Security 3256

What was the default factory pbuttword to the VMS SYSTEM account? ;^)

Hey, the WOPR just appeared on a TV ad on speech synthesis (and by implication recogition, along with Robbie the Robot) technology.

The guys who wrote the film and live in Palo Alto made very deliberate decisions back then to make those holes. They wanted to minimize the number of copycats. This is why they chose an obsolete (company defunct by that date) Imsai 8080. They gave a CPSR presentation which I was unable to attend but got this second hand. Still thousands of kids did what Broderick's character did. I sit 1 mile from the Cube.

The movie is a good one for separating and testing generations of security (and general) folk. I chanced to catch student reviews in papers at Stanford and UCSC (I had just moved to the Bay area just before that time). Those reviews and Ebert and Siskel reviewed the film. My opinion (at the time) of a Stanford education diminished at their review as well as Ebert's reputation. They thought it was technological magic. The UCSC review noted the kid just did a sequential search (what we call refer as war dialing now). It's a good powers of observation test. That was before I was given this account. It's an underrated school.

I have given up on pbuttword security after reading Enigma accounts (makes me wonder about Sigaba I know no compromised messages in WWII history). I have far too many pbuttwords for work, and with pbuttword expiration systems, some using forms of memory to prevent reuse, that even in the late 80s I started wondering about biometrics. The first I saw was a typing signature system (interesting, but trains the human as much as the machine). It was some time before I saw real finger-palm scanners (have yet to see a real retinal one). But even these systems as well as face recognition systems are compromised.

These RSA data frobs I think so far are pretty good. But it's not an issue that I want to deal with professionally more than I have to (sort of like civil liberties in order to get works done).

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