Related and possibly-interesting note: a significant part of one of the Stainless Steel Rat books — written long before the first electronic voting machines made their debut — revolved around a rigged electronic voting system. The main character knew that the electronic system would be rigged, and was counting on it, because he’d found a clause in the constitution of the planet in question that allowed him to force a manually-counted election if the electronic one was shown to be grossly in error. The manual one was even more rigged than the electronic one, but since it was manual, the current dictator President found it much harder to cheat — and the good guys found it much easier. The end result was very, VERY close, but I’m sure you can guess the outcome.

• An “interactive brute force search space calculator” for passwords, which you can play with to get a good idea how easily a brute-force attack would find YOUR passwords.

• Some comments further down the page on mathematical entropy, and how it doesn’t affect password strength (despite common wisdom on the subject) nearly as much as pure password length.

• A description of a “password padding” system that looks like it would generate strong and remember-able passwords.

I have reason to know the math for this kind of thing myself, and it all looks pretty accurate. Of course, a “password safe” with truly random passwords (and a really good backup system) is the best way to go these days, hands down, but there will always be a few passwords that you’ll need to keep in your wetware.

(The comment about the interview with Fox News amuses me, as even more evidence that regular Fox News viewers are on the low end of the intelligence spectrum. Not that more evidence was really necessary.)

If you knew that someone’s password was several properly-spelled English words separated by single spaces, you’d still have 65,000-to-the-power-of-X combinations to go through for X words. That’s over four billion combinations to try for a two-word phrase, and about 275 trillion combinations for a three-word phrase — four billion is easy enough for a computer to handle, but 275 trillion is more secure than a seven-random-character password. And if you didn’t know that the password followed that pattern, or there was even one deliberately misspelled word or different bit of punctuation, the numbers skyrocket.

That said, I’m not about to abandon my current password scheme, but for some passwords, this might be useful.

The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.
— Harry Emerson Fosdick

Project M is nearing usability, at long last. A couple days ago I finished a very tricky bit of code involving caching pages of results from a database query on demand and tracking their offsets as the database is updated in the background. It was vital for handling large result sets; now Project M should be able to handle sets as large as any program of its type, very quickly, even when sorted on unindexed columns.

I’m also trying to implement a new form of public-key signature for Project Badger (new to me anyway; it’s about ten years old). If done properly, it promises to be much faster than the signature system which we were forced to adopt a while back. It’s a fun project to work on, but I haven’t gotten it to work yet, so we’ll see how that goes.

Our personal taxes were actually done early this year, for a change… they’re usually done just in the nick of time, but I managed to force myself to do it several weeks before the deadline, even though it meant an entire day spent on nothing else. This being-responsible thing really sucks.

All in all, things are looking up, and in a couple months we may even be able to afford furniture for a room or two, as GoddessJ has wanted for the last seven months. We’ll see how that goes.

Well, these guys have built a mechanical computer that duplicates its function — and they did it entirely out of Lego!

Now that’s freakin’ awesome.

I’m sure you’ll be able to buy a Lego kit specifically for this, at some point, if there’s enough interest in it. I’m not sure I’d have the interest to buy it, but I know several people who might.

(Thanks for the heads-up, c-square!)

(Via BoingBoing)

(No omniscient beings were harmed in the calculation of that answer.)

There’s so much that this implies, from the evolutionary reasons for religion, to questions about whether we’re really as insignificant in the grand scheme of things as we seem to be, to metaphysical questions of all sorts that can never be scientifically answered. For instance, is this ability limited to our physical bodies, or might healing simply be one manifestation of something a lot more extensive, as many people have claimed through the centuries? The Secret was widely dismissed as mystical bunk when it was released a few years ago, but some people who heard its message found that it simply described what they’d already experienced. (I’ve had a few such experiences myself, things that my rational, scientific side find difficult to assign to chance alone, even with the help of my mathematical and statistical side.)

The more I learn about the world, and the more I experience, the more I have to admit that mere physical processes simply don’t explain it all. There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence to back up that view, if you’re willing to see it. Never enough to prove anything… which is itself suggestive… but enough to put doubts into any truly logical mind.

My take on it? The entire universe is fake. Some kind of simulation, a la The Matrix and many science fiction works before it. These little inconsistencies are clues that whoever is responsible for it have deliberately left in the program, presumably so that we would have some chance of noticing them. There’s never any conclusive proof because the program is deliberately designed to prevent that from ever happening. I can only speculate why, but think about it… if we could prove that it was all fake, that would change our collective behavior in myriad ways, many of which the majority of us probably wouldn’t want.

Who could be responsible for such a thing? Who would design and build a simulation like this, which presumably could be perfect, but leave so many clues that at least a few people in every generation are bound to notice and wonder about? It’s impossible to say, of course, but assuming that they aren’t simply mistakes on the part of the designers, think about this: if some person or group was responsible for designing a computer simulation that would have billions of inhabitants during its run, why would they deliberately leave any clues to its artificial nature at all? A malevolent force like the machines in The Matrix certainly wouldn’t, why give their captives any reason to believe they could ever escape? A benevolent force wouldn’t either, because it would be cruel to give the poor sods within any glimpse of something they could never have. And an indifferent force would see no reason to do so. But if that person or group was going to subject themselves to it…

‘Nuf said.