She must be a hasher

bad-decision-bearsOnly a hasher would think this is a great idea:

Hero: Unable to carry on, woman chugs entire bottle of cognac at airport security

Consider this your evening palate cleanser, appropriately alcohol- and China-related in light of today’s drink-inducing rollercoaster ride on Wall Street.  Sorry aspirants — this year’s Alcohol Olympics are over, and we have ourselves an undisputed gold medalist. Raise the flag and strike up the band:

We’ve all been stopped at airport security with a forgotten bottle of water, which we can either toss away or drink quickly in front of airport security. But what happens if that liquid is not water, but an entire bottle of European cognac? For airline passenger Miss Zhao, there was only one solution: slam it back at once. Zhao was transferring to a Wenzhou flight at Beijing Airport at noon on August 21 when she was stopped at airport security. A worker told the woman in her forties that she was not able to bring the imported cognac through the security checkpoint in her carry-on. As it was too late to transfer the cognac to her checked-in luggage, Zhao did what any responsible person that hates wasting food would do: she sat down in a corner and drank the entire bottle of cognac herself.

But to paraphrase Hillary Clinton’s top spokesperson, it seems as though Ms. Zhao didn’t quite think this “solution” through:

That created a new security problem though, and it had to do with the bottle of cognac that was now inside her. Zhao started acting wildly and yelling incoherently. Due to her massive inebriation, when Zhao fell to the floor, that’s where she stayed. When police arrived at the scene, they decided not to let her board her flight out of concern that she had become a security risk to others and herself as Zhao was travelling alone. Zhao was taken to a convalescence room and was checked out by a doctor. It wasn’t until 7pm when she sobered up and realized what she had done. Zhao was eventually released by police to her family who had come to Beijing Airport to escort her home.

Password requirements FAIL

pwfail

I went to sign up with the DMV website to put in a change of address.  After providing some info off my license and some other bits, they sent a link to the page shown above.

Only eight characters?  Not case-sensitive?  Really?

It also barfed on some of the non-alphanumeric characters KeePass wanted to use…an unstated requirement, apparently, is that only the three non-alphanumeric characters given are acceptable.  I’m used to giving websites passwords that are 20 or more characters of random gibberish to provide plenty of entropy; the limits imposed by the DMV website only allow about 50 bits of entropy, which is fairly weak security.

The length limit suggests that perhaps they’re storing raw passwords in their database, as that’s the only reason to have a length limit.  Even Ashley Madison probably didn’t make that kind of rookie mistake.

(Of course, no post on password strength issues is complete without this: https://xkcd.com/936/)

I bet they paid extra for this level of quality legal analysis

So now they tell us the Constitution is fixed and unviolable.  Guess it’s not nearly as much of a “living document” as they’ve led people to believe:

HuffPo Legal Affairs Writer: Amending the Constitution Is Unconstitutional

Cristian Farias at HuffPo:

Key figures in the crowded Republican field have spoken loud and clear about their desire to do away with birthright citizenship for the children of immigrants.

Donald Trump went a step further Tuesday when he said in a CNN interview that children born to immigrants under the present constitutional order “do not have American citizenship.”

In other words, the citizenship they were born with is invalid, a notion Trump said he’d be willing to “test out” in a court of law.

But one needs not go that far.

It turns out that the very idea of amending the Constitution to end birthright citizenship for the children of immigrants — a move that squarely targets Latinos — would probably be found unconstitutional.

That’s right. This guy thinks amending the Constitution is unconstitutional. He thinks that a 28th Amendment outlawing birthright citizenship would violate . . . the 14th Amendment.

One wonders if he thinks the Amendment undoing Prohibition was unconstitutional, because it violated the Amendment instituting Prohibition.