Does enforcing strong passwords actually create strong passwords or is its primary benefit just creating awareness of them? I can't imagine the kind of person who used to use "pass" is going to wind up the better for the recent enforcement that has been spreading. I need eight characters? "password" I need capitals and lowercase? "Password" I need a number now? "Password1" Goddamn! I need a special character now! "FuckYOU1!!!" IT WONT LET ME REPEAT THREE CHARACTERS! AUGH! FIRST OBAMA TAXES AND NOW THIS! Hmmmm. Maybe strong password enforcement is a form of internet natual selection.
When we play Charades on Hard!Mode (you can only use the second language; comparative to jewish swear words or entish) it is an act of supreme idiocy to write something like, "I hate it when Jesus Christ breaks into my living room riding a dinosaur and offering salvation to the village peasants" or variations thereof. Not that I did too badly mocking that up, myself.
Neither really, sometimes it can just be about passing audit. Failing that, the idea is to ensure someone must pick something which isn't vulnerable to a brute force attach. Of course, with dictionaries being what they are these days (real-world passwords of a billion plus) you've still likely got weak passwords. Account lockouts are a more useful tool, and I think password minimum length is more useful than complexity because you should be getting people to think in terms of passphrases rather than passwords, and setting a minimum length longer than words they can think of helps with that. If you're an organisation (like Microsoft) which doesn't use account lockouts but rather has log monitoring software looking for account attacks, then password complexity is probably more important. On top of all that there's protecting against offline attacks where someone has secured a copy of your password database. Then complexity (including length) is everything, it determines how many passwords will get broken. In the end, we're approaching the point where machines are too good for the human brain and passwords will be replaced as the primary means of authentication. Or two-factor authentication will become common-place. Hopefully the former, but my money is on the latter.
So basically just the second factor in modern two-factor authentication schemes would become the primary factor, then.
Yes, except I think with smart phones being as prevalent as they are that passwords will remain and phones will become the secondary device, and that's how most businesses will move forward. Minimal expense.
I am having the most frustrating return experience with Newegg trying to return 3 slips of paper that they initially described as "Acronis True Image 2013 w/ 250 GB Online Backup 90 day Subscription." After I received it, and after everyone realized they had fucked up, it is described as "Acronis 250 GB Online Backup 90 day Subscription," because it's basically trialware. What they shipped me was a goddamned slip of paper with a link to acronis.com/newegg, as if that justified the $10 I paid for it. Now I'm having to jump through hoops just to make sure that I don't get A) dinged with a restocking fee and B) have to pay return shipping on 3 fucking slips of paper. What a fuckup.
I'm still sort of amazed there are professionally-designed websites out there with search boxes that don't erase the text when you put your cursor in them. I don't really need you to put any text in there at all to indicate that it's a search field for one, but at least make it go away if I want to type there. Seastupid websiterch
It bugs me that as we approach 2013 an OS still can't update itself without the computer being restarted. We should be fearing SkyNET by now, not worrying about file corruption because Windows is updating.
My biggest fear is that once SkyNET takes over and we all become slaves to the machines, they'll all have some big driver update that screws everything up just as I'm getting used to the whole deal.
Until I finally talked the boss into trying Google Site Search the number one search term on our site (by a LARGE margin) was "Search our site" :(
I'm about ready to give up on the Apple Ecosphere. Yes, I'd be losing hundreds of dollars worth of $0.99 apps, but fuck it. I have a bunch of playlists that I want to sync to my iPhone. The songs sync just fine, but the playlists themselves do not. On a whim, I thought if I just nuked it from orbit and started over again maybe that would work. So set iTunes to not sync any music whatsoever. It deletes all my music and iTunes is showing zero songs on my iPhone. Except when I load up the music app on my phone, there's about 2 gigs worth of music. So I delete all of that from within the phone's usage settings. And there's still 3 albums sitting in the music player. Clicking play on any of them just causes the phone to hang as it tries to download from iTunes Match (I have it disabled on my phone because Match is an unusable piece of shit on the iPhone). Turns out some update changed a setting so that anything I buy on the iTunes store is automatically downloaded to my phone. FUUUCK YOU ITUNES! At this point, I'm ready to scrub the whole thing and start over from a factory reset. I'm just about to do that when I remember that I have the google authenticator and blizzard authenticator attached to my phone and it really is a hassle to get those unhooked and then re-applied to the account. So my phone is stuck with two dozen phantom songs that I can't do anything with. I re-transfer the playlists I want back to my phone, and 3 of the 8 actually show up on my iPhones playlists screen. All 1108 songs have been transfered, but either iTunes refuses to transfer the playlists, or the iPhone refuses to display them. Between this and my earlier nerdrage post about the removal of the iTunes DJ: fuck Apple sideways with a jackhammer.
Did you buy your music on iTunes? If not you could just keep the iPhone as a gaming handheld and use any number of dirt-cheap MP3 players for your music.
