XKCD this week had a wonderful piece of commentary about the way we choose passwords.
Four randomly chosen common English words make for a remarkably good password. Randall Monroe's example uses a word-list about 2,000 words long (11 bits per word). The beauty of this suggestion is that you can choose any 2,000 different words you like and even assume that the attacker knows your word list and it will still have about 44 bits of randomness in. And 2 to the 44 is a pretty damn big number.
This is very similar suggestion to one made by Thomas Baekdal a few years ago that:
"this is fun" is 10 times more secure than "J4fS!2"
I'm pretty sure that's wrong, but in a slightly subtle way.
More on Simple/complicated passwords…
Tagged: Security, Technology, Social
Posted at 07:46 EDT, 12th August 2011.
Twitter's a pretty handy way to vent about something good or bad that's happening.
Here's a really simple way to flag that:
They're just hashtags. They're as short as can be, but I think their meaning is pretty clear.
More on Hashplus and Hashminus…
Tagged: Upbeat, Web, Technology, Social
Posted at 06:48 EDT, 21st September 2010.
Copying television programmes and music tracks around is a very social thing. Not so many people do it using their computers just now, but I'll wager that's because it's fiddly, rather than because it is socially terribly unacceptable.
We've been copying and sharing media around for a long time. You can go back to home taping, which plainly never managed to kill music. But you can go back a lot further than that: to the fireside, to the cave wall, to an oral tradition of storytelling and art that far outstrips today's commercial structures for copyright.
Lots has changed since then, but storytelling is still at the heart of it.
More on Socially acceptable copying…
I've been shopping for a new DVD player recently, and have been quite surprised by the attitude of so many shops when I ask which of their players are multi-region.
I'd really like a multi-region DVD & Blu-ray player, but that hardly seems like an option. I expect I'll get an encumbered PS3 later on, and a multi-region DVD player now.
A typical response from shops that sold decent electronics was 'We don't sell that sort of thing' and to suggest I try a cheaper, dodgier part of town.
This is tricky for me as I'm looking for two distinct kinds of quality. I want both:
- a well designed, constructed and built machine, with particularly good upscaling to 1080p, so it looks good on our HD telly.
- a lack of anti-user features that will mean some of the discs I own won't play because of where in the world they were originally sold.
They are both about a smooth and pleasant user experience, but one is the side of that the industry pushes, the other is about how the industry tries to segment markets in both time and space.
More on Two kinds of quality…
Tagged: Distribution, Technology, Social, Media
Posted at 11:37 EST, 13th December 2009.
The UK's Home Office has been running a consultation, entitled Keeping the right people on the DNA database.
I'm gravely sceptical about the entire episode and, throughout, the document tilts heavily towards keeping DNA for a long time because that will – supposedly – make us safer.
David Mery has had some choice words and a very thorough response to the Home Office's proposal. I am not so thorough, and kept my contribution to the section of which Ben Goldacre rightly asked 'Is this a joke?'.
The consultation closed yesterday, here is my contribution, written from the vantage point of my academic high horse.
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Mary & I were both overcharged on a recent jaunt around London. The barriers beeped and didn't let me out, so the station staff opened the barrier to let me through. The barriers did let Mary out, but it turned out she had been charged two lots of the we-didn't-see-you-touch-out-so-we'll-take-four-pounds.
(Oyster is London's RFID-based ticketing system. You can put travelcards on them, but I use it as a pay-as-you-go card. It charges you for each journey and they promise not to charge you more than the equivalent travelcard. In practice this goes wrong a bit: it's a very complex system, and the software must be a nightmare.)
More on Oyster annoyance…
The sign-up for SemanticCamp London is open.
If you are near London and interested in using the Web with meaning, then grab a spot before they are all gone. It'll be on the 16th and 17th of February, at the Department of Computing at Imperial College (or 'work' from my point of view).
We also have some good pubs nearby, for refreshments afterwards.
