A person-woman-man-camera-TV just announced his new creation - DiceKeys. The point is that you roll a set of 25 special dice, each with 6 sides I presume, that will land in a truly random pattern that can be scanned using a custom application, that will then interpret the orientation and faces of these dice and generate a master key with lots of entropy, about 2¹⁹⁶. That is the same entropy of an alphanumeric password of 33 characters [a-z, A-Z, 0-9] which is 62³³.

But why overcomplicate something already so confusing to most people as good security? He claims you can place a lid on the box and preserve the layout of the dice as a secure way to store your dice keys.

However there is absolutely no added security compared to writing a secure 33 character password on a piece of paper and storing it where you would have stored the DiceKeys. Ink will last a long, long time. As far as getting a good secure password? Easy. If you really want to use a mechanically random method, write the letters a to z, A to Z and 0 - 9 on small pieces of paper. Toss them in a basket. Cover the basket and shuffle them by shaking the basket. With the cover on, pick a piece of paper. Write it down, return it and repeat 32 more times. There is your person-woman-man-camera-TV über secure password.

I have a client with ESET Security Management Center 7.1 installed and try to upgrade to 7.2 using the Upgrade task within the web console. That failed with no reason. So I tried downloading the installer and upgrading it that way, but it still failed.

In the log file of the installer I saw that when it was connecting to the database it complained that the ODBC string did not contain the database name (no MySQL database selected). After lots of probing (the console worked, it had a valid connection to the DB) I decided to take the DSN in startupconfiguration.ini and change it from:

DatabaseConnectionString=Driver=MySQL ODBC 5.3 Unicode Driver;Server=SERVER;Port=3306;User=USER; ↩
  Password=PASSWORD;CharSet=utf8;NO_LOCALE=1;Database=era_db 

I just read this exert from an article:

According to NASA, that tail is 5 km long, so it might be surprising that it’s not visible to the unaided eye, but considering the closest it will get is 10 million km from earth, it’s impressive we can see anything at all.

That sounded like a lot of crap, as it will be impossible to see something 5km long from a distance such as that of the comet from the earth.

It feels to me like borderline criminal.

I get that with time we as a species become more informed - be that science or humanitarian. 105 years ago we figured out that space is not static. About 39 years ago the last country (supposedly) officially abandoned slavery, generally considered inhumane and wrong under our collective set of norms and values. 25 years ago we discovered the first exoplanet. 107 years ago we discovered the ozone layer, which we started to destroy (unknowingly) about 130 years ago when we starting pumping CFC's into the atmosphere. Only 44 years ago we realised we did something naughty, potentially killing us all, and started implementing measures to ban the use of CFCs which leads us to today, when most evidence suggests the ozone layer is healing. Same goes for asbestos, lead, mercury, radioactive materials and so on.

However, these days, "In the year 2020 when men are still alive" (yeah that is misquoted), we now have to perform complex symmetry rotations and transformations to a lot of what we used to believe was common knowledge:

1. Gender, sex, and sexual orientation and romantic orientation are four different constructs, not necessarily related at all.
2. Sex can be:
   • Male
   • Female
   • Intersex
3. Gender can be:
   • Agender
   • Androgyne
   • Androgynous
   • Bigender
   • Cis
   • Cisgender
   • Cis Female
   • Cis Male
   • Cis Man
   • Cis Woman
   • Cisgender Female
   • Cisgender Male
   • Cisgender Man
   • Cisgender Woman
   • Female to Male
   • FTM
   • Gender Fluid
   • Gender Nonconforming
   • Gender Questioning
   • Gender Variant
   • Genderqueer
   • Intersex
   • Male to Female
   • MTF
   • Neither
   • Neutrois
   • Non-binary
   • Other
   • Pangender
   • Trans
   • Trans*
   • Trans Female
   • Trans* Female
   • Trans Male
   • Trans* Male
   • Trans Man
   • Trans* Man
   • Trans Person
   • Trans* Person
   • Trans Woman
   • Trans* Woman
   • Transfeminine
   • Transgender
   • Transgender Female
   • Transgender Male
   • Transgender Man
   • Transgender Person
   • Transgender Woman
   • Transmasculine
   • Transsexual
   • Transsexual Female
   • Transsexual Male
   • Transsexual Man
   • Transsexual Person
   • Transsexual Woman
   • Two-Spirit
4. Sexual and romantic orientation can be:
   • Heterosexual
   • Homosexual
   • Lesbian
   • Bisexual
   • Pansexual
   • Bicurious
   • Polysexual
   • Monosexual
   • Allosexual
   • Androsexual
   • Gynosexual
   • Questioning
   • Asexual
   • Demisexual
   • Grey Asexual
   • Perioriented
   • Varioriented
   • Heteronormative
   • Erasure
   • Cishet
   • Polyamorous
   • Monoamorous
   • Queer
   • Ally