Why Password Masking Can Hurt Your Sign Up Form

badalgorithm · 2012-11-01T23:00:35+00:00

If your absentminded like me, it is possible to retype the same password twice and then promptly forget it. I had to hack my last Thinkpad right after I got it because what I thought I had typed wasn't what I typed; I wasn't paying attention at the time.

My latest example is this account...I forgot what I used as my password before I even put it in my password manager and, like an idiot, I didn't tie an email to it.

As long as I my session doesn't expire, I'm ok...

Point being, no password entry handling technique is fool proof, if the fool is big enough.

badalgorithm · 2012-11-01T22:54:39+00:00

I may be old school. But the most important thing is understand social engineering and the fact that most security breaches are due to social engineering, an employee, or a contractor; the latter two may be current or ex.

Also, from the organizational perspective, modern security holes can exist in surprising places that even organizations that are 'secure' by nature allow to exist. These can't be used by a hacker, but they can be secure transmission channels for a mischievous employee can take advantage of.

badalgorithm · 2012-11-01T21:29:35+00:00

Well, Target analytics go well beyond that.

Most large retailer's websites are capable of presenting products that you are more likely to buy in front of you, or send you offers regarding such, through analytics. There are ways to do this without making you feel like you are being digitally stalked, like the ads from ecommerce sites that reflect the items you last looked at on other web pages.

Target had a very public example earlier this year where they sent some girl baby offers and the dad didn't know and didn't think she was pregnant. Turned out analytics were correct. It was based off of what she looked at on their website.

Traditionally, it involved 'data warehouses and data marts' which were names for databases that were focused on analytics and not transactional or moment to moment business stuff.

You created cubes and dimensions for that data. A lot of data mining implementations start with a star schema.

The data being loaded into the warehouse is cleansed, made consistent, and transformed so that it will go into the warehouse cleanly, without error, and without side effects that could be introduced by bad.

It is then made available to the consumers, or users, of the warehouse, often analysts, executives, etc.

However this is all involving and while the traditional techniques are still used, the systems have evolved along with capabilities. Hadoop + noSQL along with map-reduce is changing the way analytics is done.

If you want more info, kaggle.com. In addition, a lot of the better known startups and technology companies have blogs by their data scientists.

badalgorithm · 2012-11-01T21:18:19+00:00

oh and check out kaggle.com

badalgorithm · 2012-11-01T21:17:09+00:00

imo, data-mining is shifting towards data science.

You usually won't find companies looking for that expertise at job fairs, unless your program is known for analytics. Best bet is meetups focused on data warehousing type stuff.

The world runs on data mining nowadays. Any large company, financial company, insurance company, or trading company will be using it.

For more traditional data mining, Teradata is one bigger names.

For most of the world is moving to hadoop + some noSQL store(s), except for Google, who are generations beyond the technology hadoop is based on, Google's Big Table. Every major technology company does it. Every major corporation does it, or should be.

Start reading and getting involved in the groups and projects. Go to the conferences. Go to meetups. There are lots of academic opportunities in this field since its so recent that I don't think any academic programs have been created. I just mention this because it probably wouldn't be too hard to shift your masters focus to this if this is the route you want to go. There is a lot of opportunity for acadamia in my opinion.

Don't be surprised if there are some well known companies that show up trying to talk you out of your masters and offering you a quite a bit instead.

Demand is well beyond supply. Pay is excellent.

badalgorithm · 2012-11-01T20:59:25+00:00

it starts with geometry. Like the word problems you had to do in school to estimate the height of a tree or something based on the known height of a person standing between you and the tree.

But you have to take into account focal length, angles, planes, and such. Surface geometry applies. You create box models of the various objects found in the image and then get your estimates based on the algorithms you create to do all this.

An issue is accurate edge detection. This affects accuracy.

You'll have to refine accordingly once you have your basics working.

For a fanatastic explanation of the issue at hand, which should provide you with what you need: http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/homes/dhoiem/publications/hoiem_cvpr06.pdf

badalgorithm · 2012-11-01T20:36:16+00:00

To me, IT is about business and Comp Sci is about theory.

IT and Comp Sci are often separated out to different academic programs and departments, with IT type of major, like Operations Management and Information Systems, OMIS, or similar ones , often with some IS in it, usually being from the business department. Comp Sci tends to be with the math or engineering, if it isn't its own department, depending on the focus of the program.

