quite a few of the comments here are pretty constructive. What struck me about the landing page though is the first things I see on the screen are the logo, then an ordering form. What would probably work better for me at least is some more information and some pictures of different examples where it could be really cool (I can imagine using this on my fridge for example). The video is OK, however youtube is banned at many workplaces as well, just a thought - some images wouldn't go astray!

By law they are meant to (I used to sell them) - depends on the guy behind the checkout though.

That's true - the policy makers is probably a better term here.

Especially since it's such a poor excuse - these sorts of people do not use standard http to communicate or distribute this sort of content (the dumb ones do but they would just as easy to catch without filters or logs like this).

Good example, hop on TOR and try to access almost any image site such as 4chan as a test. 99% of endpoints are banned for uploading child-pornography or other material while these sorts of users simply look for another exit point.

The government is either ignorant about how these sorts of people actually operate, and how the internet facilitates them, or it really is a Big Brother style solution to put a full blanket audit-at-will on the general population.

Linus Torvolds as well - There's a number of reasonably famous programmers out there, and they're often known for revolutionising the areas of industry as opposed to their celebrity lifestyles. Not sure what the writer is on about here really.

It looks like they are hanging onto a little of their culture at least even externally - just take a look at the link in the about section at the bottom of the page labelled 'Don't ever click here'

The issue is ClearType - turn it off, refresh your browser and it will render properly. Something somewhere needs fixing up obviously but it doesn't look to be with the engine Google is using to put the font on the page.