axiolite

Nothing in the linked story explained it. Did someone make a whole documentary and couldn't get the most basic info right? Or did the reporter mangle the article write-up?

The fact that "A city can also exist in multiple zip codes. And there can be multiple cities with the same name in the same state" is a good point IN FAVOR of asking for the zip code first (NOT to avoid it) because you certainly can't do it the other way round.

And if you just leave it to the user to free-type all that info in, you have to verify it after... Users are going to make typos, and the USPS will kick your butt if you don't correct it (and credit card payments won't go through, either). So it may be less work for web-form creators, but pushing the verification down stream just makes it all worse for the company using it.

    According to Dennis Ritchie, the name is an allusion to the DD statement found in IBM's Job Control Language (JCL), where DD is short for data definition  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_%28Unix%29#History

> write stdin to a file that doesn't also write it to stdout

You mean like "dd of=/path/file" ?

That doesn't seem to be accurate. Wikipedia says, by the end of "2000 the number of users had grown to 2 million"

> everybody was using ssh because there wasn't any alternative

I already listed TWO of the most popular alternatives.

> the mouse-jiggling thing... not specifically a PuttyGen thing. On linux

Parent specifically said "windows client installation." Putty was very common on Windows. PuttyGen specifically and prominently told the user to move their mouse... etc. etc.

By avoiding that one step and using rsync instead, you're resigning yourself to "send 600MiBs" over the network for every tiny config change. Not a good trade-off.

I can understand how, if your whole world was Windows 3.1 and 95, you'd feel that way about security at the time.

What you're describing is PuttyGen. According to Wikipedia, the first Putty release was in 1999. Archive.org doesn't have any snapshots of the Putty website before 2000, so that checks-out.

The RSA patent didn't expire in the US until September 2000, so that's when free implementations like OpenSSH first became widely available. That's precisely when I started using it...

The original SSH was first released mid-1995. There would have been a small number of installations in 1996, but absolutely negligible. It was not well-known until later, circa 2000.

Admittedly SSH wasn't around, but kerberos+rlogin and SSL+telnet was available. Organizations who cared about security would have SecurID tokens issued to their employees and required for login.

Dial-in over phone lines, and requiring a password, was much less discoverable or exploitable than services exposed to the internet, today.