September 23, 2016 at 03:39AM

Today I Learned: 1) ...that default ssh settings are really shockingly insecure. If I read those guides correctly, when you send your password when logging in, it sends it in plaintext! Key-pair login is much more secure -- that way you never have to send a password, and the server doesn't need to know a password (aside from the user's public key). 2) Fan death (the idea that running a fan in a closed room overnight can kill you) is, in fact, still believed in South Korea, though not as much among the young (if you believe an uncited sentence on Wiki). Moreover, Korean news agencies report cases of "fan death" relatively frequently (a couple of times each year). MOREOVER, the Korea Consumer Protection Board (a government-funded public agency) warns about fan death and states in no uncertain terms that direct use of a fan indoors can raise the risk of death by asphyxiation due to "[an] increase of carbon dioxide saturation concentration [sic] and decrease of oxygen concentration". 3) Speaking of ridiculous ideas, when Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod, Americans were hesitant to employ them. Why? Because lightning was believed to be primarily an act of God's righteous anger, and therefore carried a heck of a lot of heavenly power. Using a lightning rod to transfer that electric/dietical power to the ground would, obviously, supercharge the ground and make things like lightning more likely. I'm not making this up. http://ift.tt/2cq3JB0 The less on of the day is that a lot of things people know are complete and utter falsehoods. Use data. Experiment. Draw on the collective experience of the scientific community, at least when *it* uses data and experiments.