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Apple does passwords smarter

DaringFireball turned me onto this blogpost about some of the password generation tools iOS uses to make passwords easier to type, but no-less strong.

To make these passwords easier to type on suboptimal keyboard layouts like my colleague's game controller, where the mode switching might be difficult, these new passwords are actually dominated by lowercase characters. And to make it easier to short-term have in your head little chunks of it to bring over to the other device, the passwords are based on syllables. That's consonant, vowel, consonant patterns. With these considerations put together, in our experience, these passwords are actually a lot easier to type on a foreign, weird keyboard, in the rare instances where that might be needed for some of our users.

And we weren't going to make any changes to our password format unless we can guarantee that it was as strong or stronger than our old format. So if you want to talk in terms of Shannon entropy once again, these new passwords have 71 bits of entropy, up from the 69 from the previous format. And a little tidbit for folks who are trying to match our math — [note that] we actually have a dictionary of offensive terms on device that we filter these generated passwords against and we'll skip over passwords that we generate that contain those offensive substrings.

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So these new passwords are 20 characters long. They contain the standard stuff, an uppercase character. They're dominated by lowercase. We chose a symbol to use, which is hyphen. We put two of them in there, and a single [digit]. We picked this length and the mix of characters to be compatible with a good mix of existing websites.

And a few more details: These aren't real syllables as defined by any language. We have a certain number of characters we consider to be consonants, which is 19. Another set we consider to be vowels, which is six. And we pick them at random. There are five positions for where the digit can go, which is on either side of the hyphen or at the end of the password.

10/17/2024 4:11 pm | Tags: password, security | Share to:

A really fun Crokinole write-up

I've known about Crokinole for a while. I don't own a board for it, but I definitely could see myself owning one eventually.

10/17/2024 3:18 pm | Tags: crokinole, game, canada | Share to:

This is a really good idea

This is a really good idea. Ensuring that if the mods somehow fall off an instance in the network, it switches to block new users to avoid being brigaded for spam purposes.

10/17/2024 2:38 pm | Tags: fediverse, mastodon | Share to:

Excel hits 40 years old

The excerpt that brought this to my attention was on Slashdot:

The business world's favourite software program enters its 40th year. The Economist: Excel has featured in plenty of workplace blunders -- though its defenders will be quick to blame human error. The financial world is littered with tales of costly spreadsheet errors. Excel has also been blamed for botching gene names in over a third of genomics papers (because it labelled them as dates); underreporting covid-19 cases in England (because it only had a limited number of rows in which to record the results); and disrupting the trial of January 6th rioters in America (because sensitive information was left in hidden cells).

Such snafus have not dented Excel's dominance. Might artificial intelligence (AI) steal its crown? With whizzy new tools powered by the technology promising to make data analysis easier, the familiar grid of numbers and calculations could soon feel outdated. Rather than replacing spreadsheets, though, AI might make them even better. Last month Microsoft introduced an AI assistant for Excel which lets users crunch data using natural-language prompts. Excel, and its faithful, aren't ready to be filtered out just yet.

To this I am reminded of a quote about the CIA: "Our failures are known, our successes are not." I think that's from a movie, but heck if I remember what.

Undoubtedly the snafus discussed above are big and important. But the literal trillions of dollars which are made and moved thanks to Excel is mind boggling and not reported on in the same way.

10/17/2024 2:30 pm | Tags: microsoft office, windows, excel | Share to:

New shark discovered every two weeks

10/17/2024 1:45 pm | Tags: marine biology, sharks, science | Share to:

NOAA's Winter Predictions

Forecasting models look like a colder and wetter than usual winter for me this year.

10/17/2024 10:11 am | Tags: weather, climate change | Share to:

Scheduled Publishing

I've also begun rethinking the publishing model for this blog. Currently, when I add a post, it immediately rebuilds the site. I've added some improvements to make it avoid publishing everything when not necessary, but largely I just say "rebuild it all" on every publish. Keep in mind, on my busiest blogging days, this is just done 6-8 times. But as I try to make this more central to my online presence again, it's a pain I feel.

