There are many different sites out there and many need passwords. As far as the passwords are concerned, there can NOT be only one.

/lifts Highlander katana to defend self from bad pun backlash

I should preempt this quick article by saying that the best practice is to have a different password for every site that is generally complex so that none can be connected to each other.  That being said, no one that is not OCD is doing this. You could do this and keep them in KeePass if you really wished to be that paranoid.  The following is what I choose to do.  Proceed at your own risk.

I generally use three different strengths of passwords with six different site associations.  They are listed in order of security importance from least to greatest. Your opinion of  security importance may differ:

1. Blogs, Spam Email accounts- These are unsecured (non Https) sites and garbage email accounts (used for spam and random sign ups with companies I don’t trust yet) -

Easy password- May be this is a noun of some sort or a number combo.  I use this one over and over again.  I really don’t care if it is compromised. Easy to remember and quick to type.  I allow my browser to store it,  and the site to store it as well if possible.   Sorry Gawker…you fall in this category.

2. Social Sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Friendster, Myspace) – You know you had a Friendster account once.

Medium password (not shared with any other sites besides these types) – Medium means you take the easy password and add a special character and may be a number to it.

3. Monetary Transaction Sites (use credit card info over Https)- Amazon, Newegg, Overstock, Etc -

Hard password- Hard is a combination of letter, number and special characters equating to about 6-8 characters. I share it amongst these monetary sites as if any are compromised, I can simply tell the bank to reissue my credit card and claim theft. Also, do not keep your credit card information on file at the site.  Don’t be lazy, take the card out of your wallet and retype the numbers in.  Do not allow your browser to record this data in memory fields.  Someone get’s your PC?  No good.

4. Paypal, Visa/Mastercard credit card confirmation

Hard password (not shared with any other sites)

5. Bank Accounts- (your physical banks online access site)

Especially hard password (not shared with any other sites)-  Especially hard means a minimum of 8 characters or more with upper and lowercase letters, at least two number, two special characters and NO associations with anything in your life whatsoever.  This password is totally random and could not be socially engineered.

6. Primary Real Email (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, Etc) -You mom still has AOL, liar

Especially hard password (not shared with any other sites)

If your real email is ever compromised…..you could be royally screwed.  This is unless, of course, you do not keep any personal data, that if in the wrong hands could lead to identity theft in your email account.  I know, difficult to uphold this kind of integrity with the mass amounts of data we have to remember in today’s world.

Therefore, a word of advice if you are very diligent, don’t keep any passwords to other sites in your main email. Memorize them.   Don’t keep any records of your bank interactions here either. Basically keep those things locked in a safe in your home on physical paper if you have to.  Same goes for your personal info and families info like Social Security numbers etc.  Don’t store them in your email account.  If you absolutely have to keep private data online, an option here is to have a second primary email that you use to store info, but do not forward, only type directly or upload info to this email.  That way no other email account  has a record of the secret info storing one.

Additionally you may have a seventh password that is only applicable for some folks.

7. Special Sites -Like if you OWN a blog-

Especially Special Hard Password (phat chance breakin’ this one folks, just walk away if you know what’s good for you)

I know it may seem ridiculous to have up to seven different passwords but when Gawker was compromised Yahoo (very intelligently) contacted me to ask me to change my email account password because it was linked to my Gawker account. Fortunately I only link Blogs with my dummy email account, and I don’t use the same password.

This is a very good reason to create a “garbage” email account and only use it with your non-monetary transaction sites.  For monetary transaction sites it’s up to you if you want connect them with a main real email account.  BUT do NOT use the same password no matter what.  So…when Gawker said that they had been hacked I just changed my Gawker password and changed my xxxxxxxxx@yahoo.com garbage account password and I was done.

No loss for me.

On the social network sites it’s a good idea to use an incorrect birthday that is a year, month, and day wrong (could even be 1 off). I use a pattern here as well so that if I am ever asked due to a security access reason, I know that I may have used my “alternate” fake birthday. I choose NOT to display my birthday in my social networks for this reason. If someone gets my SS and is able to look up a parent’s maiden name, hometown, etc…well..you get the point.