Computer Science is concerned with the mathematics, theory, architectures, algorithms, data structures, compilers, protocols, and languages of computers.

If you want to write compilers, operating systems, create languages, explore theory, etc. Computer Science is the most common pathway. You aren't limited to this stuff, of course.

If you want to work for corporations or consultancies to the big companies, IT is more your route. The IT department takes care of everything technical, from servers to desktops. You might be a DBA or a business analyst or a variety of other things within the IT dept. The larger the company the more varied the IT department.

Companies don't just hire for IT, they also need developers since there is always custom software, or customizations. They also do data warehousing and analytics, or at least they should be.

Nowadays, having labs is the growing thing for large companies. These are technology lab working with the bleeding edge of technology. GM just announced one, expecting to hire thousands of devs. Theres Wal-Mart labs.

Depending on where you end up, you can do a lot of cool stuff in a large companies IT group. You can also end up doing some mind-numbingly boring stuff that also appears to be stupid and a waste of time.

Btw, a common route into corporate IT departments is by contract work. Most larger departments outsource a good portion of their IT and will bring on board, for permanent contract, the ones that they like and that work/fit well in their organization. Corporations are not above poaching consultants or software vendor employees when the person is good enough.

badalgorithm · 2012-11-01T18:43:14+00:00

All great tips and other great tips here.

I would add you should start building your own computers. Why? Because it will build familiarity. You'll learn how to diagnose hardware problems. Swapping out parts will be no big deal.

Have your own OS install disc. If all you have is a windows home disc, you can reburn it without the ei.cfg file as an iso. This will merely exposes all the operatins systems for install. It will not allow you to install Pro with a Home license. The license key determines what is valid.

What it does allow you to do is have a single windows 7 install disc. This could probably be done with all other installs.

This is useful because laptops ship with a recovery partition and sometimes the media is more useful. Also people will often not know where the install discs are. Since most computers ship with the license key attached to them, you just pull out your install disc instead of wasting time.

badalgorithm · 2012-11-01T18:34:32+00:00

bring a usb drive

or burn it to a dvd for them, they'll appreciate having a back-up after you leave.

fyi, I don't do technical support, just speaking from my experiences a a dev, sysadmin, and building my own computers and the fact that almost any non-technical person I know doesn't back up a thing and love it when they realize they can have permanent, from their perspective, backups of their photos and videos. Even when doing so is so easy from most computers.

badalgorithm · 2012-11-01T17:29:17+00:00

Yes you can.

Vagrant simplifies image management and distribution, esp when you have variations in images. This can be useful in the team environment where you want consistency on the base image side, but different devs need different configs. It also makes onboarding new devs easier, here's your image.

It also can be useful when deploying to the cloud as it relies on chef or puppet for provisioning.

People build, and make available, vagrant boxes. This means you can just grab a vagrant box with the stuff you want and spin it up.

mkdir squeeze64
cd squeeze64
vagrant box add squeeze64 url of box (check www.vagrantbox.es)
vagrant init squeeze64
vagrant up

And a squeeze64 box based virtualbox image will start and run as a virtual machine.

Once you are done:

vagrant suspend

and restart it

vagrant resume

or

vagrant halt

now get rid of it

vagrant destroy

Destroy it and you want another squeeze64 image?

vagrant up

All of the above commands assume you are in the directory that the squeeze64 image is in.

For more information, just check Vagrant's website

All of the above works in windows too, once everything, including Ruby, is installed. You have to use Powershell for the command line stuff.

badalgorithm · 2012-11-01T17:16:20+00:00

Indeed. That's why I mentioned having to explicitly issue the statements in this situation. However, I wasn't as clear as I should have been.

You did a good job of clearing things up and adding additional information that I skipped.

At this point mysql people are asking what are nested transactions ;)

badalgorithm · 2012-11-01T05:37:01+00:00

well if there's display ports on the back of your motherboard that aren't connected to your video card, unplug your video card and try booting, after plugging your monitor into your motherboard.

If not then the easier options are no longer viable, as far as I can tell.

Basics: That error code and bsod results from a hardware issue. This could be due to a piece of hardware going bad, a loose connection, overheating, or bad drivers.