As the blog gets older, the time to generate the site's pages gets longer and longer. It's most felt when I'm publishing from my phone, but even when on the desktop I feel the wait. So I'm thinking that I will shift to be a regularly scheduled process which publishes new posts on a regular cadence in the background, disconnected from my interacting with the UI.

Last night, while I was working on the other issues on the blog, I poked around in the code to figure out how to best make this change. It's absolutely doable, it's just not clean and simple. It breaks some functionality that I'll need to either modify, or disable.

10/17/2024 8:27 am | Tags: glowbug, programming | Share to:

Podcast Middleman

The NYT are putting their podcasts behind a paywall. You can still get them free for the first few days and then they move behind the paywall. I get it. It's business. But my consumption of podcasts is heavily dependent on the day. And I like being able to go back a little while to recent topics but maybe not immediate.

So I decided to look into using Plex as my podcast server, thinking I could automatically download new podcast files to my server and then listen whenever I wanted. Unfortunately it seems Plex had a podcast function, but it was buggy and they made the call to cut the function rather than integrate it.

Disappointing, but I get it.

Now, I'm going even simpler. A folder on my server, a cron job which fetches and downloads the podcasts daily and keeps them for a month (to avoid devouring server space.) And then I just make my own personal podcast feed for them.

10/17/2024 7:04 am | Tags: podcast, programming, new york times | Share to:

Logistics Win Wars

I continue to slowly make my way through a book about the Mexican-American war, and looking at how it was so impactful on the American Civil war. It shares the stories of Robert E. Lee, Ulysses Grant, Tecumseh Sherman, Jefferson Davis, and a few others, by sharing their stories from the Mexican-American war. It's a very interesting look at what was the first war fought by the US Military other than England, or the native tribes, etc.

One thing that really struck me is that both Lee and Grant held logistics roles during their time serving in the Mexican-American war. Lee was the Inspector General for the unit under one of the Generals, and Grant was quartermaster.

I'm far from a war historian, but it's no secret that wars are won and lost largely due to their ability to fund, fuel, and feed their armies. And to have the two main Generals from the Civil War shown in such clear comparison, knowing what comes in their future just is very interesting to me.

As for the book, we've reached the point where I am speed skimming rather than forcing myself to read in-depth. The reality is, I don't want to know the details of the urban warfare as the US Military took control of Monterrey, etc. So I'm hoping to finish the book soon so I can move on to something new.

10/17/2024 6:50 am | Tags: us history, mexican history, war, civil war, logistics | Share to:

The Trap is setup again

A few weeks ago I posted about setting up a forum for this blog as an experiment. A perk of no one reading this is that when I screw up, no one notices.

The Trap existed but never really worked. I was testing things out and just let it fall off. Today I moved to phpBB rather than the forum tool I had been experimenting with, and in doing so have the first iteration of the forum's automated posting made. When I publish a new post that has its own page (rather than just existing in the date archive) it will automatically create a post on the forum.

It's not perfect. It runs by having the forum pull my RSS feed, which it does every 30 minutes. Additionally, this means there is no way for me to let the blog know a forum link, so I can't link to the forum discussion automatically. Yet.

But, since no one is here, I get the joy of just futzing around at my own pace.

The other screw up no one noticed was that single pages for entries weren't publishing at all. I implemented some code behind the scenes and I totally screwed it up. So it was making every single entry page just blank. And I only noticed it, today, after a few weeks of this issue being live, because I was messing around with The Trap forum.

10/16/2024 11:18 pm | Tags: glowbug, the trap, blog, forum | Share to:

"The Secretive Dynasty That Controls the Boar’s Head Brand"

A fascinating look into Boars Head and its privacy and secrecy around ownership.

10/14/2024 10:43 pm | Tags: meat, listeria, public recall | Share to:

Decadence's second meaning

Decadence is also a noun for "a period of decline." - Which, makes sense when you break the word apart.

10/14/2024 11:57 am | Tags: language, english, etymology | Share to:

Protip: Sit on your socks before putting them on. Warms them up nicely.

10/12/2024 9:58 am | Tags: mobile posting | Share to:

Glowbug goes mobile

10/12/2024 9:52 am | Tags: mobile posting | Share to: