Rizz

Sorry for being harsh, but your "solutions" are mostly useless in the context of providing an API for phone apps.

Use OAuth or similar and make sure every user has their own account. That's the only answer. Don't roll your own! Especially don't roll your own when you don't have a solid security background. You have obviously heard some of the right terms, but how and where you can apply them is at least as important as using them at all.

1. Doesn't protect anything at all. Hash functions don't do anything when people have access to the program code. No matter how fancy you go with time limited hashes (and there are smarter ways to create those). At most it adds a few minutes to the reverse engineering.

2. Again, this doesn't protect against anything. HTTPS stops intercepts on the wire, not someone who has access to your app, people can still lift the secret keys and the hashing scheme from the app binary.

3.& 4. Both true, and would protect against mass stealing of the passwords like happened here, but it wouldn't prevent abuse of the API.

There are very many people who use techniques like the ones you suggest in 1. and 2. and the same very many people have vulnerable apps that usually expose all users' data to the world. There are a lot of apps that store e.g. user files or some sort of configuration not on a per user OAuth protected storage like OneDrive, DropBox or Google Drive, but either there but on just the account of the developer, or on another storage that is only authenticated with the developer's credentials. People who do that allow anyone to read and modify the data of all users, exactly the same as people are allowed to do to their own data, or more if the credentials aren't properly limited, even if it's blocked in the app.

So? The user's IP address matches his web traffic, no reason why they couldn't send pizza ads to him that way. Remember Microsoft is a Gawker advertising partner (which runs Kotaku), they're even listed first in the list of partners, so no doubt visiting Kotaku will give some of your info to Microsoft, which they can then use to target ads in their ad network. That's how advertising on the internet works. Every visit to an ad supported website means your information is shared with dozens if not hundreds of advertising partners and partners of partners.

Edit: I just checked that video page. For me it connects to at least 11 different parties:

  Facebook + its CDN
  Youtube + its CDN
  Google Analytics
  t.skimresources.com/api.track.php
  Gawker advertising API
  Gawker CDN
  Twitter
  imrworldwide.com
  quantserve.com
  chartbeat.net
  scorecardresearch.com
  criteo.com
  doubleclick.net

And your ISP, your DNS service provider, your router manufacturer (yes, some routers intercept traffic and certainly redirect failed dns requests, but might also inject or track other stuff), and of course all running software and browser toolbars/scripts/addins can also know what you visit.

And that's just directly, on the background each of those is more than likely to send your information to other advertising partners.

He seems to be quoting another text, with running commentary by himself. Language use is too different for him to be the likely author of both parts of the dialog.

One correction, the 1999 is when the article was written, the game was created mostly in 1996 and released early 1997. Your point still stands of course.

Price. I only just got my first contract with unlimited sms, before that it was € 0,09 (12¢) after using the few hundred that come with your plan. MMS is not included in plans and still is € 0,50 (69¢). So everything that's an image or goes to a group goes on whatsapp.

The current DRM was broken years ago, so I doubt that any leak of private information necessitated a change.

>Imagine if the NYSE priced publicly traded equities in this manner?

Actually, stock exchanges like NYSE are accused of front-running, the SEC has been investigating for a few years already.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000087239639044398920... Or if you prefer a 50 minute documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFQJNeQDDHA

One difference is that with embed you can still support most existing platforms by implementing NSAPI.

As you are talking about reasonably sized input, your constant examples should also be reasonable. 10000 times difference in the constant is not reasonable. You wouldn't even get that from going from all data in the level 1 cache to random memory access with 10 times more instructions.

And "these papers" often do care about running time and will say whether it is possible to implement the algorithm efficiently, if you're lucky they'll even have done an implementation and you can see at what dataset sizes they are faster in practice.

And even if it were slower in practice, research like this is very useful, because it helps gives other researchers inspiration, ever since someone thought of looking at these problems like electrical flow in 2010, there have been ever faster approximations for it, while others will find ways to implement the algorithm efficiently, just in case a naive implementation of the offered algorithm isn't efficient enough.

Dismissing such research without having found any actual extreme inefficiencies in the proposed algorithm is not an attitude suited to anyone who wants to see progress.

And finally, the actual speed increase in the past decades hasn't been from O(N^2) to O(N^1.9) but from O(VE^2) to O(VE), which obviously does have a real impact, and even with a non-realistic 10000 times bigger constant it would still be far faster in any graph with more 10000 edges. And graphs with billions of edges aren't unusual anymore.

The paper also mentions someone else who also recently found a near linear time approximation for maximum flow: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1304.2077v1

"Negated" is certainly overstating things, traffic deaths have been going down for decades in the US and European countries, so the combination of safety features in roads and cars, driver education work well enough to offset any worsening of driver culture (alleged increase of speeding, more cell phone use, etc.)

We already have square structures in the landscape: office buildings. These could be put on top of regular buildings keeping the shape of the buildings, just making them a bit higher.

Did they really try to put him out of work? I could not read any such thing in the vendor's emails. Perhaps the vendor just wanted to complain to the researcher's manager so he might receive additional training or so protocols could be set up for handling such issues?

One reason for tolls (and patents from public research) is that they cause the people who use them to pay, instead of everyone. That seems reasonable to me in those instances where the road or invention isn't clearly for the public good of the whole public.

What exactly is the problem with patent trolls? Someone made an invention and wants to profit from it, and not every inventor is good at starting and running a business. Besides in quite a few business sectors the barriers of entry are too high to be able to monetize an invention from scratch. You see the exact same with lawyers, accountants, etc. Companies specialize in those specific tasks so they can be good at what they do, and other businesses hire them to simplify their own.

As I see it the problems are that patents are granted on ridiculous things, every new type of digital device comes with a slew of patents that basically replicate everything that can be done with a computer, and in biology patents are granted on DNA simply for finding it in a creature, not for actually designing it. That is one thing that should be solved, the other thing that should be fixed are the damages awarded by courts. For a phone or software product with 10000 features any single one shouldn't be worth much more than a ten thousandth of the price.