Carl T. Holscher fights for the customers.

Category: Links and Quotes Page 10 of 25

Shared from elsewhere.

NIST updating password recommendations

The Man Who Wrote Those Password Rules Has a New Tip: N3v$r M1^d!

(Full story is behind the Wall Street Journal’s pay wall.)

You’ve used P@ssw0rds like this for years. It’s what NIST recommended for the Federal Government in 2003 and major corporations and universities picked up the guidance and set their password requirements to match.

Mr. Burr, who once programmed Army mainframe computers during the Vietnam War, had wanted to base his advice on real-world password data. But back in 2003, there just wasn’t much to find, and he said he was under pressure to publish guidance quickly.

He looked for some real-world data to see what people were doing.

He asked the computer administrators at NIST if they would let him have a look at the actual passwords on their network. They refused to share them, he said, citing privacy concerns.

Given there wasn’t much research into the field of password security and no real-world password stockpiles to pull from, he did the best he could.

With no empirical data on computer-password security to be found, Mr. Burr leaned heavily on a white paper written in the mid-1980s—long before consumers bought DVDs and cat food online.

Now there is better password data available. Have I been Pwned currently lists 3,999,249,352 accounts from 228 websites. My own data has been breached over a dozen times including by our own government

The truth about passwords is we’re bad at passwords. I am terrible at passwords. That’s why I’ve used 1Password to keep my passwords secure. I don’t know most of my passwords because they are nonsense and very long. I know a single master password.

Given this new data, NIST is updating its recommendations which will slowly be adopted by the government and companies as it did originally.

Long, easy-to-remember phrases now get the nod over crazy characters, and users should be forced to change passwords only if there is a sign they may have been stolen, says NIST, the federal agency that helps set industrial standards in the U.S.

Academics who have studied passwords say using a series of four words can be harder for hackers to crack than a shorter hodgepodge of strange characters—since having a large number of letters makes things harder than a smaller number of letters, characters and numbers.

This XKCD comic explains the math behind cracking these types of passwords. I look forward to leaving the P@ssw0rd days behind and welcome the correct horse battery staple.

Password requirement comic from XKCD.

William Gibson Interview

William Gibson Talks ‘Archangel,’ Apocalypses, and Dystopias

Much of the planet’s human population, today, lives in conditions that many inhabitants of North America would regard as dystopian. Quite a few citizens of the United States live under conditions that many people would regard as dystopian. Dystopia is not very evenly distributed. Fantasy is fun, but naturalism is the necessary balance — realism, to be less precise. Naturalistic fiction written today is necessarily fairly pessimistic — otherwise, it wouldn’t be a realistic depiction of the present. If you were, say, a tiger, and you knew what’s about to happen to your species (extinction, almost certainly), wouldn’t it be realistic to have a pessimistic view of things? I think it’s realistic, as a human, to have a pessimistic view of a world minus tigers.


Q: How do you maintain hope in these dark times?
A: One day at a time, and treasuring those who retain an active sense of humor.

Blizzard of 20-pound bond

Knocking Down your Creative Blocks – 99U

In time, my office looked like it had been hit by a blizzard of 20-pound bond. There were piles of paper on every flat surface, and on the floor around me, all of them tagged with colorful Post-it Notes, some of the piles reaching several feet in height—a miniature cityscape at my feet: Transcribed interviews, notes, court documents and legal transcripts of testimony and deposition hearings, newspaper clippings, non-fiction books and research papers on the subjects of AIDS and the Reagan Administration’s war on pornography (a period during which porn consumption by the public rose exponentially, I would learn). Not to mention my collection of VHS films—black plastic rectangles, clad in colorful cardboard slip covers, stacked in rickety piles like so many skyscrapers populating my urban jungle of research materials.

The blizzard of 20-pound bond is a beautiful bit of writing. Reading that line made my old soul smile. I can also relate to being surrounded by paper and Post-It Notes.

Women are Angry

Most Women You Know Are Angry — and That’s All Right | Teen Vogue

As I’ve grown up, I’ve stayed angry — but my anger has grown up, too. It has boiled down and condensed into something strong and subtle, something that I can control. Writing out my rage is cathartic — and useful, too. I’m lucky that my coping mechanism is also my career. Plenty of women are angry, and why wouldn’t they be? It’s bad enough that women and girls are still being attacked and undermined, as individuals and as a group — when our basic rights to health care are stripped away, when we are blamed for the violence that is done to us and shamed for our sexuality, when we have to get up every day and deal with racism and homophobia and class prejudice. It’s bad enough that we still have to fight to be treated as full, equal human beings without also being shamed and silenced if the whole situation makes us furious. Yes, we’re angry. Why shouldn’t we be? Why aren’t you?

Every woman is The Incredible Hulk. Their secret is their always angry and that anger needs some place to go.
You anger is a gift.

Facebook discovers telepresence?

Facebook is testing a feature that would allow the camera to automatically scan for people in its range and lock onto them, one of the people said. For example, the camera could zoom onto a painting that a child brought home from school to show to a parent away on a business trip. Facebook has also been developing a 360 degree camera for the device, but people familiar with the matter say it’s unlikely to be ready in time for the initial launch.

Source: Facebook Is Working on a Video Chat Device – Bloomberg

This is nothing new in the telepresence space. Cisco and Polycom have similar technologies available. The technology is impressive and useful in conference rooms to tell who is speaking.

Bringing this technology into the home was an obvious step. If (and I say if because anything speculative doesn’t exist yet) this device exists with the facial tracking software will be useful for chatting at home.

Facebook is behind it so people are going to scream about that. And they’re not wrong. Google and Facebook are advertising companies. They thrive on personal information so they can sell that information to companies who want to sell us stuff. (And doing a poor job from the looks of ads I’m being served.)

There is a big world of data yet to be exploited and Facebook will do their best to exploit it.

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