Dopey, the Folder-Selection Annoyance
Just about every Windows program prompts a user to select a file for some purpose, such as through the Open File dialog window: I’ll call this kind of window “Opie” for the rest of this article. Occasionally, a program will prompt a user not for a file, but for a folder. In such cases programs will typically bring up the Folder Selection dialog window, which I’ll call “Dopey“: Had I never known Opie, I might not dislike Dopey. Since I do, however, I find Dopey to be a vastly inferior and annoying UI element, for several reasons: 1. Dopey can’t get to a folder directly. Most of my files are nested four or five levels down from My Documents. When I’m working on a project, I’ll typically have...
Can bcrypt’s computational expense be reduced on the server side?
(Caution: Amateur security research ahead. Using it in a live system is not recommendable.) I recently read “How to Safely Store a Password”, an article by Coda Hale. For years I’ve thought that salting and hashing passwords with MD5 or SHA-1 prior to storage was sufficient to thwart password-cracking efforts (in cases where the user-account database table is stolen or publicly divulged). Apparently, this approach is not much better than simply storing plaintext passwords (a practice widely scoffed at). It was fascinating to find out about a better approach, that of using bcrypt instead of ordinary hash functions. Unfortunately, it seems to me that bcrypt creates a new problem even as it solves an old one… The New Problem The use of bcrypt turns...