Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2013 July 15

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July 15

facebook names

I recently created one of these 'facebook accounts' but being silly, thought it'd be fun to make up an amusing nickname rather than using my real name. a couple of days later, I regret that, and have avoided using the site since, so I'm wondering, is it possible to change from that to my real name instead, or would I have to close that account and create a new one?

213.104.128.16 (talk) 16:51, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Check out this page. Hope this helps! --Yellow1996 (talk) 17:24, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

What's the Apple equivalent to MS Paint ?

StuRat (talk) 20:08, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

There hasn't been a direct equivalent since MacPaint was discontinued in 1989. WikiPuppies _bark ^dig 20:54, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Anything close then ? StuRat (talk) 21:06, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Try Paintbrush. WikiPuppies _bark ^dig 21:09, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. Is that free ? Does it need to be downloaded ? StuRat (talk) 18:37, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

It is open source. It is free. Download it here. Richard-of-Earth (talk) 19:28, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

You can also try Pixen for Mac. It's a bitmap editor. --157.254.210.11 (talk) 17:39, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

OK, thanks all. StuRat (talk) 08:35, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

WinRAR safe from PRISM?

Dear Wikipedians:

Are WinRAR encrypted archives safe from PRISM?

Thanks,

76.75.148.30 (talk) 20:59, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

And also TrueCrypt?--128.237.207.243 (talk) 21:29, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Maybe. Firstly the ciphers they use, such as AES are strong; used properly, it's impractical for anyone in the public cryptography community to break them. But NSA/GCHQ have an impressive number of mathematicians working on this kind of thing, and vast compute infrastructure - in the past they've been years ahead of public (that is, academic and commercial) cryptographic researchers. We don't know whether they've got a tractable means of breaking ciphers like AES; you can bet your life they're trying hard to acquire one. Secondly is the whole cryptosystem - how the ciphers are used, the keys managed, entropy generated, and so on. That's often more involved, less standard, and with a bigger attack surface; add the fact that these systems then need to be reduced to practice (actually written as software code running on a real system) means there's lots more opportunities for things to be invisibly defective. As Stuxnet shows us, governments actively research security vulnerabilities which aren't public knowledge (and keep them secret until they have need of them); it's optimistic to imagine that WinRAR and TrueCrypt don't have such vulnerabilities. Whether they're enough for a breach, again who knows. Surely any kind of encryption will go some way to frustrate the mass trawl for data that PRISM is claimed to do; but detecting encrypted data is easy, so it's not unreasonable to imagine using cryptography might lead PRISM to pay special attention. Lastly, particularly for anyone being specifically targeted, breaking the cryptography is far from the most obvious thing a security service would do - there's any number of ways to avoid needing to (virus on your machine, tap your keyboard, revolver-to-the-forehead). -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 22:11, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

PRISM only captures data sent over the Internet, so a RAR archive or TrueCrypt volume would only be visible if you sent it as an email attachment, for example.

The current versions of RAR encryption and the TrueCrypt format have no known cryptographic weaknesses. It's impossible to prove that the NSA doesn't have a secret attack, but most academic cryptographers think it's unlikely, and if they do have one it would be an extremely valuable and closely guarded secret and they wouldn't risk exposure by using it against people like you. All major governments are certainly sitting on large collections of publicly unknown software vulnerabilities, perhaps even including vulnerabilities in the WinRAR or TrueCrypt software, but a practical attack on the file formats is another matter—that would very likely extend to other similar cryptosystems, including those used by banks and such to protect information that really needs protection. -- BenRG (talk) 00:29, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Attacks on RNG systems are apparently the most fun, and as the debian openssl fiasco proved, these vulnerabilities can go on unnoticed for quite a while. Who knows if the NSA has some hack for AES; it seems almost unnecessary. Shadowjams (talk) 06:26, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

You're right, an RNG-related attack is plausible. I actually looked at TrueCrypt's entropy generation and it seemed okay, but I could miss a bug like the Debian OpenSSL one that would make the whole thing moot. WinRAR is closed source and I have no idea what it's doing (but there's no particular reason not to trust it). -- BenRG (talk) 16:07, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

How can I google the earliest something?

For example, I want to know where on internet did some text first appear. I see there are some option to filter results by time like the past day/hour/week, but are there an option of findind earliest instances? --128.237.207.243 (talk) 21:27, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't think you can do this with google's regular web search web searches but you can with books and news searches (and you can assume that the earliest in print of most things will be from books or newspapers anyway). Both are available from the "advanced" search options of each of them, at the bottom of the page. For books you just choose a date range, so you can put in 1700 to 1850, and then narrow if that brings up too many. For example, [3 results for "flintlock" from 1700 to 1750 http://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=flintlock&tbs=,cdr:1,cd_min:Jan+1_2+1700,cd_max:Dec+31_2+1750&num=10]. For google news you have to choose the "archive" from advanced and then can do the same thing. I missed the part about the search being about the first to appear on the Internet.--108.46.106.40 (talk) 01:42, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

[ec] search tool are you using? Presuming you are using Google, when you set the filter for a specific time range, it theoretically gives you the results that were published within that range. However, it depends on what you are looking for. Google hasn't always existed (well less than have the lifespan of the internet and maybe about have of the life of the web), so the earliest instances of whatever you are looking for might not be in their archives. Mingmingla (talk) 01:44, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

That filter only goes back one year, though; and I bet the OP is looking for entries older than that... I don't think this is possible. --Yellow1996 (talk) 16:10, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

If you have narrowed it down to a few pages you suspect may be the original you can check them on the Wayback Machine: [1]. It will let you see how a site has changed over time, so you can see when the text was added. 209.131.76.183 (talk) 17:12, 16 July 2013 (UTC)