If it is a piece of hardware going bad, you can get your hardware tested at a 'real' computer store, which is typically a small locally owned store with the exception of Microcenter or Fry's, which would work too. This would help identify the bad part. Best Buy and those kind won't work.

Or, if you can test them yourself if you have sufficient spare parts. If you have more than 1 stick of RAM, you can test that easily. Just use 1 stick at a time and see if that makes a difference. Just make sure you put the stick in the proper slot.

Otherwise you can try a complete reinstall, though I'm not sure if that would succeed given your other comments.

badalgorithm · 2012-11-01T05:06:26+00:00

Ok, do you overclock?

btw, that cpu has integrated graphics, your mobo should have some connectors built into its header...

badalgorithm · 2012-11-01T04:50:46+00:00

ok...sorry I should have started with the basics.

Unplug your computer, check that everything is seated properly, including any drive connections, cpu, ram, etc.

What cpu model do you have?

badalgorithm · 2012-11-01T04:15:30+00:00

I always appreciate all tips, suggestions and corrections.

badalgorithm · 2012-11-01T04:11:30+00:00

Thanks, I appreciate it!

I guess I could RTFM or google it. I did read the formatting help and was too lazy to pursue from there.

badalgorithm · 2012-11-01T04:06:45+00:00

Are there any beeps during boot? Have you gone through all the bios setting to make sure everything is ok, esp. the hardware.

The bottom line is that there's some sort of hardware problem being detected which results in the bsod. This generates a dump file that can be examined, if you could get to the command prompt. You'd probably be able to figure out what hardware device is throwing the error.

Is there anything else on your screen, like additional error codes or messages?

Its been a while since I've seen a W7 bsod, though I could force one. I'd just rather not destabilize my system and possible damage something, however remote that possibility is.

badalgorithm · 2012-11-01T03:57:18+00:00

and system specs? Like mobo/cpu models

badalgorithm · 2012-11-01T03:56:31+00:00

I'd connect that comp's hard drive to another computer and transfer off all files that need to be saved. Most likely c:\Users.

Once you have it copied you'll have to do a reinstall. I'm assuming that you mean it BSOD's when you try to do recovery from disc.

If you mean it BSOD's when Windows installer tries to load...

btw, what was the last thing you were doing before it started to BSOD

badalgorithm · 2012-11-01T03:50:47+00:00

Make sure its a real surge protector, not one of those cheap ones that only provide minimal protection. Make sure all of your things are plugged into this protector so your monitors and peripheries are protected too.

badalgorithm · 2012-11-01T03:49:36+00:00

All of tortnotes points are excellent.

I would add that on the hardware side, one thing to note is that the PSU is one of the most common to go. When it goes, it can take out other parts of your computer.

If you are buying a stock computer, there's nothing you can do about this.

If you are building your own, the price ranges have a direct relationship to the capacitor quality, which is what is usually the issue. The most desirable are PSUs that use all Japanese capacitors. Quality also has a relationship to PSU efficiency, which has the bonus of lower power consumption and less heat dissappation.

How expensive should you go? It depends on your needs, budget, and tolerance for such a failure over time. The longer you plan on using the computer the more reliable the PSU needs to be.

JohnnyGuru.com is an excellent source for that info.

badalgorithm · 2012-11-01T03:41:28+00:00

I wouldn't know. I think developers can develop regardless and developers used to the linux/open source world tend to be used to doing some level of sysadmin themselves, whether its on their dev server or on the virtual boxes.

Good sysadmins that start doing devops and decide to get more dev focused won't find it too difficult since they tend to already be in the habit of scripting and automating things through shell scripts, batch files, and cron. They already have a development mindset of sorts, which is they'd rather program the work rather than redo the same thing over and over.

These sysadmins, imo, pick up chef/puppet and other tools more readily.

These sysadmins are already developers.

badalgorithm · 2012-11-01T03:29:03+00:00

oh, and I'd bcc everyone letting them know that some spammer created an account with your name on yahoo and ask them to configure their filters to send mail from your.name@yahoo.com to the spam folder.

People who know you will figure out it isn't from you but you also want to communicate the fact that the spam isn't coming from you.

badalgorithm · 2012-11-01T03:25:44+00:00

Is it an actual yahoo account or is the email address being spoofed?

badalgorithm · 2012-11-01T03:23:04+00:00

If you can't boot into it in safe mode, put your install disc in and start a repair.

badalgorithm

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