When
· Naughties
· · 2005
· · · November
· · · · 04 (2 entries)
FSS: Baldini Sunset · Friday Slide Scan #12 is a picture of a sunset near Fort Vermilion, Alberta, which is way up north. It’s by my Dad, and while it’s pretty nice, it’s not his best, not even his best sunset; but it’s the oldest I’ve scanned so far, dating from 1953 ...
Security Hell · Tap, tap, tap, pause... “hmph”. Tap, tap, tap, pause... "grmph". [Ten minutes pass.] Tap, tap, tap, pause... “Hellfire.” Tap, tap, tap, pause... “Crap.” [Ten more minutes.] Tap, tap, tap, pause... “<multiple expletives deleted>.” Tap, tap, tap, pause... loud splat sound as the yellow-stickies pad impacts the far office wall. The cats, sensing trouble, have left the room. Is this the sound of: Trying to book a flight to somewhere attractive using points? Multi-threaded software being debugged? An attempt to write WSDL by hand? Solving a really nasty Myst-series puzzle? None of the above. Those sounds would be me trying to pick a new Sun LDAP password that meets the incredibly-stiff requirements of our new (SarbOx-driven, they say) security policy. The dictionary they check includes variant spellings of the names of little towns in the Lebanese mountains! I asked Lauren: “How am I going to remember this?” She said: “Go pick up that that yellow-stickies pad you threw across the room, write it down on one, and put it somewhere safe. Bruce Schneier says that’s OK.” While I generally approve of forcing people to avoid easily-stolen passwords, I do worry a little that these hard-to-guess things can also be hard to type, and perhaps thus vulnerable to prying eyes. But anyhow, if you were thinking of writing a program to guess anyone’s password here at Sun, well forget about it. [Update: I got a bunch of suggestions on how to deal with this, some of them good.] ...
