The entertainment industry's release strategy creates piracy

From The Guardian:

If you want people to buy media, you have to offer it for sale. If it's not for sale, they won't buy it, but many of them will still want to watch or hear or play it, and will turn to the darknet to get – for free – the media that no one will sell to them.

This isn't a surprising research finding. Everyone who's ever run a business or worked in any kind of sales job knows that rule one is to make a product that people want and then offer it at a price they're willing to pay. Doing this won't always make you rich, but no one ever got rich without starting from there.

25-GPU cluster cracks every standard Windows password in <6 hours

Via ArsTechnica:

A password-cracking expert has unveiled a computer cluster that can cycle through as many as 350 billion guesses per second. It's an almost unprecedented speed that can try every possible Windows passcode in the typical enterprise in less than six hours.

The five-server system uses a relatively new package of virtualization software that harnesses the power of 25 AMD Radeon graphics cards. It achieves the 350 billion-guess-per-second speed when cracking password hashes generated by the NTLM cryptographic algorithm that Microsoft has included in every version of Windows since Server 2003. As a result, it can try an astounding 958 combinations in just 5.5 hours, enough to brute force every possible eight-character password containing upper- and lower-case letters, digits, and symbols. Such password policies are common in many enterprise settings. The same passwords protected by Microsoft's LM algorithm—which many organizations enable for compatibility with older Windows versions—will fall in just six minutes.

The Linux-based GPU cluster runs the Virtual OpenCL cluster platform, which allows the graphics cards to function as if they were running on a single desktop computer. ocl-Hashcat Plus, a freely available password-cracking suite optimized for GPU computing, runs on top, allowing the machine to tackle at least 44 other algorithms at near-unprecedented speeds. In addition to brute-force attacks, the cluster can bring that speed to cracks that use a variety of other techniques, including dictionary attacks containing millions of words.

...the machine is able to make about 63 billion guesses against SHA1, the algorithm used to hash the LinkedIn passwords, versus the 15.5 billion guesses his previous hardware was capable of. The cluster can try 180 billion combinations per second against the widely used MD5 algorithm, which is also about a four-fold improvement over his older system.

Skype hands 16-year-old's personal information to IT company

A police file has recently revealed that, during a police investigation into the Anonymous-sanctioned cyberattacks on PayPal, the Dutch police has received personal data on a young Dutchman through an IT firm which, in its turn, received the data from Skype apparently in an illegal way.

In the file called Operation Talang, the Dutch police had information on two people that allegedly played a part in the attacks on websites belonging to Mastercard, VISA and Paypal by hacker collective Anonymous, following the blocking of donations to Wikileaks in 2011.

Joep Gommers, senior director of global research at the Dutch IT security firm iSIGHT Partners, who was hired by PayPal to investigate the attacks, found out the pseudonym of a 16-year-old boy who apparently was involved in the attacks and contacted Skype to ask for the suspect's account data. According to the police file, Skype handed over, voluntarily and without any court order, the suspect's personal information, such as his user name, real name, e-mail addresses and home address.

"You would imagine that subscriber data aren't simply handed over. They have to be provided when the police has a valid demand or court order, but not in any other case. (...) You can also wonder whether police can use that information if it was acquired this way," said Gerrit-Jan Zwenne, a professor of Law and Information Society in Leiden and a lawyer at Bird & Bird in The Hague.

Skype spokesman reaffirmed that the company was taking privacy very seriously and there would be an investigation in the matter. "It is our policy not to provide customer data unless we are served with valid request from legal authorities, or when legally required to do so, or in the event of a threat to physical safety."

Truth about Green Harddrives

Good advice from an Anandtech poster:

Western Digital BLACK or RED is a minimal consumer drive quality level to be used in any application, and anything less reliable should never be graced with your dollars. Less reliable drives lasting for years in some particular situations is largely a myth - it happens only if certain criteria are meet, namely, low loads and small temp cycling, which rarely occurs in the real world of consumer computing. When looking at Western Digital drives, always stay away from GREEN and BLUE drives, simply because components are designed to last only under certain special conditions, and I believe these special operating conditions in practical terms are just a myth. In essence these manufacturers (marketing honchos) give credence to conditions of "LOW THERMAL CYCLING", which they then decree is a significant portion of the market place, when in reality it really does not exist, and only gives them an excuse to design "only as good as needed" devices. The existence of the low quality drives permits them to charge more than they normally could for the better drives. Don't believe the hype, the more expensive drives are required for good reliability and performance.

Don't ever buy too cheap, if you want to avoid repeated disk crashes, and there is nothing wrong with periodically replacing working drives with new ones periodically to avoid the inevitable disk crashes. Even good drives eventually fail. If the manufacturer specifies a 3y warranty, then replace the drives every 2 years.