My favorite is to click on the pictures with crosswalk, traffic lights, cars etc. and it is one picture cut into 9 pieces. So is that piece with the corner of the traffic light in it a yes or a no?
I always treat it as a ‘yes.’ It’s worked so far.
The bottom right corner looks like part of a traffic light but does it count? Whoever puts these together is an idiot.
Surely it must be auto-generated in terms of what falls within what square – nothing thought-out in advance – but then the “correct” answer is a popularity contest; you just have to guess what you think others guessed. Hence the anxiety sweat.
And whoever designed that system is an idiot.
I’m a designated timekeeper and do pretty much the same thing for the employees on my list when the password for their virtual timecard stops working. Usually they simply forget what it is but recently one emailed me and the timekeeping help desk so they ended up with two temporary passwords.
Some years ago, California came out with a new license plate font in which you needed a magnifying glass to tell O from Q. That was quickly fixed, and subsequent plates had a huge tail on the Qs.
Cloudflare encryption using lava lamps.
//www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/lava-lamp-encryption/
Or am I being whoooosssed?
It’s plausible. And “lava lamp encryption” will get attention which is good for a business.
I wrote code for a game once that would generate random numbers from a seed derived from a fraction of a second on the clock when the player started the game. Because that will be truly random. Getting real randomness on a computer often relies on borrowing from the analog world, because true digital randomness is hard.
Tom Scott video on the process.
Yup. Raindrops might work as an analog input. Lava lamps are cooler though…
Actually I think 2FA is an effective security augmentation that in many cases is quite necessary, but I agree that incompetent IT types can create bad implementations.
I was initially pissed off that Gmail discontinued its simple password-only login capability (the one where you had to check “allow login from less secure devices”) and instead required Oauth or “Google login” authentication, because I (and others I know) cannot easily upgrade our current POP3/IMAP clients to Oauth2.
Fortunately, Gmail did it right by also offering a 2FA option as an alternative, along with a device-specific password. The 2FA authentication is only required once, for the first time for each device, and subsequently never again for a device that’s already authenticated. It’s simple, effective, and non-intrusive.
I don’t have any particular issues with 2FA, but the difficulty of login sometimes seems to inversely correlate with how secure something should be. What’s obnoxious about Google is that they seem to have grandfathered in old accounts, but new ones forced it. I’m sure there’s better services for managing shared accounts, but that’s what I’m given.
None of these handle VPNs well, not sure if they should, but it’s a hassle for sure.
Random enough for a game, sure. Not remotely random enough for cryptography. If the clock ticks over every millisecond, and you can figure out down to a minute when the user started the program, that’s only 60,000 possibilities to check, easy for a brute-force method. Get it down to an hour, and it’s still only 3.6 million.
What I have seen is that the operating system constantly “harvests” entropy, or a specific application will even ask you to randomly bang on the keyboard, and the resulting entropy is distilled into random bits. I admit to having used the clock trick myself, though, because in some applications the pseudo-random samples are not required to be truly random.
I think I was writing in QBASIC, or Pascal. I was a kid. 
Ummm, gang? Those gotchas are designed by the very robots who are plotting our demise… this is how they’re learning about traffic lights.
Next: “Select all squares that show places where humans might hide.”
Not sure I should be typing this, even in my home … (Alexa was way too interested in this thread, so I dropped her in a vat of molten steel before replying here…)
You fool! The nanocircuits will be embedded in whatever is made from that steel! You’ve doomed us all!
Uh, oh… it was a paperclip factory. Those little nanoclips will soon be everywhere…
Ehh… I’m okay with that.