Status-Q

I’m pleased to say that I hadn’t thought of this particular use for my Pebble smartwatch!

Thanks to Alastair for the link

My quick review of the new Hobbit film: I enjoyed it a lot, though perhaps not as much as the first one. Too much romance, not enough Mirkwood, too many echoes of LOTR, and somewhat excessive use of decapitation, but, it must be said, an exceedingly fine dragon.

Tolkien purists (like Rose) will be furious, but my view is that you have to change even a good book to make a good film. And, if you’re going to invent new characters, then you’ll get fewer complaints from me if you have them played by people like Evangeline Lilly.

The middle film of a trilogy is always the hardest to do, to which a fair response would be that they were foolish to do it as a trilogy. That, I imagine, was determined by pure economics. It’ll be interesting to see whether Peter Jackson can do something really new with part III. In the book, Bilbo misses the whole final battle through being knocked on the head. Somehow, I think the movie may deviate from the canon there…

Meanwhile, I imagine that the entrepreneurs of New Zealand’s South Island are already planning barrel riding trips for the spring tourists…

Some people find these scribblings through Google, others through RSS, Tweets, Facebook or App.net posts. And you lovely readers often write comments, but in all these different places, so only a subset of other readers are likely to see them.

In an attempt to make it easier to post comments here on the site, I’ve now enabled one of these newfangled social login things, so you can post using your Facebook or Google account if preferred. Other options may come along in due course!

What is it that estate agents really mean when they talk of a “deceptively spacious” property? It’s one of their favourite phrases, after all.

If I say that my wallet felt deceptively full before I left the house, doesn’t that suggest that later, at some inconvenient moment, I discovered I had less money than I thought? Still, perhaps the operative word there is felt, which implies that I was mistaken?

OK, then, so if a house actually is deceptively spacious, that must mean that it does have a lot of space, but for some reason that doesn’t bring with it the characteristics that you’d normally associate with spaciousness. It’s a very inconvenient shape, for example, so you can’t actually use it as you would expect.

Or there is occasionally some warping of the space-time continuum in that area, so that when you visit, it is spacious, but later on you’ll discover it’s only suitable for hobbits? As in, “it’s deceptively spacious at the moment”.

Yes, I guess that must be it. Good of them to warn you in advance.

As many of you will know, two months ago, Adobe’s servers were hacked into and the user information stolen. At first this was thought to be a major breach, with about 3M records lost. Then the number went to abut ten times that. Now, however, there is talk of it heading for the Guinness Book of Records, as it appears the number may be closer to 150M!

Now, the passwords were encrypted (or, more technically, ‘hashed’), so the bad guys can’t just read them off. But they weren’t encrypted as well as they might be, in particular because if several people use the same password, the system stores the same thing. So if you know one person’s password, perhaps because you got it from a previous hacking incident elsewhere and can tie it to their email address, you can now work out anybody else who uses the same password.

But it’s more fun than that… and there’s a great article on the Sophos site going into more gory detail if you’re interested.

One column that wasn’t encrypted in the database was the one holding the ‘password hints’… you know, the phrases you can put in on some sites to remind you if you forget your password.

Now, the most popular password is “123456”, which encrypts to “110edf2294fb8bf4” in the Adobe database. Hundreds of thousands of people use this one. Another very popular one, believe it or not, is “password”, which becomes “2fca9b003de79778 e2a311ba09ab4707”. (You can see more of the most common choices here.)

If you know the encrypted form, you may not be able to work out the original. But if many thousands of people use it, and just one of them gives it away in the password hint, then things become trivial. And it turns out that there are lots of lovely examples in the Adobe file, where users have put in hints like “Rhymes with assword”, or ‘1-6’…

Anyway, if you’re curious about whether you appear in this list, which you might if, say, you’ve ever downloaded Acrobat, there’s a a very nice service that LastPass have put together at:

https://lastpass.com/adobe/

where you can type in your email address and it will let you know if you’re in the database. It can also email you a link showing how many other people used the same password as you, and what some of their hints were. Which can be quite sobering.

I’m embarrassed to say that mine, which was mildly obscure, I originally thought, had 40 other users. That’s only 40 in 150 million, but it’s still not good for precisely the above reasons. I’ve had an Adobe account for a very long time, and this password predated my use of 1Password to generate unique and complex passwords for each site. Thankfully, since I’ve been storing my passwords in 1Password for quite a long time, it’s easy now (if somewhat tedious) to find the other elderly accounts on which I’ve used it, and fix them…

How about you?

As we know, people in the past were black and white – you can see that in the photos…

But there are some very dedicated artists who, using today’s technology, are doing a fabulous job of recolouring some iconic images from the past.

There’s a great selection here. I find them very compelling.

Here’s a list of actors, who have something in common:

• Charles Seel
• Judith Anderson
• Morgan Farley
• Richard Hale
• Anthony Jochim
• Felix Locher
• Celia Lovsky
• Leonard Mudie
• Abraham Sofaer
• John Warburton
• Ian Wolfe

What ties them together?

They all acted in Star Trek.

And they were all born in the 19th century.

I think that’s quite cool.

Thanks to this page for the info.

Those of us with a firm belief in the scientific method need to read this Economist article about how easily it can fall short of its ideals.

The good news is that this is being brought to light… In fact, I would propose the term Metascience, if nobody has already coined it, to describe this kind of work: the application of the scientific method to the scientific method!

I’m sitting in a traffic jam behind a car bearing a sticker, “Atomkraft? Nein danke.” (Nuclear power? No thanks!)

I’ve always liked this design, which has been around for some time – the sun with the smiley face makes it into a nice, happy, positive statement. It’s a clever bit of marketing.

However, the sun is, of course, powered by… ?

Seth Brown has been doing some experiments. There are still many unanswered questions, but it’s a more rigorous approach than most of us have ever tried!

Nicely done!

Thanks to Hap for the link.