gsoltis

Sure, they can absolutely make it non-trivial, but for this to be effective, it needs to be a guarantee. All it takes is one of these keyboards being cracked. Add to that the fact that the keyboards would have to be ubiquitous, and you're virtually guaranteeing that an attacker has direct access to the hardware. You then have one of the most challenging scenarios to defend against.

Also, this suffers from the same issue as many (all?) biometric authentication systems: revocation support.

Say someone hacks the db where my particular typing style signature is stored. Now they can skip the typing and send the signal my keyboard would have sent and authenticate as me to whatever service was using that db.

You can push the problem into hardware (authenticate the keyboard as well) but that's just making the same mistake twice (once the keyboard gets hacked...).

Part of a good authentication system is being able to change the locks on the door when someone loses a key, which is why biometric data is particularly unsuited for the purpose.

I did the same thing, and another quick plug for sonic since there are likely people here who would find this useful: I'm using their basic dsl service (single-line) and even that comes with a free static ip address. No more messing around with dynamic dns providers just to get ssh access to my desktop at home.

I'll give this a try. I did some research a month or so ago when I upgraded one of my machines to 11.10 (which I now really regret doing). At the time, everywhere I looked said alt+tab for switching applications, and alt+~ for switching windows within applications. If there's a way to get alt+tab back to just switching windows, I'll gladly give it a try.

The issue I had with virtual workspaces was that alt+tab still showed every app on every workspace. The menu on top thing is annoying, but not a deal-breaker I guess.

Anyways, I know this is not the ubuntu forums, I just thought I would chime in with the regressions in my workflow. I spent 2 or 3 hours trying to make it work. I am aware of ccsm, and I don't consider myself an expert, but I'm not a complete n00b either. I gave up and went back to the GNOME fallback. My other machines I won't be upgrading. Backwards compatibility is important, even with new fancy window managers.

I've been using ubuntu for about 5 years now, and using it as basically my only OS for the last 3. I was very satisfied with it. The reason I'm not a fan of Unity is that not only did it break my workflow, but there appears to be no way to customize it to get back to what I have been doing for the past 5 years.

I understand the developers don't owe anyone anything, and everyone's free to leave (and I may, once staying on 10.10 gets to be a problem). I'm just unhappy that they decided to break what I was doing after 5 good years.

For those curious, the features I'm referring to are alt-tab to switch between windows (not applications) and proper virtual desktop support. Doesn't seem like much, and indeed, these features have worked flawlessly for me for years. Once I'm too far behind the upgrade curve, I'll probably have to try another distro or window manager, since from what I've read, Unity has no intention of un-breaking these. It was fun while it lasted though.

Thought experiment: Imagine the same product, determining the location of a mobile device, through a different mechanism. How about we replace SSID with paint color of a building, and the mobile device's wifi antenna with the same device's camera. From there, the service works more or less the same. The sensor (camera) sends google a snapshot of its current surroundings. Google compares this pattern of colors to a map it has created by cataloging building colors around the world and makes a best effort to find a match and provide a location based on that.

Assuming you are ok with google street view (if you're not, I assume they same reasons would apply to SSID mapping), what then is the difference between the color of your house and your SSID?

And to head off one possible reply, the data collection issue is orthogonal to the mapping of SSIDs. I don't think anyone is saying that it was ok to capture data packets, but for the purpose of this thought experiment, let's pretend that google had properly performed the SSID mapping and stored only SSID and location of their collection vehicle.

You were lucky to have a quality library available to you. They aren't really free, and not everyone has the good fortune to grow up in a place that can afford one. You were lucky that your public school education was able to get you into a college. Not everyone has that opportunity, no matter how hard they work in school. You were lucky that you were able to find a crappy retail job to put yourself through college. Some people can't find jobs to do that, and not for lack of looking.

Libraries and public schools are excellent examples. While I can't speak for these protesters as I'm not there with them, a lot of the sentiment that people are expressing is a sense of fewer opportunities. Schools and libraries are getting their budgets slashed across the entire country. This due in large part to fiscal policy. Bad policy leads to lower tax revenues leads to cutting teachers and library resources. I don't have the solution, but I can see how it's related to the finance industry as a whole.

I agree with you that people should be responsible for making use of the opportunities that they have. Being offered a public education doesn't guarantee you anything, you have to actually take the time to learn from it. But that only works so long as we continue to offer quality public educations.

I'm really just tired of people saying "I made it, why can't everyone else?" without considering that their situation may be different.

In some sense, I sympathize with you. I too have worked hard and been successful. I chose (out of passion, but I don't begrudge those who chose based on economics) to go into engineering while friends of mine went into less lucrative fields.

I myself was fortunate. Lucky, to be honest. My parents took advantage of things like student loans so that they could work hard and be successful. The result was that I didn't have to worry about student loans and graduated without debt. I worked hard to graduate, but I don't have illusions that my financial situation was anything other than luck on my part.

You may not call it luck, and I don't know your specific situation, but I'm going to hypothesize that you had some help along the way. How did you educate yourself? How did you pay for it? Did you go to a public school system? Was it better than the ones that exist now? Did you go to a private school? Did you pay for it yourself? My point is, we often take this sort of assistance for granted, and it is gratifying to credit ourselves with 100% of our success. Maybe you are 100% responsible for your own success. If that's the case, you're the first such person that I've ever met.

Has anyone gotten the people demo to work? I can't seem to get by own data, even after switching to private access. I get a 403 on everything.

Sexual orientation is not universally a protected class. I don't know about non-US employment law, but at least in the US, I believe it is on a state-by-state basis.

Likewise there are costs to a loss of anonymity. Consider political dissidents living under oppressive regimes, or whistleblowers afraid of retaliation. So in a very real way, preventing anonymity does allow and is currently allowing people to do bad things and get away with it.

A variation on this is to use a random salt with each password that you store. Your auth process then becomes: 1. check the username 2: if the user exists, prepend the salt stored in the user row to supplied password, check against stored hash.

At the very least, you will make it harder for someone to crack all of your passwords by computing one table with a single salt.

See getaround.com. They are doing something like this already.