Examples of strong passwords (that use at least 8 characters).

Here is an example of a strong password using a kind of L33T (“elite” hack password manipulations) speak,  in case you are unaware.  I’ll take the word-

password

and show how even though it is 8 places, I can turn it into 11 places.

p4$Sw0Rd*49

I have upper and lowercase letters. p S w R d (notice I did NOT put the first letter as uppercase)

I have two special characters,
one that replaced an S.                                         $ *

I have exchanged some letters
for numbers.                                                            a=4 O=0(zero)

I put a random special character at the
end and some numbers that are
significant to me but not connected to
anything (no parents birth years or
anything like that)                                                  *49

It’s important to use a word that no one would expect. Not your kids name alone either. Combine a name with a word if you have to use someone’s name then change it to the variation you see above. Manipulate the combo name/word into an complex password.  Be aware that mixed passwords take a long time to brute force decipher while simple names and phrases can be done in almost an instant depending on the hacker.

Easy vs. Hard passwords- What does that mean to a hacker?
Click on Images for full screen

See here how a class A (all classes listed at the end of the post), the weakest PC using free or easily available cracking software can break your 9 character number only password in 28 hours?  This means your nine year old kid can use L0phtCrack, Cain or John The Ripper password cracking software, and with a Playschool netbook get into your secret stuff.

On the other end of the spectrum. Having at least 8 characters mixed up as I have done to the word password above means that even a class F supercomputer would take over 80 days to break it.

Here you can see that a password like “B33r&Mug”   takes 83 days on a class F setup to break. Even on a class D machine your nine year old will be 30 by the time he breaks your password.

I was fortunate to not have a real email account tied to Gawker with the same password.  I hear that others were not so lucky and now they have to deal with the aftermath.

I hope this helps my fellow readers/writers.

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

Source for time to crack info:

http://www.lockdown.co.uk/?pg=combi

Images via Joystiq & MaximumPC.

This is completely true and changing the world as we know it.  The folks over at Cognitive Media created this visual art transcription drawing.  Here is what they had to say:

“Here’s our latest effort in the video Scribing arena. I say arena, but there seems to be very few of us doing this sort of thing. This is for the RSAnimate series we are doing. We are getting a great response from it and we are fortunate to have great sponsors at the RSA. We thank them and the great speakers we get to listen to and translate. If it wasn’t for the rich content they provide, we wouldn’t be able to do what we do.  Anyway, Dan Pink gave great talk at the RSA in London about what motivates us and here’s how we translated what he said. We are just about to start work on another two ‘animations’ and they should be up very shortly.”

As a part of the community of Android users that are constantly innovating beyond what Google issues as the stock operating system, I can see this concept coming to fruition all the timer.  With new innovations becoming a reality on a daily basis, simply because of developers that work to give back to the community of their knowledge freely, compliments being their only compensation.

Back in November we had a post about this.  I am re-posting as I really enjoyed the video.

(Thanks for the tip Rick)

Here is the full list.

send text to [contact] [message]
listen to [artist/song/album]
call [business]
call [contact]
send email to [contact] [message]
go to [website]
note to self [note]
navigate to [location/business name]
directions to [location/business name]
map of [location]

“The fastest we go is 172,800x, compressing 24 hours of real time into a blazing 1/2 second. The slowest is 1/32x speed, stretching a mere 1/2 second of real time into a whopping 16 seconds. This gives us a fastest to slowest ratio of 5.5 million. If you like averages, the average speed up factor of the band dancing is 270x. In total we shot 18 hours of the band dancing and 192 hours of LA skyline timelapse – over a million frames of video – and compressed it all down to 4 minutes and 30 seconds! Oh and don’t forget, it’s one continuous camera shot.”

Looks like Engadget has the scoop on a possible (probable?) Android/Sony gaming phone.