The fact that setting my homepage to about:blank in IE9 actually takes me to about:tabs. I don't want about:tabs. I want about:blank. Is there really no way to override this?
Games that aren't going to come out for the Mac, I can safely ignore. Games that simultaneously release for Windows and Mac, I can get a copy of at my leisure. Games that are totally coming out for the Mac eventually, no, really, we promise, it'll take a few months, no, that's not an actual release date, just, y'know, at some point, really and truly! ...drive me to nerd rage. (Give me my Torchlight II, damn you! Stop taunting me with Steam sales!)
Tools -> Internet Options -> Tabs (button) -> Modify the setting for "When a new tab is opened, open:".
Yes. Learn to want something else. Ely's method works - but what's the purpose of wanting about:blank rather than about:tabs if all you're going to do is take an extra step to navigate to a new page?
You get a like! Thank you, Elyscape! You can go eat a bag of hell for being as useful as a chocolate teapot!
People that put meeting links in the subject and not the body of the invite. I can't click on a link in the subject!
Chocolate teapots are useful! I mean, they're chocolate. You can eat them. I wouldn't put tea in one, but... CHOCOLATE!
It's possible to do it, people have known how for years. It just 1) requires a lot more advanced OS design than is cost-feasible to implement for the mass client market, much less the server market, 2) would break the backwards compatability that makes Windows so popular, and 3) is kind of becoming irrelevant in the horizontal scale-out scenario of massive piles of unreliable hardware.
Steve Jobs got to hide a lot of unprofitable but shiny cool sexy things behind his (or maybe his executive dudes, I'm not up on the Apple corporate structure) unbelievably innovative low-inventory, low-SKU, high-turnover profit strategy. If the rest of the market moves in that direction I expect things like "overengineering hardware" to disappear again from competitive pressures. If Apple continues to expand their client share they're going to have fun with their own Patch Wednesday as the viruses show up. That's when I'll be seriously worried about their client market penetration.
Because it's by far the best browser for use in an enterprise because no one else seems to give a shit about providing centralised management,
Vendors. Fucking vendors. I deal with them so often that I know exactly what I need to do when asking for some help: outline EXACTLY what the problem is, outline EXACTLY what steps I have taken so far to try to fix things, then tell them EXACTLY what I need them to do. It still never stops me from getting someone reading from a script. No, that question you're asking me has nothing to do with my problem. Yes, as it says in the ticket, I've already done that. Maybe if you ACTUALLY READ THE FUCKING TICKET I wouldn't be sitting here, on hold for thirty minutes, while you double check the things I've already done, then bumble about trying to figure out what the problem might be. Never mind that they were 40 minutes late to call me and I was supposed to leave 15 minutes ago. In another two minutes, I'm just hanging up. EDITED TO ADD: OH MY FUCKING GOD. My problem is that I installed an application on the E: drive. They assure me that's fine. But OH WAIT NO the application can't find a bunch of files it needs that ARE RIGHT THERE IN THE RIGHT PLACE. So for this thirty minutes I've been on hold, this guy has just been getting a copy of a file to move over to make sure it's the same. When I said "It's not just this file, it's every file." There was a pause before he said, "Oh. It is?" And then I hung up.
I love me some vendor rage! I have to deal with third-party hosted crapware where even rudimentary user administration requires "customization time" that we're billed $160/hr for. ("That's our discounted rate!" Yeah? This is my irate: FUCK YOU!) If some user mistypes their password three times then leaves their account locked for the rest of the day... it will be locked the ENTIRE NEXT BUSINESS DAY because they tied their user admin to an overnight process. Hello, hundreds of hours of lost annual productivity!
On the phone with them again. Guy keeps opening up the files and saying "They open!" to which I reply, "I know. As it says in the ticket, the problem is not the files. The problem is the program isn't looking for the files in the right place." Again a pause, an "Oh." and now I've been on hold for twenty minutes. I do not have high hopes.
If you sell me something that has a sticker on it, let's take the bar code on my pen as an example, and that sticker, in the removal of, leaves adhesive residue, I'm likely to lose my mind. I know they make stickers that peel off nice and cleanly. Fuck you for not using one.
I don't think it would be advantageous for retailers to make price/bar code stickers easily and cleanly removable swappable.
ok, fine, perhaps not the best example. But, I now have a pen that is effectively useless to me because it has a nasty residue. (also, there are plenty of anti-theft stickers that don't leave residue but aren't swappable) Stickers that aren't necessary to the product that don't peel cleanly, piss me off.
When I worked in retail we always had stickers that left residue (they bought cheap versions which did that), but were easily cleaned with benzene (Google translate says it's the right translation, I don't really know what else it could be). Or some form of nailpolish-remover, if you think the pen won't be damaged.
Acetone and rubbing alcohol are good tools to remove adhesives. I'm not sure about benzene; isn't it a carcinogen?
