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Comment: pay for use (Score 1) 191

by Seth024 (#45686085) Attached to: Why Cloud Infrastructure Pricing Is Absurd

Is there a cloud service provider that allows complete usage-based payment? Where you don't select how much storage/computing/bandwith you need when you select your plan but at the end of the month you have to pay for whatever you used.

Maybe my website only needs a few Mb/s of data transfer, but if a video suddenly goes viral, the cloud provider can automatically increase the bandwith to my website. And at the end of the month I only have to pay for whatever data upload/download I used. (and similar for cpu cycles, data storage and memory use)

Comment: Finally. (Score 1) 88

by Seth024 (#37184846) Attached to: Facebook Makes Privacy Settings More Obvious

"Another change Facebook is introducing is allowing users to modify the audience of a post after it's published, which they couldn't do before."

Finally. Why did this have to take so long to implement? I was considering deleting all posts I made that were viewable by everyone to clean up my profile for future job interviews. Luckily now I don't have to.

Comment: Re:Really, no salt? (Score 2) 308

by Seth024 (#36338192) Attached to: Hacker Group LulzSec Challenges FBI

Your math is correct if you want to know how many entries it would take to cover the entire hash space.
However more advanced tables don't store all entries. (rainbow tables)

In short: they repeatedly hash a word and turn the hash into another word. After many of these iterations they store the word they started with and the word they end up with. If you want to look up a hash, repeatedly turn it into a word and hash it until you find a word that's in the table. They you can start off at the starting word of that chain and continue until you end up at the password you were looking for.

It saves you a ton of storage space.

Comment: Re:Maybe 3-SAT isn't NP-complete (Score 1) 700

by Seth024 (#34948054) Attached to: Polynomial Time Code For 3-SAT Released, P==NP

I believe it was based on the NP-completeness of the general SAT.

1) 3SAT is a special case of SAT so it's also NP.
2) A SAT problem can be reduced to 3SAT (add some variables to it: x||y becomes x||y||z && x||y||NOTz (similar for clauses with 1, 4, 5, 6... numbers of literals)
3) the reduction is clearly done in polynomial time

Comment: Re:And how many people actually protect their phon (Score 1) 154

by Seth024 (#34900524) Attached to: Smartphone As Your Most Dangerous Possession

Yes the iPhone 4 has full device encryption but Android phones don't. A thief can root a phone and read all unencrypted data from it when connecting it to a computer. example:
There are a number of open issues about it on the google android site; ex.

Comment: Re:Pretty simple. (Score 1) 728

by Seth024 (#34144250) Attached to: Considering a Fair Penalty For Illegal File-sharing

Sure I'm already paying levies on blank media (€9 for a TB HD and €0.59 per DVD (yes that's 60% of the retail price)) here in Belgium.

However, it's still illegal to download or upload a song or movie.
The levy is just used to "compensate" for making copies of copyrightable material. Yes, for personal copies/backups of the data.

Comment: Re:Talk about censorship (Score 2, Informative) 306

by Seth024 (#33703056) Attached to: Pentagon Makes Good On Plan To Destroy Critical Book
From the article of the original slashdotted article (

"Shaffer's book was reviewed and cleared in writing by the Army Reserve earlier this year."

They did clear it. Afterwards they realized they forgot something and are paying for the damages of the first run.

Science is what happens when preconception meets verification.