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lyle_nel

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I don't disagree with you on any particular point. However, who do you suppose we trust to decide what is a software implemented weapon and what is not? Of course there are very clear black and white examples, but the in between is where we should be concerned. Consider the USA stance on export of encryption as a historical example of where it can go terribly wrong.

Emissions of CO2 on its own does not necessarily imply that there is a carbon footprint.

Besides the carbon footprint of transporting food, the food we consume is carbon neutral since the carbon in the food comes from the atmosphere. Therefore the CO2 gas we expel is mostly carbon neutral.

Cars are a different story since their carbon originates from ancient reserves(oil and coal) that has long since been removed from the carbon cycle. This carbon is now reintroduced to the carbon cycle, thus leading to a positive carbon footprint.

Put differently, if our food we eat consisted of carbon extracted from oil or coal, then we would be adding CO2 to the current carbon cycle, thus leading to a positive carbon footprint. However this is not true.

GNU Parallel 10 years ago

I have a small cluster of machines that I run experiments on. GNU parallel makes the dispatch of jobs on remote machines very easy.

In addition, I often use it to search for sequences by running grep in parallel. For example

$ parallel 'grep {1} -f haystack.txt' :::: many_needles.txt

Where {1} is a single line in many_needles.txt

Although not this particular face recognition. I managed to fool face recognition passwords in the past with a simple photograph of the person. As you would expect it works perfectly fine.

Most world class athletes are already genetically superior by the measure of athleticism. Even though these favourable mutations or inherited traits have not been engineered, they still exist and it does enhance the athlete's performance.

The Linux Documentation Project has this to say about flushing of buffer cache: "In traditional UNIX systems, there is a program called update running in the background which does a sync every 30 seconds, so it is usually not necessary to use sync. Linux has an additional daemon, bdflush, which does a more imperfect sync more frequently to avoid the sudden freeze due to heavy disk I/O that sync sometimes causes."

How do you do the shutdown on USB change? I would like to try that out.

I would imagine, depending on how it is done, that the malicious usb device might get a few keystrokes in before the system is completely down.

Ah is see. Although I would not put it past people to protest nuclear fusion, it would be strange indeed, since nuclear fusion does not produce the same kind of radioactive waste(shorter half-life) as alternative nuclear technologies.

I really appreciate your enthusiasm. It is one of the core concepts and passwords seemed to be a good way to explore my FIFO idea in a practical manner. It might well have been done before, but from preliminary searches I could not find anything on it(not that I searched really hard). Due to its simplicity, I suspect it will lend itself to some pretty efficient implementations.

I would be interested to hear what other kinds of problems you see it being used for.

The part about not deleting organisms, is a small caveat that I omitted in most of the discussion since it makes the algorithm just a bit harder to understand. To clarify that point, since you asked, the organisms can be popped from the front of the container if we provide a maximum population size. If we do not provide a maximum population size, we do not delete the organisms. Older organisms do however lie dormant due to the non-uniform distribution, thereby providing the same advantage as selection while preserving a greater degree of genetic diversity. If there is anything else that is not clear to you then I am open to any questions you might have. I will help where I can to clarify things.

With regard to the fitness function, I think I agree with you that checking if the offspring matches a password will fall in the category of a fitness function albeit a binary one. I will update my description to include that, thanks.

With regard to if it is useful, I will let it stand or fall on its own merits. If people are going to use it to find bad passwords, then I would say yes it is. It might be pertinent to mention that I am interested in genetic algorithms in general and this is a good practical way of exploring my own theoretical ideas.

Yes, "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" really is a password. Have a look at the rock_you list of passwords and sort them by length. There are some extremely long but silly passwords in there.

I see what you are saying. To some extent this is already true ,since high frequency ngrams(substrings) already dominate the gene-pool if they happen to facilitate the production of a large amount viable offspring. That is why you would see swearwords with high frequency since that is what many people use for passwords(in the case of the myspace list).

Sure I'll run some tests for you.

I ran 2 experiments each lasting 120 seconds.

For the diceware list as a seed population it finds 4570 passwords. The 6 longest ones are:

11 michelle420

11 karen123456

11 iloveyouu16

11 iloveyou789

11 iloveyou234

11 iloveyou191

For the top 2000 ngrams from the rock_you list(which is the current list used) it finds 5317 passwords. The top 6 longest passwords are:

14 fuckyouhackers

13 fuckyouhahaha

11 sexylove889

11 scooter1234

11 princess123

11 iloveyouu16

Yes it is completely useless against random strings as one would expect, but with word salad it not completely useless. For example, it can find words like "tequieromuchogerald" and "paulaalejandrailove" easily enough. I haven't fully explored its ability to do this, but I suspect starting with a dictionary of words instead of a random population might aid it in finding XKCD like random passwords. In general I don't disagree though, passphrases if chosen correctly can be completely intractable to a password cracker.