Saturday, April 3, 2010
Telling a Story With My Spam
We could start an entirely new internet meme: using the subjects of your email spam to create a serial storyline.
I was injured when those perpetrating a Nigerian email scam used discount erectile dysfunction drugs to help them screw me.
Share your ideas in the comments. It can't be a meme if it's just me!
Share your ideas in the comments. It can't be a meme if it's just me!
Awesome LEGO Spider
Awesome in a creepy, "I hope it doesn't come to life wrap me up in a silken LEGO cocoon!" sort of way.
Via Geekologie
Via Geekologie
Rapist Priests Suffer Like Jews?
Joe Sudbay @ AMERICAblog:
I don't have anything enlightening to say about the whole Catholic priest pedophilia legacy. It's wrong, it's been tolerated and covered up, and people are fed up with both the crimes and the hypocrisy.
Let's hope there's a special section in Hell reserved for everyone who either abused or failed to protect our young people.
So, that latest ploy for victimhood from the Vatican has backfired, big time. Yesterday, at Good Friday services, the Pope's priest, Raniero Cantalamessa, gave a sermon comparing criticism of the church over the child rape scandal to the worst of what happened to the Jewish people. Stunning really. The Vatican has tried to distance the Church from those remarks. But, the priest gave those remarks in front of the pope and his words were reported by the Vatican newspaper. That would be like Robert Gibbs making a statement in front of Obama, which was also posted on the White House website -- and have the White House say Gibbs wasn't speaking for them.
I don't have anything enlightening to say about the whole Catholic priest pedophilia legacy. It's wrong, it's been tolerated and covered up, and people are fed up with both the crimes and the hypocrisy.
Let's hope there's a special section in Hell reserved for everyone who either abused or failed to protect our young people.
General McChrystal On Shooting Innocent People in Afghanistan
Via Talking Points Memo:
We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force.
CNN = WTF?
Jon Stewart has the right idea when it comes to CNN.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| CNN Hires Erick Erickson | ||||
| ||||
Friday, April 2, 2010
Password Hacking Time Comparison
One of the largest chasms in computer security is the distance between good password practices and their actual use.
Everyone knows by now that the longer and more complex a password, the harder it is to break using commonly available password cracking tools. Yet people continue to employ short, simplistic passwords that don't survive three minutes of a brute force or dictionary attack.
If you want some examples of the most common passwords, click here. If you have a password on that list, just remember that the rest of the internet is using it too.
At what point does a password achieve enough complexity to be effective without requiring you to write it down on a Post-It note that you hide in your desk drawer or under your keyboard? Perhaps this chart, provided by Forever Geek, will help.
Passwords containing lowercase letters only are quite obviously not a deterrent to rudimentary cracking tools. Simply adding capital letters and/or special characters ($,&,#,+) to the mix takes the average cracking time for a seven-character password from 2.23 hours to 2.21 years.
Back when I was teaching computer security classes, I took this a little bit further as I explained the difference between using a simple password that Microsoft products would turn into an easily-cracked hash stored in the local SAM and in Active Directory, and instead typing a more complex 15-character string that Windows turns into a LM hash value that cannot be used to authenticate the user, making it closer to being the Fort Knox of passwords.
It's as easy as using a passphrase - a series of words that's easily remembered, hard to brute force attack, but not so cumbersome that you can't use it regularly. The example passphrase I used was ILikeStinkyCheese.
The result: Seventeen characters, both upper and lower case, in an easily-remembered format. Let's take a look at what that does the cracking times according to the chart:
The point is to make the bad guys work for it, and to eliminate the low-hanging fruit.
Most people close the front door to their house when they're not home. That keeps normal crooks from wandering inside. The majority of us also lock the door, which keeps out all but the most determined thieves. Others add deadbolts, alarms, and vicious attack poodles.
Each layer of additional security increases the complexity needed for a successful attack, and therefore eliminates most would-be attackers from targeting you in the first place. It's much easier to move on to the four houses down the road with open doors.
It's easy, it's fast, and it's effective. You're welcome.
If you want some examples of the most common passwords, click here. If you have a password on that list, just remember that the rest of the internet is using it too.
At what point does a password achieve enough complexity to be effective without requiring you to write it down on a Post-It note that you hide in your desk drawer or under your keyboard? Perhaps this chart, provided by Forever Geek, will help.
Passwords containing lowercase letters only are quite obviously not a deterrent to rudimentary cracking tools. Simply adding capital letters and/or special characters ($,&,#,+) to the mix takes the average cracking time for a seven-character password from 2.23 hours to 2.21 years.
Back when I was teaching computer security classes, I took this a little bit further as I explained the difference between using a simple password that Microsoft products would turn into an easily-cracked hash stored in the local SAM and in Active Directory, and instead typing a more complex 15-character string that Windows turns into a LM hash value that cannot be used to authenticate the user, making it closer to being the Fort Knox of passwords.
It's as easy as using a passphrase - a series of words that's easily remembered, hard to brute force attack, but not so cumbersome that you can't use it regularly. The example passphrase I used was ILikeStinkyCheese.
The result: Seventeen characters, both upper and lower case, in an easily-remembered format. Let's take a look at what that does the cracking times according to the chart:
- lowercase only moves to more than 2.046 millenia
- all characters moves to more than 154,640,721,434 millenia
The point is to make the bad guys work for it, and to eliminate the low-hanging fruit.
Most people close the front door to their house when they're not home. That keeps normal crooks from wandering inside. The majority of us also lock the door, which keeps out all but the most determined thieves. Others add deadbolts, alarms, and vicious attack poodles.
Each layer of additional security increases the complexity needed for a successful attack, and therefore eliminates most would-be attackers from targeting you in the first place. It's much easier to move on to the four houses down the road with open doors.
It's easy, it's fast, and it's effective. You're welcome.
Peepza - Peeps on a Pizza
Wow, this looks wonderful!
My God! What happened to this inside the oven? Oh, the humanity!
Via Serious Eats
My God! What happened to this inside the oven? Oh, the humanity!
Via Serious Eats
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)