4 ms·
> Recovering the key was usually instantaneous, but to help people feel like they’d gotten their money’s worth, we’d put on a little animated show like a Hollyw
by aazaa 7y ago
> Recovering the key was usually instantaneous, but to help people feel like they’d gotten their money’s worth, we’d put on a little animated show like a Hollywood hacking scene with lots of random characters that gradually revealed the right password.
and later ...
> I’m currently looking for work in a staff or senior staff engineering or data scientist role. If you’ve got interesting technical analysis or optimization problems, please reach out to me and let’s talk.
I can't help but wonder if this write-up (which is fascinating) may not be one of those little animated shows to help propspective employers feel like they'll get their money's worth.
- njsubedi 7y agoThat animation was 20 years ago. The author probably has different priorities now?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- metaweta 7y agoThat little animation was put there by the guy who hired me. We got rid of it in the Password Recovery ToolKit that combined all the modules I'd written into a single tool. In that one, we had a big list of any encrypted files we found and their passwords. With enough modules, it was entertaining enough to watch the list grow. And it was very satisfying when the user reused a password on something trivial to crack that let us open a Word 97 file.
- hippich 7y agoSlightly offtopic, but I always laughed at these types of animations in hacker movies. Until one day I made a tool to extract strings (mostly passwords or hashes, purely for academic purposes!) through SQL injections in SQL Server when the error message did not return anything useful. I scanned each character bit by bit and depending on the value, I would either return control immediately or delay the response by a couple of hundred ms. That allowed me to reconstruct the string bit by bit, and as new information was acquired for each character - it would change on the screen. It looked exactly like some of these hacker movie scenes... =)
- DangitBobby 7y agoThat's an incredibly cynical take.
- logarhythmic 7y agoRight? Jesus...
- Thorrez 7y agoThe animated show isn't useful. This article is useful because it actually reveals information about the author. Also even if you're not interested in the author, it has useful information about cryptography, cryptanalysis, and optimization.
- afiori 7y agothe animated show is useful, it is part of the UX and it can be focal in communicating the intention and expectation behind the software. it is not part of the main business logic but neither are well designed icons.