Area51, here be raliens

În trecutul recent am petrecut ceva timp în Hale Manoa - un cămin din campusul universității din Hawaii, unde am venit pentru a contribui la programul lor de securitate informațională.

Căminul este foarte user-friendly, dar are câteva lucruri bizare, despre unul din ele Îți povestesc chiar acum.

Cum am pășit în clădire pentru prima dată, am decis că e timpul să plec la WC. Eram foarte obosit și pe lângă toate astea am trecut printr-o aventură cu cardul bancar, care a fost blocat; cu telefonul mobil - care nu mai avea credit; și cu banii gheață - pe care nu-i aveam (-:

Am găsit camera mea, apoi am studiat ceea ce se află lângă dânsa, am găsit o ușă cu inscripția ”women” (femei).

Read more »

Pages: 1· 2

Eu cred că un curs de literatură ar fi mult mai zmeuriu dacă elevii nu ar fi impuși să învețe poeziile pentru ca mai apoi să le recite. Chiar crezi că poetul a scris ce a scris pentru ca mai apoi să urmărească cum un suflet rătăcit în propria-i memorie încearcă să-și amintească niște cuvinte?

Nu pun la îndoială faptul că antrenarea memoriei în așa fel e un lucru bun în viață, dar sunt sigur că asta dezbate entuziasmul din unii elevi, care poate că sunt interesați în analiza poeziei și interpretarea acesteia... Însă necesitatea de a memoriza un text îi distrage de la partea zmeurie - dezvoltarea empatiei prin încercarea de a înțelege starea eului liric, studiul cuvintelor noi și extinderea propriului vocabular, dezvoltarea gândirii analitice, conștientizarea faptului că alți colegi tălmăcesc altfel același text, etc. Aceste abilități chiar îți prind bine în viață și în relațiile personale.

Mai mult ca atât, sunt sigur că mulți elevi nu sunt pregătiți pentru informația pe care le-o comunică autorii. Ce pot să știu eu la 15 ani despre sentimentele lui Eminescu, când prima dată am ținut de mână o fată la vre-o 22 ani? Da... Desigur, scriam și eu comentarii cu idei de genul ”poetul exprimă durere profundă”, dar... Numai după ce am trecut și eu prin stări similare, [cred că] am înțeles seriozitatea situației. Îmi dau seama că atunci scriam ceea ce știam că vor să audă profii, nu ceea ce simțeam (pentru că nu simțeam - adică eram un nesimțit).

Read more »

Have you ever read an email? I bet you were about to say "yes!", but I assure you that you most likely have not.

What you've read is just what the sender wanted you to see. Emails are not delivered to your computer screen by some magical force, the process invloves various transformations that are applied to the email while it is en route. The real thing looks different, and it contains various details that indicate how the message travelled across the globe before it reached you.

I will reveal some of the details about how it works, and explain how this can be used to track anonymous messages. While the story itself is in plain English, there are some technical quirks that I'll include for the geeks in the audience; feel free to skip those and look at the pictures instead.

Read more »

Many moons ago, if you happened to see a nice girl, it would take many weeks of "hanging out in the same area" at different times of the day, hoping that chance would intersect your paths again.

You would ruminate on that memory of her fading in and out of your view. You would keep guessing and imagining who she is, what she does and what kind of music she prefers.

And maybe... maybe, if you were a good guy (take the trash out, keep the house clean, do your homework and help your neighbors), the planets would align in your favour and you'd get the chance to have another glance at her fair face.

***

All you have to do today is sift your friends' photographs and look for that charming smile.

You will shortly find out her name and see that you have 19 friends in common. In 10 minutes you will know which other countries she visited, which movies she likes, where she studied, where and with whom she works.

If you get lucky (I did), she'll show up at the top of your news-feed, tagged in the photo of someone you know.

After a few more clicks, you might even see a pic of her handsome boyfriend and discover that she's friends with the people you were in a relationship with :-)

Welcome to the present! Mwahahaha!

A Railean well is a hypothetical structure designed to trap humans who chose regeneration as their super-power. Typically, this is achieved by adding ε to whatever limit the trapped person can overcome.

Read more »

An interesting thing happened to me a few days ago. I was browsing the web and studying our competitors and their offers - business as usual.

