Posts by TheOtherPhil 12 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jul 2013
Exactly....
Exchange (offline, ideally in person) random one-time pads with your contacts, and encrypt/decrypt with pencil & paper. Destroy the pad as it's used.
15th (or 16th, depending on who we credit) century and 19th century cryptography combined remain unbreakable*.
*Well... it could be decrypted, but the true plaintext message would be indistinguishable from every other sentence with the same length generated in the process.
Working for a large telco in the 90's; the workshop foreman would receive instructions to dispose of aged equipment after each annual stock-take.
He'd loudly announce "I'm just going out to throw this perfectly good equipment in the skip", and we'd queue up to give it a soft landing.
(Still got some of it... still going strong.)
Dilbert as a training manual? Absolutely.
My (now ex) boss explained we had a new customer visiting for a site tour, and he may have very slightly exaggerated the number of staff... His idea was that we all sit downstairs with jackets on, then when he took the visitors up the main stairs we'd run up the back stairs and be working in the other dept in shirt sleeves - and the visitor wouldn't notice.
Having laughed him into derision, we noticed that the Dilbert on the back page of whichever magazine was http://dilbert.com/strip/2002-08-08.
Never did figure out if it was co-incidence...
Exactly... Some of us make our contact details available on purpose - but that won't stop the wrong ones being used.
As someone with an unusual surname you'd think it would be difficult to mix me up with anyone else; except there's someone with the exact same name, same age (within a couple of months) same geographic area, same business sector, and no relation. I get his linkedin requests and sales calls all the time.
Just hope he's not upset anyone lately.
danskebank.ie - They insist on using JRE but apparently that's OK because they use two-token authentication. Shame it's in the form of a handily copied credit-card sized bit of paper with a look-up table on it. (And, in the case of one user at least, a scribbled password in the corner.)
Their tech support chaps tell me it's fine using java in the browser - but you do need to make sure you trust your computer...
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