Yes but as the supply of oil dwindles it will approach a point where it's more expensive to extract than it costs to use a substitute. At that point we'll be "out" of oil but there will still be plenty left in the Earth.
Good ol' fracking! Who needs to do expensive things like drill holes and pump in fillers to displace the stuff we're trying to harvest? Let's just smash the lithosphere like a dinner plate on the slate floor and collect all the goodies that pour out!
It's not like we actually need that land to grow food on or anything.
Actually we have an embarrassment of land to grow food on. Its fair to examine the wisdom in that tradeoff. At some point it becomes untenable, but right now actually we're doing OK. E.g. Iowa can grow enough food to feed 2 United States.
Yes. But for example, the amount of nuclear fuel that is extractable is enough to power us for >>1000 years, even if it would be used replace all other forms of energy. Such as using nuclear to make artificial gasoline.
I think that would be enough time to figure out fusion. Or put wind and solar everywhere.
But we seem to be stuck, paralysed in our fight to solve everything with impossible requirements.
Fight AGW, NO nuclear, and keep the standard of living (or even increase it). All at the same time.
Personally, I would rather relax the second requirement.
All planet-based resources; all non-renewable resources. Some are near-infinite over time, others near-infinite over space. A system-spanning civilization would have many orders of magnitude more resources than our one tiny M-class world.
As soon as anyone knows, they are going to use that info however they see fit. Probably getting their own house in order before spreading the news, to not put themselves at risk.
However, even though spouting a conspiracy theory is a faux pas here, I can't help but wonder if the "he who smelt it, dealt it" rule applies here. Lets say your country were to setup a network interconnecting major research institutions, etc. After its use takes off and it is obvious that everyone is going to be communicating over this new medium in a short amount of time, you see the value in keeping tabs on people. You decide that it is in your best interest to put backdoors into encryption algorithms in enterprise communication software. So you see there are these guys that have become the place that everyone is starting to go to find what they are looking for. This is a good place to be. You eventually get your hands on this also. It's a waste of time and energy to constantly be decrypting everyone's messages, so what the hell- let's put a backdoor in that also. Everything is going well. Wait... ok, we should have thought of that. Another country now knows about this vulnerability and it hasn't been publicized, which means they will start using it to spy on contractors that work for us. We'd better leak this information so everyone fixes their hole. Let's tell Google. We're already on good terms with them.
I always like reading historical analysis, but have a few questions:
> We did a bad job of distributing the wealth generated by that.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Do you mean that those that profited did not reinvest in stocks that may have helped companies grow and provide jobs? Or, that the government did not tax enough to pay its own staff and overhead and then redistribute via programs that do not necessarily target the areas that really need it? Or that they should have given that money to churches and other charities to distribute?
The reason I ask is that there are few pure redistribution models. The closest are some churches and charities, but they typically still have some overhead deducted. The next best can be stock investment, as, depending on the companies, that money is in large part repaid in the form of raises or new jobs. The least efficient is ofter government, because accountability is limited to the % wasted in the process of providing services, unlike capitalism where competition provides accountability; if you do poorly, you don't survive, unless a government bails you out.
> What happened to agricultural commodities in the 1920s is happening to nearly all human labor now. And that's pretty terrifying.
Could you expand on that and provide some references?
Now, 2-3%. One in 4 people had their profession superseded. A lot of that slack was taken up by industry (and war and death), but that took 20-30 years to catch up.
Is there a pool of work for people to absorb 25% of the present labor force? Most of the emerging technologies I see are labor-saving, not labor consuming.
Two possibilities for big labor demand in the next few decades:
- healthcare and assistance for the elderly
- removing development restrictions in booming cities, unleashing an epic (or Chinese-level) building boom
Both have fundamental political foundations and won't be solved solely by technology.
> removing development restrictions in booming cities, unleashing an epic (or Chinese-level) building boom
Which would be interesting because it is debatable whether we have the resources for that.
On one hand, we have people like Tim Worstall of Forbes claiming that we will never run out of metals that would be used in a building boom, because innovation reduces and replaces use of existing metals, e.g. modern day pennies use steel and a copper coating:
Although, I think Tim takes a lot of liberty with his assessments, like his recent wild speculation that humanity could never populate another star system because it would take too many people to preserve our culture: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/04/07/perhaps-c...
On the other hand, in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_ore#Available_iron_ore_res... it states that Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute has suggested iron ore could run out within 64 years based on an extremely conservative extrapolation of 2% growth per year, and so if there were a boom, innovation to replace use of iron ore as a structural component would be required.
> sort of like two-factor authentication without the two-factor?
If you don't have 2-factor, which most sites don't, then it is 1-factor. This is replacing that 1-factor with another 1-factor.
> So how do I login to my email account for example if I need to login first to my email and get the temporary password? It's a chicken and egg problem.
You are taking him too literally. While he did say it could replace passwords, he obviously didn't mean email auth. Email auth would probably still require a password. Since many have their email password saved, they may not usually have to enter that anyway, most of the time.
> Somewhat flawed idea in theory, even more horrible in practice. I hope this doesn't become a real thing. I will refuse to use any site that implements this flawed passwordless solution.
