Last I read a DNA test took at least three days to complete. Amazing they were able to pull it off in just a few hours of dumping the body. And what DNA did they compare it too, btw?
In this day and age, not only is the cost of DNA sequencing beating Moore's Law, but the turn-around time is around 45 minutes to an hour for the actual analysis. For the University of California system, you get your results by e-mail by the next day at the latest, and that's assuming that the day was busy for them. The "3 days" thing is typically the time it takes to mail a package or similarly courier the physical end-product. There are handheld DNA testing portable labs about the size of an AED or first aid kit nowadays, too.
I agree Apple needs to look out for their employee's health by providing the appropriate equipment, but I think they also need to design equipment that can handle the normal operating environment for the customers they sell to.
For better or worse, smokers and heavily polluted cities still represent a significant source of revenue for computer companies. So long as that is the case, their products need to be designed for their customers.
Gaining root on one box shouldn't give you easy access to all others.
Yes, but this statement relates to my original reply in what way?
And brute force IS affected by complexity, in that a lower-case alphabetic password only requires 26 possible combination, while a password using characters from the entire 8-bit set, requires 256 possible combination. That's the base, so brute-force time goes exponential from there depending on range of characters used.
Only if you know that you can limit your search space that way.
Even if you structure your brute-force by initially ignoring special characters, do some math.
8 characters, letters only, assuming at most the initial letter could be a capital: 417654129152 possible combinations, i.e. ~1^12
8 characters, 7-bit set (8-bit is nonsense, most of them are non-printable): 67675234241018881, i.e. ~1^17
But "letters only" allows us to use pronouncable passwords that people can remember. Hf$6o/r^ may be a 1^17 complexity password, but 99% of the average user will write it down. "sophisticated" is a 1^19 complexity password, and a lot easier to remember.
Special characters are way overrated. The idiocity of limiting password length is a lot more harmful. If your attacker knows how long your password can at most be, his brute-forcing becomes a ton easier, because he can estimate how much of the search space he's got. If my password can be anything (because it's hashed anyways, so what do you care?) then he never knows if he's close or not, and he can not estimate how long it will take at most.
Even if you use a dictionary attack, more space is the answer, not special characters. The OED contains about 300,000 words. Adding a special character or number brings the complexity up to only 1^9. But allowing for two words instead of one brings the complexity to 1^12, and is equally easy to remember.
Did you know that if you took all the economists in the world and lined them up end to end, they'd still point in the wrong direction?