It’s getting ever more dangerous out there. No one can afford to ignore the modern world of fraud and theft anymore — educate yourselves and anyone else who will listen, because those who would steal your money are getting better at it all the time.
“Frozen armadillo as weapon”
Watch out, those armadillos can be tough customers. 😉
(For those not in the know, there’s an inside joke here for a good portion of those who read this blog, as well as the obvious humor.)
“Researchers propose simple fix to thwart e-voting attack”
This had better become required by law, and soon, if the government wants people to trust electronic voting machines. Every security expert who’s even glanced at them has been appalled at how easily they can be manipulated.
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. 🙂
“How Big is Your Haystack?”
There are three interesting things on this page:
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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.
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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.
“Mars, Moon, solar system could be littered with alien artifacts”
This is assuming, of course, that these aliens are exactly like us and send dumb, inflexible machines that will run out of power and can’t draw attention to themselves. And, for that matter, that they would want to draw attention to themselves.
We’ll probably have some form of strong AI within a generation, and one that will be ready to act as our ambassador to an alien race within three. Allow it to replicate itself when it has the chance (the von Newmann “universal constructor” idea), and even if each one only makes two copies in its lifetime, we’re all but guaranteed to find any other civilizations that might exist out there sooner or later. There are problems to that idea, of course — given what’s happening right now to the Russian Mars mission, I really wouldn’t trust our race to make something with that much raw potential for disaster, but presumably strong AI will help greatly reduce that problem.
Of course, once we do have that capability, there’s a very good chance we’ll want our ambassador to simply study the races it finds and let us know about them, rather than blindly trying to contact them. After all, knowing our own history, would you trust a newly-discovered race to be peaceful and interested only in commerce and exchanging ideas? There could be intelligent probes from dozens of races sitting in our solar system right now, trying to determine whether our race is mature enough to approach, as posited by the popular Star Trek series and many other works of science fiction. If I were them, I certainly couldn’t think that we’re ready, taken as a whole.
I guess we’ll find out if and when the hypothetical aliens deem us grown up enough.
(I have my own ideas on the subject, but even if they’re correct, there’s no way to prove them.)
“I Live in the Future and Here’s How it Works”
A small excerpt from that excerpt:
A few years ago, researchers quizzed more than thirty surgeons and surgical residents on their video-game habits […] Then they put all the surgeons through a laparoscopic surgery simulator, in which thin instruments akin to extremely long chopsticks are inserted into one or more small incisions through the skin along with a small camera that is inserted into an additional small opening. Minimally invasive surgery like this frequently is used for gallbladder removal, gynecologic procedures, and other procedures that once involved major cutting and stitching and could require hours on an operating table.
The researchers found that surgeons or residents who used to be avid video game players had significantly better laparoscopic skills than did those who’d never played. […] The more video games the surgeons had played in the past, the better their numbers. […] The results were surprising given the criticism video games have received for rotting young minds, turning upstanding youngsters into juvenile delinquents, and just wasting time. […]
I know I’ve flogged this particular dead horse many times on this blog, and I’ll try not to do it too many more, but I have to say: take that, video-game scoffers and reactionary eighties parents! 😉
[…] But not every game helps surgeons improve their skills. It turns out that Wii’s Marble Mania stimulates the areas of the brain needed for surgery. […]
Hm… I do well enough in that game to amaze my wife and game-playing relatives who’ve tried it. Maybe I should switch careers. 😉
“Bill Gates drops $1m on laser-based malaria fighter”
I’ve had this vision for years of a machine that identifies mosquitoes in a house or around people in a backyard area at dusk, targets them, and ruthlessly burns them down with a precision blast from a small, high-powered laser. I’m generally a peaceful person, but I have no mercy toward fleas, ticks, and blood-suckers of all types — most especially mosquitoes.
Alas, it’s still a dream.
But this is good too, from a practical perspective.
“Your Fellow Citizens”
Sometimes Dilbert creator Scott Adams comes up with some really amusing blog posts. This one is one of them.
Unfortunately it’s mostly amusing because it’s true.
I can only hope that this is just the same relatively tiny group of vocal and stupid people that I see commenting everywhere. If not, our future may be very… interesting.
“How websites use your browser to sell you for cash”
A good and up-to-date overview of defensive measures you should be taking to preserve your privacy on the Internet. I use many of the add-ons mentioned there already, but at least one was new to me too.
(Here’s part 2.)
STEED: Usable end-to-end encryption
I’ve been using GPG to sign my e-mail for years, and encrypt it when the recipient will accept such messages (which is very rarely). I find it ridiculous that essentially everyone out there is doing the equivalent of sending e-mail postcards that anyone and everyone with access to any system along their delivery path can read, but it’s (just barely) understandable when you consider the background knowledge you need to use encryption tools properly.
That’s why I was very interested to hear about the STEED project a couple weeks ago. They’re aiming to fix the usability problems of the system, while preserving its proven strengths.
We’ll see how it goes, but I’m hopeful.