You've not presented any valid argument against it. Why is it flawed? If it is horrible in practice then why do many companies use SMS as secondary auth (for the "2" in 2-factor)?
>why do many companies use SMS as secondary auth (for the "2" in 2-factor)?
Because they don't know about TOTP or HOTP, and they instead decided to use a terribly insecure protocol as the basis for user authentication? The onus is on you to prove SMS is better than a shared secret + a nonce.
Ok, valid point- to clarify, when I said 2-factor SMS, I was assuming a 30-second TOTP like Google's.
If you don't use TOTP, someone can login to your account just by knowing the password which they can use from almost anywhere. If you were to only use TOTP, they'd need your phone. To me them stealing your phone is tougher than stealing or guessing your password.
That is exactly the point. The author is proposing we replace one thing with another which doesn't fix the problem. There'll just be some other vulnerability with a passwordless approach we'll have to work around. I don't see the point to be honest. Passwords aren't what make web applications and services insecure, nor are they any more of a risk than say sending a user a temporary code to enter to login.
I am taking him somewhat literally because the author and the sensationalist title saying passwords are obsolete. As you pointed out yourself, passwords are not obsolete because how else are we going to login to our email to get our temporary passcodes (if sent to our email)? Any solution which pitches itself like: well you would use it for everything except for the one thing you most likely would care about protecting over everything else, your email.
My argument against this approach is it doesn't solve the problem. Those generated passcodes are being stored somewhere on the server-side, correct? How is what the author proposing any different to that of a securely hashed password? Replace hashed password with hashed temporary code and you get the same results: they're both passwords when you view this proposed solution on a technical level.
To quote a few parts of the article:
Passwords are obsolete because of email and SMS. Specifically, the ability to send an email or SMS to users reliably and quickly. In theory, we’ve had that ability for a long time.
Sending our a passcode via SMS which the author seems to be a fan of costs money. Unless you're the likes of Google, Facebook or Twitter, implementing a solution that costs real money on an already tight-budgeted service is most likely at the bottom of your priority list, if you have thousands of users logging in daily, that's a lot of cash being spent, even if an SMS is cents on the dollar. Why would I implement a solution that is for people too lazy to use a password manager or use strong passwords for the various web services they use?
Adding in functionality that requires use of a third party service also doesn't sit well with me. I have to trust that Twilio or whomever is sending out these SMS's have a secure service that isn't going to allow the wrong people to get passcodes sent from the website because of some API flaw nobody has discovered yet (or heartbleed like attack).
But the recent Heartbleed bug highlights the fact that hacking password reset flows for convenience is not good enough. We need to convince websites to stop using passwords altogether.
As I pointed out, this temporary passcode approach isn't truly passwordless. A hash is being generated on the server side, stored in a database awaiting a user to login. The difference being the server is generating the passcode for you and you're trusting that passcode is secure enough.
The problem is that getting email or SMS and having to type that code in every time, then deleting that email/SMS, manually is less convenient that using a password manager.
You can have an "authentication email manager" just like password managers, but then what have we solved exactly? Nothing.
Except that emails, when used as mass-authentication device, will become an even more attractive target to hackers. In most cases accounts are exploited namely via their email password recovery, not via their password.
Email/SMS are an ok layer when used as a second factor, but on their own, they are less secure than a strong password. While logins are HTTPS, email is plain text, so is SMS.
Heartbleed is an exception. Dropping passwords over Heartbleed is precisely the same type of overreaction we had after 9/11 when suddenly flying became a nightmare (and still is).
The proper reaction here is: Heartbleed is fixed, and we better put some resources towards vetting and fixing OpenSSL so this doesn't happen again.
No need to build towers of nonsense that assume it'll be Heartbleed every week now for the next 20 years.
You're underestimating the work that's been done in secure password managers in the last few years.
Check the whitepaper Apple published regarding their iCloud Keychain mechanism.
It generates secure passwords, locks them with a passphrase, but also makes them available on all your devices, not just one (which, if it breaks, you're locked out of all your services).
Using hardware for tokens is secure and simple, but it shows a severe lack of imagination. I only see hardware tokens as useful for very high security logins, like bank accounts, where the apparent inconvenience is at least justified.
Funding Monday - where everyone pitches to VC's in the same HN thread.
Trial Tuesday - where everyone provides a link to their demo in the same HN thread.
Writing Wednesday - where everyone writes an informative hacker-related topic on their blog and shares a link to it in the same HN thread.
Throwback Thursday - where people all share something informative about past experiences or past apps/etc. in the same HN thread.
Free Work Friday - where people request work to be done by volunteers to develop their product with a possible chance at employment at some future date all in the same HN thread.
I like some of these ideas. The Trial Tuesday could be a nice way for people to get feedback on their WIP projects and perhaps motivate them to keep up and have weekly updates.
that's a great idea. get together a community who will each publish an update/demo on their project each week on the same thread. I'd certainly be up for joining in; it might shame me out of letting side-projects sit untouched for a month at a time.
No, it's not. It means the relationship between the cofounders is severely damaged. The company may be fine.
