Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to
Hopefully not this fictional university :)
Ah, but that's Canterbury University, not the University of Canterbury, and those are very, very different things. The UC fencing club used to call itself the CUFC rather than the UCFC until we got a website and Canterbury University in England called to make us take it down. They take it seriously, apparently. Or at least the foilists do. (I'm betting it's the foilists. They believe in rules and stuff.)
I have noticed that the New Zealand media are blithely unaware of this difference, however.
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to
Anyone who has gone to the trouble of making sure they’re in Google is likely to be expensive.
Or they know they're going to get a lot of business that way - the proper international food shop closest to me with the good Indonesian noodles and the Asian Home Gourmet curry packets is very easy to find with Google Maps, because obviously they get a tonne of business from homesick international students who are likely to turn to the Internet. OTOH, when I tried to find a bakery, I couldn't find one for love or money (it kept sending me to bagel shops and cafes.) Its reliability is quite varied.
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to
I just entered 'convenience store' in my phone and google pointed me to a bunch of local 7-elevens (and one Star Mart - they're not as common but they exist). I'd imagine it would do similar things in Auckland?
Star Marts I'll grant you, dairies I'd be doubtful of - Google Maps tends to be a lot dodgier the smaller/more local the store. Besides, unless things have changed a lot in the past year, smartphones still aren't *that* common in NZ. If they had that free WiFi everyone's wishing for....in a few years, maybe. And it still does sound like there's a call for a convenience type-store in that particular location.
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to
And there is a massive Starmart at the base of the Crab – the old AHB building – anyway, about a 10 min walk away.
Which would be a pretty acceptable solution *if people could find it*. Dairies just aren't the sort of thing that end up on maps. (Plus, overseas visitors aren't even going to know what a "StarMart" is if it was marked somewhere.) If you could find some way to convey that information to the people who needed it - or, I'm not familiar with the geography of the area, the place is one people are inevitably going to pass on the way there - that's fine, but otherwise...
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to
The location means for six months the proprietors will probably get away with a continuous supply of first time customers, but after that I would hope reality sets in. Didn’t this happen in the Viaduct?
Well, depends. If somewhere gets enough of a reputation as a place to be seen, as opposed to a place to eat good food - or into guidebooks for tourists - I imagine it could sustain that business model for quite some time.
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Hard News: Steve, 1999, in reply to
Strikes me as an extremely unlikely thing to happen. The cost would not be great. The cost of entering long passwords adds up every day.
As Stephen says, identity theft is a real concern. Not as much in NZ as the States, but it's there. And there are a number of very nifty tools for minimizing password re-entry on, for example, home computers (Firefox's master password tool, frex.) Of course, that password then needs to be high-security, but for that sort of usage there are plenty of hardcopy options for storage, and remembering *one* complex password on a regular basis is a much simpler proposition.
Ultimately, of course, all security is a risk/cost analysis; what's the risk of a breach and what's the cost of stopping it? There are some pretty crazy password policies out there in the name of security that inevitably result in bypasses. Twenty random characters, changed every sixty days, never repeated, that sort of thing, which is fine if you work for the SIS or whoever, but ludicrous for pretty much everyone else.
There's a middle ground somewhere. It's different for everyone, and different for work vs. home and for different types of work. Personally, I live with someone who is paid to lovingly maintain his tinfoil hat in regards to these matters, so I will never be allowed to live it down if anyone ever hacks any computer-related account I have, no matter the actual result. I have lots of incentive to care.
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to
Yep – That is standard for pretty much any waterfront restaurant around the world. Overpriced decidedly average or worse food.
Isn't there some saying about an inverse relationship between a restaurant's views and the quality of its dining experience?
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“It kinda needs a StarMart,” observed Nigel from The Down Low.
It’s a shocking thing to say, but … yeah, it kinda does.
There are actually few things more vexing than being in a town - or part of a town - and not being able to find a dairy when you need one. They can be fiendishly difficult to locate if they're not in a prominent place or you're not familiar with the area - or you don't know that there isn't one at all.
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Hard News: Steve, 1999, in reply to
Password security? Cracks me up how much people obsess about it. Only my bank account is even worth bothering on a strong password, and even then, it does lock up after 3 failed attempts anyway, and sends me a text.
There are plenty of things for which password security is not hugely important. But I'd venture that there's a few more things than your bank account deserving of some attention to security. If nothing else, having something like your Facebook or Google account hacked might not be extremely costly, but it is really fucking annoying. (And can be used for some very malicious things.)
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Hard News: Steve, 1999, in reply to
If you choose a five word password from a 40,000 word vocabulary you get ~10^23 total passwords. To get the same security from an ascii password you’d have to have to remember 12 random characters.
Using random words as a password works better than random characters because people are better at remembering a sequence of random words than a sequence of random characters.
Which would work, if the average person had a 40,000 word vocabulary. They don’t. Most people use well under 10,000 words on a regular basis, and then we’re back to the whole remembering words you aren’t familiar with thing, and the ease-of-use is gone.
And then you get the real danger, which is the thought “I have a super secret password, I’ll just use it on everything!” In a lot of ways password re-use is actually the biggest problem, arguing about levels of entropy is just rearranging the deck-chairs. Having the most secure password in the entire world is worthless if the website you use it on is selling user credentials, or your computer is compromised.
I used “swiddening” because it’s a word I learned yesterday. I do think that’s a reason why working vocabulary limits aren’t the problem Lucy thinks they might be. I see no reason why I’ll ever use “swiddening” more than once a decade, but it’s now a VERY memorable word for me.
But let’s be realistic – you’re hardly likely to be an average person in terms of either common vocabulary or memory. And can you remember a different sentence like that for every important website you have a password for?