I bumped into several companies that promise to recover deleted SMS - just like one of Dekart's programs does (Dekart is my employer). Being one of the people behind the product, and having conducted all sorts of recovery experiments - I know that not any deleted SMS can be restored. There are many factors that influence your chance of success and I won't discuss them here (see this video if you're interested).

After reading the promo-materials written with a great deal of self-confidence, I asked myself whether they can do something our software cannot, so I wrote an email to several companies, asking if they could help me with my problem - an accidentally deleted SMS, which contained very very important information.

I would like to highlight one of the responses:

As I read it, I realize that it is very familiar; in fact - I am looking at my own text! Take a look at the original article that explains how SMS recovery works (it's OK, it has pictures :-).

I highlighted two spots in 'their' response, that's not something I would write. I checked that in my article - yep, my version was different:

• its own way - I wrote "each phone manufacturer has it their way"; I guess we went to different schools :-)
• see for yourself - my bad, I wrote "see yourself", which is incorrect. It is funny, because just a few days ago my sister pointed out this mistake in a description I wrote for a disk encryption program (see the last remark about a straightforward interface).

It would have been nice if they told me about "see for yourself", but alas, that's business as usual ;-)

p.s. SIM Manager is the best way to read the SIM card and recover deleted texts from it, have no doubts about it. Even the competition relies on our competence to get their act together, see for yourself :-)

Anul acesta am fost printre echipele care au organizat prima etapă a jocului Ce? Unde? Cînd?.

Acestea sunt întrebările generate de echipa noastră. O parte din ele au fost introduse în pachetul de întrebări care a fost jucat, însă majoritatea lor au fost transformate. Aici sunt publicate variantele originale, i.e. nu toate sună așa cum au sunat în timpul jocului.

Spoiler alert: Răspunsurile sunt date la urmă (pe o altă pagină, va mai fi necesar încă un click).

Read more »

Pages: 1· 2

Disclaimer: to protect the identity of those involved in the story, all the names wer

Many moons ago, an unusual thing happened to me.

I got a call from a girl (if you are not surprised by now, keep reading). Her voice was unknown to me, so were her intentions. The conversation started with a standard exchange of "Hello" and "Hello back", "What's up?" and "The sky". I realized that the caller was someone I did not know, not a friend who was just fooling around.

The conversation took a path that I do not remember exactly. It wasn't personal [not about relationships], nor was it absolutely impersonal, so I prefer to call it "personalish". That is, a very light version of "personal", something you do when you're just getting to know someone. Not too warm, but not as cold as asking a random stranger "Which year is this?" or "What is the name of the planet we're on?".

I could hear another voice in the background, another girl giving hints to her friend, the misterious caller. "Hmmmm", I thought.

The conversation took an unexpected turn. She asked me if I had "Macromedia Flash 5" :-)

Allow me put things into perspective - this was happening in an era in which the Internet was not ubiquitous, at least not in these parts. Heck, even computers were rare; only a handful of people in my class had one. In contrast, today even my neighbor's cat has a blog, and stray dogs coordinate their actions via #eatcyclists on Twitter; but I digress...
Internet was expensive and slow, downloading files was a pain because connections were unreliable. Advanced people used browsers that could be configured not to load images, they also used download managers to squeeze everything out of a dial-up connection, but it still took time to send a byte from point A to point B. The bit-torrent protocol was not born yet. A boy's dream was not "unlimited traffic and a great bandwidth", it was "unlimited callback".

I told her I didn't have it, but I would ask around and find it for her.

Looking back at that conversation, I cannot recall all the details. Maybe I was too dumb to ask her phone number, or maybe I did find the courage to do so, but she said "No, I'll call you tomorrow". Maybe I did ask her name, but she refused to tell me? Or maybe she did - and her name was Aliona or Alina? Certainly, it ended with an 'a'.

She never called me back.

Moral of the story:

• since then I make sure the home phones have caller-ID;
• I always keep a fresh copy of "Macromedia Flash 5", just in case.

Be prepared! [Russian version]

Short-circuit evaluation is a trick that saves time and resources. The idea is very simple - if a decision requires multiple conditions to be true, there is no need to continue analyzing the case if at least one of them is false.

This is often used in programming and engineering (the resulting program works faster, the circuit is smaller and cheaper, etc), it is also used in relationships. My observations also tell me that this is a common source of misunderstandings between men and women.

Read more »