Here’s some info:

“Here’s what we can tell you about the hardware: if you’re a gaming fan, this is exactly the kind of phone you’ve been waiting for. The device is described as cross between the Samsung Captivate and the PSP Go — in other words, it’s a landscape slider with game controls in place of the typical QWERTY keyboard. The D-pad is here, but instead of the small joystick, the device will have what was described as a “long touch pad” for analog controls, along with standard PSP buttons and shoulder buttons. The phone has a large display, described as being between 3.7 and 4.1 inches with WVGA or better resolution, a 5 megapixel camera that we’re told might not be final, and it’ll likely have a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU on board. The phone is mostly black with some silver highlights, and the gamepad area is white / silver in color. Apparently it’s currently branded as a Xperia device, but it looks like it will carry PlayStation branding as well. Those who’ve seen the phone say it looks “pretty damn sexy.” The mockup above probably doesn’t do the actual hardware justice, but it should give you an idea of what you’ll be dealing with.”

On the software side, it looks like the device will be running Gingerbread (Android 3.0) with a phone-specific skin, and there will be a new area of the Android Market specifically for the games.

Jump over to Engadget for the entire article and the massive ” Android + Sony + Gaming = FTW” and “Heeeeellllzzzz yeah” commentary.

Gizmodo mock up:

Apple has purchased the patents for an electronic casing industry called Liquidmetal®.

On August 5, 2010, Liquidmetal Technologies, Inc., a Delaware corporation (“Liquidmetal”), entered into a Master Transaction Agreement with Apple Inc., a California corporation (“Apple”), pursuant to which (i) Liquidmetal contributed substantially all of its intellectual property assets to a newly organized special-purpose, wholly-owned subsidiary (the “IP Company”), (ii) the IP Company granted to Apple a perpetual, worldwide, fully-paid, exclusive license to commercialize such intellectual property in the field of consumer electronic products in exchange for a license fee, and (iii) the IP Company granted back to Liquidmetal a perpetual, worldwide, fully-paid, exclusive license to commercialize such intellectual property in all other fields of use (together with all ancillary agreements, the “Master Transaction Agreement”).

This video show the elasticity of the compound.

From the companies website:

“As the demand for product “miniaturization” continues in the electronic casings industry, Liquidmetal® alloys enable smaller, thinner and more durable designs. Current casings technology is pushed to the limit in supporting these new designs and specifications, especially requirements for larger LCD screens, thinner wall sections and pure metallic surface finishes for products such as mobile phones, PDA’s and cameras.

Liquidmetal alloys possess a unique combination of performance and processing characteristics that are in many ways superior to all available high performance materials such as magnesium, aluminum, titanium and plastics, providing innovative design and manufacturing solutions to the electronic casings industry.

Key Casings Advantages:

With approximately 2.5 times the strength of commonly used titanium alloy and 1.5 times the hardness of commonly used stainless steel, Liquidmetal alloys enable sophisticated, engineered designs required by the evolution of new technologies
Enables thinner, smaller designs while providing greater protection for internal components
Permits thinner walls while providing greater strength
Allows larger, wider screens for expanded features and capabilities
With precision net-shape casting, Liquidmetal alloys can be readily fashioned into intricate, innovative designs resulting in a unique aesthetic advantage
Excellent durability
Scratch and corrosion resistant
Non-reactive

As the demand for innovative electronic casings product designs increases worldwide, Liquidmetal alloys’ cutting edge materials technology is finding an ever increasing and important role in providing designers, engineers and manufacturers solutions to meet expanding customer needs. Liquidmetal alloys combine the processing and cost advantages of competing technologies and performance characteristics that exceed current super alloys which position Liquidmetal alloys in the forefront of many design centers around the globe.”

As seen on Gizmodo.

I look nice
I got dozens of dollars
And that’s right
It goes straight to my daughters and my wife
I’m a miracle dad
Makin’ magic with the checkbook is a talent I have

Featured on GodTube

Samsung is full of win.

One of the solutions to the antenna fix?  Well, just watch the video.

