Today in good ideas likely to be misinterpreted: British young-adult author Malorie Blackman, who was recently named children’s laureate, is calling for more realist sex scenes in books for teenagers, so they don’t get all their information from “innuendo and porn.” Or, worse, the online erotic fan-fic versions of their favorite Y.A. series. Blackman told the Telegraph:
“I was reading an article three weeks ago where this teenage girl was saying everything her boyfriend knew about sex he knew from porn. He was brutalising her, because that’s what he thought sex was about from watching online ... It made me angry and it made me sad. I thought well, this is exactly why we need not just sex education in schools but also books that tackle the subject of relationships and your first time. Otherwise teens and young adults will get their information from somewhere and in this case it was getting it from porn.”
Here’s the part where we share our favorite Y.A. sex scenes. I’ll go first: Judy Blume’s Forever, in which the young man has named his penis Ralph.
Anyone who's tried to tether to their iPhone or iPad will recall how iOS manages to craft its own passwords when used as a personal hotspot. The aim is to ensure that anyone sharing a data connection will get some degree of security, regardless of whether or not they tinker with the password themselves. However, three researchers from FAU in Germany have now worked the structure behind these auto-generated keys -- a combination of a short English word and a series or random numbers -- and managed to crack that hotspot protection in under a minute. To start, the word list contains about 52,500 entries, and once the testers were able to capture a WiFi connection, they used an AMD Radeon HD 6990 GPU to cycle through all those words with number codes, taking just under 50 minutes to crack with rote entry. Following that, they realized that only a small subset (just 1,842) of the word list was being used.With an even faster GPU -- a cluster of four AMD Radeon HD 7970s -- they got the hotspot password cracking time to 50 seconds. The Friedrich-Alexander University researchers added that unscrupulous types could use comparable processing power through cloud computing. "System-generated passwords should be reasonably long, and should use a reasonably large character set. Consequently, hotspot passwords should be composed of completely random sequences of letters, numbers, and special characters," says the report, which outlines the trade-off between security and usability. However, as ZDNet notes, Apple's cycled password approach still offers more protection than static options found elsewhere. Check out the full paper at the source. when.eng("eng.perm.init")