Everyone is making the assumption here that what the CTO is doing is wrong. It may have been the right thing to do for the company. It is just the wrong thing for the OP.
I think the OP should lawyer up, try to get fairly compensated for his contributions, and end the relationship.
Business is unemotional. Those that invest their life into a business are emotional. Be true to yourself and it is ok to love what you do and enjoy who you work with and what you work on, but when it comes down to it, it is a job. Founders are no more special than any others. As soon as you start making significant progress from idea to product, ensure that you have clear written contracts setup.
There should really be a site for those beginning their company that provides sample contracts and talk about about the pros and cons of each approach for ensuring that when relationships end, things are handled in manner civil and with prior understanding of how things work. It could only be a good thing, because the incentive will be there to work more effectively in order to contribute in a way that will end in value immediately and/or later, regardless of the outcome. There are a lot of people that specialize in helping people in this regard, but I can't think of a site that is specifically for the purpose I'm speaking of.
> Everyone is making the assumption here that what the CTO is doing is wrong. It may have been the right thing to do for the company. It is just the wrong thing for the OP.
Barring the question of whether the OP is just lying about what's going on (so taking as given that the concerns raised are technical proficiency and that the CTO is asking the OP to leave the company and not just to lay off doing production coding work), I'm curious if you can explain under what circumstances this would be the right thing to do?
Undermining someone like this strikes me as probably almost never the right thing for the company. It's toxic and destroys trust in all directions.
On a related topic, a troubling new trend (to me) is the reliance on passwords being automatically generated/kept by a tool. You are putting your trust in something else for something only you (or a select group) should be trusted with. If everyone were to start doing this or a vulnerability was found in it and exposed, then attackers would exclusively target the tool or the password store, making many at risk.
It is a trade off, because you have the ability to use significantly more complex passwords that are harder to brute force or guess using personal information. Just don't forget that you are providing new attack vectors in the process. If they access your password store and you didn't know about it, how at risk would you be if they were to unlock all of your passwords?
Do you really understand how the password store and password generator work?
> Don't let a user submit a password which doesn't meet your requirements. Use JavaScript to disable the button and highlight the text of your password policy.
If you are going that route, please change last line to:
"Use JavaScript to disable the button and highlight the text of your password policy (in addition to server-side validation)."
However, consider using a "poor password", "good password", "great password" approach that changes as you type and don't have a short max length in your validation, this way you can promote entering sufficient complex passwords of longer length. The best of these I've seen is a "progress bar"-looking thing under the password fields that also uses color changes (just don't use green as bad and red as good, and be aware of color-blindness/blindness) and text under it to describe how good or bad the password is.
Focus a bit on entropy to go with that colored-progress bar I talked about:
"It is usual in the computer industry to specify password strength in terms of information entropy, measured in bits, a concept from information theory. Instead of the number of guesses needed to find the password with certainty, the base-2 logarithm of that number is given, which is the number of "entropy bits" in a password. A password with, say, 42 bits of strength calculated in this way would be as strong as a string of 42 bits chosen randomly, say by a fair coin toss. Put another way, a password with 42 bits of strength would require 242 attempts to exhaust all possibilities during a brute force search. Thus, adding one bit of entropy to a password doubles the number of guesses required, which makes an attacker's task twice as difficult. On average, an attacker will have to try half of the possible passwords before finding the correct one."
That states the limitations thereof, so entropy alone is not good enough:
"Limitations of entropy as a measure of unpredictability
In cryptanalysis, entropy is often roughly used as a measure of the unpredictability of a cryptographic key. For example, a 128-bit key that is randomly generated has 128 bits of entropy. It takes (on average) 2^{128-1} guesses to break by brute force. If the key's first digit is 0, and the others random, then the entropy is 127 bits, and it takes (on average) 2^{127-1} guesses.
However, entropy fails to capture the number of guesses required if the possible keys are not of equal probability.[17][18] If the key is half the time "password" and half the time a true random 128-bit key, then the entropy is approximately 65 bits. Yet half the time the key may be guessed on the first try, if your first guess is "password", and on average, it takes around 2^{126} guesses (not 2^{65-1}) to break this password.
Similarly, consider a 1000000-digit binary one-time pad. If the pad has 1000000 bits of entropy, it is perfect. If the pad has 999999 bits of entropy, evenly distributed (each individual bit of the pad having 0.999999 bits of entropy) it may still be considered very good. But if the pad has 999999 bits of entropy, where the first digit is fixed and the remaining 999999 digits are perfectly random, then the first digit of the ciphertext will not be encrypted at all."
But, even checking for common passwords (search and you can find numerous articles on that), etc. is not good enough. You must also tell people not to use easily guessable personal information in their passwords. Your birthdate, then "$" then your son's name then "$" then his birthdate may have "ok" entropy, but it would be easily hackable for anyone with elementary knowledge about the person.
That starts to get into the fallacy of security questions to reset your password, though. Security questions are terrible, and I cannot believe that financial institutions use them. If you hack the email account and know enough personal info, you bypass the password. That's bad.
But, everything is hackable, eventually. There are no hard rules that cannot be broken. Even our understanding of physics, etc. is incomplete. Anything is possible.