Via Gizmodo.

Always more and more interesting. Improv Anywhere does it again. This time with a Star Wars theme.

Classic.

Freddie25:
A Christmas project with accordion, flutes and other acoustic “instruments”. The original music is from the Legend of Zelda series. (Mostly from The Wind Waker, full song list below.)

MP3 here: http://www.speedyshare.com/704964519….

0:04 Medli’s Prayer (part of the opening theme)
0:21 Makar’s Prayer (also part of the opening theme)
0:40 Medli’s Prayer again
0:52 Aryll’s Theme + Makar’s Prayer
1:04 Overworld (Ocean Theme)
1:28 Zelda’s Lullaby
1:34 Dark World (A Link to the Past)
1:44 Aryll’s Theme + Medli’s Prayer
1:56 Aryll’s Theme + Makar’s Prayer + Zelda’s Lullaby
2:08 An arrangement of the original Zelda Overworld theme

Most of these songs were already included in a medley at the end of the game though. (The Staff Credits music.)

As seen at Gizmodo.

Specs:

Samsung Galaxy 2 Leaked Specs:

• 3.7 inches AMOLED display
• 1 GHz Snapdragon processor

• 90 Million Triangles per second GPU  (PS3 does 250)

• Android 2.1 Operating System
• 5 megapixel camera
• Wi-Fi
• 3G connectivity
• Bluetooth 2.1
• A-GPS
• 32GB internal storage
• 3.5mm audio jack
• microSD card slot
  

Now if all Android devices could do this and had better video codec support I would be even more smiley.

Check out Sven’s instructions HERE on how to do this yourself.

You will need:

• Hardware
  • Nexus One
  • Micro USB OTG cable (e.g.)
  • USB Dual Power Cable (e.g.) to provide power to the hub chip through the uplink port, since the Nexus One doesn’t provide bus power (yet)
  • Powered USB 2.0 hub (will charge the Nexus One) (e.g.) and optionally a battery pack for mobile use (e.g.) (some power calculations)
• Software
  • Android 2.2 Froyo (2.1 may work, too)
  • ConnectBot
  • Download binaries…
    • boot.img or zImage
    • Modules
  • …or build a Nexus One kernel from source
    • # Fetch msm kernel tree
      git clone git://android.git.kernel.org/kernel/msm.git
      cd msm
      # Switch to Nexus One 2.2 Froyo
      git checkout origin/android-msm-2.6.32
      # Get config
      wget http://sven.killig.de/android/N1/2.2/usb_host/.config
      # Patch (No device mode, Andrew de Quincey’s work not ported yet.)
      wget http://sven.killig.de/android/N1/2.2/usb_host/android-kernel_msm-v2.6.30-rc2-27223-g248970b_Nexus-One_usb-host.patch
      patch -p1 < android-kernel_msm-v2.6.30-rc2-27223-g248970b_Nexus-One_usb-host.patch
      # Build
      make -j2 ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=/android-ndk-r4/build/prebuilt/linux-x86/arm-eabi-4.4.0/bin/arm-eabi-
  • Install kernel
    • # Boot from RAM (till next reset)…
      fastboot boot arch/arm/boot/zImage
    • # …or write to flash (boot.img from a nandroid backup)
      /getramdisk.py boot.img
      /mydroid/out/host/linux-x86/bin/mkbootimg --kernel arch/arm/boot/zImage --ramdisk ramdisk.img --base 0x20000000 -o boot_usb-host.img
      fastboot flash boot boot_usb-host.img
  • Start ConnectBot and connect to Local
    • su
      insmod drivers/usb/core/usbcore.ko
      insmod drivers/usb/host/ehci-hcd.ko
      insmod drivers/hid/usbhid/usbhid.ko
      insmod drivers/usb/storage/usb-storage.ko
      # Wait for usb-storage to enumerate partitions
      mount /dev/block/sda1 /sdcard/usbstick
  • To use adb over WLAN
    • adb connect IPAddress:5555

As seen at Gizmodo.