Tagged: Technology, Web, Social
Posted at 07:00 EST, 9th January 2008.
A couple of weeks ago, Matthew Cashmore of backstage.bbc.co.uk published a very interesting interview with Anthony Rose, head of Digital Media Technology at the BBC.
I was impressed by Rose, generally. He seems to be pretty clued up about what's possible with the technology, which I suppose is no great surprise given his background at Kazaa. I'll get into some of the contradictions I see in what he says in another post, but first there is one comment he made that particularly grates.
He says, just over 2 minutes in (emphasis mine):
The good news is, as you move to streaming, at this time, there's no requirement for DRM.
…
We put quite complex back-end controls to make sure that our rights-holders' rights are still protected. In other words the content is only available in the UK, and we make it hard to nick the stream.
More on Recording television is not theft…
A long time ago, I wrote gallery.future-i.com, and I was particularly exercised about using clean URLs (and still am).
One place I feel I did a really nice job was in making the search URLs pretty nice, e.g. a search for 'mary' lives at:
http://gallery.future-i.com/search/mary
I did that in the middle of 2001, and I expect plenty of others did similar things by then, too. For me, the tricky bit is all done by Apache's mod_rewrite, which takes incoming requests to your web site, and let's you rejig it to pass parameters to scripts without exposing all that grunge to the outside world. It isn't the only way to do it, but it is powerful and effective.
My annoyance now is that Amazon have a patent on a very similar technique, covering URLs for search results of the form http://somedomain/flibble, filed in 2004.
I was impressed by Amazon's A9 when it launched, principally for the clean URLs for search.
That doesn't mean they own the idea, which is plainly in play before that. And don't get me started on parallel invention, making it all the sillier.
I hope the patent boils away in a sea of prior art.
[Via Buzz Out Loud #589, Slashdot coverage]
The BBC have a great new Web site – BBC Programme Support (more info from Tom Scott of the BBC). This is especially good for Web nerds like me, but it will help make link-centric television work for Real Human Beings, too.
There are a few quirks in how things are listed right now but I'm sure they'll shake out in due course. What's great about this service is that the Beeb is committing to long-term, stable URIs for their programmes, with a single, clear link for each show, irrespective of how and when it is shown or repeated.
[Via Chris]
More on BBC Programme Support…
Tagged: Media, Web, Technology, Social, Upbeat
Posted at 10:54 EDT, 19th October 2007.
So, Google are shutting down their DRM-backed video sales and rental service. Instead of giving customers the video they 'bought' or a proper refund Google are giving them a "bonus" voucher to spend through Google Checkout, which rusts in 60 days.
Back in the day, we understood the simple cases of:
- you have bought this
- you have borrowed this
- and, you have rented this
DRM intends to make the middle case go away, and skew the first to be a wierd and different thing. If we choose to build technology that breaks these norms, we're going to need much clearer language than 'download-to-own' and 'buy' to cover all of the new possibilities for worse-than-before media.
More on Google un-sells videos…
I'm a Harry Potter fan. I like the books, and I really don't want spoiling about the last book. According to Torrent Freak, poor quality scans of the book are already kicking about over BitTorrent.
Now I'm not surprised, but I think – in this case at least – the publisher is winning.
Update at 12:42 EDT, 19th July 2007 – Tracing leaker via EXIF metadata
More on Harry Potter leaked…
Socially acceptable copying
Copying television programmes and music tracks around is a very social thing. Not so many people do it using their computers just now, but I'll wager that's because it's fiddly, rather than because it is socially terribly unacceptable.
We've been copying and sharing media around for a long time. You can go back to home taping, which plainly never managed to kill music. But you can go back a lot further than that: to the fireside, to the cave wall, to an oral tradition of storytelling and art that far outstrips today's commercial structures for copyright.
Lots has changed since then, but storytelling is still at the heart of it.
More on Socially acceptable copying…
Tagged: Media, Technology, Social, Distribution
Posted at 06:59 EDT, 26th May 2010.
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